To stop them before they could overwhelm her, she kissed his ear and murmured, ‘They don’t know what they’re missing.’
DCI Marvel knew
Sky TV.
His team were billeted in quarters so basic that he was surprised no one had started whining.
But it was only a matter of time. Marvel liked to have little private wagers with himself. His money was on Grey, Pollard, Rice and Singh to start whining in that order. Rice and Singh were Elizabeth Rice and Armand Singh, and in his experience women and ethnics either never made waves or made effing great tsunamis. Rice and Singh were both pretty easy-going that way, although he had once seen DC Rice knee a grabby drunk in the balls when she thought no one was watching. Pollard was solid and stolid, and worked best when others did the thinking for him, but Grey was more bolshy and thought he had rights. Marvel wasn’t counting Reynolds. His sergeant was not
Police budgetary constraints meant they had been booked into a stable block outside Shipcott. Oh, sure, the sign at the end of the long and rutted track read ‘Farmhouse Accommodation’, but the low, ugly row of ‘cottages’ were no more than converted stables with window-boxes. And the owner, a bent and arthritic crone improbably named Joy Springer, apparently thought that tiny televisions and giant microwave ovens were enough to justify the tagline ‘All Mod Cons’.
At home he had Sky on a 48-inch screen, complete with a set of Acoustic Energy Aelite 3 home-cinema speakers. There were six in the set and they easily filled the spaces left by Debbie’s furniture. The precious 1970s Habitat suite she’d brought into their relationship was now squeezed uncomfortably into her mother’s house, elbowing the over-stuffed mock-leather into corners and competing for floor-space with the Formica coffee table. So he’d have somewhere to watch the TV from, Marvel had bought a cheap couch and taken pleasure in putting his feet all over it – often in his shoes.
Now he surfed through the channels for what felt like the hundredth time. It didn’t take long. BBC1, BBC2 and ITV1, though BBC2 was grainy and flickering. Channel 4 and Five were seemingly beyond the reach of this part of the moor. He imagined the second test match from Australia dancing and crackling somewhere above his head, searching forlornly for a receiver high enough to be welcomed by, before finally weakening and sputtering out over the heather, lost to him for ever.
Fucking Timbuktu.
He looked at his watch. Ten thirty pm.
The night was young.
Unfortunately, so were his team. They were like babies, the way they were all in bed by ten. Not like his days in the Met, where they’d roll off duty when they ran out of arms to twist and spend the rest of the night in Spearmint Rhino. DS Reynolds was a reasonable cop but Marvel couldn’t imagine his sergeant stuffing a twenty into a G-string any more than he could imagine him doing a shampoo ad. DS Reynolds’s hair grew on his head in unfortunate tufts. Sometimes they almost joined up; other times he was nearly bald. Reynolds claimed it was stress-related. Fucking nancy boy.
Marvel ran a hand through his own hair and wondered how long it would be before he was shedding like a Persian cat. His hair would go first, then his teeth. Then his joints, he imagined. Or maybe his eyesight. Already he needed to squint at the menu at McDonald’s drive-thru. Once he’d tried to order a McFury, imagining it must be some hellishly well-peppered new burger. He and the pimpled girl in the window had almost come to blows before she worked it out and told him with some degree of triumph that a
Just imagining his teeth falling out made them twinge, so he stopped thinking about dying and concentrated on Margaret Priddy. He’d spoken to the nurse, Annette Rogers, and was reasonably satisfied she was in the clear. She seemed to be going through the motions of sympathy in a way he’d expect a professional nurse to – as if she was simultaneously wondering what she would have for tea. That was fine by Marvel; if she’d wept and wailed over Margaret Priddy’s death, he would have had her in custody before her ugly white shoes could touch the ground.
There were two other nurses who had split shifts with Annette Rogers. He had asked Reynolds to track them down for interview.
He pulled the flimsy file towards him and checked. Lynne Twitchett and Gary Liss. A male nurse. Marvel would have snorted if there’d been anyone in the room to hear him pass comment on male nurses. In his head he knew Gary Liss was large, soft, blond – and camp as a row of tents. He’d lay good money on it.
He lost focus on the TV while he thought of how the investigation would proceed, all the elements that he needed to ensure worked together. When it came to leading a homicide investigation, Marvel liked to think of himself as a swan, sailing majestically along while under the surface his team paddled like crazy to keep the whole thing moving smoothly in the right direction.
Marvel mused on Margaret Priddy. It was a strange one. He had been working murders since he was twenty- four years old and his instincts were pretty sharp, but they didn’t have to be honed to know that it’s hard for a mute and bedridden old woman to make enemies.
But he also knew that friends could be just as dangerous.
In the morning he’d speak to Margaret Priddy’s son.
After smothering Margaret Priddy, the killer had gone home, showered, and made himself a cheese and bacon sandwich. There was an old black-and-white film on TV – a wide-eyed Hayley Mills lying her earnest way out of trouble over the sound of his teeth on salty meat and sticky bread. He didn’t like to turn the volume up. He watched the girl clambering over rocks, spying on a church picnic, jumping on the back of a white pony. The killer switched off the TV and threw away what was left of his sandwich. He curled into a foetal ball on the couch, slept like a baby, and when he awoke he felt like a new man.
Twenty-two Days
The first snow of this winter came in blustery little flurries, like handfuls of frost thrown across the moor by a petulant god. It gathered on the ground only in pockets and made the moor look merely wan rather than truly white. In the villages it made the pavements slippery without making them pretty first, and for that sin the hardy residents of Exmoor – ponies and people alike – hunched their shoulders and doggedly ignored the stinging flakes.
Despite getting off on the wrong foot, Jonas called Marvel before leaving the house, to offer his local knowledge to the investigating team. It was only professional.
There was a brief pause on the other end of the crackly line, then Marvel said, ‘I think we’ll manage without you—’ before the line went dead. He might have been cut off – mobile signals were notoriously poor on Exmoor – but Jonas was pretty convinced he’d just been hung up on.
He put the phone back in its cradle and Lucy looked at him curiously.
‘Business as usual then,’ he shrugged, feeling like a fool.
By 9am the snow had stopped and by ten it had started to melt away.
Jonas had a routine. Park at the edge of each village he covered and walk up one side of the main street and back in a rough loop. He would pop into tiny shops or post offices, check on old folk, referee neighbour disputes, have a Coke in the pub. Only when he was sure all was well would he move on to the next village. It let the locals see what their taxes were buying in the way of policing. In winter each village took half the time it did in summer. Summer meant stopping to chat, giving directions to tourists, enjoying the sunshine, buying an ice cream. Winter was all brisk pace and hurried hellos so people could get back to their work or their hearths.
But the Exmoor grapevine had been active and today everybody wanted to talk about Margaret Priddy. Doors opened as he passed and warmth wafted from cottage doors as women stood on doorsteps and asked about what had happened, while passers-by hurried over to hear the latest.
There was no latest, of course. Not that
