Darkside Read online

  He had secured the scene. Which here in Shipcott meant shutting the front door and putting a note on it torn from his police-issue notebook. He’d considered the content of that note with care, running from the self-important ‘Crime Scene’ – which seemed merely laughable on a scrap of lined paper – through ‘Police! Do Not Pass’ (too bossy) and ‘No Entry’ (too vague), finally ending up with ‘Please Do Not Disturb’, which appealed to everybody’s better nature and which he felt confident would work. And it did.

  He had alerted Tiverton to the fact that foul play may possibly be involved in the death of Mrs Margaret Priddy of Big Pot Cottage, Shipcott, and Tiverton had called on the services of Taunton CID.

  Taunton Homicide was a team of frustrated detectives generally under-extended by drunken brawls gone wrong, and Jonas thought Marvel should have been grateful for the call, not openly disdainful of him. He understood that in police hierarchy the village bobby – or ‘community beat officer’ as he was officially called – was the lowest of the low. He also knew that his youth worked against him. Any policeman of his age worth his salt should be at the top of his game – swathed in Kevlar, armed with something shiny, clearing tall buildings in his pursuit of criminal masterminds and mad bombers – not walking the beat, ticking off children and corralling stray sheep in some sleepy backwater. That was a job for an old man and Jonas had only just turned thirty-one, so it smacked of laziness or stupidity. Therefore Jonas tried hard to appear neither lazy nor stupid as he ran through his notes with Marvel.

  It made no difference.

  Marvel listened to the young PC’s report with a glazed look in his eyes, then asked: ‘Did you touch her?’

  Jonas blinked then nodded – reddening at the same time.

  Marvel pursed his lips. ‘Where?’

  ‘Her nose. Dr Dennis said it was broken and I felt it.’

  ‘Why?’

  Jonas felt his face burn as everyone in the room seemed to have stopped what they were doing to watch him being grilled.

  ‘I don’t know, sir. Just to see.’

  ‘Just for fun?’

  ‘No, sir, the doctor said it was broken and I checked.’

  ‘Because you needed to confirm his diagnosis? Are you more highly qualified than him? Medically speaking?’ Marvel dripped sarcasm from every pore, and from the corner of his eye Jonas saw the Taunton cops grin and roll their eyes at each other.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Anyone else touch her?’

  ‘The nurse, sir.’

  ‘Was she more highly qualified than Dr Dennis?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Marvel sighed and flapped his arms once helplessly like a man who has given up chasing down a mugger. The flap said, ‘There’s only so much you can do.’

  ‘So the doctor touched her. Then you touched her. Then the nurse touched her.’

  Jonas didn’t correct Marvel on the sequence of events.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘You sure? Not the milkman? The village idiot? You didn’t get one man and his dog up here to give her a little poke?’

  There were snorts of amusement all round.

  ‘I’m sure, sir.’

  Marvel sighed, then asked: ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘PC Holly, sir.’

  ‘Have you ever heard of a crime scene, Holly?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Jonas hated Marvel now. The man was grandstanding in front of his team and Jonas shouldn’t have touched Margaret Priddy’s nose, but still …

  ‘Have you ever heard of contaminating a crime scene, Holly?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The heat of embarrassment was leaving Jonas and being replaced by a cool and distant anger, which he found easy to hide but which he knew he would nurture forever in that very small and stony corner where he kept all that was not kind, responsible and selfless in his heart.

  ‘And you understand that it’s a bad thing, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘A stupid thing.’

  Jonas wanted to punch him.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Marvel smiled slowly.

  ‘Then why would you do that?’

  Jonas was eight years old and Pete Bryant had put a cricket ball through Mr Randall’s greenhouse roof. Pete had run, but Jonas had dithered – and Mr Randall had gripped him in a single meaty claw and shaken his arm while shouting that same question into his face. Eight-year-old Jonas could have told Mr Randall that it was Pete who had thrown the ball, but he didn’t. Not because he was scared; not because he wasn’t a rat; just because it was too late; the damage was already done. The glass was already shattered, Mr Randall already angry, his bicep already bruised, his tears already flowing and his self-worth already pricked. All that was left was for him to get home as quickly as possible so he could shut his bedroom door and cry at the unfairness of it all without alerting his mother.

  Now the thirty-one-year-old Jonas swallowed that same bitter pill and unfocused his eyes so he could look straight over Marvel’s greying hair.

  ‘I’m very sorry, sir.’

  Marvel regarded the tall young policeman with a little disappointment. He’d really have preferred the fool to have got defensive and angry. He loved a good fight. Instead PC Holly had rolled over like a puppy and shown the world his belly.

  Ah well.

  Marvel turned away before speaking.

  ‘You can go,’ he said.

  In small defiance, Jonas bit back his ‘Yes, sir’ and left without another word. Halfway down the stairs he heard Marvel say something he didn’t catch, and the laughter of the big-town cops.

  *

  Some investigation, thought DCI John Marvel, as he stared out at the leaden Somerset sky. A dead old woman with a broken nose. Big deal. But a suspicious death was a suspicious death and helped to justify the funding that kept his Task Force (as he used to like to call it over late suppers with Debbie) in existence. So if they could whip suspicious death up into murder, then all well and good.

  Marvel had spent twenty-five years as a homicide detective. Half his life. To Marvel there was no other crime worth investigating – nothing that came close to the sheer finality of death by the hand of another. It kicked assault’s arse, rode roughshod over robbery and even trumped rape in his book. Of course, there were degrees – and not every case was a thrill. Some were one long slog from beginning to end, some went off like firecrackers and turned into damp squibs, while others started off quietly and then spiralled wildly out of control. There was no telling at the start how it was going to finish, but the thing that kicked each one off was what sustained Marvel after all these years. The body. The corpse. That stabbed, strangled, beaten, shot, dismembered, poisoned used-to-be-person hung over his head every day like a cat toy – endlessly fascinating, tantalizing, taunting, always reminding him of why he was here and the job he had to do.

  The burgled replaced their televisions, bruises healed on the beaten, and the raped kept living, kept going to work and buying groceries and sending postcards and singing in the choir.

  The murdered were dead and stayed dead.

  For ever.

  How could any true copper not love the murdered and the challenge they threw down from beyond the grave?

  AVENGE ME!

  Marvel could never hear that ghostly voice in his head without also imagining some kind of broad, dark cape billowing in righteous vengeance.

  It was stirring stuff.

  And Marvel was always stirred.

  Eventually.

  Even by a case like this in a place like this, he knew he would be stirred once death by violence was confirmed. He had to sort of grow into being stirred.

  But until then, he was just a bit cheesed off.

  Marvel sighed.

  Margaret Priddy’s body had been removed to civilization – or what passed for it in this neck of the yokel woods. He hated to be out of town. He’d been born and brought u
p in London. Battersea, to be precise, where the stunted lime trees grown through lifting, cracking pavement were all the green he felt anyone should suffer. Once he’d carved his name in the bark and been repelled by the damp, greenish flesh his penknife had exposed. Sometimes as a kid he’d hung around a bus stop close to the park, but had rarely ventured in. Only on the occasional Saturday for a kickabout, and even then he’d never warmed to the muddy, olive-green grass. Playing behind the garages or under the railway arches was cleaner and faster. Grass was overrated, in Marvel’s opinion, and it was his constant gripe that most of the Avon and Somerset force area where he’d ended up working was covered in it.

  Now here he was in this shit-hole village in the middle of a moor that didn’t even have the niceties of fences or barns on it, with the miserable prospect of having to conduct a murder investigation surrounded by the vagaries of gorse, yokels and pony shit instead of the sensible amenities of self-service petrol stations, meaningful road-signs and his beloved Kings Arms.

  The Divisional Surgeon had already found cuts and bruising inside Margaret Priddy’s mouth where her lips had been crushed against her teeth, and the pathologist might find even more. All it would take now was for the Scientific Investigations Department in Portishead to confirm that the saliva and mucus on the well-plumped pillow found lying next to Mrs Priddy belonged to the victim, and they would have their upgrade to murder and their murder weapon all in one neat forensic package.

  Marvel looked at the empty bed over which three white-paper-clad CSIs crouched like folk off to a costume party dressed as sperm.

  ‘I like the son for this,’ Marvel told DS Reynolds. Marvel loved saying that he ‘liked’ someone for something. It made him feel as if he were in a Quentin Tarantino film. His south-London accent was a handicap but not a bar to such pronouncements.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said DS Reynolds carefully.

  ‘Sick of watching his inheritance pour down the home-nursing drain.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘So what have we got?’

  ‘So far? Hairs, fibres, fluids—

  ‘Semen?’

  ‘Doesn’t look like it, sir. Just what was on the pillow, and urine.’

  ‘I thought she was catheterized?’

  ‘I think the bag must’ve burst.’

  ‘So the perp could be covered in piss.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Lovely. Anything missing?’

  ‘Doesn’t look like a burglary, sir. If something was taken then the killer knew exactly what he was looking for and where to find it.’

  Marvel glanced around the room with its old dark furniture. A lifetime of use was evidenced by the wear around the dull brass handles on the chest of drawers. Nothing looked disturbed; even the lace doily on the dresser was flat and un-mussed.

  ‘I want the names of all the nurses employed and hair samples from everyone at the scene.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Prints?’

  ‘Not so far.’

  It was a bitterly cold January and the killer could have worn gloves for that reason alone. But Marvel hoped he was not just some opportunist burglar who had overreacted to finding a woman watching him silently from the bed in what he’d thought was an empty room. Marvel hoped he’d planned ahead. Whether he’d planned burglary or murder ahead was open to question, but the fact that it looked unlikely that they would find prints made the whole case more interesting to Marvel. He hated to waste his talents on the low and the stupid, and – since coming to Somerset – he’d started to tire a little of the flailing drunks who’d turned from nuisances to killers because of the unfortunate coming together of heads and kerbs, and of the glazed teenagers whose generosity in sharing their gear had been repaid by their ingrate friends dying curled around pub toilets with shit in their pants and in their veins.

  No, the gloves made the killer a more worthwhile quarry in Marvel’s eyes.

  Just how worthwhile remained to be seen.

  *

  Four hundred yards before the sign that read PLEASE DRIVE SLOWLY THROUGH SHIPCOTT was the house Jonas had grown up in, and from where his parents had been carried to their graves. Not house really, more cottage – although cottage sounded nicer than it really was, as if it were the picture on a box of souvenir fudge. This cottage was squat and tiled rather than thatched, and attached to its only neighbour like a conjoined twin. The pair of them sat and glared across the narrow road at the high hedge beyond it, which cut off both light and the view from the downstairs windows. Both twins had identical silvered-oak nameplates on their garden gates: Rose Cottage and Honeysuckle Cottage. The John and Mary of adjoining country homes. Rose for Jonas and Lucy, Honeysuckle for old Mrs Paddon next door.

  Jonas parked the garish police Land Rover behind Lucy’s Beetle in the track beside Rose Cottage and felt his heart quicken.

  He had to keep hold of himself.

  Had to step out on to the dry, freezing mud slowly and walk normally through the front door, and clean the bathroom and fill the washer-dryer, and make the tea – just the way Mark Dennis had told him he must.

  ‘Lucy needs you. You can’t fall apart on her, Jonas. Now more than ever.’

  He wouldn’t fall apart. He would keep hold of himself. Even though every day for the past three weeks he had walked up the cracked and un-weeded stone pathway with his heart squeezed into his throat with fear, and his keys jingling like wind chimes in his trembling hands. The dread was almost overwhelming – the dread that he would push open the front door and it would once more wedge softly against the body of his wife. Or that he would call her echoing name and finally find her in a bath of tepid, pink water. Or that he would walk into the house enclosed in winter darkness and feel her bare feet nudge his face as they dangled in the stairwell.

  Jonas shook himself on the doorstep, forcing his breathing back to normal so he wouldn’t cry with relief when he saw her, and pushed open the door.

  ‘Yuk’ had made it home before him.

  Lucy greeted him with the word and a single questioning eyebrow as he walked into the living room. If he’d had to hazard a guess he’d say that Mark Dennis had told his receptionist, who’d passed it on to Mr Jacoby or someone in Mr Jacoby’s shop. From there it could have been anyone who finally brought it to the Holly household. Steven the paper boy, old Will Bishop the milkman, or one of the several visitors Lucy received sometimes on her couch, between the horror movies which Jonas ordered by mail for her in a never-ending supply, and which she watched with indecent joy from behind her favourite tasselled cushion.

  He gave a mock-sigh and shrugged expansively, making her laugh. It lit up her face. Lucy was always beautiful to Jonas, but when she smiled, that became a universal truth – even after the ravages of disease and the strain of recent weeks. Her boyish face with its upturned, freckled nose and widely spaced green eyes – together with her cap of cropped auburn hair – gave her an elfin look.

  He kissed the top of her head and she took his hand and became serious.

  ‘Poor Margaret.’

  Poor Margaret indeed. But it was a relief. A relief to speak of death like common gossips for whom it was merely a passing notion, instead of a time bomb in their pockets.

  ‘What have you heard?’ It was a village in the middle of Exmoor; she could have heard anything.

  ‘That somebody killed her.’

  ‘Possibly. Taunton have it now.’ He squeezed her hand, feeling with relief that it was warm and steady, then turned and sat down beside her on the edge of the couch. ‘How are you feeling, Lu?’

  It was a question he’d been asking daily in one form or another for nearly three years. Sometimes it came out sounding strange to his ears, other times it was a studiedly casual ‘All right, Lu?’ He could reduce it to a mere questioning look from across the room, which she would answer with a smile or a shrug.

  Sometimes he didn’t even have to ask.

  Those were the days when he came home to find her curled
and gasping in the rib-crunching spasms of the MS ‘hug’, or jabbing at a broken plate and spilled food with the dustpan and brush, her spastic hands that had caused the mess in the first place unable to make it right. Sometimes when he found her like that he pulled the rug over them both on the couch and tickled her arms languorously until she relaxed and finally slept; other times he held her while she shook and cried and slapped at her own failing body with her angry, twisted hands. Jonas had never cried with her – never given in to the self-pity that that would imply.

  After she had been diagnosed, everything had changed – at home and at work. He had withdrawn an application for Anti-Terrorism and applied instead for this backwater posting where he was largely autonomous and could fit work around home rather than the other way round. They moved into Rose Cottage, which had been closed up after the death of his parents. Jonas had never wanted to come back but he knew the place; he knew the people; he knew it would be easier to do his job on Exmoor than learn the ropes somewhere new, and that that would make it easier to take care of Lucy.

  But sometimes even the comfort of familiarity was not enough to ease his mind. Sometimes – as he gave walkers directions to Dunkery Beacon, or spoke to the parents of a teenager with a half-bottle of vodka and an attitude – Jonas would feel the almost overwhelming urge to jump in his car and race back to check on Lucy. The first time his heart had clenched that way he had given in to the impulse and driven home blindly through winding lanes at 60mph. He’d burst through the front door shouting her name and she’d come running down the stairs of their little cottage in a panic, almost tumbling the last few treads. He’d caught her at the bottom and babbled his usual question, ‘Are you OK?’ and she had thumped his arm for scaring her so.

  That was when Lu could still go up and down stairs properly. Jonas wanted to get a loan for a stair lift, but she said she liked the couch and the TV through the days and liked the challenge of inching upstairs on her bottom to the bathroom.

  ‘Keeps my triceps in shape,’ she’d teased him at the time. ‘Other women pay a fortune for that kind of workout.’

  He’d laughed to please her, and left the elephant in the room unremarked upon – that three years previously Lucy Holly could have walked upstairs on her hands if she’d fancied it. She’d been the fittest woman Jonas had ever met. Even straight out of training in Portishead he’d had to work to keep ahead of her on the five-mile runs they’d regularly taken together. Lucy was no gym-bore. She ran, she swam, she rode horses and bikes and, for the first winter after Jonas had got the posting back home on Exmoor, she’d turned out occasionally for the local girls’ football team, Blacklanders Ladies. Jonas smiled a little now at the memory of his petite wife going nose-to-nose with the ref, her eyes flashing and her pony-tail flicking until the cowed man reversed a poor penalty decision in her favour. Once a week for ninety minutes ‘Ladies’ was just a euphemism.