Darkside

by Belinda Bauer

  ‘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.

  ‘Please don’t trouble yourself,’ said Marvel formally, but Priddy got on his haunches in case someone had hidden them behind the bleach under the kitchen sink.

  ‘I know they’re by here somewhere. I brought them myself and Mum weren’t a big biscuit person.’

  ‘Could she eat anything? With her injury?’

  ‘Only all mushed up.’

  Reynolds grimaced at the idea.

  ‘Was that the last time you saw your mother?’ asked Marvel.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How long ago was that?’

  ‘Errrrr … About two weeks.’ He straightened up and stared at the door of the refrigerator. ‘This is daft.’

  ‘I understand she was unable to speak?’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Priddy with his head in another cupboard, ‘but she could blink and smile and so forth. I’ll bet them fucking nurses have had them.’ He slammed the door.

  Marvel and Reynolds exchanged brief looks. For the first time since they’d arrived, Peter Priddy looked at them properly. He sighed, leaned on the kitchen counter and threw his hands briefly in the air in anger. ‘Have you seen the size of them? Them nurses? I’m amazed there’s a bloody thing left in these cupboards.’ Then his big baby-face screwed up and he let out a single bubbly sob.

  ‘Sorry,’ he added and blew his nose into a crumpled handkerchief.

  Marvel hated shows of emotion and ignored them whenever possible. ‘Is anything missing from the house?’

  Priddy looked confused. ‘Not that I’ve noticed. They wouldn’t let me upstairs.’

  Reynolds looked sympathetic. ‘We can assign you a family liaison officer, Mr Priddy. They’d keep you informed of the progress of the investigation.’

  Priddy shook his big baby-head and stared at the new contents of his handkerchief before stuffing it back into his pocket.

  ‘Who paid for your mother’s care, Mr Priddy?’

  ‘She did. She had savings.’

  ‘What’s that cost nowadays?’ said Marvel, turning to Reynolds as if he would know. ‘Five hundred, six hundred quid a week? Savings don’t last long at that rate.’

  ‘More like seven hundred,’ supplied Priddy with a grimace. ‘She had my dad’s pension too, but it weren’t going to last for ever.’

  ‘No. Precisely. And what would have happened then?’

  Priddy sighed and shrugged. ‘Would have had to sell up and go into a home, I suppose. On benefits.’

  ‘Once she’d spent all her savings?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All your inheritance.’

  ‘That’s the way it goes nowadays,’ said Priddy with a long-suffering air. ‘She would have wanted to stay here though. That’s why I got the nurses. I’m glad in a way that she died here and never had to go into some shitty nursing home.’

  ‘Oh yes. Much better she die in her own bed, hey?’

  Marvel watched for his response but the barb was lost; Priddy was staring at curling photos stuck on the fridge. Horses mostly, several with Margaret on them. One of a chubby child in a Batman T-shirt.

  ‘Did you ever get the feeling that your mother was in danger, Mr Priddy?’

  ‘No,’ said Priddy, returning his attention to Marvel. ‘Who from?’

  ‘One of the nurses perhaps?’

  Priddy shook his head, surprised. ‘I don’t think so. Why?’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘You tell me like who,’ Marvel said – and the words hung between them, their slightly harder tone changing the very air in the room.

  Peter Priddy’s gaze hardened. ‘Not like me,’ he said very slowly.

  Marvel shrugged, his eyes never leaving Priddy’s. ‘All that money pouring out every wee
k. Your money, really …’

  ‘That’s sick.’

  ‘People are sick,’ said Marvel sharply. ‘Most people are murdered by someone they know. Someone they love. I’m just asking.’

  ‘And I’m just telling you,’ said Priddy stiffly.

  ‘Well,’ said Marvel, pushing himself off the chair with the help of a heavy hand on the kitchen table, ‘thank you, Mr Priddy.’

  Silence.

  Reynolds flipped his notebook shut and looked uncomfortable.

  ‘We’ll be in touch,’ added Marvel as he started towards the front door.

  The big man watched them leave with contempt in his baby-blue eyes.

  At the front door Reynolds turned back. ‘Thanks for the tea, Mr Priddy,’ he said.

  Priddy snorted as he swung the door closed. ‘I can’t believe I was trying to find the Jaffa Cakes for you.’

  They walked to the car.

  ‘That went well,’ said Reynolds.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Marvel.

  *

  At the shop Jonas bought a Mars Bar and peeled the price off a can of pineapple chunks so that Mr Jacoby could exercise his dormant talent and tell him they were 44p.

  He came outside and saw a slip of paper under the windscreen wiper of his Land Rover. This was how a village worked – gossip over garden fences, Chinese whispers from the postman or the milkman, idle chats with Mr Jacoby or Graham Nash in the Red Lion – and these little flyers. They were run off on home PCs and displayed a wild variety of grammatical competence while offering a wide range of content: Young Farmers’ Club discos, car-boot sales, the Winsford Woodbees doing South Pacific, cats lost and umbrellas found. He slid the flyer from under the wiper and got into the car, which was still warm because he’d left the engine running. He knew it was against the rules but this wasn’t Bristol; this was Shipcott, where he knew all by sight and most by name; nobody was going to steal his car except possibly Ronnie Trewell, and if Ronnie stole it, Jonas would know where to find it, so that wasn’t so much stealing as it was borrowing really, when you thought about it.

  Jonas unfolded the flyer, expecting to crumple it immediately and throw it in the plastic Spar bag he kept for litter.

  Instead he felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach.

  Jonas stared at the words in dumb shock. It was so unexpected. The note was only pen on paper but contempt came off it like something sharp and physical. Whoever wrote it hated him.

  Hated.

  Him.

  Jonas couldn’t think for a moment or two – just gripped the scrap of paper so tightly that his fingers went white at the tips, while his stomach clenched painfully.

  Then he felt the heat of shame rise up his neck and into his ears.

  Whoever had written this note was right. He was a policeman. The only policeman in Shipcott! And protecting people was his job – his whole reason for being. If he couldn’t protect people, he had no right to the title. The logical part of his brain started to complain that he could not have known that Margaret Priddy was in danger, but it was quickly smothered by the guilt. It didn’t matter. He should have known. Mrs Priddy was a member of his community; she was his responsibility. And yet someone had climbed through Mrs Priddy’s window and crammed a pillow on to her face and stolen her life from her, such as it was. He, Jonas Holly, was here to stop things like that happening. He’d failed, and she’d died – simple as that.

  Jonas bit his lip. He looked around to see if anyone was watching him – maybe a clue as to who had written the note in this odd, spiky hand. His eyes scanned the empty street and darted from parked car to parked car, seeking a watchful silhouette or the sudden ducking motion that could denote culpability. Then his gaze flickered over the windows of the brightly painted cottages that crowded the narrow main street, waiting for a twitching net to give the guilty party away.

  Nothing moved apart from Bill Beer’s fat border collie, Bongo, snuffling his way up towards the shop where he spent every day door-hanging for treats and gently removing sweets from the unwary hands of passing toddlers.

  Jonas felt like a stranger in his own home. Somebody knew he’d failed in his duty. Worse than that … that somebody wasn’t on his side. Jonas had always felt that the local people held him in warm regard. Now a small dagger of ice had pierced that warmth and everything had changed in an instant.

  Call yourself a policeman?

  Jonas tore the note into small pieces and squeezed those pieces together into a shapeless lump in his hand, before dropping them in the litter bag behind the passenger seat. Then he looked around at the village once more and – with a hollow sense of foreboding – drove slowly away down its curiously silent street.

  *

  Lucy watched The Exorcist in slices between her intertwined fingers. So silly! She’d watched it a dozen times; it was dated; the story was so copied it was a retroactive cliché; the effects were all pea soup and puppetry – and it scared the crap out of her every time.

  Lucy had a degree in psychology. She knew that demonic possession was rubbish – that it was the way religions had for centuries explained conditions like schizophrenia and multiple-personality disorders. She knew that. She reminded herself of that. She believed it to be so. But the idea of a little girl possessed by the devil, of a mother’s reluctance to accept the fact as her golden-haired child descends into apparent madness – and the final showdown in all its hellish hamminess. It ticked all the right boxes for Lucy.

  She had always liked horror films. As a teenager they had just been a way to allow a boy to put his arm around her at the movies without feeling as though she was being a slut. Then she got addicted to the thrill – the jumps and the gore. How many ways could a head come off a human being? How far could blood squirt from a severed artery? And over what? Or whom? Lucy applauded every new method of murder, exalted any clever new way to make her jump out of her skin, bowed down in awe to any film that could leave her wishing that turning on the lights on a winter’s afternoon was a quicker affair than hauling herself across the room on sticks and pressing the switch with her chin.

  But she always came back to The Exorcist.

  Often, when she thought about her life and death, Lucy wondered about her passion for horror. She had finally come to the conclusion that it was born out of a deep-seated sense of security. Until the MS was diagnosed, Lucy had led a charmed life. She had meandered through school and university in the manner of many very bright students – neglecting her studies with a vengeance and yet still managing to pick up her First and lifelong friends along the way. She had dabbled with cannabis and yet never had a trip worse than the one where she suspected her best friend, Sharma, had stolen her new Max Factor mascara. She had been on three protest marches – Animal Rights, Tibet, and Tibet again – without ever having her name taken by police. She’d got drunk only in the company of friends who made sure she got home safely, she’d never lost a close relative and she’d never had her heart broken. Probably, she reasoned, she enjoyed horror because nothing even vaguely similar had ever happened to her or ever would.

  At least, that’s what she told Jonas.

  But it was not as strictly true as it had been before she was diagnosed. Since the MS had started to take over her life, she grudgingly recognized some need to test herself through horror, to push the boundaries of her own strength and resourcefulness to reassure herself that she was not yet helpless – even if the test was just in her mind.

  She watched the films for fun; she studied them like manuals.

  No longer could she simply see a pretty young girl walk through creepy woods or a dark house without some part of her wishing she was there – and handling it better.

  Lucy Holly would never turn round and call out, ‘Who’s there?’ in that tremulous voice. She’d duck suddenly into the trees, circle silently back through the undergrowth and get behind the lurching zombies. See how they liked it!

  She’d never creep downstairs in the dark with a knife shaki
ng pathetically in her hand to confront an intruder; she’d stay at the top of the stairs and tip the landing bookcase on to the bastard as he crept ignorantly up towards her.

  If she could stalk a zombie; if she could squash an intruder … how hard could it be to repel the killer in her own body?

  Sometimes, when she felt mentally strong enough, Lucy would stand naked and watch herself in the mirror. That was what it felt like – watching herself, not looking.

  She had been beautiful. She knew that – although it was behind her now.

  The year of steroids was over and she had lost all the weight and more. She had hated being fat and puffed up almost more than she hated the disease – had not wanted Jonas to touch her, even when she wanted to touch him. But now even she could see that things had gone too far the other way. She was so thin and wobbly that when she stood before the mirror she almost fancied that, if she only looked hard enough, she could see the very beast that was consuming her from the inside out. Sometimes she even thought she caught a glimpse of it – a tic in the skin stretched over her hip, an odd bulge under her ribs that disappeared with the light. She would feel sick at the thought that one day she might be looking into this mirror and see a sharp claw split her belly, a scaled hand emerge, and the cold-eyed reptilian disease open her skin like curtains on the final act in the play of her life.

  Lucy shivered, even though their heating bills were ridiculously high and she had the rug snuggled up to her chin. She thought of the real-life horror that had played out less than a quarter of a mile from where she lay now on the couch. Had Margaret woken before dying? She must have. Even if it was only when the pillow was already over her face. The terror. The helpless terror. Lucy felt compassion overwhelm her. Poor Margaret.

  Shamefully hot on the heels of compassion came the usual question: what would she do?

  She thought that she would bite an assailant to make him let go of her. Biting was weird, and taboo enough to be unexpected. So, bite him in the face like a pit bull. She imagined the taste of his unshaven cheek and the howl of pain and outrage as his grip loosened … Then she would jerk upwards and sideways to throw him off the bed and on to the floor – like this! – then she would twist, fling the bed covers over his head, stamp on the place where she’d last seen his face and run next door to Mrs Paddon to use the phone.