Darkside

getting there ‘before the circus starts’. Which Pollard ‘thought’ might mean they were about to be besieged by the press. Marvel mentally rolled his eyes at Pollard’s lack of imagination and had second thoughts about putting him in charge now that this thing looked like going national, but was too busy to start redeploying staff at this stage.

At 6am he called Elizabeth Rice to check on the Marshes. He didn’t want to start going after Liss if she told him both men had sneaked out in the night and come home covered in blood. He really hoped they had; everything would be so much easier. He held while she checked that they were still in bed. She said she had last checked on them at midnight and had personally locked the front and back doors and all the downstairs windows, and had kept the keys with her at all times.

‘Why, sir?’ she asked.

He told her there’d been three murders at Sunset Lodge, then the doorbell rang and Marvel heard the CSIs identifying themselves at the entrance. They had a huge job ahead of them.

‘Shall I come up to help, sir?’ said Rice hopefully.

Marvel thought of Reynolds’s tipping-point theory. If it was true then nobody was off the hook quite yet.

‘No,’ he told her. ‘You stay there.’

Downstairs, Jonas was sitting white-faced and dark-eyed in a chair with an undrunk cup of tea on his knee.

Around him the vast black windows of the garden room reflected the scene in all directions, making it seem that hundreds of people were standing around whispering, bending over each other; crying in relay in a cocktail party of mourning.

‘You take sugar?’ said Marvel.

Jonas raised his eyes slowly to Marvel’s. ‘What?’

‘Do you take sugar?’

Jonas looked dully at his cup and shook his head. Marvel picked the sugar bowl off a nearby tea trolley, put two heaped spoonfuls into Jonas’s tea and stirred it briskly, slopping it into the saucer.

‘Drink up,’ he said.

Jonas did, wincing at the sweetness. Marvel pulled the piano stool away from the piano and sat down facing him.

‘You know Gary Liss?’

‘Not well, but yeah, I know him. He lives here, so I know him.’

‘Tell me about him.’

Jonas stared down at his cup for a long moment. ‘I can’t believe he did this.’

Marvel spread his hands and said curtly, ‘You can’t believe anyone did it – but there are three dead people upstairs and Liss has taken off. It doesn’t look good.’

‘I know,’ said Jonas miserably.

‘He ever been in trouble?’

‘Not really. Once there were some things missing. From the residents’ rooms. A few bits of jewellery, that kind of thing. I came round and spoke to staff members. There was no evidence even though I suspected it might be Gary, so it was more to let them know it had been noticed than anything else. It stopped. That was all.’

‘Any items recovered?’ asked Reynolds.

‘Not to my knowledge.’

‘Could’ve been Liss,’ said Marvel. ‘Petty crime leads to bigger things.’

‘But not this,’ said Jonas. ‘I don’t understand what’s happening here. Why this is happening …’ He stopped, realizing he sounded lost and feeble, and cleared his throat.

Marvel said, ‘Grey and Singh are at Liss’s house but it doesn’t look as if he’s been back home. You know where else he might be?’

‘Paul’s,’ said Jonas, and then sat up quickly, clattering his cup and saucer on to the trolley. ‘Shit. I have to tell Paul.’

‘Who’s Paul?’

‘His partner.’

Marvel glanced at Reynolds. ‘He told us he had a girlfriend.’

‘He doesn’t know you.’ Jonas shrugged, getting up and picking up his helmet. ‘Why would he tell you?’

Marvel felt a twinge of irritation. ‘Hold on. I’ll send a man with you. He could be harbouring Liss.’

But Jonas was impatient. ‘He lives in Withypool. I can’t see how Gary would have got there by now, sir. Not in this snow, and his car’s still out the back. I don’t want Paul to hear it through the grapevine.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Mr Cooke’s wife is Dr Dennis’s receptionist and she’s best friends with Lisa Tanner who lives next door to Paul. She’ll tell him if I don’t get there first.’ Jonas hesitated, then remembered that he was supposed to be on doorstep duty. ‘If that’s all right with you, sir?’

Marvel nodded curtly. ‘Come to the unit afterwards. I’ll need you on other things now.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Jonas. ‘Will you be treating Gary as a suspect? Just want to know how to handle Paul.’

‘Bloody right!’ said Marvel. ‘The only bloody suspect.’

Jonas nodded neutrally.

‘Get a picture of Liss,’ Marvel said as Jonas left, then added, ‘preferably one where he’s not wearing leather shorts.’

Reynolds and Marvel sat for a minute in the soporific heat of the garden room. God knew what it was like in the summer. Reynolds wrinkled his nose. The room was clean and tidy but it smelled of old things.

‘Liss lied to us,’ said Marvel.

‘Only about his sexuality,’ shrugged Reynolds. ‘That’s understandable in a small village.’

‘Not in a fucking murder investigation, it’s not.’

‘Jonas seems to think it’s beyond him,’ said Reynolds cautiously.

‘Bollocks to him. He’s a boy scout.’

Several old ladies looked round at the language and Marvel lowered his voice. ‘You think Liss didn’t do it?’

‘No, sir,’ said Reynolds – and meant it. ‘I was only keeping an open mind, that’s all. As we haven’t interviewed him yet.’

‘Well when we have him behind bars, I’ll keep an open mind too. Until then he’s Jack the fucking Ripper in my book.’

One of the CSIs spoke from the door: ‘We’ve got a trail.’

Reynolds got up, but Marvel didn’t rise from the piano stool. Instead he pursed his lips and looked around at the remaining residents. They wept and held each other’s hands – and stared into their own short futures with new fear.

‘The old, the weak, the infirm,’ he said in a low but harsh voice that Reynolds had to lean forward to hear …

‘This is not a killing – it’s a cull.’

* * *

Jonas had no fear of going to Paul Angell’s alone. He knew it wasn’t Gary Liss. He couldn’t have said how he knew it. It was the same way he knew it wasn’t Peter Priddy, and the same way he’d known the identity of the body in the stream; the same way he knew that the killer of Margaret Priddy had also killed Yvonne Marsh. He just felt it.

Big deal, he berated himself under his breath, as he drove carefully through the snow to Withypool. He seemed to know an awful lot about who the killer wasn’t. But he felt no closer to understanding who the killer was. And although he hadn’t been involved in the investigation, he also had a gut feeling that Marvel had no more insight than he did. The man had the look of someone who has just realized he has wandered off a true path and into quicksand. Something in Jonas enjoyed knowing that the abrasive Marvel was suffering.

They were all suffering.

Jonas found it hard to grasp what was happening to his village; to his friends and neighbours; to the very