Darkside

Fate Dictates, which had skidded off the stair and now lay open and face-down in the hallway.

‘Shit! ’ Lucy bit her lip while her funny bone grinningly punished her for being careless. She’d dropped the knife down a few treads too, and knocked her mug so that some tea had dotted the carpet.

Lucy had slipped before; she had fallen before; she had hurt herself worse than she was hurt now.

But this time … This time she understood death.

With the house wrapped in the cocoon of snow that made it quiet as a tomb, Lucy became aware that her own breathing was the only sound that demarcated her living from her dying.

She held it.

She sat halfway up the stairs and held her breath and let the silence assault her ears.

This was what it would be like.

Underneath the dirt.

Lying still and silent and helpless in a box waiting for nature to worm its way into her so that it could reclaim her for the greater good.

Lucy Holly was not stupid. She understood the cessation of consciousness that comes with death. She understood that if she were aware of anything it would be in a spiritual sense, and that her body was just meat. Meat rotting on young bones.

But this vivid preview was new. This feeling that she was lying in this house with her wedding ring on and a posy on her chest, and that death had finally arrived with the snow and was even now pressed against the windows, testing the chinks made by the mice and the sparrows, trying to slither inside to get at her while she sat halfway up the stairs without even Jonas’s knife to protect herself with. This was all new.

Before – before the pills – death had been an abstract notion, a way to be relieved of the pain. The relief of pain had been the goal – and she’d barely thought about the death that would facilitate that. Now she knew she’d turned a corner. She didn’t only know it was coming, she knew how it would feel when it did. How it would look. How it would taste.

It was overwhelming. And inconsequential.

She’d thought she would cry, but instead she got calm, calm, calm, as if someone had drugged her tea. She wished they had. She wished suddenly and fiercely that someone had drugged her tea and that she would fall asleep here on the stair that always creaked, and that they would come and kill her softly so she’d never have to bother with the rest of the stairs. They were a struggle and she was sick of them.

Her bum started to ache and she looked at her watch to see she had sat here for more than an hour. No wonder she was so cold and desperate for the loo.

She would go outside.

Lucy left the toothpaste and the mug of cold tea on the stairs.

She picked up the knife as she slid back down past it and, when she got to the bottom, she closed Fate Dictates and never opened it again.

* * *

Jonas walked home in a daze just before 6am.

He’d felt as if he were floating ever since Danny died in his arms. Like a spacewalking astronaut whose tether has been severed, Jonas felt himself drifting slowly away from everything, and off towards nothing.

How did Marvel know?

Jonas had not been specific about the wording of the first two notes. He hadn’t wanted to say the word ‘crybaby’, so had been fuzzy about the first note too, for the sake of appearing consistent, even if it was only consistently stupid. But Marvel’s words had snapped everything back into sharp relief.

Call yourself a policeman.

Why had he said it? How did he know?

As sleet started to spit in Jonas’s face, his mind turned slow, gravity-free circles around Marvel, looking at him from new angles and with fresh eyes.

Marvel had never liked him. He wasn’t sure how, but he’d managed to piss the man off right from the start of this investigation.

Now he began to wonder why.

Even from his doorstep viewpoint, Jonas had the feeling that Marvel had been lost on the case, that he’d employed a scattergun approach to suspects, that there was no real sense of focus in his investigation.

The way he’d over-reacted to finding Jonas on the doorstep of Margaret Priddy’s told of a man who was floundering and insecure, and Jonas had thought he had smelled booze on the man’s breath. Or maybe just in his sweat.

When the alleged vomit had disappeared, Marvel had told him to do his job – and the way he’d said it, ‘crybaby’ was only a whisper away.

And now he’d repeated the first note almost word for word.

Had he seen it?

Had he written it?

It sounded stupid, even inside the privacy of his own head, but did Marvel have some kind of connection with the killer?

Jonas shuddered at the thought. He had Reynolds’s card still in his breast pocket. Would Reynolds be discreet if Jonas voiced his fears to him? He doubted it. Jonas had the impression that Reynolds did not like Marvel that much, but that didn’t necessarily mean he’d take sides against him.

He looked up into the sleet to see that he was almost at his gate.

He needed to speak to Lucy. Lucy’s brain worked faster than his at the best of times, and right now his brain was stuffed so full, and was nonetheless so empty of solutions, that it was as if a super-massive black hole was expanding slowly within his head, ready to burst out and swallow up the whole world in compressed nothingness.

Lucy was on the living-room floor, weeping and gnarled up with pain and with an unopened bottle of pills beside her.

In an instant the black hole in Jonas’s head shrank to a pinprick and his heart exploded into his throat with fear.

He dropped to the carpet beside her and tried to gather her into his arms, but she tucked up and resisted.

Her head was hot with tears, but the rest of her was icy from being on the floor. The fire was long burned out and had turned to white ashes. Jonas got her tartan rug and wrapped it around her, then lay down behind her and wrapped his arms around that. He could keep her warm, even if he couldn’t keep her well.

‘Did you take anything, Lu?’

‘No!’ she shouted. ‘No, I didn’t!’

He squeezed her into his chest. ‘I meant for the pain.’

‘If I had then it wouldn’t be hurting so much!’ she yelled at him – and started a new bout of hopeless crying.

An hour later they were in the same position but on the bed, where Lucy had allowed herself to be carried.

The silence was complete – what isolation and winter had not dampered, the snow had shushed as it fell.

Jonas had given her three painkillers and the worst of it was over.

‘How do you feel?’ he whispered.

‘Better,’ she said. Better than what she did not say, but Jonas understood that, and hoped she knew that he did.

Jonas stared unblinkingly at the opposite wall of what he would always think of as his parents’ room.

‘Tell me about your night,’ she said, still with the weary trace of a sob in her voice.

She needed to forget her own. He knew that.