Darkside

locals.

In Exford he asked old Reg Yardley to walk his dog by the river and not on the green – for only about the hundredth time – and the man strode off muttering something about catching real criminals. Jonas let it go, but it didn’t help his guilt or his rising sense of frustration that he was at the frontline of public relations but without any inside knowledge of the investigation to make him seem anything more than a barrier between the people and the information. Not that he could or would have told people much more than he was able to now, but being able to say ‘we’ instead of ‘they’ when talking about the murder hunt would have reassured people that their local bobby was taking an interest, and made him feel like less of a fraud. Jonas was not a self-important man – when Lucy had been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis he had left his future behind him and never looked back – but for the first time in his career he felt he needed the validation of being an insider. It made him abashed to admit it, even to himself.

Finally back in Shipcott, he walked past the flapping blue-and-white tape cordoning off Margaret Priddy’s cottage at the end of the row. The Taunton cops had put it up to keep people out, but, of course, all it had done was draw attention to the scene. Since Sunday morning when it went up, he’d seen local boys daring each other under the tape to knock on the door, and now he noticed that Will Bishop had left milk on the doorstep. It had frozen in one of the bottles and pushed the silver-foil lid up into the air, where it perched like a jaunty cap on a misshapen column of crystalline calcium.

Jonas knew the milk would be sure to piss Marvel off. He’d have to do something about it.

As he walked through the village he’d grown up in, Jonas was reminded that in the years he had been away from Shipcott, not much had changed but plenty had happened.

Mr Jacoby’s shop had become a Spar; Mr Randall’s son Neil had left his right leg beside an army checkpoint in Iraq, and the bones of poor Mrs Peters’ lost son had been found at last up on the moor. The consequences would have been imperceptible to anyone but a local. When he’d first come back after the death of his parents, Jonas had noticed that everything in Mr Jacoby’s shop had a price label on it now, so Mr Jacoby’s eidetic recall was surplus to requirements – which made Mr Jacoby sort of surplus to requirements too; that Neil Randall was getting drunker and more bloated by the day, so that his woven way home along narrow pavements on his poorly fitted prosthetic was becoming a hazard to traffic; and that Mrs Peters no longer stood at her window waiting for Billy to come back.

A stranger wouldn’t have understood.

But Jonas did.

While never wondering why he was so blessed – or cursed – Jonas understood how almost everything important happens underneath, and away from public view – that signage and medals and headlines are just the tip of the village iceberg, and that real life is shaped long before and far below the surface in the blue-black depths of the community ocean.

Linda Cobb complained about the boys getting under the tape and banging on Margaret’s door and windows. Jonas said he’d have a word.

A little way up, Mrs Peters opened her door. ‘What’s happening with Margaret?’ He told her what he’d been telling people all day.

‘And what are you doing?’ she asked bluntly.

‘Nothing,’ he said, and when Mrs Peters cocked her grey head and peered up at him intently, he hurried on: ‘I mean, they’re the experts in this sort of crime.’

She eyed him for a disbelieving second, then snorted.

Jonas got a sudden uneasy flash of the day her son had disappeared. Jonas had been at school with Billy. In the not-quite-dark summer evening he and his friends had buzzed with the sick thrill of a boy gone missing. For a short while they had roamed the streets, made adult and brash by the self-proclaimed tag of ‘search party’. Then later, when he was alone, there had been the more sobering – more real – sight of torches on the moor and lazy blue lights pulsing past the windows, until his mother came into his room, yanked his curtains together, and told him if she had to come in one more time, then his behind would be the first to know about it. He remembered lying in the dark afterwards, sure of what must have happened to Mrs Peters’ little boy, and fearing it would happen to him too …

‘They’ll catch him, Mrs Peters,’ he said now, and tried to put as much feeling into it as he could. More than anyone in Shipcott, she deserved to be reassured that she was safe – that her family was safe.

She didn’t look reassured. ‘Poor Margaret,’ she said by way of goodbye. Then she turned into the house and closed the door.

He really should be doing something. Or at least come up with a better answer than ‘nothing’ the next time somebody asked him. He hadn’t realized how bad it sounded until he said it out loud.

Up ahead he saw the milk float bump on to the pavement …

Will Bishop told Jonas that he’d been paid a month in advance.

‘But there’s nobody there, Will.’

‘Yur, but her’s paid me to provide a service, see. Can’t just take the money and then stop doing the job just on account of Mrs Priddy being dead, can I?’

Jonas knew that the ‘her’ who had paid Will Bishop was Peter Priddy. Older locals still blurred their genders that way. He looked at the milkman. He was seventy if he was a day. Whip-thin, weathered, and as crumpled as a brown paper bag. Been delivering milk on this part of the moor seven days a week for over fifty years.

Jonas admired his devotion to duty but he also knew that the logical option – halting the deliveries and giving Peter Priddy his money back – had not even crossed Will Bishop’s mind. If there was a tighter fist on Exmoor, Jonas would not have liked to have felt its grip. Had Margaret Priddy’s house been picked up and swept away by a twister, Will Bishop would have continued to place a pint on the lonely doorstep every day until he’d discharged his duty. And the very day the bill was overdue, he’d have left a note instead: Pay yor bill or I will see you in cort, or Pay yor milkman or pay the consuquenses. Jonas and Lucy had had such a note themselves which read: Milk bill dew. Pay up OR ELSE.

Jonas hated to pull rank, but … ‘You’re not supposed to cross the police tapes, Will. It’s a crime scene.’

Will looked up at him witheringly with his small, bright-blue eyes: ‘I seen them roller-skate boys bang on the door plenty.’

‘I know, but they don’t leave a pint of milk there as proof that they’ve been.’ Jonas sighed. ‘I don’t mind. I know it’s harmless. But Taunton is handling the investigation now and they will mind.’

Will waved a hand of dismissal and hopped back into his float. ‘Let ’em sue me then! I’ll see ’em in court!’

His getaway was slow and electric, but Jonas still felt as if he’d been left eating the milkman’s dust.

* * *

The CSIs had finished with Margaret Priddy’s home and so, in the absence of a local police station – and with the stables too far from the village to make an effective base – Marvel had arranged to meet her son there. Once foul play was confirmed, he’d be able to call in a mobile incident room and work from that.

In any case, Marvel liked to question suspects or would-be suspects at the scene of the crime whenever possible. He had seen too many guilty men crack under the weight of memory to discount it as an investigative tool. So he got Reynolds to tell Priddy to meet them outside, and then Marvel led them into the kitchen.

Peter Priddy was a tall, broad man, but with the unfortunate face of a toddler. His cheeks were too rosy, his chin too pudgy, his eyes too blue and his hair too wispy-yellow to fake adulthood, even when perched atop such a frame. But Marvel noted that the man’s hand engulfed his own when he shook it. He also noted the shiny black work-shoes that spoke of a uniform in another context.

‘Prison officer,’ said Priddy when he enquired. ‘At Longmoor.’

‘Interesting,’ said Marvel, which was what he always said when he had no interest.

Priddy spoke slowly and carefully and in the country twang Marvel hated so much. He made tea – thick and milky – and then searched pointlessly through the cluttered kitchen cupboards for a packet of Jaffa Cakes he claimed to have brought on his last visit, while Marvel and Reynolds sat at the table.

‘Not real ones,’ Priddy added hastily, to allay any soaring expectations. ‘Spar ones. Copies.’

‘Generic,’ supplied Reynolds helpfully and Marvel frowned; Reynolds couldn’t bear to hide his education – even when it came to biscuits.