Darkside

by Belinda Bauer

  ‘Nope. Not an ST though, is it?’ said Ronnie with a little sneer in his voice as he peered through the window. Marvel didn’t give a shit what the Focus was or wasn’t, but that little sneer made him feel suddenly protective towards the pool car.

  ‘Goes well though,’ he said, feeling foolishly like he was seventeen again with his first learner motorbike – a 125cc Honda Benley with a hand-painted tank – trying to talk it up to the older, richer boys with their RD250s …

  ‘Yeah?’ said Ronnie. ‘Believe it when I see it.’

  It nearly worked. For a second Marvel was all ready to jump behind the wheel and do a donut in the mud at the end of the lane beside the dirty little bungalow. Floor the accelerator and spray the kid with gravel. Maybe even let him feel the kick for himself …

  ‘Nice try, Ronnie,’ he said, not without a little respect.

  Marvel opened the door of the Ford and thought he’d better go out on an authoritarian note. ‘Don’t go anywhere, all right?’

  ‘Where am I going to go?’ said Ronnie Trewell, with a shrug at the darkening moor around them. He seemed genuinely at a loss.

  Marvel ignored the question and drove away.

  Ronnie Trewell wasn’t the killer. He wasn’t … quite right.

  Seventeen Days

  The mobile incident room arrived and it was shit.

  Just the way Marvel liked it.

  There were soggy Polo mints in the desk, mud up the walls, two black bags filled with junk-food wrappers, and someone had used indelible green ink on the whiteboard and then what looked like some kind of wire brush to try to remove it.

  Marvel felt himself relax into the squalor of the unit in a way he just couldn’t into the rusticity of Springer Farm. The rutted driveway, the mossy roofs, the smell of manure repelled him. But this squalor was different. He wanted the stained coffee pot, he liked the muddy lino, and the sour reek of the grubby little fridge was napalm in the morning to him.

  Didn’t mean anyone else had to know that. ‘Clean this place up,’ he growled at Reynolds, who made a note in his book.

  ‘What are you writing?’ said Marvel irritably.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘What are you writing in your little book? I said “Clean this place up.” Doesn’t need a fucking memo, does it?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Then clean this place up.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Don’t let Rice do it.’

  ‘No, sir.’ Before Reynolds could ask why, when Rice was the only member of the team who might make a decent job of it, Marvel had trudged down the steps and slammed the door.

  The unit was parked at the edge of the playing field alongside Margaret Priddy’s home. Nonetheless, Marvel drove the four hundred yards to the shop.

  He asked for wellington boots but was told he’d have to go to Dulverton or to somewhere the large, docile man behind the counter called ‘the farm shop’ – the directions to which were so complex that Marvel stopped listening after the third dogleg.

  ‘You’re the chap in charge?’ asked the man, and Marvel nodded. ‘Any progress?’

  ‘Early days,’ said Marvel. It was all he ever said in response to inquiries by civilians – right up to the point where he stood in his funeral suit and only decent tie to hear the verdict of the jury. Before that, nothing was sure.

  ‘Poor Margaret,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘Although it was a blessing really.’

  ‘Hmm,’ nodded Marvel, but was not sure he agreed.

  Outside, he saw the small brown dog from next door to the Priddy home, and introduced himself to the owner, Mrs Cobb. He asked whether the dog had barked on the night of the murder and she said ‘No’ as if it was the first time it had occurred to her.

  Typical, thought Marvel. The dog barks at me but not at the bloody killer.

  He went back to the unit, where Reynolds had made a poor enough job of cleaning the unit to satisfy the most ardent slob. He was now standing by for plaudits, but Marvel merely glanced around and grunted, then answered his phone. Jos Reeves told him they had the hair matches. Two from Peter Priddy, two from Dr Mark Dennis, and one each from Gary Liss and Annette Rogers.

  ‘Nothing from Reynolds? He usually sheds like a fucking Retriever all over the scene.’

  ‘Nothing from Reynolds.’

  ‘You said there were seven.’

  ‘One unidentified,’ said Reeves.

  Marvel accepted the news with grudging silence. ‘What about fibres?’

  Reeves sighed. ‘Nothing of significance yet.’

  ‘Let me be the judge of that,’ snapped Marvel.

  ‘OK,’ said Reeves mildly and started to recite their results so far in a relentless monotone. ‘Carpet, white cotton, black cotton, blue cotton, red wool, blue wool—’

  ‘Email me,’ said Marvel and hung up.

  Sixteen Days

  Mike Foster and his enthusiasm for vomit proved to be the highlight of Jonas’s first few days on the doorstep. Linda Cobb brought him increasingly infrequent cups of tea and his novelty quickly wore off with the schoolchildren. None came out of their way to stare at him and whisper at each other now, and the few who passed gave him barely a glance. He had tried to maintain the illusion, even in his own head, that he might at some point spot the killer, but he really wasn’t even rooting for himself. He felt it was a pointless exercise and had no wish for Marvel to be proven right through some weird fluke, even if it did mean catching the perpetrator of a horrible crime.

  No, that wasn’t true, thought Jonas, shamed. Catching the killer of Margaret Priddy would be worth any kind of humiliation. But he’d prefer it if they caught him another way – a way that wouldn’t give Marvel the option of an ‘I told you so.’

  It was a long, cold day.

  *

  Jonas got home to find Lucy asleep on the couch with the phone in her hand and Rosemary’s Baby playing silently on the TV.

  ‘How are you, Lu?’ he asked softly as she stirred.

  She blinked in confusion for a few seconds and Jonas watched recognition float back into her eyes.

  ‘My legs hurt,’ she said grumpily. ‘And Margaret Priddy’s son called you. He didn’t say why.’

  She shifted up and he sat down and pulled her bare legs on to his lap, covering them up again with the brown tartan rug.

  Jonas started to massage her calves.

  ‘Are you going to call him back?’ she said.

  ‘In a minute.’ He shrugged.

  Onscreen Mia Farrow was over-acting at the sight of the devil-child she’d spawned.

  ‘Let’s have a baby,’ said Lucy.

  He didn’t stop massaging her, but he also didn’t answer her. Or even turn his eyes from the TV.

  ‘Jonas?’

  ‘Can we talk about it later?’ He still caressed her, but she could tell now that it was perfunctory.

  ‘I want to talk about it now.’

  Jonas sighed and looked at her. ‘We’ve talked about it, Lu. You’re ill …’

  ‘That’s not it.’ She drew her legs up and away from him, and curled them under herself. Now it was her turn to look at the TV.

  He said nothing. They had last had this conversation almost two years ago. He’d hoped they wouldn’t have it again.

  But Lucy wanted it again. ‘You wanted children before we got married.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  He said it automatically and saw her eyes widen.

  ‘You said you did.’

  There was no way out of it now. His mouth had betrayed him and he couldn’t take it back. ‘You said I did.’

  ‘You never said you didn’t.’

  ‘Well …’ shrugged Jonas with a helpless lift of one hand. ‘I don’t.’

  Lucy bit her lip, determined to be an adult about this. This was an adult conversation between two adults. The fact that she wanted to slap him and cry on the floor like a child was an aberration.

  ‘Why?’ she said and hated the tremble in her own voice
.

  ‘I just don’t.’

  ‘I think I deserve a better answer than that, Jonas.’

  Jonas thought she did too. Knew she did. But stayed as silent as a coward, which he knew was his only defence.

  Usually Lucy let it go. They never fought and weren’t quite sure how to, but tonight Lucy was finally hurt enough …

  ‘Don’t you want something to remember me by?’

  Jonas stood up in an instant, and as soon as Lucy saw his face she wished she could take it back. For a second she was actually frightened.

  He walked out of the room and she heard him pick up his car keys and phone from beside the flowers on the hall table.

  She nearly called out to him, but then held her tongue.

  She had a right to say what she was feeling! If things were the other way round, Lucy would have moved Heaven and Earth to have Jonas’s child. She could barely believe that – for once – he did not want the same thing as she did. Disagreeing was one thing, but refusal to even discuss such a vital issue was quite another. She felt her throat constrict in self-pity. She wasn’t dead yet! Her vote still counted!

  Didn’t it?

  She heard the front door shut quietly behind him.

  Jonas drove away.

  He had no idea how to tell her the truth: I can’t protect a child.

  Because in his head he always heard her ask Why?

  And then he’d have to tell the truth again.

  Nobody can …

  *

  Marvel sat with an unopened bottle of Jameson whiskey in one hand, the TV bunny aerial in the other, and watched Coronation Street for the first time in about twenty years. He was shocked and confused to find that at some point Tracy Barlow had served time for murder, and while he was trying to work out how that could legally happen to a five-year-old girl, someone knocked on his door.

  He hadn’t heard a car but he thought it might be Reynolds, who had taken the DNA swabs to Portishead. Marvel could have gone too, but had finally decided that going back to the future at this point would make it that much harder to return to Exmoor.

  He was therefore more than a little surprised to find PC Jonas Holly standing in the dark.

  ‘I need to speak to you about Peter Priddy.’

  Marvel held open the door by way of invitation, and immediately felt the cold night air invade his cottage, giving him an unexpected pang of empathy with Joy Springer and her jealous guardianship of warmth.

  But Jonas didn’t come in. Instead he stood hesitantly in the yard, then asked if they could go to the pub. Marvel needed no second bidding. He abandoned Tracy Barlow to her fate and grabbed his coat.

  It was warm in the Land Rover. Holly swung it round expertly in a tight turn. As he did, Marvel noticed Joy Springer peering at them from behind her kitchen curtain.

  They turned right at the bottom of the drive – away from Shipcott – and headed up the hill across the moor.

  ‘Not going to the Red Lion?’

  ‘I thought it would be better to go somewhere away from the village to discuss work.’

  Marvel nodded. Holly was different tonight. There was nothing of the junior officer about him. His manner was surprisingly brusque and he looked as if he was brooding about something.

  ‘I spoke to Peter Priddy. He’s got a right cob on.’

  Marvel didn’t understand the reference but got the gist. ‘Mr Priddy doesn’t understand the process of elimination.’

  ‘He feels victimized.’

  ‘He had motive, opportunity and probably inclination.’

  ‘It’s his mother!’

  ‘You think nobody kills their mother? Or father? Or their own kids? What do you think this is, bloody Toytown? Grow up, Holly, for fuck’s sake!’

  Jonas said nothing and put his foot down.

  Marvel watched the empty ribbon of tarmac lined by dirty brown moor race at them out of blackness and disappear as soon as the lights had passed over it. It was like travelling through space, or a lower intestine. The blackness could have been infinite or claustrophobically close, there was no way of telling – and the motion was timeless and hypnotic.

  ‘Where’s the pub?’ he said.

  ‘Withypool,’ said Jonas just as curtly, as he stopped at a T-junction.

  A porcupine of white wooden signposts bristled out of the opposite hedge.

  ‘Withypool two and a quarter!’ read Marvel in exasperation. ‘This place is like Middle fucking Earth.’

  Jonas turned right and floored the accelerator again, his jaw set. Marvel was starting to enjoy needling him.

  ‘He was with a woman at the time. Not his wife.’

  Marvel rubbed his hands together. ‘Now we’re talking! In Shipcott?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yeah, we had someone who saw his car on Saturday night. He with her all night?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Guessing so does not make it so. You spoken to her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A miracle! Someone you haven’t fucked about with before we could get there. Who is it?’

  Jonas tightened his fists on the wheel. This wasn’t going as planned. He should have thought it through before calling Marvel. He’d thought he was doing Peter Priddy a favour … that Marvel would accept his word about an alibi, but now it was all getting away from him. His head had started to ache as soon as he’d walked out on Lucy and now it throbbed cruelly as the tunnel of road and moor rushed at him like a video game. He should never have gone to see Marvel when he felt this way but he’d needed something to take his mind off her words. He couldn’t bear to think about them – to think of her being gone. Of her being not there. Of having to have something to remember her by …

  He’d had to stop thinking of it. He’d called Peter Priddy; he’d picked up Marvel. Now he tried to focus on what they’d said and what he’d said to them, piling words up like ashes on embers, but her words still glowed and flickered underneath. Now those words had been lit, he couldn’t imagine they’d ever go out, and he felt their burn at the base of his skull.

  The pony came out of nowhere, filled his vision and struck the car all in the same frantic second. By the time Jonas hit the brakes, it was behind them.

  The car slewed briefly and stalled with a lurch.

  ‘Shit!’ said Marvel.

  The engine ticked quietly in the silence.

  Marvel looked in his wing mirror and saw the dark shape of the animal in the road twenty yards behind them, lit faintly by their brake lights.

  ‘I think it’s still alive,’ he said. ‘We’d better go and see.’

  He looked at Jonas but the younger man just stared at him blankly, as if he hadn’t heard.

  ‘We’d better go and look at it,’ he repeated, and this time Holly registered what he’d said and looked in his rear-view mirror. Then he backed up the car until they were just a few feet from the horse.

  Marvel got out. It was much colder up here on the moor, and drying out too – as if the sky was sucking the moisture from the air and preparing for something much more spectacular than mere rain. He walked round to the back of the Land Rover. By the dull red of the tail lights, even Marvel could see that the pony’s front leg was broken at a sickening angle. The animal was trying to get up anyway, heaving itself on to its chest then flailing helplessly – its hoofs drubbing the tarmac and leaving pale scrapes in its surface – before collapsing back on to its side, snorting, ribs heaving under its shaggy winter coat, and its eye rolling wild and white around the edges.

  ‘Its leg’s broken,’ he said, looking up for a lead from Jonas, and surprised to find him not there. He looked round. Jonas had got out of the car with him but was still at the door of the Land Rover, silhouetted against the stars.

  He raised his voice. ‘It’s got a broken leg.’

  Through the vague red darkness he saw the silhouette nod its head.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ asked Marvel.

  ‘I don’t know.’

/>   ‘Well you’re the bloody local! People must hit these buggers all the time.’

  ‘I’ll call the hunt,’ said Jonas after a pause.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll call the hunt. They’ll come out and shoot it and take it for meat.’

  ‘Meat?’ Marvel was utterly confused.

  ‘For the hounds,’ said Jonas.

  ‘You’re fucking joking!’ said Marvel.

  ‘No,’ said Jonas, ‘I’m not.’

  Marvel tried to regain a sense of normality. Two minutes ago, he had been off to the pub. Now he was confronted with a dying horse, a remote companion, and the mental image of a pack of hounds tearing the dark-brown hide from a still-warm beast, while faceless men in scarlet stood by laughing.

  And he wasn’t even drunk.

  Maybe he was in shock. Maybe Jonas Holly was too, with his monosyllabic responses.

  He had to keep things in perspective. Be practical.

  ‘We should put it out of its misery,’ said Marvel, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to, but hoping that a countryman like Jonas would take control.

  He knew nothing of horses. He wasn’t sure he’d ever touched one, but something made him hunch down now beside this pony’s head and reach out to it. The animal let out a shrill whinny, driving his hand away from it briefly. But because Jonas had already seen him scared at Margaret Priddy’s house, he reached out again.

  This time he touched the horse’s neck. The coat was thick but surprisingly soft, and slightly damp. He let his hand sink into it until he could feel the hot skin.

  For a moment his touch seemed to calm the beast and he felt the faint throb of the pulse under his fingers. Then it squealed and started to thrash about, knocking Marvel on to his backside in the road. Disorientated, he opened his eyes to see its hoofs blurring close to his face. He put up a protective hand and it was immediately kicked aside. He shouted in pain, then felt a rough tug at the scruff of his neck and was dragged out of range of the flailing hoofs.

  His hand was agony. In his head he ran through every expletive he’d ever heard, but in reality he just bit his lip, laid his cheek on the cold tarmac, squeezed his hand in his armpit and tried to stem the tears of pain that threatened to drown his eyes.