Darkside

his way across the icy cobbles to his room.

* * *

Elizabeth Rice had been too embarrassed to ask Alan Marsh whether she could go through his dead son’s clothing looking for a missing button so that he could be more conclusively branded a killer. More conclusively than hanging himself and leaving a confessional note, she thought with no little irritation. But because that’s what Marvel had ordered her to do by tomorrow, she was doing it now, at almost midnight, by torchlight and in secret.

While Alan Marsh was next door in a sleep induced by the local surfer-cum-doctor and his magic needle, she crept into his dead son’s room and started to do her duty.

Danny Marsh had been surprisingly neat for a young man who’d never been in the army. He didn’t have many clothes. Maybe a dozen shirts and T-shirts, a winter jacket, a summer jacket, three or four pairs of jeans and a cheap black suit she remembered he’d worn at his mother’s funeral.

All buttons were present.

A pair of black Doc Martens with steel toecaps had matched the Polaroid of the dusty shoe-print that the CSI had taken off her window sill. Danny Marsh had passed her silently in the night. Going out and coming in. Hadn’t hurt her. Hadn’t even woken her.

It didn’t matter now.

She found a small stash of porn under his shirts. Magazines on busty blondes and MILFs. Mild, really, by today’s standards. Certainly milder than the stuff that Eric often failed to wipe clear of their computer’s history.

She’d liked Danny Marsh. He was a good listener. When they’d been to the pub together that one time, he’d made her laugh. Rice sat down on the bed. It was still up against the window where Danny had pulled it so he could tie the sheet to it before jumping out.

That was where Alan Marsh found her fifteen minutes later when her loud sobs pulled him from his magic sleep.

He sat down beside her and took her hand in his and hushed her gently the way he always had Yvonne, whenever she remembered that she’d lost her mind. They sat there for a long time – the weeping police officer and the bereaved husband and father – their joined hands resting in her lap on a dog-eared copy of Big Jugs.

Three Days

Lucy Holly hated John Marvel, and it felt good.

She was so used to hating her hands, hating her legs, hating her memory, hating her disease, that to hate something external and tangible that might actually be able to give a shit about her hatred was invigorating in a dour, angry way.

Jonas had told her that Marvel obviously thought he had been protecting Danny Marsh in some way; that Danny was the killer, and that that made Jonas somehow complicit in the murders. And he’d told her of Marvel’s repetition of the words that had been contained in the first note.

Call yourself a policeman?

That bastard.

The thought of Jonas or Danny being involved was laughable. Or would be if it were not potentially so serious. She thought Jonas was a little paranoid – that the idea of Marvel being involved in the crimes was also too far-fetched to be credible – but she hated Marvel anyway for taunting Jonas when he was obviously in shock, even if his words had been a lucky guess.

Danny Marsh was dead. Lucy could hardly believe it herself. Danny, who worked shifts with his dad and Ronnie Trewell at the little tin garage A & D MARSH MOTOR REPAIRS. Danny, who was so nice that she could never understand why he hadn’t been snapped up by some local girl.

Jonas had not elaborated on his childhood friendship with Danny, but she thought it must have been deeper than he’d ever said, given how distraught he had been over his death.

Once he had let go and started to cry, it had been difficult for him to stop.

I’m sorry, he’d kept saying, I’m sorry – as if he had done something terrible, instead of finally given in to understandable grief.

Here over the remains of breakfast – eggshells and crusts – Lucy felt her eyes heat up at the memory of her big, capable husband reduced to a weeping, foetal ball in her arms.

That bastard!

Jonas had left already – ever the professional, even when other professionals were acting like pricks around him. He hadn’t had a day off since this all started. On an uncommon whim she called him.

I love you, she wanted to say. Just for the hell of it.

But the phone just rang and rang.

Marvel would have to pass the cottage to get to the village from Springer Farm.

Before she had really thought about it, Lucy had seized her sticks, stamped her feet into her wellies and was out of the front door.

* * *

Jonas drove through Shipcott without stopping. He passed the mobile police unit and Danny Marsh’s house without looking at either.

His head was so profoundly numb that his thoughts were only wisps and fragments, like a blizzard on his tongue. Nothing was sticking – except for the weird feeling that with the snow, the white sky and this blankness of mind, he was moving slowly through the tunnel of light that leads to death.

At the brow of the steep slope leading down into Withypool, Jonas stamped on the brakes and the Land Rover slid to a halt. He got out and locked the door.

He put one foot in front of the other, watching the snow give way under him, hearing the soft, squeaky crunch, and the sound of his own breathing as he climbed the narrow track away from the houses towards the top of Withypool Hill.

Everything disappeared in the mist behind him. The car, the knee-high blackthorn halfway up the hill, the village itself. He could not even make out the matching lump of the high common across the way, it was all so white-on-white.

At the summit, the silence was a cotton-wool-covered heartbeat. Jonas felt nothing as he listened to it fill the void.

He called Peter Priddy on a fractured line.

‘Did you do it?’ he asked softly.

‘… alling?’

‘Did you kill them, Pete? Just tell me, please.’

Priddy was the only one who made any real sense now – and Jonas had vouched for him; diverted Marvel from him. Priddy had asked him for a favour and he had granted it out of a misplaced sense of loyalty.

Call yourself a policeman?

‘I understand if it was. I really do, Pete. But I have to know. Because it’s my job. That’s all.’ Jonas was in a dream, so there was no harm asking.

‘Sorr … c … hear … ou …’ lied Priddy through the static.

Jonas calmly threw his phone off Withypool Hill. It spun lazily through the air like a disobedient boomerang, and landed out of sight and without a sound somewhere in the mist that was rising around him like a sea of bleach. Jonas watched the dead black heather dissolve into white in front of his eyes. No wonder he couldn’t see the common.

He turned to go.

And was lost.

Just like that.

He had been here a hundred times, but he had no idea how to get back to the car. The blackthorn and the common were the only landmarks, and both were hidden by a conjurer’s cloth of white damp.