Darkside (35 page)

'Maybe
she
did it,' interrupted Lucy. 'Aren't spouses always the first suspects? Maybe she was pointing the finger at Danny to distract from the fact that
she
killed him.'

'I'm just telling you what she told me,' said Marvel impatiently.

'Maybe she wore surgical gloves,' Lucy murmured with a wry raise of her eyebrows.

Marvel ignored the dig. 'You know Jonas and Danny Marsh were childhood friends?'

'That doesn't mean he'd cover up for him if he knew Danny had done something wrong,' said Lucy quickly. 'Jonas would never do that.'

Marvel smiled without humour. 'You know, every wife of every criminal I've ever caught has said exactly the same thing - he'd never do that.'

'Well, it's true,' she said defiantly.

'You knew him as a boy?' he inquired sarcastically.

'I know him now,' she snapped back.

'You and your husband are well matched.'

'What does
that
mean?'

'You both think you know people. Know what they're capable of.'

'I suppose you think
you
know people.'

'Yes, I do,' said Marvel. 'And what
I
know is that people are capable
of anything.'

Lucy looked at him with a small smile. 'I think you know the wrong kind of people, Mr Marvel.'

He shrugged and let her score that point. Proving her wrong would take time he didn't want to waste. He changed direction again. Maybe he could get something out of Lucy Holly without her even knowing it.

'Your husband tell you what happened the other night? When we hit the horse?'

'Yes.'

'He wouldn't touch it.'

'Jonas doesn't like horses.' She shrugged.

'Not
now,'
agreed Marvel.

He reached into his inside coat pocket and handed her the photo.

'What's this?' she said, but he thought he'd let her work it out for herself.

She did, but it took her a lot longer than it had taken him. He saw the exact moment she recognized her future husband - the tiny intake of breath and the way she dropped her head to get closer to the photo.

'Jonas,' she said.

'And Danny Marsh.'

She didn't say anything, her head bowed.

'Seemed to like horses plenty then, didn't he?'

Nothing.

'You know what changed?'

She shook her head, unable to tear her eyes away from the photo.

'I'm thinking it might go back to the night the stables burned down. Someone they knew died. All the horses died. Must have been traumatic for a kid.'

Lucy nodded silently.

'Maybe he even felt guilty,' he suggested carefully. 'Maybe Danny burned the stables down and Jonas knew about it.'

'Maybe,' she said, to his surprise. Seeing the photo seemed to have knocked all the spirit out of Lucy Holly, all the defence and all the defiance.

'What did he say about it?' It was worth a shot - tricking her into blurting out something by behaving as if his theory was already established fact.

'He never told me. I don't know. I never knew this.'

Her voice was dull. Dead. Marvel was a little concerned, despite himself, at the radical change in Lucy Holly. Her feisty spirit had seemed real, but he saw now that it had been a mere soap-bubble which, once popped, had disappeared so completely that he could not even see where it used to be.

He stood up, feeling oddly guilty that he had done something to her that might be irreparable.

'I've never seen a picture of him as a boy,' she said, still not looking at him.

'Why is that?' Marvel was surprised. Even in
his
fucked-up relationships he could remember the mother-bearing-photo-album routine as an early step in the courtship dance.

'I don't know. Can I keep it?'

'I'm afraid I need it.'

But she held on to it in hands that shook just a little.

Marvel stood undecided for a long moment. Lucy Holly stared at the photo in her wasted lap, as if he'd already left.

Jonas looked so happy!

That was Lucy's overwhelming first impression. She had almost not recognized him because of it. His brow, his nose, his lips - all were younger but definite versions of the Jonas she had fallen in love with. But his eyes ... his eyes were completely different. Across the years, ten-year-old Jonas Holly grinned at her - without shyness, without caution.

Without fear.

It was all she could think of.

Nothing bad has happened to him yet
.

She had never thought of Jonas as fearful until she'd seen this picture. She might have, if she'd seen others, but there were none to see that she could find. No reminders for her of how he had been as a child.

The photo was a tunnel in time. Danny was taller and
bigger than the friend who would eventually tower over him and they held two proud little ponies - no doubt long dead. Lucy could see that this was a snapshot of the boys' whole lives at that moment, plucked from the past and shown to her now: they were at a summer show; they had won; they were happy. That was all that shone from their faces.

Her heart wrenched to see them, so young and so vital together, when now Danny was cold on a slab and Jonas's eyes were sunken with lack of sleep, and his body made too thin by work and fear and the burden of her; it seemed a fate too cruel to befall the two joyous children she held in her trembling hands.

'How could you do this?' she said.

'Hmm?' Marvel bent at the waist to hear her better.

'How could you do this to him?'

'I haven't done anything to him.'

'Look at him,' she said, her voice starting to strengthen once more.

Lucy turned the photo to Marvel and he looked past it to where her eyes had gone dark with anger.
Real
anger this time - not feistiness.

'I don't know what you mean,' he said.

'Look
at him!' she said again. 'Look how happy he is! And look what you've done to him now! He's a good man trying to do his job and you're just trying to make him look bad because
you
can't catch the killer!'

Lucy got to her unsteady feet as her voice gathered pace. 'Putting him on a doorstep, humiliating him in front of the whole village, implying that he'd cover up for someone who had killed six people! It's just
sick! You're
sick.'

Sick
.

Marvel snatched the photo from her hand, giving her a fright.

'Fuck
you!' she hissed at him.

'Fuck
you
!' he spat back, making her flinch. 'If your husband's miserable it's
your
fault, not mine! Someone in this shit-hole village has been taking out old people like seal pups, and your yokel husband is hiding something from me. So the last thing I need is some angry cripple telling me how to do my fucking job.'

He walked out and slammed the front door behind him as hard as he could.

Lucy swayed in his wake, breathless with shock, holding the arm of the couch for support - and viewed herself in Marvel's words as if in the brightest mirror. She had seen herself reflected in Jonas's loving eyes for so long that she had forgotten what she really was.

Some angry cripple
.

*

Reynolds sat in the chilly mobile unit and compared Danny Marsh's suicide note with the one Jonas Holly had found pinned to his garden gate.

There was not the slightest resemblance between the two hands. In the suicide note it was rounded and sprawling; in the other it was tight and spiky.

Reynolds was no expert, but they couldn't get the notes
to
the expert, Bob Hamilton, until the snow cleared a little. They had emailed a scan so that he could start work but he'd need the originals to make a proper comparison. In the interim, they were all having a good look - although Reynolds didn't need more than a glance to tell him that a match between the two notes was highly unlikely.

He looked up at Marvel with a shrug and a bottom lip that expressed that opinion.

'It's possible the writing in the gate note was disguised,' said Marvel in a tone that invited no dissent. 'Hamilton may well be able to make a match.'

'He'd have to be a magician or an idiot,' dissented Reynolds.

Grey sniggered and Marvel's fist itched. Reynolds was always such a fucking clever clogs. Marvel knew the writing on the notes was never going to be a match. Hell, Stevie Wonder could see
that
. But as he saw it, it was Reynolds's job to support his decisions and to pretend to be surprised and disappointed when the expert failed to make a connection - especially in front of other people. Of course, he'd long ceased to expect such support from his DS, but
just once
would be nice.

Especially in this case.

There was still a chance, of course, that the notes written to Jonas Holly had not come from the killer - although that seemed unlikely. But if the note left on Holly's gate
was
written by the killer, and Danny Marsh
hadn't
written it, then two plus two made four and Danny Marsh could not be the killer.

And
that
made Marvel feel that he might be going quietly crazy.

By this stage in an investigation, Marvel was used to feeling as though he were in complete control. But here he was so far from control that he couldn't quite remember what control felt like.

It was the village; he was sure.

In Shipcott he felt cut off and lost. He was in this glorified horsebox, or he was staring at static in a stable. People told him everything and nothing. Everyone knew everyone else - except that nobody knew the killer. Evidence was there one day and gone the next. Suspects fell into his lap and then
slipped through his fingers. Mobile connections were made and lost in the twinkling of an eye - and the cold, the rain, the snow were active and malicious participants in the slippery deception.

It was like investigating a murder in
Brigadoon
.

Every morning he got up and drove down the hill into the village and was somehow surprised to find it still there. Every day was another dose of secrecy and fuzzy disconnection, and it was only his now nightly sessions with Joy Springer that seemed to anchor him in time or space.

He snatched the two notes from Reynolds, and when Pollard held out his hand for them, he ignored him and banged them back into the battered filing cabinet euphemistically marked 'Evidence'.

*

Jonas got home and found that Lucy had changed into another person who wore Lucy's smile and Lucy's eyes like a poor facsimile of the real thing.

'What's wrong?' he asked her in bed.

'Nothing,' she said. 'I love you.'

He wanted to tell her not to change the subject, but couldn't find it in his heart - not even in that very small and stony corner where he kept all that was not kind, responsible and selfless.

'I love you too,' he agreed sadly.

*

Jonas thought he was strong, but the killer knew her was as weak as a kitten.

You can't fall apart now
.

But Jonas
was
falling apart.

He left the house every morning and some nights to satisfy his own fragile ego in the name of protection - all the while leaving the most important person in the world alone and in peril. He seemed to have
no idea
about how to do his job. No
idea
who it was that he should
really
be protecting ...

The killer got shivers at the thought.

Those shivers kept him focused - his eyes on the prize.

The killer liked Lucy Holly.

Loved
her, in his own way.

But it didn't mean he wouldn't kill her given half a chance.

As soon as Jonas left in the Land Rover the next morning, Lucy Holly got the number of the mobile unit from Taunton HQ, then called it. When a man picked up, she said she wanted to make a formal complaint about DCI Marvel.

There was a pregnant silence at the other end of the line and Lucy braced herself for a hostile request for her address so that the appropriate form could be sent. She was prepared to argue the toss; she didn't want an appropriate form; she wanted to drop Marvel in shit right up to his foul, hurtful, bastard mouth.

Instead of turning cold and official, the policeman - who identified himself as DS Reynolds - started to ask her quite pertinent questions, which allowed her to vent in the most satisfying way imaginable. She told Reynolds about Marvel nearly hitting her with the car; she told him how he had snatched the photograph of Jonas from her; she took a deep breath and told him that Marvel had said, 'Fuck you' and called her a name.

'What name?' asked Reynolds.