Darkside

* * *

Marvel had rather grudgingly told him to take the rest of the day off, but Jonas knew he couldn’t stay at home and out of sight for all of it – not after a second murder in the village he was charged with the care of. He also didn’t want to leave Lucy alone. He knew he’d have to at some point, but today was too raw, too soon.

So that night he took her to the Red Lion, ostensibly for a drink, but they both knew it was so he could be seen; be seen to be part of things.

The mood in the pub was paradoxically sober and the moment they walked in Jonas knew it had been a bad idea to come. Everyone wanted to talk to him, everyone wanted to speculate and everyone wanted to know what the police were doing. This would have been bad enough if he’d been alone – telling them that all he was doing was standing on a doorstep, effectively doing nothing while villagers were being slaughtered – but with Lucy in tow, it was truly shaming. She squeezed his hand under the table at one point, which made it even worse. People weren’t rude about it, but he could see the esteem in which he’d been held slipping as they realized that, while they’d been treating him like one for years, he wasn’t a real policeman after all. All very well to drive about the place in a flashy Land Rover with bull bars and a winch, but when it came down to the nitty gritty, they might as well have a scarecrow for a village bobby, if all he was going to do was stand there.

Jonas felt a sweat starting and got up and went to the bathroom, just to get away from them all. He shut himself in a stall and tried to think clearly.

If he could only go back to his usual routine it wouldn’t be so bad. At least then he’d look as if he was doing what he did best while leaving the murder investigation to the experts. But Marvel wasn’t going to give him a break. He felt that instinctively. He may not keep him on the doorstep for ever, but there was no way he was going to release Jonas while he was still smarting over some imagined slight. He’d give him some other shit thing to do; keep punishing him. Jonas saw his days stretching out in front of him, pointless, boring, undermining his position in the community, and – most importantly – not helping to catch the killer. It was a grim picture.

He stepped out of the stall, still deep in thought, and went over to wash his hands. As he raised his eyes to his reflection in the scarred and pitted mirror over the basin, he noticed the writing on the door behind him. Graham Nash had painted all the toilet doors with blackboard paint inside and out, and provided chalk so customers could write on them. It was a nice idea and gave people something to read while taking a shit, but, of course, it always threw up a mixed bag of dirty limericks, four-letter words and local libel, which required that the whole lot was washed down and erased on a regular basis.

Jonas frowned and turned to look at the door to the stall he’d just come out of. There was a single message in an oddly familiar, spiky hand:

A cold prickle ran over his skin.

Who knew? Who the fuck knew that he’d cried in the bath? His mind scrabbled for purchase on the idea that someone had seen him, or heard him, or just plain knew that he’d sobbed like a little girl. The invasion of privacy felt total. The idea that someone could watch him naked and vulnerable – intrude on the safe cosiness of the bathroom he’d thought he shared with his wife alone. It seemed impossible. Their cottage was not overlooked and Mrs Paddon was their only neighbour. She was a genteel woman in her eighties and was the last person in the world Jonas could ever imagine spying on him and then sneaking into the gents’ at the Red Lion to scribble vicious accusations on the door.

Do your job, crybaby!

Another murder. Another note directed at him.

He hadn’t heard anyone come into the bathroom since he’d entered, but then he hadn’t been listening for anyone; he’d been deep in thought. Someone could have come in, written this and left. Couldn’t they? He wasn’t sure. He racked his brains to try to recall whether the message had been there before he entered the stall. It couldn’t have been; he’d have seen it. He’d noticed it in the mirror from across the room, after all.

The door to the only other stall was closed. Jonas knelt slowly and looked under it. Empty. He pushed the door and it opened, then creaked slowly shut again. Badly hung, that was all.

Suddenly Jonas didn’t want to leave the bathroom. The thought of walking back out into the bar knowing that the person who had written the message was probably there, watching him, made him shake.

The truth of it made him shake.

He wasn’t doing his job.

He was a crybaby.

This thing with Lucy. It had taken his eye off the ball, stopped him focusing on his work at the precise moment when he needed to be 100 per cent at the top of his game.

Mark Dennis’s words rang in his ears: Lucy needs you. Now more than ever.

Jonas wet a paper towel and rubbed the message off the door, then balled it up and flung it hard against the mirror. It hit with a satisfying splat and sprayed water across the glass in a pop-art Pow!

Other people needed him more than ever now, too.

He looked at his broken image again through the trickles of water and made up his mind.

Marvel controlled his days.

But he was still master of his own nights.

Fourteen Days

Shipcott shut down.

In the wake of two murders, the village folded in on itself with a surreal sense of disbelief.

An outsider would have noticed nothing but furtive looks; any local would have known that nothing was as it was before, and nothing was as it should be.

People went about their business. They worked, they shopped, they walked their dogs. But the Shipcott air itself had changed and all who lived there took in toxins with every breath now. Suspicion, fear and confusion started to suffuse their beings and they looked at each other with new eyes that sought clues to the killer’s identity.

It was only 3.45pm but the light was already fading from the sky. The streetlamps flickered orange and warmed up slowly and, while death was still the subject on everyone’s mind, life poured out of the school gates into the strange new world. Children who were used to walking home alone were surprised and embarrassed to find that nervous mothers had come to meet them with pushchairs and dogs on leads, while the narrow road outside the school was clogged with cars ready to transport children through the normally quiet lanes to other villages, rather than risk their missing the bus or walking the last few hundred yards alone in the dark. A single murder was bad enough; a second had created a sense of beyond-coincidence which justified vehicular over-protectiveness, and Pat Jones the lollipop lady bore the brunt of the fear as she tried to cope single-handedly with the sudden traffic mayhem.

Dog-walkers stopped approaching each other so readily. Women walking alone on the moor or on the playing field were nervous of men they’d known all their lives, and those men kept their distance to avoid scaring the women. Farmers who noticed walkers on footpaths kept watching until they were out of sight, and made notes of the number plates of cars parked in lay-bys. Brusque waves took the place of face-to-face conversations, and people shouted ‘Hello’ too loudly at each other across the street, so everyone could tell they were normal and friendly and not weird loners plotting murder.

The Bugle reporter came from Dulverton and attracted small knots of people nodding and looking worried on each other’s doorsteps.

The Red Lion and the Blue Dolphin chip shop saw brisk early trade, but each then closed earlier than usual for want of customers. Dedicated drinkers went home at an unaccustomed hour to discover that their children had grown up in their pub-induced absence and now insisted on watching sexually charged soaps instead of Sesame Street.

Steven Lamb was forbidden by his mother to go to the skate ramp after dark and was secretly relieved, and Billy Beer – who had been plagued for years by a small knot of teenagers who gathered at the bus stop outside his home every night and made Bongo bark – was so unnerved by the sudden silence that he tossed and turned all night, and woke up each morning more exhausted than he had been the night before.