Darkside

by Belinda Bauer

  Not for the first time.

  Jonas took a scratchy grey blanket from the Land Rover and walked towards the mother of his old school friend. As he got closer he could see her pale flesh raised in goose-bumps, mottled purple from the cold.

  ‘She’s been there half an hour!’ one of the skaters called to him. He looked over at them but couldn’t tell which of them had spoken, so just raised one hand in a vague gesture of acknowledgement. The boys – four of them – were lined up on the top of the ramp, watching, their fingers tucked into their armpits and pockets, their skateboards captured with easy dominance underfoot like dead colonial lions.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Marsh,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Bit nippy for swings, isn’t it?’

  Her distant stare shifted to him without real focus. She didn’t recognize him and he was grateful for it. He thought of the day he and Danny had jumped out of the bathroom window holding Mrs Marsh’s brand-new Egyptian cotton sheets as parachutes. He could still feel the garden hitting his feet – the jar of it running up to his armpits – and Danny’s high-pitched yowling in the flower bed.

  He focused.

  Her breasts were almost on her thighs, the way she sat. In between were three distinct rolls of cold, pale fat.

  ‘Want a blanket?’ Jonas stepped forward and, when she did not object, draped it over her shoulders and gathered it at her throat. ‘Here, you hold on to that for me, Mrs Marsh,’ he said as he unfurled her left hand from the chain and moved it to the blanket. She gripped the wool, still vacant, and he straightened up.

  ‘Got the heater on in the car. And a flask of tea. You want to jump in there and warm up a bit?’

  ‘All right then,’ she said. ‘But I lost my sandals in the lake.’

  ‘No problem, Mrs Marsh, I’ll send one of my lads out to find them.’

  There was no lake. He had no lads.

  She staggered as she rose from the swing and he caught her with one arm around what used to be her waist, and helped her to the car – slowly because of her bare feet on the frosty grass and then the rough tarmac.

  He settled Mrs Marsh into the passenger seat and leaned across her to fasten the seatbelt. He caught a scent of unwashed body and remembered a different Mrs Marsh sun-bathing in her tiny back garden, the sleek lines of her tanned skin, the smell of coconut lotion, the stolen peek at the swell of her full breasts and how they sloped away from her body to be captured by the meagre turquoise cups of her bikini …

  ‘I remember you, Jonas Holly,’ she said suddenly and with a sly lilt that made him blush as if they were back in that summer garden and it was that Mrs Marsh who had caught that long-gone boy peeking.

  He said nothing, willing her to shut up.

  ‘Sticking gum in Danny’s hair!’ she teased, and fluttered her lashes at him. ‘And mud all over my best sheets that day he fell in the roses!’

  Jonas hoped this wasn’t the start of a sudden shower of remembering after a long dry spell.

  But she just laughed again and sighed. ‘You boys!’

  He gave a rueful smile and shut the door on her. By the time he had walked round the back of the Land Rover and opened his own door, she had forgotten who he was.

  Danny Marsh answered his knock and Jonas watched his expression flit from surprise to wariness and then to concern as he registered that Jonas had his near-naked mother in tow.

  ‘My sandals are in the lake,’ she said as he drew her indoors, gently handing her over to his tight-lipped father and watching them disappear into the kitchen, where it was always warm. Jonas could hear Alan Marsh murmuring quietly and his wife’s confused responses growing more muffled as they went.

  For a moment he and Danny stood awkwardly, both looking down the hallway at nothing at all. Then Danny cleared his throat and said, ‘Thanks, mate.’

  ‘No problem.’

  It was the first time they had spoken in twenty years.

  *

  While the rest of his team went on knocking on hopeless doors, Marvel drove to Margaret Priddy’s under a sky the colour of an old bruise. He wanted to be able to think, without Reynolds being clever beside him.

  Three boys sitting hunched on a bench at the edge of the playing field shared a cigarette and watched him lock his car.

  ‘Double yellows there, mate,’ one of them pointed out.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be in school?’ he said and they all looked at him as if he were speaking Dutch. Shut them up, though.

  Marvel faced the playing field. One hundred yards to his left was a sign saying THANK YOU FOR DRIVING SLOWLY THROUGH SHIPCOTT. He knew that the back of it read PLEASE SLOW DOWN THROUGH SHIPCOTT. Or something like that; it had been blurred when he’d passed it. He’d also driven by several cottages dotted singly or in pairs at the roadside, part of the village but separate from it. But Margaret Priddy’s home, with its dirty peach walls, was the first one inside the tenuous boundary marked by the sign. He wondered whether that was significant – whether the killer had come from the east and broken into the first house he reached. That would say something about his state of mind. It would speak of desperation and recklessness. But the killer had left no prints – not even shoe prints – which didn’t fit with recklessness.

  The playing field had goalposts without nets, and sloped alarmingly towards the furthest corner flag. In London the flags would have been stolen. Behind the posts nearest the village were three swings, an old metal slide of the type that most council Health & Safety committees had long since sold for scrap, and a low half-pipe skateboard ramp with a railing along each end – presumably to keep the village children from loop-the-looping into the narrow stream that ran along the back of the field, marking the foot of the moor. While Marvel watched, a lone fat collie meandered over and took a shit on the penalty spot.

  Marvel could see dark footprints in the frosty grass leading to and from the swings and more to the ramp. Skating before school. Or maybe instead of school. Truants? Drop-outs? Or something more sinister? Apart from his good nose for a killer, Marvel’s greatest gift was that he could see the bad in anyone. He had already seen enough in his career to justify a healthy dose of misanthropic suspicion and, in his mind, a half-pipe ramp and a crime scene in anything like close proximity was good enough reason to pull in any passing skater for a grilling. If the killer wasn’t Peter Priddy, he’d put good money on it being some zit-covered hoodie with his fake Calvin Kleins poking out of his half-mast jeans.

  ‘You skate?’ he asked the boys, then – when they looked confused – he jerked his thumb at the ramp. They all turned round and stared at it as if it had suddenly materialized from outer space.

  ‘Nah,’ said one. ‘We smoke.’

  Slow sleet started to fall straight down from the sky like broken plumb-lines, and the boys got up as one and hurried off. Marvel pulled the collar of his overcoat up around his ears and ventured out on to the grass. Past the side of Margaret Priddy’s home and round to the bottom of the garden, which was enclosed by buckled sheep wire on concrete posts and – now – a strip of police tape which an over-enthusiastic somebody had used to wrap around the entire house and garden like a birthday bow. Pollard, most likely. He lacked the imagination to make a bad job of anything.

  The sheep wire sagged and bowed in several places, loose between the posts, and he had no trouble stepping over it. As he did he noticed that his dull-brown brogues were going dark with water, and made a mental note to buy some boots. He walked up the overgrown back garden, ridiculously trying not to put his feet down in the wet grass. He passed broken terracotta flowerpots showing dead roots, a pile of old metal door strips, a couple of plastic carrier bags pressed against the boundary fence, while a ramshackle kennel spoke of a long-ago dog. As if on cue a small brown terrier started to bark at him from next door, running up and down the line of the fence as if it might break through and tear him limb from limb, even though it was barely taller than his shin.

  ‘Piss off!’ Marvel feinted towards the dog and it yelped and rus
hed behind a garden shed, from where it peered and growled.

  ‘All mouth and no bloody trousers,’ muttered Marvel, then swore and lurched sideways to avoid stepping in what looked like vomit in the grass between the back door and the lean-to. He stood for a moment staring down at it while large wet drops of ice plopped into it like little meteorites. Vomit! There was vomit at the murder scene and no one had spotted it! Not surprising – the vomit was only really visible from directly above – splashed through the tufty, unkempt grass like modern art. Marvel stood hunched over it, protecting it from the sleet, then realized that he couldn’t do that for as long as it would take for someone to get down here from the lab. They were lucky it had been pretty dry since the body was discovered.

  There was an old steel dustbin on its side and he looked around for the lid. When he found it he put it carefully over the splash.

  He pulled out his mobile phone and glared at the lack of signal bars on it. He’d discovered that they came and went here, seemingly on a whim, sometimes lingering for hours, sometimes teasing with a fleeting appearance and then winking out as quickly as they’d come.

  The bloody sticks.

  He looked up at the bedroom window. From here he could see how easy it had been for the killer to get into the house. The green wheelie bin that must have been used as a ladder had been carefully wrapped and taken to the lab for examination. His eyes traced the obvious path from the lean-to roof to the window. A man would have to be fit to pull himself up to force the latch and then over the sill, but he wouldn’t have to be Superman.

  Marvel tried the back door and felt a little stab of irritation when it opened, even though it saved him having to go round to the front door and using the key he had. He’d find out who had been responsible for leaving the house secure and give them a bollocking.

  Inside, the place already felt abandoned. The kitchen where he and Reynolds had drunk tea just the day before yesterday was now cold and dingy. Their mugs were still in the sink with the dregs in the bottom. He wondered whether Peter Priddy had found the Jaffa Cakes after they’d left.

  He tried the lights and they came on, although even they seemed dull and sickly.

  Upstairs he stood in the bedroom doorway and stared for several minutes at the bed where Margaret Priddy had died. The linen had been stripped from it and taken away to the lab. All that was left was a blue mattress with an old yellow-brown stain on it. On the bedside table was a lamp with a stand made of a chipped plaster cherub, and a shade the same colour as the stain.

  There was also an alarm clock, a box of tissues, and a dog-eared copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune. Distant planets, spice wars and giant worms. One of the nurses was a man, he remembered. Gary Something. Liss. Gary Liss. Marvel guessed that the book belonged to him.

  Lightning flickered and the lights went out with a resigned click. There was a long second when Marvel missed the tiny sound of electricity, and then he adjusted. With the fading light and the storm clouds, the house was all but dark now and Marvel could feel his heart pumping more urgently. Marvel had never liked the dark. Stupid! It was a power cut – that was all. Nothing to be afraid of. He took a rechargeable penlight from his pocket and switched it on. Strangely, it made him feel worse, not better. As if everything outside the narrow beam was now even blacker and more dangerous than it had been before.

  Half a dozen Christmas cards were curling with damp beside the bed. He glanced at each; they said safe, meaningless things and were signed with the names of old people.

  Love from Jean and Arthur. Best wishes from Dolly, Geoff and Family.

  He opened the drawers and the wardrobe and examined the detritus of a life. The wardrobe contained few items of clothing but what there was smelled of damp. A winter coat, two dresses, a skirt, two blouses, carefully folded underwear, two pairs of sensible shoes speckled with mould. Enough to be going on with had Margaret Priddy ever been the subject of a miracle rather than a murder. The drawers were mini scrapyards of single earrings, old lipsticks, foreign coins and what looked like a pair of spurs. Right at the back of the bottom drawer was a jewellery box, which he opened with a modicum of anticipation, but all it held were yellowing invitations to weddings and christenings and a few fragile letters. He unfolded one … wasn’t at the Ridge when we arrived so we had coffee in the conservatory and waited … the going was bottomless so we all got into a fine mess and I was glad to hand the nappy beast back at the yard and walk away without a backward glance … naturally Raymond opened the ’63 – always the snob …

  Marvel refolded the letter, closed the drawer and flicked off the penlight. His fingers were covered in fingerprint powder, which he wiped on the chintz curtains. Debbie would have gone mad to see him do it.

  The window sill and frame were similarly daubed with powder and he ran a practised eye around the square of the frame, seeking anything the CSIs had missed. He always thought he might and was usually disappointed. They knew their job and did it well. The vomit was a rarity, but it wouldn’t stop him giving Jos Reeves an earful first chance he got.

  Outside the sleet had turned to rain.

  He looked out at the moor, which rose so steep and close behind the houses that it stole the remaining light from the room.

  What a place to live.

  What a place to die.

  He shivered and turned away from the window. Before he came back he’d get Grey to check the fuses; the man fancied himself handy.

  Halfway down the stairs he heard a sound. He froze and held his breath. It came again – a scrape, a clink. His eyes followed his ears to the front door and he started to move again – with surprising stealth for a man his age and size. Another scrape. Someone was at the door. Trying to be quiet. Trying to break in? He put his hand to his pocket, felt his phone, but knew there was no signal … knew he’d have to deal with this alone … felt his heartbeat pick up again and adrenaline spurt into his guts at the thought.

  Despite his job, it had been a long time since Marvel was in any actual personal danger. Homicide detectives, by their very nature, arrived after the killer had done his deed, and retro-engineered the crime from there. Sure, sometimes the killer was still at the scene – in the shape of a glazed-drunk teenager or a husband who had snapped and was already confessing. But being in imminent threat of violence was so rare that – if pressed – Marvel would have had trouble remembering when it had last happened.

  Now he was shocked by how nervous he felt. How his breathing got too short and too loud and how he was suddenly aware of how noisy he was! His shoes creaked, his palm squeaked on the banister; his thigh-length coat scraped the woodchip wall in papery warning. Everything gave him away. And in a way he wanted it to. In a way he wanted the person who was now trying to gain access to the scene of Margaret Priddy’s murder to hear him and run off. Then Marvel could open the front door and stare belligerently up and down the narrow street and pretend he was sorry to have missed his chance.

  He suddenly remembered how a lot of people in Quentin Tarantino movies ended up.

  He reached the bottom stair, the gloomy tiled hallway, ran his eyes over the door catch – bog-standard Yale – and braced his feet apart for balance. He raised his hands and saw that they were trembling like a drunk’s. Outside, the scrape came again. A little whisper of cloth on the other side of the wooden door. He held his breath. All he had to do was quietly twist the knob, grip the handle and pull …

  The brass knob slipped from his sweaty grip, the door hit his foot and rebounded, making him shut his eyes; he grabbed at it and caught the tip of his finger between it and the frame, sending a needle of pain running up his shoulders and neck like voltage.

  Fuck!

  Marvel finally gripped the door and focused.

  Jonas Holly stood on the doorstep with a guilty look on his face and three pints of milk clutched to his chest.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

  Marvel slammed the door behind Jonas and strode through the dim house to t
he kitchen. As he did, his fear and pain segued seamlessly into an anger that was fuelled by the dread that the younger man might have seen the panic on his face in the seconds he took to fumble the door open like some crappy amateur magician bungling a trick.

  Jonas followed, as the DCI’s angry stride demanded of him, still holding the icy bottles.

  In the kitchen Marvel turned on Jonas.

  ‘Explain yourself.’

  Haltingly, Jonas did. He explained about Will Bishop, the relentless milkman. He tried to lighten the mood with the joke about the twister but it went nowhere. He got back on track by suggesting that the cordon of tape was doing nothing but flapping a challenge to local boys who were daring each other underneath it and annoying the neighbours; he dangled a comradely escape route in front of Marvel in the shape of a comment about how everyone in the village was understandably on edge with the killer still at large. Marvel ignored the comradeship and the escape.

  And so – because he didn’t really know what else he could usefully say – Jonas Holly made a serious mistake.

  He apologized.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said, ‘if I gave you a fright.’

  The glamorous assistant with a sword through her leg, the dead rabbit in the hat.

  ‘You didn’t give me a fright, you fucking moron! I almost fucking killed you, that’s all! You don’t know how close you fucking came!’ Marvel bumped round the Formica table and held his thumb and forefinger a hair’s breadth apart an inch from Jonas’s nose.

  ‘This close! This fucking close!’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Jonas, unable to meet Marvel’s eyes to lend honesty to his answer.

  Marvel glared up at him and Jonas felt himself starting to detach. He’d done all he could here. He’d done the right thing. If it hadn’t worked then he would just have to let Marvel decide how this would play out.

  Marvel watched Jonas’s face go blank and knew he was hiding his real feelings. Knew he was hating him inside. Somehow that made Marvel feel a little better – that Jonas had to hide his feelings, while he – as the senior officer – was allowed to give vent to his.