Darkside

Six Days

Marvel and Reynolds moved from room to room in silence.

Gorse, Hazel and Moss.

Violet Eaves, Bridget Hammond and Lionel Chard.

Each had died without waking. Their covers were untrammelled, their hands lay calmly at their sides; Bridget Hammond still held a delicately embroidered handkerchief crumpled loosely in her palm.

From cursory inspection, Marvel surmised that each had been rendered unconscious or killed outright by a single mighty blow to the head. Then the killer had made sure by smothering them with their own pillows.

Marvel thought of the killer’s rough hand on the frail faces, holding it there until he was sure each was lifeless. Then moving on.

Marvel thought this, but said nothing. He did not trust himself. And he could barely hear himself think for the hoarse whispers of the dead. Avenge me! Avenge me!

Reynolds had his notebook out and for once Marvel was grateful. His own head was so full of the horror that he felt he’d need to empty it like a waste basket before he could actually sit down and start to make sense of the carnage.

Downstairs he could hear the sound of crying. Lynne Twitchett had been crying since they had arrived, less than ten minutes after getting the call from Jonas Holly. The other residents cried spasmodically, and when they weren’t crying they were comforting others who were, in quavering, tremulous voices that might as well have been weeping. Rupert Cooke had arrived red-eyed just after he and Reynolds had, and had continued to burst into tears every few minutes after that. The Reverend Chard was trying to offer words of comfort, while openly weeping at the loss of his own father.

Mayhem on wheels.

It seemed the only person not actively crying was Jonas Holly, and Marvel thought that might well be because the young constable was in shock. He had been called by Lynne Twitchett, and met Marvel and Reynolds at the door. He had taken them through his preservation of the scene in a low, careful voice. He had made sure everyone stayed in their rooms as far as was possible with confused old folk, and had asked Rupert Cooke to call all his relief staff in to help organize things in case the home had to be evacuated to allow the investigation to continue.

He had ensured that there were no other casualties in the first- or second-floor bedrooms and had kept people from moving about the house unnecessarily. He had taken off his boots. ‘I thought they might be able to get prints off the carpets.’ He shrugged sadly.

Jonas Holly had done a good job. Dully Marvel recognized that he’d done a similarly good job in most respects at the scene of Margaret Priddy’s murder, for which he’d received no credit. Ah well, life wasn’t fair.

The young constable had written everything in his notebook and kept referring to it for much longer than seemed necessary – kept staring at the pages as if he’d lost his place. At one point Marvel had become impatient and nearly snatched the notebook from him, but then he’d seen the man’s Adam’s apple working in his throat, and he’d given him the extra time he’d apparently needed to be able to speak without his voice breaking into a million pieces.

He felt close himself. Close to tears. He had never cried on a job – never even felt his bottom lip wobble in time to the grief around him.

But this…

This was…

Just.

Tragic.

The old people, helpless in their beds, their spectacles and teeth on their nightstands.

He remembered Lionel Chard, peering at the TV.

Countdown.

Big ears.

He wanted to punch a hole in Gary Liss’s face with his bare hands. The nurse had disappeared. Never come down from wreaking havoc on the first floor. It all made sense now. It always did when it was far too late. No doubt when they caught Liss he would have some ridiculous reason why he had not returned to the kitchen after going upstairs in response to an alarm. Tell them that he’d found the bodies and lost his mind, or pursued the killer across the moors at great personal risk, or checked on Violet Eaves and then remembered he’d left the gas on at home… Madmen were only clever in the movies; in real life they were mostly just mad – and it was usually only the inability of the sane to recognize the depth of that madness which allowed them to prosper even temporarily. Sometimes Marvel felt that being psychotic would be a great asset to a homicide detective; that possibly the Force should leave room for manoeuvre in its recruitment criteria.

‘We should’ve arrested the bastard.’

‘We couldn’t have held him for long, sir,’ Reynolds said. It wasn’t his style to make Marvel feel better about things, but that was the truth.

‘I don’t fucking care. The sonofabitch as good as said he’d killed Margaret Priddy, and we should have taken him in right there and then and made his life hell for forty-eight hours. Maybe we wouldn’t be standing here now. Maybe these three would still be alive.’

Reynolds said nothing, because he felt the same gnawing guilt that they had dismissed Gary Liss as merely a straight-talker, when now it looked as if he were more than that. A lot more than that.

He’d have to be a psychopath.

Yes, he would.

Marvel felt sick at the memory. They had left Gary Liss here. That meant they had left these poor people in the care of a serial killer. It was a miracle there were only three bodies, when you looked at it like that. Although he felt so far from a miracle right now that it would have taken Jesus Christ himself to come up the swirly stair carpet at Sunset Lodge and raise the victims from the dead before he’d be convinced of one.

‘Should we call Gulliver, sir?’ said Reynolds.

Kate Gulliver was a forensic psychologist based in Bristol and one of Marvel’s least favourite people, right up there with Jos Reeves. He felt the little prick of anger at the implication that Reynolds thought he was out of his depth. Immediately after that, he realized that he was out of his depth – or at least wading there fast. And refusing to consult Gulliver at this point would look territorial and negligent.

‘You call her.’ He nodded to Reynolds. He knew Reynolds would love that – and be good at it. Kate Gulliver was his kind of person – the young, bright, First-Class-Honours kind.

He was busy enough here.

He wished he could clear the entire home properly, but transporting twenty-two elderly and frail residents was easier said than done. When he’d suggested it, Rupert Cooke – who was wearing paisley pyjamas under his mackintosh, like someone from an episode of Poirot – had started to list what they’d need to take with them. Medications, walking sticks, Zimmer frames, wheelchairs, warm clothing, changes of underwear… When he’d got to incontinence pads, Marvel had put up a hand to stop him and had asked for them all to be moved into the garden room until the CSIs could examine the first floor and establish points of entry and exit.

He asked Rupert Cooke for the use of his office and got Reynolds to clear the desk so he had somewhere to put his elbows.

Grey said they had not yet found the murder weapon but confirmed that as soon as it was light they’d be moving outside the house to the grounds and the graveyard and starting on a grid until reinforcements arrived. Marvel told him to take Singh to Liss’s home in the meantime – just in case their man was stupid after all.

Then Dave Pollard lumbered in and said a local agency reporter had picked up the story from a loose-lipped control-room officer, and had already called him three times on her way to Shipcott. She had said something about getting there ‘before the circus starts’. Which Pollard ‘thought’ might mean they were about to be besieged by the press. Marvel mentally rolled his eyes at Pollard’s lack of imagination and had second thoughts about putting him in charge now that this thing looked like going national, but was too busy to start redeploying staff at this stage.

At 6am he called Elizabeth Rice to check on the Marshes. He didn’t want to start going after Liss if she told him both men had sneaked out in the night and come home covered in blood. He really hoped they had; everything would be so much easier. He held while she checked that they were still in bed. She said she had last checked on them at midnight and had personally locked the front and back doors and all the downstairs windows, and had kept the keys with her at all times.

‘Why, sir?’ she asked.

He told her there’d been three murders at Sunset Lodge, then the doorbell rang and Marvel heard the CSIs identifying themselves at the entrance. They had a huge job ahead of them.

‘Shall I come up to help, sir?’ said Rice hopefully.

Marvel thought of Reynolds’s tipping-point theory. If it was true then nobody was off the hook quite yet.

‘No,’ he told her. ‘You stay there.’

Downstairs, Jonas was sitting white-faced and dark-eyed in a chair with an undrunk cup of tea on his knee.

Around him the vast black windows of the garden room reflected the scene in all directions, making it seem that hundreds of people were standing around whispering, bending over each other; crying in relay in a cocktail party of mourning.

‘You take sugar?’ said Marvel.

Jonas raised his eyes slowly to Marvel’s. ‘What?’

‘Do you take sugar?’

Jonas looked dully at his cup and shook his head. Marvel picked the sugar bowl off a nearby tea trolley, put two heaped spoonfuls into Jonas’s tea and stirred it briskly, slopping it into the saucer.

‘Drink up,’ he said.

Jonas did, wincing at the sweetness. Marvel pulled the piano stool away from the piano and sat down facing him.

‘You know Gary Liss?’

‘Not well, but yeah, I know him. He lives here, so I know him.’

‘Tell me about him.’

Jonas stared down at his cup for a long moment. ‘I can’t believe he did this.’

Marvel spread his hands and said curtly, ‘You can’t believe anyone did it – but there are three dead people upstairs and Liss has taken off. It doesn’t look good.’

‘I know,’ said Jonas miserably.

‘He ever been in trouble?’

‘Not really. Once there were some things missing. From the residents’ rooms. A few bits of jewellery, that kind of thing. I came round and spoke to staff members. There was no evidence even though I suspected it might be Gary, so it was more to let them know it had been noticed than anything else. It stopped. That was all.’

‘Any items recovered?’ asked Reynolds.

‘Not to my knowledge.’

‘Could’ve been Liss,’ said Marvel. ‘Petty crime leads to bigger things.’

‘But not this,’ said Jonas. ‘I don’t understand what’s happening here. Why this is happening…’ He stopped, realizing he sounded lost and feeble, and cleared his throat.

Marvel said, ‘Grey and Singh are at Liss’s house but it doesn’t look as if he’s been back home. You know where else he might be?’

‘Paul’s,’ said Jonas, and then sat up quickly, clattering his cup and saucer on to the trolley. ‘Shit. I have to tell Paul.’

‘Who’s Paul?’

‘His partner.’

Marvel glanced at Reynolds. ‘He told us he had a girlfriend.’

‘He doesn’t know you.’ Jonas shrugged, getting up and picking up his helmet. ‘Why would he tell you?’

Marvel felt a twinge of irritation. ‘Hold on. I’ll send a man with you. He could be harbouring Liss.’

But Jonas was impatient. ‘He lives in Withypool. I can’t see how Gary would have got there by now, sir. Not in this snow, and his car’s still out the back. I don’t want Paul to hear it through the grapevine.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Mr Cooke’s wife is Dr Dennis’s receptionist and she’s best friends with Lisa Tanner who lives next door to Paul. She’ll tell him if I don’t get there first.’ Jonas hesitated, then remembered that he was supposed to be on doorstep duty. ‘If that’s all right with you, sir?’

Marvel nodded curtly. ‘Come to the unit afterwards. I’ll need you on other things now.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Jonas. ‘Will you be treating Gary as a suspect? Just want to know how to handle Paul.’

‘Bloody right!’ said Marvel. ‘The only bloody suspect.’

Jonas nodded neutrally.

‘Get a picture of Liss,’ Marvel said as Jonas left, then added, ‘preferably one where he’s not wearing leather shorts.’

Reynolds and Marvel sat for a minute in the soporific heat of the garden room. God knew what it was like in the summer. Reynolds wrinkled his nose. The room was clean and tidy but it smelled of old things.

‘Liss lied to us,’ said Marvel.

‘Only about his sexuality,’ shrugged Reynolds. ‘That’s understandable in a small village.’

‘Not in a fucking murder investigation, it’s not.’

‘Jonas seems to think it’s beyond him,’ said Reynolds cautiously.

‘Bollocks to him. He’s a boy scout.’

Several old ladies looked round at the language and Marvel lowered his voice. ‘You think Liss didn’t do it?’

‘No, sir,’ said Reynolds – and meant it. ‘I was only keeping an open mind, that’s all. As we haven’t interviewed him yet.’

‘Well when we have him behind bars, I’ll keep an open mind too. Until then he’s Jack the fucking Ripper in my book.’

One of the CSIs spoke from the door: ‘We’ve got a trail.’

Reynolds got up, but Marvel didn’t rise from the piano stool. Instead he pursed his lips and looked around at the remaining residents. They wept and held each other’s hands – and stared into their own short futures with new fear.

‘The old, the weak, the infirm,’ he said in a low but harsh voice that Reynolds had to lean forward to hear…

‘This is not a killing – it’s a cull.’

Jonas had no fear of going to Paul Angell’s alone. He knew it wasn’t Gary Liss. He couldn’t have said how he knew it. It was the same way he knew it wasn’t Peter Priddy, and the same way he’d known the identity of the body in the stream; the same way he knew that the killer of Margaret Priddy had also killed Yvonne Marsh. He just felt it.

Big deal, he berated himself under his breath, as he drove carefully through the snow to Withypool. He seemed to know an awful lot about who the killer wasn’t. But he felt no closer to understanding who the killer was. And although he hadn’t been involved in the investigation, he also had a gut feeling that Marvel had no more insight than he did. The man had the look of someone who has just realized he has wandered off a true path and into quicksand. Something in Jonas enjoyed knowing that the abrasive Marvel was suffering.

They were all suffering.

Jonas found it hard to grasp what was happening to his village; to his friends and neighbours; to the very life he had always known.

He had already called Lucy from Sunset Lodge. Woken her up to ask if she had the knife with her, less than an hour since he’d taken so much care not to wake her as he slipped out of bed in response to the vibration of his phone. She had asked him to repeat the question, and said crossly, ‘Wait a mo.’ She had taken ages to groggily turn on the light and look for the knife, and, while she did, Jonas had the nutty idea that he should attach it to her with a piece of elastic the way surfers did with their boards. If an intruder broke in, she wouldn’t be able to ask him to ‘wait a mo’ while she groped about on the bedside table for her only means of defence.

Finally she’d said, ‘Yes, why?’ still sounding irritated. He didn’t blame her. Even without being woken in the early hours and ordered to seek out random cutlery, Lucy’s moods could be erratic nowadays. Dr Wickramsinghe told them it was ‘to be expected’, but Jonas never quite did expect it.

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!’

He got up suddenly and Jonas realized he had been holding a tack hammer in his other hand; Jonas took a slow step backwards.

‘I thought you meant you were concerned for his safety! He wouldn’t do anything to harm those people, Jonas. Never.’

‘I know that, Paul.’ Jonas badly wanted to glance at the tack hammer but stayed focused on the man’s face. ‘And I am concerned for his safety. Truly. That’s why we need to find him.’

He thought of Marvel’s offer of back-up and felt a twinge of regret that he’d been too keen to wait for it.

Paul seemed unaware that he was holding the hammer. He stood stock still for at least a minute. Jonas gave him the time. Didn’t know what else he could do really.

Then Paul nodded. ‘Yes. We must. He could have been kidnapped. He could be trapped somewhere, or injured.’

‘He could,’ agreed Jonas, and got a nasty underneath feeling in his belly.

The agency reporter arrived first and was Australian. Marvel found Australians unbearably cocky, so he told Pollard she’d have to wait until the TV news crews got there so that he could do just one press conference. The reporter – Marcie Meyrick – made such a fuss that even Pollard nearly caved in and told her everything she wanted to know right up front. Only a well-timed call from the ITN crew asking for directions kept him loyal.

By lunchtime Marvel had another six officers at his disposal: four uniforms and two DCs from Weston-super-Mare. He sent them all to assist in the search for the murder weapon.

They didn’t find it.

By 4pm the BBC and ITN had joined the fuming Marcie Meyrick, and at a press conference that Rupert Cooke offered to let them hold in the garden room while the residents were at tea, Marvel told them the names, ages and sex of the victims, the fact that they had suffered blunt-force trauma, and about the ‘concerning’ disappearance of Gary Liss. He then distributed the good, clear photograph Jonas Holly had brought back with him from Paul Angell – Gary Liss looking like a member of a comeback boy-band in jeans and a tight T-shirt. Nothing was said about the box of jewellery. The watch had belonged to Violet Eaves, and the Reverend Chard identified a signet ring of his father’s. When they found Gary Liss, it would be one of the few surprises they could spring on him.

The usual blah about what a terrible crime it was was said with far more than the usual vehemence by Marvel. Luckily for the two TV news crews, a trick of the light caught an ambiguous liquid shine in Marvel’s eyes and ‘A MURDER DETECTIVE WEEPS’ booked the story a top berth on both the evening news bulletins.

Marvel protested too much, Reynolds was faux sympathetic and Marcie Meyrick – whose photographer had been delayed by a snow-crash on the M5 – was enraged.

Elizabeth Rice felt thoroughly left out.

Family liaison was a get-out clause for every senior police officer who had women to deploy, and sometimes she wished she’d never done the additional training the position required.

Marvel acting as if Alan and Danny Marsh were both still suspects was a joke; if he seriously considered them to be suspects in the latest brutal murders then he would never have left her alone with them. Marvel was an arsehole but he wasn’t completely stupid – so why the hell couldn’t she abandon her assignment and get where the action was? All her fancy-pants high-falutin family-liaison status afforded her was a total lack of privacy, and the honour of sharing a bathroom with two men who were too unreconstructed to bother with the niceties of flushing, let alone putting the seat down.

They barely said a word to each other, and that gave her the creeps.

Alan Marsh sat for hours staring at inanimate objects, while Danny stayed in his bedroom and read, occasionally went to the Red Lion, or wandered from lounge to kitchen and back, twitching.

‘I suppose it was a release,’ Alan said at least one thousand times a day, usually after a long sigh. Sometimes Danny would grunt in reply; sometimes he would snort; sometimes he would jump to his feet and say ‘Bollocks!’ and leave the room. He would come back ten minutes later and they would resume their positions.

Their tiny terraced house smelled of sweat, mildew and something else which she took days to identify as a bag of onions liquefying in the vegetable rack. One part of her wanted so badly to scrub the place from top to bottom that she kept opening the cupboard under the sink and staring at the bleach; another part of her rebelled at the thought that, because she was a woman, she should clean the house. She had a degree in Criminal Psychology! She’d graduated top of her class at Portishead! She was a highly trained and highly effective officer of the law!

It sucked, because she really wanted to clean that house.

The Marshes weren’t under arrest; they were free to come and go – but they hardly did. By day Alan stared at The Jeremy

Kyle Show and Homes under the Hammer as if he had common ground with unwed slags and millionaire property developers. Danny would slouch down at breakfast and attempt to make small talk over the cornflakes. Very small talk. He was no talker, Danny Marsh, but he was a surprisingly good listener. He would ask her something and then just let her keep talking while he poured milk and sprinkled sugar and crunched cereal. Now and then he would look up and make eye-contact; now and then he would grunt; now and then he would nod. It was the only encouragement she needed. Sometimes she found herself telling him things about her own life that she hadn’t even told her boyfriend, Eric. Sometimes she told him things about Eric! Afterwards she was always sorry she’d been disloyal, but Danny Marsh’s grunts and nods seemed to open her eyes to certain aspects of Eric’s personality that she had to admit she’d never noticed before. Or if she had, they had never bothered her before. It had taken Danny Marsh and his objectivity to make her see…

She locked them all in every night. Back door, front door and all the downstairs windows. Alan Marsh was too out of it to notice, but Danny had watched her do it the first night and had asked, ‘Are you locking someone out, or locking us in?’

‘Someone out, of course,’ she’d said, but she could feel her cheeks grow warm and hoped he hadn’t noticed.

Every night she kept the keys under her pillow while she slept in the tiny box room they had cleared for her. ‘Cleared’ was a euphemism for shoving everything that apparently wouldn’t fit in the attic against the opposite wall, and Rice had to turn sideways to approach the bed at nights, down a narrow pathway of ugly green carpet.

She crab-walked down that pathway around midnight every night and woke at six. She checked on the Marshes as soon as she woke – but for the rapid application of mascara to her pale lashes, because that was next to waking like cleanliness is next to godliness – and she checked by pressing an ear against their bedroom doors and listening to them breathe. Alan snored; his son did not, but in the still darkness of dawn she could always hear him breathe eventually, once she focused and calmed her own breathing.

From day three onwards she had inquired of Alan and Danny whether they might like to return to work at the ramshackle little garage behind their home. She’d gathered that they kept half the cars on Exmoor running from the dingy corrugated-iron shed, and was more than prepared to jump around and stamp her feet to stay warm if only it took them all out of this stuffy little house. But no amount of encouragement would shift them into any action that was not slow or short-lived. Danny went to the pub now and then, but constantly forgot that he was supposed to have bought something for tea, and eventually Rice chose female submission over starvation and stormed down to the Spar to keep them all in the most mundane of foods – beans, toast, eggs, toast, cheese, toast and more toast. Her low-carb diet was a thing of the past and she felt the old white-bread addiction gripping her like crack, the longer her pointless occupation of the Marsh home continued.

When Marvel called about the murders at Sunset Lodge, she had wanted to rush out of the house and up the snowy road to be part of it all. Missing the buzz of the scene of a triple murder was killing her. The thought of that idiot Pollard being there when she was not was especially hard to bear.

All day she was short and gloomy and that night she sat fuming on the easy chair beside the sofa, from where Alan and Danny stared sightlessly at Top Gear repeats. Even she had seen this one and she’d only been here nine days.

Alan went to bed at 10.30pm, Danny at twelve when she did. She said goodnight with forced cheerfulness; he didn’t bother to force anything apart from a mumble, and closed his bedroom door.

She did her teeth and washed her face, trying hard not to touch the toothpaste-spotted taps or even the cracked and grimy pink soap, which looked as if it might have been a pre-war fixture along with the mottled tiles.

As she opened her bedroom door, she shivered.

She sidled towards the head of her bed and shivered again. The little room was always cold but there was a terrible draught coming from somewhere…

As if in answer to an unspoken question, the open curtains wafted inwards.

The window was slightly open. ‘Slightly’ in this winter was enough for the cold to stab its way into the room and chill it like a fridge.

A cheap office desk lamp with a flexible neck was the only makeshift light in here. Rice turned it to the window.

On the sill was a footprint showing where someone had climbed from the roof of the lean-to and into her room.

Elizabeth Rice had watched enough teen horror flicks on the sofa with Eric to know that the killer was right behind her with a steak knife.

She turned on a stifled shriek, throwing up her hands to protect her throat.

Nobody there.

She took three lurching sideways steps towards her bedroom door to alert the Marshes that there had been an intruder, and then stopped dead, even though her mind continued to click through scenarios so fast that it felt like one of those flicker-books where a thousand static images make a jerky motion picture.

The print was coming in.

There was no print going out.

If this was the killer, then the killer was still in the house.

Rice looked down at the boxes of junk and selected an ugly blue vase. She weighed it in her hand. She had always been a supporter of the British police remaining un-armed apart from specialized units. She felt that the lack of a firearm enforced the tacit notion of policing by consent, and that – democratically speaking – that was a good thing.

But right now she would give her right arm for a big gun.

Rice walked through the house – quietly, but not quietly enough to scare herself – switching on lights, checking doors and rattling windows. She stood outside the other bedroom doors and listened to the Marshes breathe.

There was no intruder.

There was no smearing of the inward-bound print. Therefore Rice felt it was fair to deduce that whoever had climbed in through this window had not climbed out through it again – and therefore they must be in the house.

Unless the person who had come in through the window had climbed out of it first before they muddied their shoes.

In which case there were only two suspects…

Neither Alan nor Danny Marsh had moved from the sofa today apart from brief visits to the bathroom or to the kitchen for tea.

Was it possible that between her checks last night – between midnight and 6am – one of the Marshes had crept past her bed and climbed out of her window?

Then back in?

Possible.

Improbable, of course, but Sherlock Holmes would base an entire case on improbable.

Her window was at the back of the house and there was a four-foot drop to the lean-to. With the downstairs doors and windows locked, it was the only viable route into or out of the house. It was, after all, the way the killer had entered Margaret Priddy’s home.

The thought of someone in her bedroom while she slept was disturbing enough; the idea that someone might have passed through on their way to and from murdering three people at Sunset Lodge made her feel sick.

She dragged one of the boxes of junk across the room and against the bedroom door. It wouldn’t stop anyone, but it would slow them down.

Then she sat on the bed cross-legged, fully clothed, with the blue vase in one hand and her phone in the other, and called DCI Marvel.

Jonas got home so late and so weary that when Lucy told him she’d made supper he could have kissed her feet. It was only spaghetti with tomatoes and basil but it tasted fantastic, and she’d put out a bottle of smooth red wine for him to open. She sat and watched him eat.

‘You want to talk about it, sweetheart?’ she said quietly.

He stared across the kitchen in silence.

‘He beat them to death.’

Lucy bit her lip and her eyes filled with tears.

‘Then put pillows over their faces.’

‘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.