Darkside (3 page)

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 up 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.

It seemed forever ago.

Just yesterday he'd found her white and drawn and although she'd insisted she was fine, he'd tasted the salt on her lips that told him she'd been crying.

Now - three weeks after the pills - the question he'd got so used to asking was fraught with new fear.

'Good,' replied Lucy, bringing him gently back to the present. 'I'm good.'

He searched her eyes for the truth and found it had already been told. He felt the tension that had been squeezing his guts relax a little.

'I planted bulbs. Daffs and tulips out front and anemones in the tubs.'

He studied her hand and saw the red-brown earth under her short, practical nails and knew the effort it must have taken for her to organize and complete that task. The bag of compost, the trowel twisting awkwardly in the weak hands and floppy wrists, the effort of breaking into the earth made hard by winter. He almost asked how long it had taken her, but knew it must have been most of the day. Instead he got up and went outside to look for himself. The fact that she didn't get up to point things out to him was proof of how much it had taken out of her. He came back in, smiling.

'And then you ...?' He left it hanging for her.

'... had a nap,' she finished dutifully and they both laughed ruefully.

'I got your stuff,' he said. They called it her 'stuff'. Her analgesics, her anti-depressants, her anti-convulsants, her anti-virals, her job-lot hypodermics ... the list seemed endless and ever-changing, which did not instil confidence in
their efficacy. Just saying the names had become depressing - Decadron, Neurotin, Prothiaden, Symmetrel ... 'Stuff' covered them all and had the power of robbing them of their doom-laden titles.