Darkside

shut.

He wouldn’t cry. He mustn’t cry. He was not allowed to cry.

For some reason which escaped him, that thought made his eyes burn even harder and his throat felt filled with a balloon with the effort it took to keep from tears.

It was Lucy. He knew it was all about Lucy, this new tearful streak. He tried to tell himself it was understandable – that facing the loss of someone he loved so much was sure to make him weak and vulnerable – but something in him found it merely pathetic and he hated himself because of it.

He opened his eyes and blinked at the monochromatic haloes around the stars above him and the streetlights below him. He made no effort to clear his vision – blurred was nice for now. Even blurred, he knew the shape of the village. He knew the light that was the pub and the light over the bus stop. A hundred feet below him he knew the yellow blob of Linda Cobb’s kitchen, and the absence of light that was Margaret Priddy’s home.

One light sparkled in isolation across the coombe – separate from the others. Jonas focused on it and breathed steadily. Slowly, slowly, the cobwebs faded around the single light and he saw it was a yellowish, un- curtained window across the way, only just visible above the rough silhouette of a hedge, which cut it off at the sill.

He looked down towards the village and took his bearings, then looked back up at that single pale window.

And felt his heart miss a beat.

From here.

From this place alone.

From atop the stile outside the Trewell home, Jonas Holly could see directly into his own bathroom.

Twelve Days

When it finally made up its mind, the snow came with a vengeance.

The first flakes wandered down from the black velvet sky like little stars that had lost their way, and within minutes the galaxies themselves were raining down on Exmoor. Without a breath of breeze to divert or delay them, a million billion points of fractured light poured from the heavens, to be finally reunited under the moon in a brilliant carpet of silent white.

* * *

Marvel woke up with a cat staring into his eyes from a distance of about three inches. He flinched and it dug its claws into his chest, keeping him just where it wanted him.

‘Get off,’ he suggested, but the enormously fluffy grey ball merely blinked its orange eyes and looked contemptuous. It did withdraw its claws a little, but was certainly not going anywhere soon.

Marvel turned his head with a wince to find he was asleep on Joy Springer’s hairy kitchen sofa and couldn’t feel his legs. Because of the cat, he couldn’t immediately see them either, which only added to the surreal feeling that his legs could be absolutely anywhere. He reached down and touched his thigh. Or what he assumed was his thigh – he had no sensation in the slab his finger felt through the cloth of his suit trousers.

The light was oddly muted, as if someone had put a pale veil over the windows while he slept. It added to the air of strangeness that waking up without his legs was giving him.

It had been a late night at the mobile unit. Late and smelling of Calor gas. He’d kept his team up past their bedtimes, laying out a strategy for the two inquiries; being the swan while wanting a drink. Luckily Reynolds was on the ball. Him and his fucking little notebook, thought Marvel sourly.

Then he had come back to the farm to find that although he’d given Joy Springer money for a bottle of whiskey, she’d instead bought two bottles of Cinzano, which he hadn’t even known they made any more.

‘Get off!’ he shouted into the cat’s face and – after a rebellious beat – it rose slowly, dug in its claws in farewell, and sauntered down his body with its tail in the air, so that Marvel could see from its puckered arse exactly what it thought of him.

Marvel struggled to his elbows and looked down at his legs, which – in their paralysis – seemed to be completely separate from his hips. He actually had to lean down and pull his own feet to the floor so that he could sit up. He noticed he’d removed his shoes, even though Joy Springer’s couch looked as if it had been retrieved from a tip. So did his shoes; they had been wet and dried so often in the past fortnight that the leather was going stiff. How hard could it be to buy wellington fucking boots?

He looked at his watch. Eight thirty-five am.

Bollocks.

The empty bottles on the table told their own story and as a prequel to that he had a hazy recollection of Joy Springer cackling while he told her an anecdote. He had several that he rolled out again and again and again in company – each time starting with ‘Reminds me of …’ As if he’d ever forgotten.

There was the story of Jason Harman, the Butcher of Bermondsey, who’d sliced up his wife and his mother- in-law and boiled their remains to soup on a two-ring hob; of Nance Locke, who’d murdered her three children by tying their hands and forcing their heads into a bucket of water one after the other; or of Ang Nu, who’d run as if guilty and then, when cornered, jumped from a bridge – not into the expected river, but on to the unfortunate spikes of the railings below. ‘One in his arse, one in his heart and one right through the eye socket,’ Marvel always finished with ghoulish glee. ‘The eyeball was sat on top of the spike like a cocktail onion on a stick.’

Of course, the older Marvel got, the fewer people had ever seen a cocktail onion on a stick and the less punch the image packed. Still, he enjoyed saying it, even if the denouement was always accompanied by the guilty nudge of the untold aftermath. That Ang Nu had been beaten up twice because of his immigrant status, spoke no English, and had probably been wholly unaware that the four burly men chasing him this time were police.

That would have spoiled the story.

Which would have been a shame, because Joy Springer had seemed to enjoy that one. Old enough to remember cocktail onions, for sure. No doubt if he’d had a story about a fondue-related crime, she’d have liked that too.

Joy had a few stories of her own, Marvel remembered dimly now with a grimace. A few too many and all against the same backdrop of Springer Farm: buying the place as newly-weds, individual horses and all their little horsey quirks, the seemingly endless years of trekking and local shows and children falling off and grockles getting trampled and the stables burning down and the cottages being built in their place … mercifully Marvel had been able to tune much of it out entirely. Until she’d got tearful. Then he’d had to re-focus and at least look as if he’d been listening all along. Really, the things you had to do to get a companionable drink around here.

She’d shown him a photo of her husband. Marvel turned his head now and could still see it on the table, propped up as if it had been watching him all night. Creepy. Her husband had been called Roy. Or Ralph. Something with an R.

Debbie used to say, ‘People get the face they deserve.’ Another of her hippy-dippy Sting-clinging homilies that made him want to smack her with her Amazonian rainstick. Annoyingly, though, Marvel had come to the grudging conclusion that she was generally right on this one. He’d banged up enough pinch-lipped, low-browed, boss-eyed criminals in his time to become receptive to the idea. Now he thought that if Something with an R had got the face he deserved then he probably should have been banged up too.

Not according to Joy Springer, he recalled vaguely. Apparently Something with an R had been descended from angels and had returned there ‘to sleep’ with them once his tortured life was at an end. Marvel tried to remember what had tortured him so badly – ill health or no money or just being so bloody ugly and married to Joy Springer – but he wasn’t sure she had told him. He did remember being surprised that the resilient old bird had got emotional about anything other than the fact that the Cinzano was finished. She didn’t seem the type.

Ah well, it was all a bit of a haze now.

Marvel rubbed his eyes and face. Reynolds would muster the troops; it wouldn’t be the first time. He got to his unsteady feet and saw the white outside. Snow making everything seem black and white, deep enough that he could not see the gravel of the courtyard, even through the footprints and the tyre tracks that indicated that