Darkside

by Belinda Bauer

  Lynne Twitchett approached a little nervously. ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘No,’ said Marvel curtly and heard Reynolds hurrying into the room.

  ‘What’s up, sir?’

  Marvel turned the hand up so Reynolds could see it, and was gratified to hear a surprised expletive. He rubbed his thumb across the smudge and a small amount of colour transferred itself. Whatever Betty had touched, she had touched it recently.

  ‘She says she hasn’t touched anything. Look around, will you?’

  Reynolds did, checking the arms of the wing chair, the head-rest, the handles of a Zimmer which was on standby for take-off a few feet away.

  ‘Can you hold your hand up for me, Betty?’

  She nodded and he let go of her wrist.

  Everyone in the room was watching them now. Behind him Marvel could hear a hum of low mutterings: ‘What’s going on?’ … ‘What’s he doing to Betty?’ … ‘Where are the biscuits?’

  Betty shifted in her seat, careful not to move her hand much, and Marvel saw her walking stick hooked over the arm of her chair, right near the back where it would be out of the way.

  He looked around for something to pick it up with and started to lift the rug off Betty’s knees. Her smudged hand clapped down to her lap to keep her rug and her modesty in place, so instead he yanked his own tie off and used it carefully to pick up the stick.

  ‘Reynolds.’

  Reynolds came over and Marvel held the walking stick up to the light. It was made of stout wood, the handle of tooled brass – stained brownish-red.

  And near the end was a small but unmistakable clump of white hair.

  He had his murder weapon.

  He had his suspect.

  Marvel thought of the line from ‘Amazing Grace’.

  I once was lost, but now I’m found.

  That was him. Lost, then found. Dark, then light. Drunk, then sober. The moment he saw those strands of white stuck to the end of the cane, Marvel knew he didn’t have to drink any more. He would, but he didn’t have to. Not on this case, at least.

  It had been getting out of hand anyway. Last night he and Joy had had a barney because she’d got all maudlin about Something with an R and, instead of sympathizing, he’d asked if she had any ice. She’d thrown a glass at him and he’d said something mean about Dubonnet …

  What the hell was he doing getting into an argument with some lonely old drunk over ice and Dubonnet? He should have his head examined.

  Lost and found.

  As long as things progressed in that order, Marvel felt he was doing a reasonable job with his life.

  All day long, while he clambered over debris and peered through shed windows on the off-chance of finding Gary Liss, Jonas worried about the notes.

  The first had been oblique: Call yourself a policeman?

  The second had been personal: Do your job, crybaby.

  The third – in the wake of a triple murder – could no longer be seen as anything but a warning: If you won’t do your job, then I’ll do it for you.

  But he was doing his job! This time the killer was wrong! He’d started his night patrols, and now he was properly part of the investigation by day, too. They even had a suspect lined up. How could the killer – or anyone – accuse him of no longer doing his job?

  But the threatening tone of this note was unmistakable, and Jonas knew he could no longer hide behind previous ambiguity.

  The time had come to speak to Marvel.

  *

  The killer couldn’t keep hiding for ever. Things were closing in. Things were catching up with him. Memories pressed against the ceiling of his subconscious like desperate sailors in the hold of a doomed ship.

  He was no longer sure he could hold it all together. Some part of him had once imagined some connection with the policeman/protector; there had been times when he had wondered if they might one day be on the same team. Work side by side.

  But Jonas was still stubbornly ineffective where it really mattered.

  The bodies were piling up.

  The wrong people were dying and it just wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t right.

  Something had to give.

  *

  Elizabeth Rice called Marvel – ostensibly to say she hadn’t yet had an opportunity to compare the Polaroid of the shoe-print with all the shoes in the Marshes’ house, but really to find out what was going on at Sunset Lodge.

  Marvel told her not to bother. They had a suspect.

  ‘Does that mean I can join you up there?’

  ‘No,’ said Marvel. ‘Stay put for a bit. Might need you to break the news of an arrest to the Marshes.’

  ‘OK. Good,’ said Rice, although she felt like throwing something in frustration.

  Preferably at Marvel.

  When Jonas arrived, the residents of Sunset Lodge had just started to make their arduous journeys from the garden room to the dining room for supper.

  Although it was dark already, the room was as hot as ever, and smelled of sweet decay under hairspray and talcum powder. After the bitter outdoors it was suffocating. He wondered if they ever opened the windows so people could breathe—

  The memory hit him like a ghost train …

  He and Danny Marsh had bought maggots for fishing from Mr Jacoby’s shop. In the late summer the stream behind the playing field had sticklebacks and the occasional brown trout, and there were schoolyard rumours of a pike that might – or might not – have eaten Annie Rossiter’s missing cat, Wobbles. Jonas did not really buy the Wobbles theory, because why would a cat be in the stream in the first place? But he did fantasize about catching a pike. Or a trout.

  A stickleback would do, to be honest.

  So he and Danny had bought a pot of maggots. A little white polystyrene cup with a not-quite-clear plastic lid, which had to be lifted to see the fat white worms properly. Mr Jacoby took them from the fridge – from a shelf alongside the cans of Coke and Dandelion & Burdock, which Jonas could never quite make up his mind whether he liked or not.

  Jonas was stunned that he could recall such details. He even remembered now that the maggots had cost 55p and that Danny had paid because he’d owed Jonas for a comic.

  They’d only had one rod between them – Jonas’s little starter rod which had come in a blister-pack last Christmas, with its fixed-spool reel already loaded with line and permanently attached between the cork grips, along with two red-and-white ball floats and a bag of small, unambitious hooks.

  They’d fished for one long, hot day, eating cheese-and-pickle rolls and taking turns to hold the rod for when The Big One bit.

  By the time dusk fell and they went home empty-handed, they had only used maybe twenty of the hundred or so maggots, most of which had simply wriggled off the hook and made a break for it, or had been discarded for becoming waterlogged, limp and – the boys agreed – unattractive to fish.

  Probably because the rod was his, when they parted ways Jonas had taken the remaining maggots home with him and put them in the fridge for the next day.

  They’d never gone fishing again.

  Other stuff had happened.

  The little white pot had first been hidden behind the jam and then pushed to the back of the fridge by yesterday’s spaghetti Bolognese.

  And it was only weeks later, when his mother complained that that fridge – which was only four years old – was making a strange buzzing noise, that Jonas had remembered …

  Through the cloudy lid of the pot, Jonas had seen that the pale maggots had been replaced by something amorphous, black and expansive, which now filled the pot so comprehensively that he could see darker patches under the plastic lid where things were actually pressing up against it. The whole pot vibrated in his nervous hand with a low, menacing buzz – and it was with a sick shock that Jonas realized that the small maggots had slowly turned to much bigger flies that were now squeezed together so tightly in the pot that they seemed to be one angry entity.

  Angry at him.

&nbs
p; He’d wanted to let them go. He was a good-hearted boy who loved animals. And flies were animals – of a sort. The thought of them inside the pot – packed so close that their wet wings could not even unfurl, while their neighbours ate them and vomited on them and ate them again – made him feel ill.

  But they were angry at him. He could feel it in the vibrating fury running up his arm as he held the pot in his hand.

  He had thrown it away without removing the lid. And until the bin men came three days later, Jonas could hear the angry thrum of the flies leading their short, trapped, nightmarish lives.

  Jonas stopped thinking of it. He had to before it made him sick.

  Standing at the threshold of the Sunset Lodge garden room, he wiped sweat off his face and forced himself to stop remembering …

  ‘It smells in here,’ he said from the doorway.

  Marvel and Reynolds were sitting silently in the two wing chairs closest to the piano and both turned to look at him as he approached. Marvel with his sagging jowls, and Reynolds with his patchwork hair: Jonas thought they both looked quite at home.

  ‘Yes,’ said Reynolds. ‘It’s impending death.’

  An old woman so doubled over her walking frame that she looked as if she was searching for a contact lens turned her head like a tortoise and fixed Reynolds with a withering glare.

  ‘We’re not all deaf, you know!’

  Reynolds reddened and mumbled an apology and she continued on her way to the dining room, following the map of the carpet.

  ‘Plonker,’ Marvel told him.

  ‘We found a weapon,’ said Reynolds. Seeing Jonas’s surprised look, he continued, ‘Walking stick. He just took it from a bedroom, killed them all, and then put it back.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Jonas. ‘Prints?’

  ‘The lab’s got it now, but I doubt it. Still …’ Reynolds shrugged. ‘Any luck today?’

  Marvel snorted sarcastically. ‘Yes, Reynolds, he’s just playing hard to get.’

  ‘No luck finding Gary,’ said Jonas. ‘But there’s something I need to tell you.’

  There. He’d said it now and couldn’t back out. He took a deep breath and told them about the notes. He was deliberately vague about the content. He told them that the first had said ‘something about the police not protecting Margaret Priddy’ and the second had told him ‘Do your job.’ He was too ashamed to tell them about the ‘crybaby’ accusation. He handed the final note to Reynolds inside a plastic freezer bag he’d taken from the kitchen drawer.

  He’d expected Marvel to be annoyed that he’d said nothing before now. He’d expected him to tear a strip off him. What he hadn’t expected was that the overweight, over-the-hill DCI would listen all the way through with a stony face – and then come out of his wing chair like Swamp Thing and knock him backwards into the piano with a clanging post-modernist crash. One second Jonas was telling his story, the next he was half sitting on the keys as Marvel jammed fistfuls of his shirt up under his chin, trembling with rage and shouting angry things that Jonas couldn’t quite comprehend. Behind Marvel, Reynolds was trying to pull his boss off, and behind him, Jonas was aware of a gaggle of old folk clutching each other’s forearms as the three of them wrestled on and around the piano. Jonas staggered as the instrument rolled sideways under the weight of the discord. He could have shoved Marvel off him easily enough, but he was his senior officer. Plus, he understood the man’s frustration, and couldn’t muster the necessary affront to get really strong with him. Even as Marvel jabbed his knuckles into his throat, some part of Jonas was thinking, ‘I deserve this.’

  Staff rushed in, shouting and demanding a halt, but it was only when Mrs Betty Tithecott started a high, papery screaming and began pointing that they finally ended the shoving match and looked around, dishevelled and breathless.

  Half wrapped in thick cloth – and stuffed between the now-displaced piano and the low wall of the garden room – was the body of Gary Liss.

  *

  Marvel was falling apart.

  Reynolds had always known he would, but now that it was actually happening, the experience was more disconcerting than he’d expected it to be.

  Even before their prime suspect had been found wrapped up like cod and chips and stuffed behind a piano, Marvel had been on a slippery slope. He’d seen Marvel’s hands shaking while they examined the Sunset Lodge bodies and bedrooms. Then there’d been the crying at the press conference. Reynolds had seen the shine in his eyes, and the light had had nothing to do with it.

  And losing it with Jonas Holly like something out of The Sweeney.

  It wasn’t shock and it wasn’t because Marvel cared so much.

  He knew Marvel was off the wagon. Even though it was a wagon he’d only ever been hitched to, never really on. It didn’t take a genius to work it out when Marvel emerged from his cottage every morning smelling of booze and mint and covered in cat hair. Although if it had taken a genius, Reynolds liked to think he’d have been up to the task.

  In Reynolds’s opinion – which was far from humble – Marvel had made some damaging decisions in this investigation.

  Prime among these was his move from the occasional pint after work to the harder liquor when he was alone. Or with Joy Springer because, in Reynolds’s view, that was only being alone with somebody else in the room.

  Another was his failure to use Jonas Holly.

  In their business they relied on local plods like Jonas, and he and Marvel had done so in several investigations over the past year. Of course, Marvel always liked to show the locals right up front who was going to be boss. Rude, bullying, bulldozing – those were apparently Marvel’s guidelines for what he sarcastically called ‘First Contact’, as if local beat officers were some alien race whose sole purpose was to be subdued and bent to his will.

  Something must have happened off-screen, as they said in the movies. One day Marvel had been merely rude to Jonas, the next Jonas was standing on a doorstep like an oversized garden gnome. If Marvel had employed a ducking stool he could hardly have humiliated the man more effectively.

  Reynolds felt Jonas’s pain. Two cases back Marvel had been such a shit – and Reynolds had had to do so much damage control among the local constabulary – that his precious hair had fallen out in handfuls. Every night he had watched it swirling down the shower drain along with his self-esteem. He remembered vividly the rush of pure fury that had overtaken him as he watched it disappear. How he’d vowed to get revenge on Marvel, like some mythic hero in a Sergio Leone film.

  Good old Sergio – he knew a dish served cold when he saw one.

  And the dish Reynolds was preparing for Marvel was very cold indeed.

  *

  Jonas told Lucy about the notes. Now that he’d told Marvel he knew she’d hear about them sooner or later, and when she asked about the cut on his lip the moment he walked into the room, he couldn’t think of anything fast enough to divert her from the truth of what had happened and why. The only thing he didn’t say was that he had found the last note on their garden gate. He told her that one had also been under the wiper of the Land Rover. It was a small distinction, but Lucy was alone all day, and unwell; the last thing he needed was for her to feel even more nervous about the murders.

  Everything he’d feared the notes might do to her, they did.

  He saw the fear flash across her face, and then her concern was all for him, and Jonas watched miserably as the two emotions etched lines in her face that he’d never seen before. Jonas promised her he would be careful, promised not to take any risks – but those lines were there to stay.

  Finally he told her that he’d informed Marvel – more to reassure her that he had police back-up than anything else.

  ‘What did he say?’ she demanded – at the same moment that Jonas realized he should have kept his mouth shut.

  He was a lousy liar, so he told her the truth.

  She was furious. He had to take the phone away from her to stop her calling 999.

 
‘It was an assault!’ she yelled.

  ‘It was just a bit of shoving. It was a disagreement, that’s all.’

  Lucy shot him a fiery look that he hadn’t seen for ages. It reminded him of her soccer days, and he smiled, which only made her more furious.

  ‘It’s not funny, Jonas!’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ he agreed hastily. ‘You’re right.’

  She gave him a circumspect stare that meant she knew he was placating her, but then allowed herself to feel a little placated anyway; she didn’t have the strength left to keep being angry.

  ‘I’d like to kick his arse,’ she told him seriously.

  ‘Me too,’ he sighed.

  They were on the couch, he with his long legs stretched out and his big feet on an old tapestry footstool that showed the wear of his father before him, Lucy facing him with her back against the padded leather arm. Now she wiggled her toes under his thigh for added warmth, and he knew he was forgiven. For a minute they watched Tom Hanks having a mental breakdown on a desert island.

  ‘This is a bit cheerful for you, isn’t it, sweetheart?’

  Lucy stuck out her tongue and dug her toes into him.

  ‘What job does he mean?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘In the notes he keeps going on about doing your job. What does it mean?’

  He frowned and shrugged one shoulder. ‘Finding the killer, I suppose.’

  Lucy nodded slowly, but Jonas could hear her brain ticking over from where he sat.

  ‘But you’re already doing that.’

  ‘Maybe he thinks I should be doing more.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she agreed tentatively, while Tom Hanks’s skin blistered off his face in the white-hot sun.

  ‘Or maybe,’ she shrugged, ‘that’s not the job he wants you to do.’

  *

  The day had passed in a blur for John Marvel.

  Another body bag. Another crime scene. More hysterical crones. The decision to move all the residents after all, and the logistics of making that happen in a snowstorm while all roads out of the village were impassable by anything but a tractor or a four-wheel-drive.

  Now – back in his little apartment with his inadequate travel kettle taking a week to boil – Marvel sat slumped and glum at the end of his bed.