Darkside (24 page)

Briefly he'd told her what had happened, because not telling her would only have irritated her further, and she'd been shocked into silence.

'I'll be home as soon as I can,' he'd said.

'OK,' she'd answered in a voice that was not ratty or cross, only very small. 'Be careful, Jonas.'

*

'There's blood on the roof.'

Marvel followed the CSI's finger to what looked like a couple of thin smears on the glass between a small window above the garden room and the guttering over the water-butt. He wondered how they could tell from down here, or whether they'd already been on the roof.

'Might be the killer's,' said Reynolds hopefully, even though they all knew that that was a very long and desperate shot. Still.

'Looks like the point of entry and exit,' said the CSI. 'And prints going that way.'

The narrow concrete pathway around the building's perimeter was flat and a perfect surface for snow. And the flat and perfect snow held the prints like a joke trail for them to follow, starting incongruously at the water-butt.

'Can't see any patterns,' added the CSI with a petulant tone, flickering a torch over the treads. 'Maybe when it gets lighter ...'

Marvel didn't care about the tread pattern on the killer's shoes. Only where he was going.

In the half-dark, Marvel and Reynolds followed the trail out of the Sunset Lodge grounds and on to the main street. Despite the hour, the road outside Sunset Lodge was already lined with tyre tracks from their own cars and those of the scenes-of-crime officers, but the pavements were still mostly clear and the trail of footprints was ludicrously easy to follow.

'I feel like Elmer Fudd,' said Reynolds, and when Marvel showed no recognition, added, 'Where da wabbit?'

Marvel knew what he meant but ignored him. So what if they were following a cartoon trail of footprints? So what if they led them straight to the killer's front door? They
deserved a break in this fucking case and it wouldn't be a moment too soon.

In a small pile of snow which had been cleared from a doorstep, they saw blood.

'Maybe he's injured,' said Marvel, unable to keep an edge of hope out of his voice.

'Maybe,' said Reynolds. 'Or maybe he washed the murder weapon there. Get the blood off it.'

Marvel nodded. They stood for a moment building the picture in their heads, then moved on briskly.

'We're heading for the Marshes' house,' Reynolds observed neutrally.

'And the bloody shop,' Marvel pointed out with an edge of annoyance as the snow started to show more prints.

They passed the Marshes' house without stopping, then crossed the road - the strangely featureless prints disappearing in the churned snow, but picking up again on the opposite pavement. They glanced at each other as the snow became dark and slushy for the ten yards either side of the door of the Spar shop. It was 7am - plenty late enough for any number of villagers to have collected their morning papers or to have topped up with breakfast milk. They lost the footprints.

'Bollocks,' said Marvel with real feeling.

'Shit,' said Reynolds.

They stood still - not wanting to risk inadvertently trampling over any print they might still pick up.

'There,' pointed Reynolds.

The killer's fragmented prints deviated into a narrow covered passageway beside the shop, where no snow had fallen. There they simply disappeared.

Both men started warily up the alleyway. It turned into a courtyard.

Nobody there.

'We fucking lost him,' said Reynolds. 'In the
snow
. How the
fuck
?'

Reynolds lifted the lid on a green wheelie bin. There was nothing inside. They looked around the edges of the courtyard carefully but there was nothing of interest. Just scraps of paper, a couple of plastic bags rustling against the wall, and broken-down cardboard boxes gone soggy in the snow.

Reynolds realized that this must be the alleyway Jonas had told him about - the one where the stranger had given him the slip. He hadn't taken Jonas seriously. He'd dismissed the report as parochial paranoia, and he had only written it down to make Jonas feel he was being listened to. For that reason, he hadn't reported it to Marvel.

Reynolds regretted that, of course. But the idea of telling Marvel about it now and being shat on from a great height was less than appealing.

They walked back to the entrance to the alleyway. People were passing regularly now, and the snow on the pavement around the shop was melting in dirty brown patches. The prints that they themselves had made were already all but obliterated. Prints made in the early hours of the morning would be gone by now for sure.

Marvel stepped into the road and stared glumly up and down as if he might still spot the killer.

'Bollocks,' he said again.

'Hold on,' said Reynolds with sudden urgency. He pointed back into the courtyard, where the Spar bags fluttered against the wall.

'Two plastic bags.'

'You found some litter,' said Marvel. 'Well done, Reynolds. Have a fucking
Blue Peter
badge.'

Reynolds ignored him. 'Two bags, two feet! He puts the
bags on his feet so he doesn't leave identifiable prints. Then he comes in here and takes them off--'

'And walks back into the slush and disappears,' finished Marvel, catching up fast and hurrying over.

Reynolds snapped on gloves and picked the bags up. 'That means there could be prints
inside
the bags.'

Reynolds looked as pleased as punch, but even that couldn't stop Marvel feeling a lift in his own spirits.

They stared at the white bags with the green and red logo, and wondered whether this odd little scene would spell a change in their luck.

*

In the grey light of morning the snow on the moor looked dull and worn out, and the narrow strip of road was just a sunken impression in the bumpy landscape. All the white was disorientating and Jonas had to work hard to keep focused on the route ahead. It was as if the moor and the murders were conspiring to confuse him, using optical illusions to obfuscate the truth of the killings and the landscape alike, and to blur the two into one. A blanket of snow had descended on Shipcott, but under that coating of purity something dark and evil was going about its work, unseen and unchecked.

Jonas thought of the notes that had first alerted him to some undercurrent of discord.

He thought of that prickly feeling that he was being watched. Observed.

Judged.

He thought of staring into the small yellow square of his own bathroom while standing like a cold giant under the starlit sky; of the stiff greyhound with the cloudy eyes; and of
the man in the hat and the herringbone treads who had given him the slip.

He remembered the brittle hope in Danny Marsh's eyes as the dirty horse pranced behind him, and the irrational fear that he was personally under threat - that if the hope in Danny's eyes had shattered, the shards would pierce him too; and that he must stop Danny at all costs, even if it was with his fists.

Jonas fought sudden panic and the Land Rover slewed sideways and bumped over the invisible heather. He lifted his foot and gripped the wheel and slammed on the brakes. The car stalled and Jonas sat for a moment, high above Withypool, and listened to his own harsh breathing ruin the silence, while he slowly kept himself from falling apart.

*

After giving the plastic bags to a CSI back at Sunset Lodge, Marvel and Reynolds met Grey and Singh at Gary Liss's home - this time to break in. They had taken a battering ram with them but after they had knocked, even Marvel felt self-conscious about getting it out in the middle of a village like Shipcott and breaking down the door of a crooked little cottage with a black wrought-iron door knocker in the shape of a pixie.

'Fairy,' he grunted at Reynolds, who resolutely didn't laugh.

Instead they efficiently broke the small pane of glass in the door and Grey, who was the tallest - and had 'the arms of a rangatang' as Marvel put it - leaned awkwardly through to open the Yale.

Inside was neat and decorated with a deft touch, which made the most of the bowed walls and limited light.

'You've got to give it to these gays,' said Marvel. 'They do know how to tidy up.'

There was no sign of Liss - or that he had been here since leaving for work last night.

Marvel put latex gloves on and the others followed suit, and they started their careful search for anything that might incriminate Gary Liss.

They worked in two teams - Marvel and Singh upstairs, Reynolds and Grey downstairs.

'What are we looking for, sir?' said Singh.

'Murder weapon would be nice,' said Marvel.

They bagged up Gary Liss's shoes, then searched for an hour with decreasing levels of optimism, before Singh found an old King Edward VII cigar box at the back of the top shelf of the wardrobe. He glanced inside and immediately alerted Marvel.

There was an assortment of jewellery: a few ladies' watches, some diamond earrings, an enamelled brooch with an ornate gold setting, five or six strings of pearls, which even Marvel's untrained eye could see were good, with clever clasps and that slight unevenness of shape and tone that marked them out as natural.

'His mother's stuff, maybe?' said Singh.

'How many watches can one woman wear?' said Marvel. He picked up the nicest of them - an art-deco face on a rose-gold bracelet - and turned it over. On the back was an inscription:
To Viola from your Best and Last
.

*

Jonas got to Withypool a little before eight, having taken twenty-five minutes to make the ten-minute journey. He
dropped off the common and down the steep hill into the village, on a sweeping road of virgin snow. He hoped he'd be able to get back up it, but at least the Land Rover would give him every chance.

Like Shipcott, Withypool looked as if it had tumbled down the sides of the moor and landed haphazardly at the bottom. Houses stood where they fell - a few here, a few there, a dozen scattered along the river either side of the stone-walled humpbacked bridge that was sneakily only wide enough for one car at a time, despite the broad approaches.

Paul Angell was already in his shed. Jonas knew he would be as soon as his knock went unanswered. He went round the side of the cottage, but not before he'd cupped his hands around his eyes and peered through the downstairs windows. Paul had Venetian blinds rather than nets, so it was easy to see between the slats. Jonas had no expectation of seeing any sign of Gary Liss, but it was only sensible to be wary. He watched nothing move for five minutes before going down the narrow alleyway into the garden.

The shed was warm and smelled of gas and glue. Paul was hunched over an old school desk wearing a torch on his forehead and a magnifying visor which made the top half of his face look cartoonishly big and brainy; the bottom half was covered by an impressive salt-and-pepper beard. Jonas's eyes were drawn to a 00-gauge model of the
Flying Scotsman
that Paul held in his left hand. The desk was covered with tools, and the interior walls of the shed had been cleverly contoured and customized so that various trains ran around them in layers, each tier with a different landscape and different type of train. Jonas was no enthusiast but even he could identify the
Orient Express
on one circuit and an old Western locomotive with a cow-catcher, pulling cattle wagons and a caboose through a painted landscape of buttes and marauding

Apaches. Paul Angell's shed was a 00-gauge Guggenheim for geeks.

Paul was fifty-eight - a retired lecturer in Astrophysics. Jonas had asked him about it once and then stood in a nebula of confusion as Paul had talked for fifteen minutes straight about string theory. Jonas had loved the sciences at school, but all he'd managed to cobble together from Paul's big-eyed excitement was a vague idea that all matter was made up of little vibrating hula-hoops. By the end he'd just been nodding, smiling and thinking of what he'd cook for tea. Cheese on toast, most likely.

Now Paul's magnified eyes lit up as Jonas opened the door, then changed fast when he saw his face.

'Hi, Paul. You know where Gary is?'

'Work,' said Paul. 'He doesn't get off until three. Why?'

Jonas took a breath; there was no easy way to break the news. 'There's been some trouble at the Lodge,' he said. 'Three residents are dead and Gary is missing.'

Paul said nothing. His huge eyes blinked at Jonas.

Jonas waited but still Paul did not respond, although the
Flying Scotsman
shook almost imperceptibly in his hand.

'Paul?' he inquired softly.

'Yes,' said Paul - then after another long pause, 'I don't know what to say. What can I say? I don't know. Or to think. What do you mean? What am I supposed to think?' He put the little engine down without looking at it and repeated, 'What am I supposed to think?'

'I don't know,' said Jonas. 'It's quite possible Gary wasn't involved, but I think we should do everything we can to find him as quickly as we can, don't you?'

'He's a suspect?' Paul was confused, with an edge of outrage. 'That's ridiculous!'