Darkside

complete power over him. So he swallowed some of his pride and said, ‘Sorry, sir.’

Marvel grunted and put the car into gear.

‘You’d better start taking your job more seriously while you still have one.’

He pulled away sharply before Jonas could answer, forcing him to step quickly out of the way.

Jonas watched the car fishtail a little in the snow. He knew it was a hollow threat, but it still made him think.

He’d have to be careful around Marvel.

* * *

A & D MARSH MOTOR REPAIRS read the sign on the trustingly unlocked door of the broken-down tin shack.

It was gloomy inside and Reynolds ran his hands up and down the wall inside the door until he found the light switch, then looked at his fingers covered in black smudge.

‘What are we looking for, sir?’

‘Evidence.’

Reynolds knew he should never have bothered asking. Marvel had no more idea what they might find than he did. Probably less. Back at the Marsh house, poor Elizabeth Rice had instructions to do the same. ‘Just nose around,’ Marvel had told her.

Because apparently ‘nosing around’ did not require a stuffy old search warrant.

Reynolds felt an ever-rising sense that they were all stagnating. They had no fingerprints and – even more curiously – no footprints. Just dirty smears and vague impressions in carpet. They were still pinning their forensic hopes on the single unidentified hair from the Margaret Priddy scene, but if that matched Peter Priddy or someone else who’d been at the scene in an official capacity then they were back to square one anyway.

When Marvel had told him about the Jonas Holly link, Reynolds had tutted in vague empathy and mentally sided with Holly.

It was just like Marvel to shit all over a guy for doing his job.

Here in the garage – for the first time since he’d come to Shipcott – Marvel felt some connection with someone local. They might be suspects, but at least it was something.

As a boy he’d wanted to be a bus driver. Not because he’d wanted to suffer the stop-and-go of Oxford Street or get caught in a six-mile tailback on the Edgware Road. No, when the boy-Marvel imagined his life as a bus driver, he’d always seen himself bent over with his head inside the cavernous engine bay, spanner in hand. Which was probably just as likely, given London’s ageing bus population, he reflected wryly whenever he thought about those times.

He felt an unaccustomed smile curl the corner of his mouth.

‘Something funny, sir?’ asked Reynolds.

‘No,’ said Marvel. A childhood ambition to be a bus driver was the last thing he was prepared to share with an over-educated prick like Reynolds.

The workshop was far neater and cleaner inside than the exterior promised. Tools were hung neatly and surfaces were reasonably tidy. The two men split automatically and walked around the premises in opposite directions.

‘You think it’s the same killer?’ mused Reynolds.

‘In a place this size?’

‘Different M.O.’

‘In a place this size?’ repeated Marvel.

‘You know Arnold Avery buried all those kids on the moors around here. Lightning can strike twice.’

Marvel grunted.

Reynolds ran his fingers over the sharp jaws of a bench vice and spun the lever, loving the smooth silence of its travel.

As a boy, Reynolds had wanted to be a bus driver. He had vivid recollections of cycling to school – and later university –through the centre of Bristol. Every time he was in a queue of traffic, he would stop his bicycle beside a bus, just to listen to the engine with its thudding bass covered by curiously breathy high notes. A sublime metal orchestra inside the grand theatre of what Reynolds had always considered to be the perfect method of mass transportation. Even while slaving over his criminology degree, a part of him always fantasized about giving it all up and spending the rest of his life behind the wheel, high above the traffic, sitting over the engine of a Routemaster or a Leyland National. It was a fantasy he had never divulged to anyone. No one would understand.

Marvel whistled low behind him and Reynolds turned to see him holding up what looked like a tissue box.

When Reynolds walked over, he could see that it was filled with disposable latex gloves.

Ten Days

Jonas hated the doctor.

Dr Anil Wickramsinghe was his name and Jonas had come to hold him personally responsible for Lucy’s decline. Dr Wickramsinghe was middle-aged, balding and utterly inoffensive, but Jonas always felt in his guts that he was holding out on them. That, for some reason he couldn’t fathom, Dr Wickramsinghe thought it would be in everyone’s best interests to watch Lucy Holly in pain, fear and depression.

Like today.

Today Dr Wickramsinghe had listened to Lucy’s halting description of the progress of her disease with his head cocked to one side, feigning concern. When she said she had dropped a mug of tea on Wednesday, unable to feel that she wasn’t gripping it properly, he nodded and tutted. When she recounted two episodes of MS hug, which had left her writhing on the floor in agony, he nodded and made a little sound like ‘mm’ in the back of his throat. And when her lip trembled as she told him that her eyesight had faltered in the middle of The Evil Dead, he sighed as if he shared her pain.

‘When?’ said Jonas sharply. ‘You didn’t tell me that!’

Lucy bit her lip.

‘Why didn’t you tell me, Lu?’

‘I’m sure I did, Jonas.’

When she used his name that way, she was lying. Not lying like criminals lie, just … being economical with the truth, like a politician.

‘If you don’t tell me these things, Lu, how can I help?’

She was too kind to say it but he knew the answer. He couldn’t help – so what was the point?

Dr Wickramsinghe placed his palms flat on the table as if he was about to make a decision. As if he was about to get up and go to the secret safe behind the ugly sailing ships above his desk and get the real medicine; the actual pills that would put an end to Lucy’s suffering. Spin the dial and Open Sesame on a cure. Every single time they were here, Jonas expected him to confess that so far they’d been giving her sugar solution and peanut M&Ms, but that now – at last – she was sick enough for them to break out the good stuff.

Instead, Dr Wickramsinghe leaned back slightly in his chair, as if distancing himself from the awkward case before him, and said, ‘This is the progression we can expect, I’m afraid.’

Jonas wanted to pounce across the desk, grip him by the throat and bang his skull repeatedly against the ships until the sea ran red.

Can’t you SEE? he wanted to shout. Can’t you SEE that she needs HELP?

Lucy’s warm hand on his thigh told him she knew what he was thinking, even as she agreed with Dr Wickramsinghe: ‘Of course, I understand. But is there any more we can do for the symptoms?’

So like Lucy. So like her to calm him down, and to make the bastard who was killing her feel less like a shit while doing it. What can we do for the