Darkside

by Belinda Bauer

  ‘She likes that,’ said Jonas.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Ronnie. And then – after a long pause – ‘You told me that.’

  ‘What?’

  Ronnie spoke with his back to Jonas but his voice was softened by the contact with the greyhound, which lay stiff-legged, hypnotized by pleasure.

  ‘You told me dogs like their armpits tickled.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Jonas was puzzled. ‘When?’

  Ronnie shrugged one shoulder. ‘Dunno. When I was a kid.’

  Jonas had no recollection of it. He only vaguely recalled Ronnie Trewell as a child – marked out by his limp – hanging around on the edges of everything, never excluded but never really involved either.

  He watched the teenager’s callused, oil-stained fingers gently stroke the most tender skin the dog had to offer.

  ‘How old is she?’ he asked.

  ‘Twelve,’ said Dougie, relieved at this new non-confrontational turn in the conversation. ‘She used to race. She had tattoos in her ears but they cut them out when they dumped her.’

  Jonas saw the dog’s cloudy eyes widen and its whole body stiffen as Ronnie lifted its ear to show where the delicate drape of silken flesh had been brutally sliced to prevent identification and responsibility.

  ‘She doesn’t like it when you touch it,’ said Ronnie, letting the ear drop back into place. ‘Even after all this time.’

  ‘She remembers, see?’ said Dougie, and he walked over, perched on the edge of the sofa and smoothed the dog’s brindle flank. ‘Don’t you, girl?’

  Jonas suddenly felt overwhelmingly sad and disconnected.

  The soft thief, the unformed boy, the stale room. The old dog with its long memory of bad things.

  He said something to Dougie – something about the help he’d rendered yesterday. He didn’t know what he said or what was said in return – it was just a way to excuse himself and move from inside the house to outside, where he could breathe and be alone.

  He turned left out of the front gate instead of right and walked twenty paces across the frozen mud to the stile that led to the moor. He climbed on to it and stood there, raised into the icy night sky, confused by the depth of his own feelings.

  So what if the dog was old? So what if it had had its tattoos cut out? Dogs went through bad things all the time and then recovered from them and lived happy lives. Just like people did. The dog was loved and cared for now, so why did he feel so sad?

  Because the dog remembered.

  Worse than that, the dog could not forget.

  Even when it had an entire green-vinyl sofa to stretch out on, and a boy stroking its armpit, the memory was right there, right underneath, all ready to burst through the skin, tear open old wounds and make them bleed afresh. And it wasn’t just the wounds. It was the memory of the trembling, pissing terror every time a human approached and a hand reached out, in case it held not titbits but sudden sharp and selfish pain.

  Jonas was dizzy with the fear of the remembering dog. He had no idea why; he just was.

  He swayed atop the icy stile, sucked air into his lungs as if he’d just missed drowning, and squeezed his eyes shut.

  He wouldn’t cry. He mustn’t cry. He was not allowed to cry.

  For some reason which escaped him, that thought made his eyes burn even harder and his throat felt filled with a balloon with the effort it took to keep from tears.

  It was Lucy. He knew it was all about Lucy, this new tearful streak. He tried to tell himself it was understandable – that facing the loss of someone he loved so much was sure to make him weak and vulnerable – but something in him found it merely pathetic and he hated himself because of it.

  He opened his eyes and blinked at the monochromatic haloes around the stars above him and the streetlights below him. He made no effort to clear his vision – blurred was nice for now. Even blurred, he knew the shape of the village. He knew the light that was the pub and the light over the bus stop. A hundred feet below him he knew the yellow blob of Linda Cobb’s kitchen, and the absence of light that was Margaret Priddy’s home.

  One light sparkled in isolation across the coombe – separate from the others. Jonas focused on it and breathed steadily. Slowly, slowly, the cobwebs faded around the single light and he saw it was a yellowish, un-curtained window across the way, only just visible above the rough silhouette of a hedge, which cut it off at the sill.

  He looked down towards the village and took his bearings, then looked back up at that single pale window.

  And felt his heart miss a beat.

  From here.

  From this place alone.

  From atop the stile outside the Trewell home, Jonas Holly could see directly into his own bathroom.

  Twelve Days

  When it finally made up its mind, the snow came with a vengeance.

  The first flakes wandered down from the black velvet sky like little stars that had lost their way, and within minutes the galaxies themselves were raining down on Exmoor. Without a breath of breeze to divert or delay them, a million billion points of fractured light poured from the heavens, to be finally reunited under the moon in a brilliant carpet of silent white.

  *

  Marvel woke up with a cat staring into his eyes from a distance of about three inches. He flinched and it dug its claws into his chest, keeping him just where it wanted him.

  ‘Get off,’ he suggested, but the enormously fluffy grey ball merely blinked its orange eyes and looked contemptuous. It did withdraw its claws a little, but was certainly not going anywhere soon.

  Marvel turned his head with a wince to find he was asleep on Joy Springer’s hairy kitchen sofa and couldn’t feel his legs. Because of the cat, he couldn’t immediately see them either, which only added to the surreal feeling that his legs could be absolutely anywhere. He reached down and touched his thigh. Or what he assumed was his thigh – he had no sensation in the slab his finger felt through the cloth of his suit trousers.

  The light was oddly muted, as if someone had put a pale veil over the windows while he slept. It added to the air of strangeness that waking up without his legs was giving him.

  It had been a late night at the mobile unit. Late and smelling of Calor gas. He’d kept his team up past their bedtimes, laying out a strategy for the two inquiries; being the swan while wanting a drink. Luckily Reynolds was on the ball. Him and his fucking little notebook, thought Marvel sourly.

  Then he had come back to the farm to find that although he’d given Joy Springer money for a bottle of whiskey, she’d instead bought two bottles of Cinzano, which he hadn’t even known they made any more.

  ‘Get off!’ he shouted into the cat’s face and – after a rebellious beat – it rose slowly, dug in its claws in farewell, and sauntered down his body with its tail in the air, so that Marvel could see from its puckered arse exactly what it thought of him.

  Marvel struggled to his elbows and looked down at his legs, which – in their paralysis – seemed to be completely separate from his hips. He actually had to lean down and pull his own feet to the floor so that he could sit up. He noticed he’d removed his shoes, even though Joy Springer’s couch looked as if it had been retrieved from a tip. So did his shoes; they had been wet and dried so often in the past fortnight that the leather was going stiff. How hard could it be to buy wellington fucking boots?

  He looked at his watch. Eight thirty-five am.

  Bollocks.

  The empty bottles on the table told their own story and as a prequel to that he had a hazy recollection of Joy Springer cackling while he told her an anecdote. He had several that he rolled out again and again and again in company – each time starting with ‘Reminds me of …’ As if he’d ever forgotten.

  There was the story of Jason Harman, the Butcher of Bermondsey, who’d sliced up his wife and his mother-in-law and boiled their remains to soup on a two-ring hob; of Nance Locke, who’d murdered her three children by tying their hands and forcing their heads into a bucket of water one after
the other; or of Ang Nu, who’d run as if guilty and then, when cornered, jumped from a bridge – not into the expected river, but on to the unfortunate spikes of the railings below. ‘One in his arse, one in his heart and one right through the eye socket,’ Marvel always finished with ghoulish glee. ‘The eyeball was sat on top of the spike like a cocktail onion on a stick.’

  Of course, the older Marvel got, the fewer people had ever seen a cocktail onion on a stick and the less punch the image packed. Still, he enjoyed saying it, even if the denouement was always accompanied by the guilty nudge of the untold aftermath. That Ang Nu had been beaten up twice because of his immigrant status, spoke no English, and had probably been wholly unaware that the four burly men chasing him this time were police.

  That would have spoiled the story.

  Which would have been a shame, because Joy Springer had seemed to enjoy that one. Old enough to remember cocktail onions, for sure. No doubt if he’d had a story about a fondue-related crime, she’d have liked that too.

  Joy had a few stories of her own, Marvel remembered dimly now with a grimace. A few too many and all against the same backdrop of Springer Farm: buying the place as newly-weds, individual horses and all their little horsey quirks, the seemingly endless years of trekking and local shows and children falling off and grockles getting trampled and the stables burning down and the cottages being built in their place … mercifully Marvel had been able to tune much of it out entirely. Until she’d got tearful. Then he’d had to re-focus and at least look as if he’d been listening all along. Really, the things you had to do to get a companionable drink around here.

  She’d shown him a photo of her husband. Marvel turned his head now and could still see it on the table, propped up as if it had been watching him all night. Creepy. Her husband had been called Roy. Or Ralph. Something with an R.

  Debbie used to say, ‘People get the face they deserve.’ Another of her hippy-dippy Sting-clinging homilies that made him want to smack her with her Amazonian rainstick. Annoyingly, though, Marvel had come to the grudging conclusion that she was generally right on this one. He’d banged up enough pinch-lipped, low-browed, boss-eyed criminals in his time to become receptive to the idea. Now he thought that if Something with an R had got the face he deserved then he probably should have been banged up too.

  Not according to Joy Springer, he recalled vaguely. Apparently Something with an R had been descended from angels and had returned there ‘to sleep’ with them once his tortured life was at an end. Marvel tried to remember what had tortured him so badly – ill health or no money or just being so bloody ugly and married to Joy Springer – but he wasn’t sure she had told him. He did remember being surprised that the resilient old bird had got emotional about anything other than the fact that the Cinzano was finished. She didn’t seem the type.

  Ah well, it was all a bit of a haze now.

  Marvel rubbed his eyes and face. Reynolds would muster the troops; it wouldn’t be the first time. He got to his unsteady feet and saw the white outside. Snow making everything seem black and white, deep enough that he could not see the gravel of the courtyard, even through the footprints and the tyre tracks that indicated that Reynolds had mustered the troops, and that they had already left.

  His phone rang and he found it under another cat on the corner of the table.

  ‘I’ve got good news and bad news,’ said Jos Reeves, and from his tone Marvel could tell that he was even happy about the bad news, which immediately got under his skin.

  ‘Don’t fuck about, Reeves.’

  ‘All right,’ said Reeves, and then proceeded to fuck about. ‘The good news is there’s a forensic link between the two scenes.’

  Marvel stayed silent, determined not to give Reeves the satisfaction of asking about the bad news, but his heart jerked anyway, as it always did when science put the seal on a suspect.

  ‘The bad news,’ said Reeves, in a voice that betrayed suppressed laughter, ‘is that it’s one of your own men.’

  *

  From her bedroom window, Mrs Paddon watched Jonas clear the snow off her path. His father used to do the same thing.

  Although Jonas also frequently offered to pick up bread or a newspaper for her, Mrs Paddon preferred to walk into the village, despite her eighty-nine years. She had an umbrella, after all – and a pair of stout waterproof boots.

  She didn’t speak to Jonas much, but she loved him dearly. Always had – from the day Cath and Des had brought him home from the hospital, all red and screwed up. Although the walls between Rose and Honeysuckle were thick and stone, she’d sometimes been able to hear him bawling, and whenever she did, she’d hold her breath until it stopped and she was sure that Cath had gone to him. Sometimes she lay awake wondering what she would do if little Jonas’s crying had ever gone unchecked, and in her sillier meanderings had imagined having to rescue him and bring him back to her bed to snuggle like a little kitten.

  She smiled faintly now at the memory – and at the anomalous thought of that tiny baby and the tall man below.

  Every now and then Jonas would straighten up and stare across the coombe. She wondered why. Could he see something suspicious? She looked herself, but things were as they always were – the rolling moor and the other side of the village nestling at its foot, all coated in virginal white that made her eyes ache.

  Terrible thing, these murders. She’d known Yvonne Marsh by sight, but Margaret Priddy and she had been friends – even though Mrs Paddon disagreed with hunting. Disagreed so strongly, in fact, that sometimes she’d pull on her waterproof boots, walk up to the common with a thermos of tea and a small wooden sign, and join the saboteurs. She’d made the sign herself: Foxes are people too. The young sabs with their woollen hats and their nose rings always made her welcome, and whenever Margaret rode past she’d wave hello with her sign and they’d chat for a bit. The first time it had happened, a sab had rushed over and called Margaret a ‘fucking bitch’ and Mrs Paddon had smacked him with her sign. Not too hard – but hard enough to make them all laugh. She hadn’t driven an ambulance through the war so people could behave like that.

  Ah yes, sabbing was a good day out.

  Poor Margaret.

  She had heard all the details in Mr Jacoby’s shop. The pillow on the face. The body in the stream, the lack of fingerprints. Gloves, Mr Jacoby said knowingly, and she thought of the films of her youth, where the goodies wore brown-leather gloves for driving, while the baddies wore black ones for killing. Gloves made the whole thing more Hollywood. She supposed she should be frightened by two murders in a week, but couldn’t find fear inside herself. She’d been in the East End during the Blitz and had expected to die every day. Being murdered now seemed ridiculously unlikely. She felt safe in her home, and even safer because Jonas and Lucy lived next door.

  She tapped on the window and waved her thanks at Jonas, then decided, despite the snow, to make the most of her clear path and go and fetch a few bits from Mr Jacoby’s. Maybe pop into the Red Lion for a sherry on the way home.

  ‘It’s all go,’ she told herself wryly, and went to get her brolly from the airing cupboard.

  Every now and then Jonas would stop scraping at the slate and look across the tall hedge in the direction of Ronnie Trewell’s house. He couldn’t see it at all from the front gardens, but he still felt compelled to keep an eye on the moorland above it in case he saw anyone there. He thought again of Ronnie and Dougie with the dog. Whichever way he came at it, he couldn’t see either of them writing the notes. Clive Trewell was the more obvious suspect. But Jonas had a lingering memory of Clive Trewell once picking him off the pavement after a spectacularly ill-judged wheelie had left him flat on his back outside the Red Lion, with a BMX bike on his chest.

  The memory absolved Clive Trewell in Jonas’s eyes.

  There were a dozen homes within a hundred yards of the stile, and the moor was open to all. Anyone could have stood where he’d stood; anyone could have seen him in the bath.

 
; Anyone.

  This morning, for the first time in his life, he’d pulled the blind down while showering.

  Just after Mrs Paddon waved, Lucy knocked on the front window and mimed a cup of tea at him, but he was already late, so he tapped his watch at her. She blew him a kiss instead and he grinned and blushed – too embarrassed to blow one back in front of Mrs Paddon, even though he knew that was ridiculous. But she’d known him as a child, and that made all the difference.

  He turned as a car pulled up with a slushy squeak outside the front gate.

  Marvel.

  Jonas’s heart sank. Something told him Marvel hadn’t stopped by to give him a lift to Margaret Priddy’s doorstep.

  He glanced back at Lucy and saw her face became quizzical. She must have seen the wariness on his. Jonas didn’t want Lucy seeing anything of Marvel’s attitude towards him, partly for her sake, partly for his own, so he went through the old wooden gate and down the three stone steps and walked round to the driver’s door. Marvel’s window was open.

  ‘What the fuck are you playing at, Holly?’

  Jonas was confused. ‘I’m sweeping my path, sir.’

  ‘Are you being funny?’

  ‘No, sir. I don’t think so.’

  ‘The lab called to say your hair and fibres are all over Margaret Priddy and Yvonne Marsh.’

  Jonas looked blank. Why was that a shock to Marvel? He’d have been shocked if his hair and fibres hadn’t been found on both victims.

  ‘And the button you found in the guttering? Mass produced for the uniform trade. Probably pulled it off your own fucking trousers when you climbed up there!’

  ‘No, sir. I—’

  ‘Are you trying to make me look like a fucking fool?’ spat Marvel.

  Jonas was caught off-balance by this sudden switch.

  ‘Excuse me, sir?’

  ‘Those bastards in the lab are laughing at me because of you, you understand?’

  Jonas did understand – that Marvel was an insecure arsehole.