Darkside

under the plastic lid where things were actually pressing up against it. The whole pot vibrated in his nervous hand with a low, menacing buzz – and it was with a sick shock that Jonas realized that the small maggots had slowly turned to much bigger flies that were now squeezed together so tightly in the pot that they seemed to be one angry entity.

Angry at him.

He’d wanted to let them go. He was a good-hearted boy who loved animals. And flies were animals – of a sort. The thought of them inside the pot – packed so close that their wet wings could not even unfurl, while their neighbours ate them and vomited on them and ate them again – made him feel ill.

But they were angry at him. He could feel it in the vibrating fury running up his arm as he held the pot in his hand.

He had thrown it away without removing the lid. And until the bin men came three days later, Jonas could hear the angry thrum of the flies leading their short, trapped, nightmarish lives.

Jonas stopped thinking of it. He had to before it made him sick.

Standing at the threshold of the Sunset Lodge garden room, he wiped sweat off his face and forced himself to stop remembering …

‘It smells in here,’ he said from the doorway.

Marvel and Reynolds were sitting silently in the two wing chairs closest to the piano and both turned to look at him as he approached. Marvel with his sagging jowls, and Reynolds with his patchwork hair: Jonas thought they both looked quite at home.

‘Yes,’ said Reynolds. ‘It’s impending death.’

An old woman so doubled over her walking frame that she looked as if she was searching for a contact lens turned her head like a tortoise and fixed Reynolds with a withering glare.

‘We’re not all deaf, you know!’

Reynolds reddened and mumbled an apology and she continued on her way to the dining room, following the map of the carpet.

‘Plonker,’ Marvel told him.

‘We found a weapon,’ said Reynolds. Seeing Jonas’s surprised look, he continued, ‘Walking stick. He just took it from a bedroom, killed them all, and then put it back.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Jonas. ‘Prints?’

‘The lab’s got it now, but I doubt it. Still …’ Reynolds shrugged. ‘Any luck today?’

Marvel snorted sarcastically. ‘Yes, Reynolds, he’s just playing hard to get.’

‘No luck finding Gary,’ said Jonas. ‘But there’s something I need to tell you.’

There. He’d said it now and couldn’t back out. He took a deep breath and told them about the notes. He was deliberately vague about the content. He told them that the first had said ‘something about the police not protecting Margaret Priddy’ and the second had told him ‘Do your job.’ He was too ashamed to tell them about the ‘crybaby’ accusation. He handed the final note to Reynolds inside a plastic freezer bag he’d taken from the kitchen drawer.

He’d expected Marvel to be annoyed that he’d said nothing before now. He’d expected him to tear a strip off him. What he hadn’t expected was that the overweight, over-the-hill DCI would listen all the way through with a stony face – and then come out of his wing chair like Swamp Thing and knock him backwards into the piano with a clanging post-modernist crash. One second Jonas was telling his story, the next he was half sitting on the keys as Marvel jammed fistfuls of his shirt up under his chin, trembling with rage and shouting angry things that Jonas couldn’t quite comprehend. Behind Marvel, Reynolds was trying to pull his boss off, and behind him, Jonas was aware of a gaggle of old folk clutching each other’s forearms as the three of them wrestled on and around the piano. Jonas staggered as the instrument rolled sideways under the weight of the discord. He could have shoved Marvel off him easily enough, but he was his senior officer. Plus, he understood the man’s frustration, and couldn’t muster the necessary affront to get really strong with him. Even as Marvel jabbed his knuckles into his throat, some part of Jonas was thinking, ‘I deserve this.’

Staff rushed in, shouting and demanding a halt, but it was only when Mrs Betty Tithecott started a high, papery screaming and began pointing that they finally ended the shoving match and looked around, dishevelled and breathless.

Half wrapped in thick cloth – and stuffed between the now-displaced piano and the low wall of the garden room – was the body of Gary Liss.

* * *

Marvel was falling apart.

Reynolds had always known he would, but now that it was actually happening, the experience was more disconcerting than he’d expected it to be.

Even before their prime suspect had been found wrapped up like cod and chips and stuffed behind a piano, Marvel had been on a slippery slope. He’d seen Marvel’s hands shaking while they examined the Sunset Lodge bodies and bedrooms. Then there’d been the crying at the press conference. Reynolds had seen the shine in his eyes, and the light had had nothing to do with it.

And losing it with Jonas Holly like something out of The Sweeney.

It wasn’t shock and it wasn’t because Marvel cared so much.

He knew Marvel was off the wagon. Even though it was a wagon he’d only ever been hitched to, never really on. It didn’t take a genius to work it out when Marvel emerged from his cottage every morning smelling of booze and mint and covered in cat hair. Although if it had taken a genius, Reynolds liked to think he’d have been up to the task.

In Reynolds’s opinion – which was far from humble – Marvel had made some damaging decisions in this investigation.

Prime among these was his move from the occasional pint after work to the harder liquor when he was alone. Or with Joy Springer because, in Reynolds’s view, that was only being alone with somebody else in the room.

Another was his failure to use Jonas Holly.

In their business they relied on local plods like Jonas, and he and Marvel had done so in several investigations over the past year. Of course, Marvel always liked to show the locals right up front who was going to be boss. Rude, bullying, bulldozing – those were apparently Marvel’s guidelines for what he sarcastically called ‘First Contact’, as if local beat officers were some alien race whose sole purpose was to be subdued and bent to his will.

Something must have happened off-screen, as they said in the movies. One day Marvel had been merely rude to Jonas, the next Jonas was standing on a doorstep like an oversized garden gnome. If Marvel had employed a ducking stool he could hardly have humiliated the man more effectively.

Reynolds felt Jonas’s pain. Two cases back Marvel had been such a shit – and Reynolds had had to do so much damage control among the local constabulary – that his precious hair had fallen out in handfuls. Every night he had watched it swirling down the shower drain along with his self-esteem. He remembered vividly the rush of pure fury that had overtaken him as he watched it disappear. How he’d vowed to get revenge on Marvel, like some mythic hero in a Sergio Leone film.

Good old Sergio – he knew a dish served cold when he saw one.

And the dish Reynolds was preparing for Marvel was very cold indeed.

* * *

Jonas told Lucy about the notes. Now that he’d told Marvel he knew she’d hear about them sooner or later, and when she asked about the cut on his lip the moment he walked into the room, he couldn’t think of anything fast enough to divert her from the truth of what had happened and why. The only thing he didn’t say was that he had found the last note on their garden gate. He told her that one had also been under the wiper of the Land Rover. It was a small distinction, but Lucy was alone all day, and unwell; the last thing he needed was for her to feel even more nervous about the murders.

Everything he’d feared the notes might do to her, they did.

He saw the fear flash across her face, and then her concern was all for him, and Jonas watched miserably as the two emotions etched lines in her face that he’d never seen before. Jonas promised her he would be careful, promised not to take any risks – but those lines were there to stay.

Finally he told her that he’d informed Marvel – more to reassure her that he had police back-up than anything