Darkside

by Belinda Bauer

  It seemed forever ago.

  Just yesterday he’d found her white and drawn and although she’d insisted she was fine, he’d tasted the salt on her lips that told him she’d been crying.

  Now – three weeks after the pills – the question he’d got so used to asking was fraught with new fear.

  ‘Good,’ replied Lucy, bringing him gently back to the present. ‘I’m good.’

  He searched her eyes for the truth and found it had already been told. He felt the tension that had been squeezing his guts relax a little.

  ‘I planted bulbs. Daffs and tulips out front and anemones in the tubs.’

  He studied her hand and saw the red-brown earth under her short, practical nails and knew the effort it must have taken for her to organize and complete that task. The bag of compost, the trowel twisting awkwardly in the weak hands and floppy wrists, the effort of breaking into the earth made hard by winter. He almost asked how long it had taken her, but knew it must have been most of the day. Instead he got up and went outside to look for himself. The fact that she didn’t get up to point things out to him was proof of how much it had taken out of her. He came back in, smiling.

  ‘And then you …?’ He left it hanging for her.

  ‘… had a nap,’ she finished dutifully and they both laughed ruefully.

  ‘I got your stuff,’ he said. They called it her ‘stuff’. Her analgesics, her anti-depressants, her anti-convulsants, her anti-virals, her job-lot hypodermics … the list seemed endless and ever-changing, which did not instil confidence in their efficacy. Just saying the names had become depressing – Decadron, Neurotin, Prothiaden, Symmetrel … ‘Stuff’ covered them all and had the power of robbing them of their doom-laden titles.

  ‘Oh Jonas! On a day like this! It could have waited. It’s only the Symmetrel I’m out of.’

  ‘No trouble,’ he shrugged, although they both knew it was a thirty-mile round trip through narrow lanes to the nearest dispensing chemist’s in Dulverton. Jonas’s beat included a clutch of tiny villages and had to be covered by Land Rover, but edging out as far as Dulverton when a woman had died in Shipcott was still more than an inconvenience.

  Still, he did it, and she appreciated it. That was how they worked at life. They cared for each other.

  The very first time Lucy had met Jonas she’d recognized something in him that reminded her of the children she taught in kindergarten. Something that she knew any amount of gung-ho police training would never quite erase from him. There was a softness, a childlike uncertainty, a silly humour in Jonas that meant he would spend the day in riot gear fending off Molotov cocktails and then demonstrate to her at night wearing a pudding bowl and armed with a spatula. When he turned out for Police XV against Army, Lucy watched in embarrassment as Jonas joined his team-mates in a testosterone-packed pre-match ritual of chanting, grunting and chest-beating. Chest-beating! Like gorillas in shorts! Halfway through the spectacle, he’d caught her eye in the stands and they’d both dissolved in such helpless laughter that his captain was still bitching at him at half-time.

  Jonas’s dark-brown eyes were too far apart, his nose too long and his mouth too full to be called handsome, but Lucy never could get enough of looking at him and craved more.When they’d first moved into his parents’ old home, she’d looked for photos of him as a boy. When she’d failed to find any, he’d joked about being ‘too ugly to show up on film’.

  In her eyes, at least, it was far from true.

  ‘Who told you about Margaret?’ he asked, even though it didn’t matter.

  ‘Frank.’

  Frank Tithecott. The postman. Of course. The postman and the milkman covered the same area as he did but without the same confidentiality. Jonas was suddenly glad Frank had brought his embarrassment home – at least it had made Lucy laugh for the first time in three weeks.

  ‘Are you going to be busy with that?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ he shrugged. ‘I don’t get the impression they’d welcome my assistance.’

  ‘Then they’re idiots and I hate them all,’ she said sharply, as if Jonas was a boy to be protected from playground bullies, and not a strapping six-foot-four officer of the law.

  Jonas rolled his eyes at her sharp words but smiled to show he enjoyed her support, even if it was hopelessly biased. Lucy shifted her legs to make room for him on the couch and Jonas sat down, draped his legs over one end and lowered his long frame gently backwards into her arms. The chores could wait.

  The TV was on, the sound down. For several minutes Jonas stroked Lucy’s arms with the backs of his nails as they idly watched a blood-spattered teenager being chased through a house by a man in a mask. Without screams and music it was hypnotically dull and soon their breathing slowed and synchronized in the way they both loved.

  Lucy slid a single finger between the buttons of his white uniform shirt and ran it tenderly along a rib. The moment caught her unawares and her eyes burned with sudden tears.

  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 exactly what he was missing.

  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 with him but was too nervous to be against him. Like a whipped dog.

  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 b
ald. 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 McFlurry was a kiddies’ ice-cream. He’d ordered it just to spite her, and lobbed it vaguely towards a bin as he drove out.

  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 he knew about anyway – and by early afternoon Jonas was sick of saying ‘I don’t know,’ and seeing the surprised, embarrassed looks on the faces of the 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 o
f 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 …