Darkside

‘You remember what she was like?’

‘Of course,’ said Jonas and Danny sighed.

‘Sometimes she remembered. How she’d been. That was the worst part, you know? Not her going nuts, but her knowing that she was going nuts.’

Jonas nodded. He understood.

‘At least that’s over now,’ Danny said, and turned back towards the surreal scene of his mother lying dead near the corner flag while the whole village watched silently from the far touchline, as if they’d come to see a match and stayed to watch a murder. His father was in the back of the ambulance now, with the two paramedics fussing over him.

Jonas saw that someone had put a blanket over Mrs Marsh’s body and he was stupidly grateful, because it was a cold day, despite the sunshine.

Danny sniffed, sighed, and shook a B&H out of a crumpled pack he found in his jeans.

‘You all right, Jonas?’

Jonas glanced at him, perplexed. He was all right! He wasn’t the one whose dead mother had just been hauled out of a frozen stream like an Arctic seal. Why the hell would Danny ask him that?

He said nothing and Danny didn’t ask again.

Nearby a blackbird burst into song and Jonas allowed it to fill him up. With his back to the body there was nothing but beauty in the world.

Danny squinted as he blew the only cloud into the clear blue sky. ‘We should have a drink,’ he said.

‘Some time,’ said Jonas, and hoped Danny realized that that meant ‘never’.

Danny smoked half the cigarette and flicked the rest into the stream. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you soon, Jonas.’

Marvel watched Danny Marsh walk away from Jonas Holly and back to his father. Without averting his gaze, he spoke quietly to Reynolds, who stood beside him with that damned notebook open.

‘What’s the link?’

‘Pardon, sir?’

‘The link. Between Margaret Priddy and …’ He nodded at the corpse.

‘Yvonne Marsh.’

‘Yes. Assuming this is murder and it’s the same killer. What’s the link?’

Reynolds thought for a second. ‘Both in their sixties. Both women …’ He dried up.

Marvel looked at Reynolds directly now. ‘Both a burden on their families, wouldn’t you say?’

Reynolds nodded his thoughtful agreement.

‘Could be two families finally snapping. But if it’s not, then what’s the link? More important, who’s the link?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘Well nor do I,’ said Marvel. ‘Yet.’

He told Pollard to bag up PC Holly’s clothes for Jos Reeves at the lab. The crime scene here was a joke – in the open air and on a field that half the village used, trampled by Holly and the skateboarders at the very least, and the body had been in water and then moved, just to add to the complications – but he might as well preserve everything he could, if only for the purpose of elimination. He walked back towards the car, his feet making a satisfying crunching sound on the frosty field, and called Jos Reeves to tell him to be sure to compare forensics in the Yvonne Marsh case with Margaret Priddy’s. Reeves got in a huff with him. Got all offended that Marvel thought he didn’t know his own job. Prima donna. Next time he’d have Reynolds call Reeves.

He sent Singh, Pollard and Grey to do another house-to-house, asking all the same questions but about a different time, place and victim. It was a chore but it had to be done.

Later he took Elizabeth Rice to meet the Marshes. He told them she would be their family liaison officer, staying with them twenty-four hours a day for support, and keeping them informed of how the investigation was progressing.

‘Anything you want, or anything you need to know, you just ask her,’ he said with surprising kindness.

He told her they were both suspects until further notice.

* * *

After Jonas had given a preliminary statement to one of Marvel’s DCs, the paramedics dropped him off at home so he could finally get some trousers on. They wanted their scratchy blanket back, and Lucy looked up in surprise as he walked into the cottage wrapped from the waist down in silver foil. She made a mermaid joke, then saw his face. He told her what had happened and watched her get quiet. More quiet; Lucy was always calm – even when told about what looked like the village’s second murder in eight days.

‘You need to get warm,’ was her verdict. She insisted on coming upstairs with him, so he carried her on legs that throbbed painfully now, cramping as the blood got going again. Without her sticks she moved carefully and with a break in her stride that made it look as if she might fall at any minute. Still, need gave her strength, and she bossed him and ran him a bath while he stripped off and bundled his clothes into the laundry basket. He thought he might as well be a mermaid, he’d been so wet in the past twelve hours. His good shoes and another pair of work trousers were still on the radiators from last night. He could hear Lucy painstakingly laying out a fresh uniform on the bed – doing her wifely thing in jerky slow motion – while he stepped into the bath, sending needles of hot pain up his legs.

Their bath – which had a view of the moor on one side and the fields sloping up to Springer Farm on the other – was the biggest that would fit into the tiny bathroom, but it was no match for Jonas. It was why he preferred the shower; in the bath he had to sit up to keep both his legs submerged. As his legs warmed and he listened to Lucy moving around – making all that effort for his benefit – he slumped back against the cold enamel and a great weariness overtook him. The shock of last night, and the bigger shock of this morning. Two murders. Two murders! Perhaps if he’d watched more American television, he wouldn’t feel so appalled. Perhaps being a policeman and having two murders in quick succession on his patch would not feel so surreal if only he’d tuned in to NYPD Blue a bit more dutifully in his formative years.

Somewhere out there was a killer. It seemed unbelievable, but a killer had come to town and – like the shark in Jaws – had apparently decided to stick around.

Call yourself a policeman?

The words hit him again, but this time they seemed to be not just an accusation but a warning. Was it the killer who had left him a message? The idea jolted him. Was the killer taunting him? Letting him know how ineffective he was? Was Yvonne Marsh another display of his dubious skills? If so, how many more people might the killer be planning to murder? Where would his appetite end?

The shame he’d felt as he read the note came back to Jonas hard, along with this new fear and a fresh wave of helplessness. He was the protector. He should be out there on the high seas hunting down the killer shark, when all he was doing was standing on the jetty with a shrimping net, hoping it would swim past and wave a fin. And if the killer was here to stay, then all he really wanted to do was stock up on canned goods, barricade the doors and wrap Lucy in his arms until it all went away.

Except that what Lucy really needed protecting from was never going to go away …

A loud sob escaped him and he clapped a hand over his mouth, feeling the tears heat his eyes as efficiently as the bath had heated his legs.

‘Jonas?’

He bent his knees and slid quickly down the enamel and under the water, so that when she came in, there would be a good reason why his face was wet.

* * *

The killer was angry.

Margaret Priddy had been unavoidable in a way, but Yvonne Marsh should never have had to happen. If Jonas had understood the first message, then he’d have done his job – and if Jonas had done his job, then Yvonne Marsh would still be alive.

To the killer it all seemed very simple.

He didn’t know why Jonas had to make it so complicated.