Darkside

sex of the victims, the fact that they had suffered blunt-force trauma, and about the ‘concerning’ disappearance of Gary Liss. He then distributed the good, clear photograph Jonas Holly had brought back with him from Paul Angell – Gary Liss looking like a member of a comeback boy-band in jeans and a tight T-shirt. Nothing was said about the box of jewellery. The watch had belonged to Violet Eaves, and the Reverend Chard identified a signet ring of his father’s. When they found Gary Liss, it would be one of the few surprises they could spring on him.

The usual blah about what a terrible crime it was was said with far more than the usual vehemence by Marvel. Luckily for the two TV news crews, a trick of the light caught an ambiguous liquid shine in Marvel’s eyes and ‘A MURDER DETECTIVE WEEPS’ booked the story a top berth on both the evening news bulletins.

Marvel protested too much, Reynolds was faux sympathetic and Marcie Meyrick – whose photographer had been delayed by a snow-crash on the M5 – was enraged.

* * *

Elizabeth Rice felt thoroughly left out.

Family liaison was a get-out clause for every senior police officer who had women to deploy, and sometimes she wished she’d never done the additional training the position required.

Marvel acting as if Alan and Danny Marsh were both still suspects was a joke; if he seriously considered them to be suspects in the latest brutal murders then he would never have left her alone with them. Marvel was an arsehole but he wasn’t completely stupid – so why the hell couldn’t she abandon her assignment and get where the action was? All her fancy-pants high-falutin family-liaison status afforded her was a total lack of privacy, and the honour of sharing a bathroom with two men who were too unreconstructed to bother with the niceties of flushing, let alone putting the seat down.

They barely said a word to each other, and that gave her the creeps.

Alan Marsh sat for hours staring at inanimate objects, while Danny stayed in his bedroom and read, occasionally went to the Red Lion, or wandered from lounge to kitchen and back, twitching.

‘I suppose it was a release,’ Alan said at least one thousand times a day, usually after a long sigh. Sometimes Danny would grunt in reply; sometimes he would snort; sometimes he would jump to his feet and say ‘Bollocks!’ and leave the room. He would come back ten minutes later and they would resume their positions.

Their tiny terraced house smelled of sweat, mildew and something else which she took days to identify as a bag of onions liquefying in the vegetable rack. One part of her wanted so badly to scrub the place from top to bottom that she kept opening the cupboard under the sink and staring at the bleach; another part of her rebelled at the thought that, because she was a woman, she should clean the house. She had a degree in Criminal Psychology! She’d graduated top of her class at Portishead! She was a highly trained and highly effective officer of the law!

It sucked, because she really wanted to clean that house.

The Marshes weren’t under arrest; they were free to come and go – but they hardly did. By day Alan stared at The Jeremy

Kyle Show and Homes under the Hammer as if he had common ground with unwed slags and millionaire property developers. Danny would slouch down at breakfast and attempt to make small talk over the cornflakes. Very small talk. He was no talker, Danny Marsh, but he was a surprisingly good listener. He would ask her something and then just let her keep talking while he poured milk and sprinkled sugar and crunched cereal. Now and then he would look up and make eye-contact; now and then he would grunt; now and then he would nod. It was the only encouragement she needed. Sometimes she found herself telling him things about her own life that she hadn’t even told her boyfriend, Eric. Sometimes she told him things about Eric! Afterwards she was always sorry she’d been disloyal, but Danny Marsh’s grunts and nods seemed to open her eyes to certain aspects of Eric’s personality that she had to admit she’d never noticed before. Or if she had, they had never bothered her before. It had taken Danny Marsh and his objectivity to make her see …

She locked them all in every night. Back door, front door and all the downstairs windows. Alan Marsh was too out of it to notice, but Danny had watched her do it the first night and had asked, ‘Are you locking someone out, or locking us in?’

‘Someone out, of course,’ she’d said, but she could feel her cheeks grow warm and hoped he hadn’t noticed.

Every night she kept the keys under her pillow while she slept in the tiny box room they had cleared for her. ‘Cleared’ was a euphemism for shoving everything that apparently wouldn’t fit in the attic against the opposite wall, and Rice had to turn sideways to approach the bed at nights, down a narrow pathway of ugly green carpet.

She crab-walked down that pathway around midnight every night and woke at six. She checked on the Marshes as soon as she woke – but for the rapid application of mascara to her pale lashes, because that was next to waking like cleanliness is next to godliness – and she checked by pressing an ear against their bedroom doors and listening to them breathe. Alan snored; his son did not, but in the still darkness of dawn she could always hear him breathe eventually, once she focused and calmed her own breathing.

From day three onwards she had inquired of Alan and Danny whether they might like to return to work at the ramshackle little garage behind their home. She’d gathered that they kept half the cars on Exmoor running from the dingy corrugated-iron shed, and was more than prepared to jump around and stamp her feet to stay warm if only it took them all out of this stuffy little house. But no amount of encouragement would shift them into any action that was not slow or short-lived. Danny went to the pub now and then, but constantly forgot that he was supposed to have bought something for tea, and eventually Rice chose female submission over starvation and stormed down to the Spar to keep them all in the most mundane of foods – beans, toast, eggs, toast, cheese, toast and more toast. Her low-carb diet was a thing of the past and she felt the old white-bread addiction gripping her like crack, the longer her pointless occupation of the Marsh home continued.

When Marvel called about the murders at Sunset Lodge, she had wanted to rush out of the house and up the snowy road to be part of it all. Missing the buzz of the scene of a triple murder was killing her. The thought of that idiot Pollard being there when she was not was especially hard to bear.

All day she was short and gloomy and that night she sat fuming on the easy chair beside the sofa, from where Alan and Danny stared sightlessly at Top Gear repeats. Even she had seen this one and she’d only been here nine days.

Alan went to bed at 10.30pm, Danny at twelve when she did. She said goodnight with forced cheerfulness; he didn’t bother to force anything apart from a mumble, and closed his bedroom door.

She did her teeth and washed her face, trying hard not to touch the toothpaste-spotted taps or even the cracked and grimy pink soap, which looked as if it might have been a pre-war fixture along with the mottled tiles.

As she opened her bedroom door, she shivered.

She sidled towards the head of her bed and shivered again. The little room was always cold but there was a terrible draught coming from somewhere …

As if in answer to an unspoken question, the open curtains wafted inwards.

The window was slightly open. ‘Slightly’ in this winter was enough for the cold to stab its way into the room and chill it like a fridge.

A cheap office desk lamp with a flexible neck was the only makeshift light in here. Rice turned it to the window.

On the sill was a footprint showing where someone had climbed from the roof of the lean-to and into her room.

Elizabeth Rice had watched enough teen horror flicks on the sofa with Eric to know that the killer was right behind her with a steak knife.

She turned on a stifled shriek, throwing up her hands to protect her throat.

Nobody there.

She took three lurching sideways steps towards her bedroom door to alert the Marshes that there had been an intruder, and then stopped dead, even though her mind continued to click through scenarios so fast that it felt like one of those flicker-books where a thousand static images make a jerky motion picture.

The print was coming in.

There was no print going out.

If this was the killer, then the killer was still in the house.