Darkside

Jonas turned right and floored the accelerator again, his jaw set. Marvel was starting to enjoy needling him.

‘He was with a woman at the time. Not his wife.’

Marvel rubbed his hands together. ‘Now we’re talking! In Shipcott?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yeah, we had someone who saw his car on Saturday night. He with her all night?’

‘I guess so.’

‘Guessing so does not make it so. You spoken to her?’

‘No.’

‘A miracle! Someone you haven’t fucked about with before we could get there. Who is it?’

Jonas tightened his fists on the wheel. This wasn’t going as planned. He should have thought it through before calling Marvel. He’d thought he was doing Peter Priddy a favour … that Marvel would accept his word about an alibi, but now it was all getting away from him. His head had started to ache as soon as he’d walked out on Lucy and now it throbbed cruelly as the tunnel of road and moor rushed at him like a video game. He should never have gone to see Marvel when he felt this way but he’d needed something to take his mind off her words. He couldn’t bear to think about them – to think of her being gone. Of her being not there. Of having to have something to remember her by …

He’d had to stop thinking of it. He’d called Peter Priddy; he’d picked up Marvel. Now he tried to focus on what they’d said and what he’d said to them, piling words up like ashes on embers, but her words still glowed and flickered underneath. Now those words had been lit, he couldn’t imagine they’d ever go out, and he felt their burn at the base of his skull.

The pony came out of nowhere, filled his vision and struck the car all in the same frantic second. By the time Jonas hit the brakes, it was behind them.

The car slewed briefly and stalled with a lurch.

‘Shit!’ said Marvel.

The engine ticked quietly in the silence.

Marvel looked in his wing mirror and saw the dark shape of the animal in the road twenty yards behind them, lit faintly by their brake lights.

‘I think it’s still alive,’ he said. ‘We’d better go and see.’

He looked at Jonas but the younger man just stared at him blankly, as if he hadn’t heard.

‘We’d better go and look at it,’ he repeated, and this time Holly registered what he’d said and looked in his rear-view mirror. Then he backed up the car until they were just a few feet from the horse.

Marvel got out. It was much colder up here on the moor, and drying out too – as if the sky was sucking the moisture from the air and preparing for something much more spectacular than mere rain. He walked round to the back of the Land Rover. By the dull red of the tail lights, even Marvel could see that the pony’s front leg was broken at a sickening angle. The animal was trying to get up anyway, heaving itself on to its chest then flailing helplessly – its hoofs drubbing the tarmac and leaving pale scrapes in its surface – before collapsing back on to its side, snorting, ribs heaving under its shaggy winter coat, and its eye rolling wild and white around the edges.

‘Its leg’s broken,’ he said, looking up for a lead from Jonas, and surprised to find him not there. He looked round. Jonas had got out of the car with him but was still at the door of the Land Rover, silhouetted against the stars.

He raised his voice. ‘It’s got a broken leg.’

Through the vague red darkness he saw the silhouette nod its head.

‘What are we going to do?’ asked Marvel.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well you’re the bloody local! People must hit these buggers all the time.’

‘I’ll call the hunt,’ said Jonas after a pause.

‘What?’

‘I’ll call the hunt. They’ll come out and shoot it and take it for meat.’

‘Meat?’ Marvel was utterly confused.

‘For the hounds,’ said Jonas.

‘You’re fucking joking!’ said Marvel.

‘No,’ said Jonas, ‘I’m not.’

Marvel tried to regain a sense of normality. Two minutes ago, he had been off to the pub. Now he was confronted with a dying horse, a remote companion, and the mental image of a pack of hounds tearing the dark- brown hide from a still-warm beast, while faceless men in scarlet stood by laughing.

And he wasn’t even drunk.

Maybe he was in shock. Maybe Jonas Holly was too, with his monosyllabic responses.

He had to keep things in perspective. Be practical.

‘We should put it out of its misery,’ said Marvel, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to, but hoping that a countryman like Jonas would take control.

He knew nothing of horses. He wasn’t sure he’d ever touched one, but something made him hunch down now beside this pony’s head and reach out to it. The animal let out a shrill whinny, driving his hand away from it briefly. But because Jonas had already seen him scared at Margaret Priddy’s house, he reached out again.

This time he touched the horse’s neck. The coat was thick but surprisingly soft, and slightly damp. He let his hand sink into it until he could feel the hot skin.

For a moment his touch seemed to calm the beast and he felt the faint throb of the pulse under his fingers. Then it squealed and started to thrash about, knocking Marvel on to his backside in the road. Disorientated, he opened his eyes to see its hoofs blurring close to his face. He put up a protective hand and it was immediately kicked aside. He shouted in pain, then felt a rough tug at the scruff of his neck and was dragged out of range of the flailing hoofs.

His hand was agony. In his head he ran through every expletive he’d ever heard, but in reality he just bit his lip, laid his cheek on the cold tarmac, squeezed his hand in his armpit and tried to stem the tears of pain that threatened to drown his eyes.

Jonas stared numbly at the pony in its death throes. It must have been injured internally because blood was now spurting from its nose as it made bubbly, squealing sounds, still trying to heave itself upright in a pointless but instinctive bid for survival. In the wild, the horse that could not get up was doomed. This one was doomed anyway, but still tried to get to its feet in a terrified panic at being left behind by its herd to be picked off by predators.

To watch it suffering was sickening. To smell it was worse. Under the fear and the blood Jonas could smell its olde-worlde horse smell of dusty pelt and grass and sweet manure. For some reason he couldn’t explain, those smells disturbed him more than anything.

Finally it gave up.

Its head flopped heavily to the tarmac at Jonas’s feet while blood continued to run out of its nose. Its flanks heaved more shallowly, and its eye started to lose focus.

Jonas felt nauseous without the capacity for vomiting. He felt tired without the capacity to sleep. And the embers of the headache had flared to white heat in his brain.

Distantly, he watched the blood from the dying pony’s nose pool towards his shoe; in this light it looked black and oily. The animal grunted once, then sighed hugely as the last of its breath left it.

‘Is it dead?’ said Marvel.

The younger man said nothing; Marvel took that as a ‘yes’.

‘It kicked the shit out of my hand.’ Marvel’s voice was shaky and he leaned over to study his hand by the lights of the car. In the redness he couldn’t see anything wrong with it but it hurt all along its outer edge. He straightened up and looked left and right to where he knew the narrow ribbon of road draped over the moor.

‘Suppose we’d better get it out of the road.’ Marvel bent down. ‘You want to take a leg?’

Jonas didn’t bend down. ‘It’s too heavy,’ he said instead.

‘You think so?’ Marvel grabbed a hoof and leaned back. The leg stretched but the horse didn’t budge. ‘You going to help me?’