Darkside

‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

How could he tell her? He felt numb. He felt detached. He didn’t know any more where lines could be drawn between past and present, good and evil, right and wrong.

‘Jonas?’

Jonas felt it all starting to rise in him. Everything underneath was coming to the surface – however much he tried to keep it down.

Tigger for Danny, Taffy for him. The slide of polished leather against his knees and the grip-and- release wonder of a whole beast held in his little-boy hands; the bunching and bumping of muscles under his backside; watching Danny fly along beside him and hoping he looked as free as his best friend did; the eager little ears, between which he’d viewed his whole world. For a happy while.

Jonas remembered.

Although he’d spent a lifetime forgetting.

He remembered the heady smell of the coarse mix and hay; the quiet sounds of hoofs brushing straw over concrete, and the velvet breath of Taffy’s muzzle touching his hair, while all the time he was held down and ordered not to cry while unspeakable things were done to him.

Unspeakable.

He shuddered against Lucy’s back.

‘Jonas?’

But Danny had seen. Danny had known. Maybe Danny had even had the same thing happen to him. He knew that must have been true, because even though they’d never spoken of it – because it was unspeakable – Danny had done something about it.

He’d burned the place down.

Now, here, twenty years later, Jonas’s head pounded and he twitched, as he remembered like a dog.

Going down the row of smouldering stables, roofs caved in and doors thrown open for the ponies to escape. Someone had done that. Someone who loved them had thought of the ponies. But the ponies had not escaped. Terrified by the flames, the ponies had screamed and died in the fire, just as Robert Springer had. Seven sad carcasses still in their boxes. Some so charred that only their legs protruded from a pile of ash, some barely damaged, killed by smoke.

Tigger was half gone but Taffy was unmarked – collapsed against the back wall of his stable, with his legs tucked under his chest, his clever little head bowed gracefully, and his soft lips pressed against the concrete, as if he were lying in a summer meadow nibbling at daisies.

The eighth carcass had already been taken away in an ambulance with a sheet over its blackened, grinning face.

The smell of death was overwhelming.

Turning to his friend through a blur of tears to find comfort in shared misery, Jonas had instead seen pale shock – and guilt.

‘Why didn’t they run away, Jonas? They should have run away!’

The ponies had died because of him. Because he was too weak to stop it.

Jonas started to shake.

‘Sweetheart. What’s wrong?’

‘Danny Marsh is dead,’ he told her bluntly.

And then – finally – he started to cry.

* * *

‘I’m glad he’s gone,’ said Joy Springer. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.’

Marvel was so surprised that he sloshed Cinzano on the kitchen table. The stuff wasn’t so bad once you got a taste for it.

Joy sat on a kitchen chair, elbows on the table and her glass outstretched for a refill. The old woman’s frizzy grey bun had escaped its grips and she looked like Albert Einstein on a bad-hair day.

‘Why?’ he said – and Marvel didn’t often say that around Joy Springer. He’d soon learned in their almost nightly sessions not to use certain words. Why was high on the list, with its answering convolutions and explanations, although When was the real killer, as it allowed Joy to ramble back over what felt like the last 150 years of her life – none of it of the slightest interest to Marvel. One night she had held him hell-bound, running through the names of her friends from nursery school onwards. No stories, no descriptions, no insightful recollections or pivotal moments – just a litany of meaningless names like a bore of biblical begattings.

‘Nothing,’ she said after a pause, and waggled her glass at him.

Marvel was instantly fascinated. All of a sudden here was something Joy Springer didn’t want to talk about.

‘You knew Danny Marsh?’

‘Years back.’ She shrugged. ‘Something be wrong with your arm, bay?’

But Marvel withheld the bottle and took a deep breath. ‘When?’

The story Joy Springer told was a good one. Everyone has to have one, Marvel reasoned, even if it was bullshit.

It was a story of flames and smoke and panic and of murder, which the coroner had stupidly ruled misadventure, after hearing of how Robert Springer was both an ardent horseman and an ardent smoker – two hobbies that Marvel gathered should be kept apart, like wives and girlfriends.

Not only was the coroner a conspiratorial fool, but Danny Marsh was the killer, according to Joy Springer. She became loud and slurred about it without ever giving Marvel any real evidence, then lost her thread a bit and went off at a paranoid tangent that included the prick of an executor, the lousy job a local builder had done on the stable conversions, and some idiot vet who said her cats needed worming.

After three more glasses of Cinzano, Joy Springer suddenly got up and wobbled across to the Welsh dresser. She opened a door on an avalanche of paperwork, old magazines, cards and photographs.

‘Robert’s things,’ she mumbled. ‘I don’t like to throw them away. Memories.’

Marvel wondered again at the sheer tedium of those memories. Who the hell would want to mull over them?

Yet another tumbler allowed her to find what she was looking for, and she handed Marvel a photograph.

‘Tha’s Danny Marsh when her were a bay,’ she slurred. ‘Little sod would be in jail if your lot had done a proper job, not living here throwing it in my face!’

Although the photo was of two boys of about ten years old, Marvel recognized Danny immediately. The photo had been kept bright in the dresser, and Danny Marsh’s brown hair had apparently been given the same cut its entire life – short back and sides. He didn’t look like a little sod; he looked like a cheeky, happy kid, holding the reins of a shaggy red pony. The photo had been taken at a show and both boys were in white shirts and Pony Club ties. The second boy was smaller and holding a brown pony with a red rosette fluttering from its bridle.

Marvel’s fingers twitched as he recognized Jonas Holly. That wide brow, dark eyes and nose that was already too straight for its age. Only the mouth here was different, and Marvel realized it was because he’d never seen Jonas smile.

He thought instantly of the dead pony on the moor. Of the way Jonas Holly had been almost pathologically unwilling to touch it – had actually refused to take a leg and help pull the carcass out of the road. And yet here he was with one arm thrown casually over the pony’s neck, a hank of mane in his little hand, leaning into the animal like a friend. What did kids say nowadays? Best friend for ever. That’s what the brown pony looked like it meant to Jonas.

What changed?

What changed in Jonas Holly to turn him from a boy who loved horses into a man who couldn’t even bear to touch a dead one?

‘Can I keep this?’ he asked Joy Springer.

But he’d looked at the photo for so long that she’d fallen asleep and was snoring with her shiny-knuckled hand still around her empty glass.

From the shadows outside the kitchen window, Reynolds watched Marvel finish his drink, then ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’