Darkside

‘She says she hasn’t touched anything. Look around, will you?’

Reynolds did, checking the arms of the wing chair, the head-rest, the handles of a Zimmer which was on standby for take-off a few feet away.

‘Can you hold your hand up for me, Betty?’

She nodded and he let go of her wrist.

Everyone in the room was watching them now. Behind him Marvel could hear a hum of low mutterings: ‘What’s going on?’ … ‘What’s he doing to Betty?’ … ‘Where are the biscuits?’

Betty shifted in her seat, careful not to move her hand much, and Marvel saw her walking stick hooked over the arm of her chair, right near the back where it would be out of the way.

He looked around for something to pick it up with and started to lift the rug off Betty’s knees. Her smudged hand clapped down to her lap to keep her rug and her modesty in place, so instead he yanked his own tie off and used it carefully to pick up the stick.

‘Reynolds.’

Reynolds came over and Marvel held the walking stick up to the light. It was made of stout wood, the handle of tooled brass – stained brownish-red.

And near the end was a small but unmistakable clump of white hair.

He had his murder weapon.

He had his suspect.

Marvel thought of the line from ‘Amazing Grace’.

I once was lost, but now I’m found.

That was him. Lost, then found. Dark, then light. Drunk, then sober. The moment he saw those strands of white stuck to the end of the cane, Marvel knew he didn’t have to drink any more. He would, but he didn’t have to. Not on this case, at least.

It had been getting out of hand anyway. Last night he and Joy had had a barney because she’d got all maudlin about Something with an R and, instead of sympathizing, he’d asked if she had any ice. She’d thrown a glass at him and he’d said something mean about Dubonnet …

What the hell was he doing getting into an argument with some lonely old drunk over ice and Dubonnet? He should have his head examined.

Lost and found.

As long as things progressed in that order, Marvel felt he was doing a reasonable job with his life.

All day long, while he clambered over debris and peered through shed windows on the off-chance of finding Gary Liss, Jonas worried about the notes.

The first had been oblique: Call yourself a policeman?

The second had been personal: Do your job, crybaby.

The third – in the wake of a triple murder – could no longer be seen as anything but a warning: If you won’t do your job, then I’ll do it for you.

But he was doing his job! This time the killer was wrong! He’d started his night patrols, and now he was properly part of the investigation by day, too. They even had a suspect lined up. How could the killer – or anyone – accuse him of no longer doing his job?

But the threatening tone of this note was unmistakable, and Jonas knew he could no longer hide behind previous ambiguity.

The time had come to speak to Marvel.

* * *

The killer couldn’t keep hiding for ever. Things were closing in. Things were catching up with him. Memories pressed against the ceiling of his subconscious like desperate sailors in the hold of a doomed ship.

He was no longer sure he could hold it all together. Some part of him had once imagined some connection with the policeman/protector; there had been times when he had wondered if they might one day be on the same team. Work side by side.

But Jonas was still stubbornly ineffective where it really mattered.

The bodies were piling up.

The wrong people were dying and it just wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t right.

Something had to give.

* * *

Elizabeth Rice called Marvel – ostensibly to say she hadn’t yet had an opportunity to compare the Polaroid of the shoe-print with all the shoes in the Marshes’ house, but really to find out what was going on at Sunset Lodge.

Marvel told her not to bother. They had a suspect.

‘Does that mean I can join you up there?’

‘No,’ said Marvel. ‘Stay put for a bit. Might need you to break the news of an arrest to the Marshes.’

‘OK. Good,’ said Rice, although she felt like throwing something in frustration.

Preferably at Marvel.

When Jonas arrived, the residents of Sunset Lodge had just started to make their arduous journeys from the garden room to the dining room for supper.

Although it was dark already, the room was as hot as ever, and smelled of sweet decay under hairspray and talcum powder. After the bitter outdoors it was suffocating. He wondered if they ever opened the windows so people could breathe—

The memory hit him like a ghost train …

He and Danny Marsh had bought maggots for fishing from Mr Jacoby’s shop. In the late summer the stream behind the playing field had sticklebacks and the occasional brown trout, and there were schoolyard rumours of a pike that might – or might not – have eaten Annie Rossiter’s missing cat, Wobbles. Jonas did not really buy the Wobbles theory, because why would a cat be in the stream in the first place? But he did fantasize about catching a pike. Or a trout.

A stickleback would do, to be honest.

So he and Danny had bought a pot of maggots. A little white polystyrene cup with a not-quite-clear plastic lid, which had to be lifted to see the fat white worms properly. Mr Jacoby took them from the fridge – from a shelf alongside the cans of Coke and Dandelion & Burdock, which Jonas could never quite make up his mind whether he liked or not.

Jonas was stunned that he could recall such details. He even remembered now that the maggots had cost 55p and that Danny had paid because he’d owed Jonas for a comic.

They’d only had one rod between them – Jonas’s little starter rod which had come in a blister-pack last Christmas, with its fixed-spool reel already loaded with line and permanently attached between the cork grips, along with two red-and-white ball floats and a bag of small, unambitious hooks.

They’d fished for one long, hot day, eating cheese-and-pickle rolls and taking turns to hold the rod for when The Big One bit.

By the time dusk fell and they went home empty-handed, they had only used maybe twenty of the hundred or so maggots, most of which had simply wriggled off the hook and made a break for it, or had been discarded for becoming waterlogged, limp and – the boys agreed – unattractive to fish.

Probably because the rod was his, when they parted ways Jonas had taken the remaining maggots home with him and put them in the fridge for the next day.

They’d never gone fishing again.

Other stuff had happened.

The little white pot had first been hidden behind the jam and then pushed to the back of the fridge by yesterday’s spaghetti Bolognese.

And it was only weeks later, when his mother complained that that fridge – which was only four years old – was making a strange buzzing noise, that Jonas had remembered …

Through the cloudy lid of the pot, Jonas had seen that the pale maggots had been replaced by something amorphous, black and expansive, which now filled the pot so comprehensively that he could see darker patches