Darkside (26 page)

'Like with Margaret?'

Jonas shook his head but did not drop his sightless thousand-yard stare at the washing machine.

'I don't think he meant to smother them.'

'Why, then?'

'I don't know. Maybe so he couldn't see their faces.'

Lucy hated to ask, but the images in her head begged the question.

'Did they ... was there a struggle?'

'I don't think so. They all looked quite ... peaceful. I think he hit them while they were asleep. They died quickly. I hope they did.'

Lucy put her hand over Jonas's and looked down at the knife he'd given her, lying on the table between them. It had seemed a silly thing at first, but since his early-morning call from Sunset Lodge, she'd barely let it go.

She shuddered and her movement made Jonas blink. He focused on the washing machine and remembered it needed emptying. And there was a basket of ironing to do. Work shirts mostly, and a couple of pairs of uniform trousers. And the one or two tops that Lucy couldn't wear if they were wrinkled. Jonas was bad at ironing and they always tried to buy wisely so he wouldn't have to do much.

Lucy stroked his hand. 'Eat, sweetheart.'

Jonas dutifully picked up his fork again.

He noticed that there was new mail propped against the fruit bowl. They'd been without mail for a few days, but now that Marvel's team and Jonas had been up and down the hill on several occasions, turning snow to slush, apparently Frank Tithecott's old red Royal Mail van was up to the challenge once more.

'Tell me about your day,' he said.

'You sure you want to hear all that boring crap?' she said in surprise.

'That's
exactly
what I want to hear,' he said with feeling.

She got it, so she told him.

Jonas felt warmed physically and spiritually as he ate and listened to his wife recounting the minutiae of her existence. Here in the kitchen, with a fire in the hearth and food in his
belly, it was easy to imagine that all was well with the world.

She told him about the robin that had sat on the window sill for almost ten minutes, staring in at her as she watched giant cockroaches munch New Yorkers in
Mimic;
she described the way she'd suddenly had a manic urge to bake a cake and had collected everything on the kitchen table, which had taken her over half an hour - and then there'd been a power cut which meant she couldn't even pre-heat the oven. She'd taken another twenty minutes putting everything back much less tidily. She'd slept for an hour and been woken by Frank, who had come in and talked about Sunset Lodge. The postman knew almost everything there was to know, and Jonas and Lucy both rolled their eyes so they didn't have to say out loud:
Only in Shipcott!

She had watched
Countdown
, where the conundrum had been 'residents' even though the same letters also spelled 'tiredness', which wasn't really fair, was it? Then she rambled on for ages about her letter from Charlie, her oldest school friend. Charlie's husband had had adult mumps, her seven-year-old son, Luca, had been diagnosed as dyslexic, while her younger, Saul, had run away from the first kitten he'd ever seen, shouting, 'Rat! Rat!'

They both laughed and Jonas stopped eating to stroke her face with the backs of his fingers.

She crumpled before his eyes, tears spilling down her cheeks so hard that they splashed on to the table as if from a faulty tap. Jonas dropped his fork and took her in his arms. There was nothing he could - or would - say that would make any of it better.

The illness, the murders, the baby-shaped hole in her life.

In the face of each of them he was overwhelmed and useless. There had been a time when he'd thought he could help, could be of some comfort; a time when he'd thought he could make a difference.

That was no longer true.

Sometimes you just had to accept what you were.

And what you were never meant to be.

He had never cried with her, but he'd never come closer than this, and they spent minutes like that, he kneeling beside her, she rigid in his arms, her hands over her face to keep her pain to herself - her refusal to let him share it properly an indication that he was to blame, in some part at the very least. He felt that burden settle like cold lead in his heart.

Slowly she quieted and disengaged herself. He gave her kitchen roll; she blew her nose.

'OK, Lu?' he asked softly.

'Frank left the gate open,' she replied without looking at him. 'It's been banging all day.'

Jonas put his boots back on and went down the dark garden path. More snow had fallen this afternoon and he needed to clear it again. He thought how frustrating it must have been for Lucy not to be able to venture the ten yards to her own front gate for fear of falling, while all the time the gate banged. The catch needed oiling really, so it would shut more easily. When he'd shut it he would get the shovel and clear the path, in case he didn't have time in the morning. Now that he was off Margaret Priddy's doorstep, he expected to be hectic instead of bored.

Oil the gate, empty the washing machine, do the ironing, clear the path, refill the bird feeders so that the robin would keep coming to keep Lucy company. He needed to remember the little things that kept their lives functioning, but he knew that by the time he went back into the house he'd have forgotten at least one of the items. He should make a list.

Home and work. Both needed constant maintenance, like
an old British motorbike. Otherwise the oil squeezed through the casings and left ugly black stains on the floor of their lives.

He thought he'd keep up the night patrols. Just for an hour or so each night; give people a sense of security. A false sense, of course - events had demonstrated that only too well - but even a false sense of security was better than nothing when fear was uppermost in everybody's mind. Yes, the night patrols were good for the village.

Jonas shut the gate.

As he did, his fingers touched something papery.

By the stars he could see it was a note pinned to the outside of the gatepost.

With his second
underneath
feeling of the day coiling like slime in his stomach, Jonas reached over and tugged the paper free of the shiny gold drawing pin.

_

Elizabeth Rice watched the CSI pottering about with powder and gelatin lifts at her window, keeping up a muttered running commentary on his own methods like a fussy TV cook.

She had introduced him to the Marshes simply as 'Tim' and taken him up to her room and closed the door. She wondered whether they thought she and Tim were having sex. It couldn't be helped. When she'd called the previous night, Marvel hadn't wanted Danny and Alan alerted to the fact that they were under suspicion. He had asked her if she felt OK about remaining in the house and she'd said 'yes', because to say 'no' would have made her look weak. Actually the thought of staying there made her feel sick inside, the way she used to feel right before walking out of the wings in school plays. But being here with Tim doing his thing was fine. She hoped she would feel the same way once he left.

Tim had found a latent print going
out
of the window, underneath the visible one she'd first spotted. He had
photographed the visible print with a Polaroid camera so that she could match it to the Marshes' shoes. She would have to do that in secret.

Secret stuff connected to a murder inquiry should have been exciting, but the thought of sneaking into Alan and Danny's bedrooms and going through their shoes made her feel slightly ashamed. They were bereaved; they were nice enough to her; Danny was quite fanciable in a lost-dog kind of way. She wished she didn't have to treat them as suspects while eating their cornflakes.

*

'She's great,' said Reynolds as he hung up on Kate Gulliver.

'We'll see,' grunted Marvel and flushed an old coffee filter down the Portaloo in the mobile unit.

'She says,' said Reynolds, then flicked back and forth through his notebook before finding his place. 'She says the fixation on the elderly is almost certainly a product of resentment of a parent or parents.' He looked up at Marvel, who rolled his eyes and made a little sound that said, 'Tell me something I
don't
know.'

Reynolds was undaunted. 'Gary Liss had to give up his job to nurse his father, didn't he?'

'And Peter Priddy had to give up his inheritance to pay for his mother's care,' countered Marvel. He didn't know what it was that drove him to take issue with Reynolds even when he agreed with him. He hoped the spirit of debate was good for the investigation, but had a sneaking suspicion that it was not. He needed to try to curb that propensity for unmotivated bolshiness.

'Well yes,' said Reynolds, made generous by his fleeting contact with what he considered to be a similar intellect. 'But
her hypothesis is that it might go beyond material deprivation and into the arena of physical or emotional abuse.'

The arena of physical or emotional abuse
. The
arena!
Seriously, sometimes Marvel just felt like punching Reynolds and getting it over with. He wished now that he had spoken to Kate Gulliver, who was also ridiculously self-important, but at least he'd now be the one imparting information to Reynolds, instead of the other way round.

'So Liss could have been beaten by his mother and is now killing other people's mothers in revenge. In
layman
's terms.'

'Right. Or fathers. Remember Lionel Chard.'

Marvel did. And that
did
put a new spin on things. Serial killers generally worked within certain parameters when it came to victims. Boys, or teenaged girls, or prostitutes with green eyes. The sex of the victims was often immutable.

'So if Liss is a serial killer he's changing his parameters, or had different ones all along.'

'Right.'

'Changing parameters
and
method.'

'Yeah,' said Reynolds less confidently. 'Maybe two killers? Working together? We've got the footprint at the Marsh house.'

Marvel made a face that said he wasn't in love with that theory.

'Or maybe it's not a serial killer at all. Kate says some elements feel more like the work of a spree killer due to the compact time frame and the number of--'

'She's reaching,' interrupted Marvel.

'So are we,' said Reynolds defensively.

'You'll be saying next that Liss had permission from Peter Priddy and Alan Marsh to kill!'

Reynolds looked wounded. 'I'm just trying to run through every possibility, that's all. I'm just trying to help.'

'I know,' sighed Marvel, which was as close as he'd ever come to apologizing to Reynolds for
anything -
even that time he'd run over his foot with the Ford Focus.

Encouraged, Reynolds continued to postulate. As he opened and closed his mouth like one of his precious guppies, Marvel stopped listening and started thinking.

He had felt lost on this case, but now they had a bona fide suspect. Few things pointed to a killer like fleeing the scene of a murder. It was a hard action to justify and Marvel felt relief spreading through him like liquor.

Gary Liss.

Finally!

A male nurse. Statistics showed they were not unlikely serial killers. Boredom and distaste masquerading as mercy.

Although poisoning or neglect were the usual methods employed by nurses who killed.

And Yvonne Marsh had never been in the care of Gary Liss.

Those two things bothered Marvel, he realized with a little jag of annoyance. Why couldn't he just enjoy the fact that they had identified the killer? Why did his memory have to bring up the kind of annoying details that he was more used to discounting from Reynolds?

The relief had been a con; a quick shot on a cold night, which could not keep him from frostbite - merely dull his senses while it ate his fingers and toes.

He had no time for relief.

Relief was for wimps.

He could do with a drink to focus his mind.

Marvel thought about the almost genteel murder of Margaret Priddy, compared to the efficient brutality visited on the three late residents of Sunset Lodge. The escalation was disturbing. It spoke of an increasing loss of control.

It was probably Gary Liss. He wished he could be sure. He
was
sure. The disappearance, the stolen jewellery. He was sure.

Soon they would know. Nobody was going to be able to stay hidden for long in this weather - not without at least trying to go home - and Jonas had assured him that Paul Angell was cooperating. Liss had no family to run to and Angell was also insisting that Gary Liss had no other lovers. Marvel wasn't so sure about
that
but, either way, it had been thirty-six hours and Liss was without his car - a twelve-year-old Renault Clio which was sitting forlornly in the car park with a foot of snow on the roof and a flapping square of police tape around it. Marvel had moved all the new crew to house-to-house inquiries and searching outbuildings. It hadn't made him popular, but very little he'd ever done had made him popular, so he wasn't boo-hooing about
that
.