Darkside

Five Days

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.

No, Liss would soon be discovered, and then they would know the truth within seconds. A single killing might be concealed for a short while, but five was the work of a madman, and this time Marvel would be able to sniff it on Liss like a dog trained by having a murder-rag rubbed over its nose. He could almost smell it now, the sour fear of a man trapped by the enormity of his own crimes; the self-justification for unjustifiable deeds. Marvel’s jaw clenched in anger, even before he had anyone to take it out on.

‘… in which case the killer may not even be aware of what he’s doing. She also says some killers just stop. They reach saturation point and don’t feel the need to kill again for years – maybe even never – depending on…’ Reynolds tapered off lamely under Marvel’s glare.

‘I stopped listening to you,’ said Marvel bluntly, and Reynolds shrugged. He’d gathered that.

Marvel got up and picked up the car keys. ‘This is bullshit. All these fucking theories aren’t getting us any closer to finding Liss. All we know for sure is that this bastard is escalating – fast.’

Reynolds nodded. ‘Knowing him is not the same as stopping him.’

‘That’s right,’ said Marvel, yanking open the unit door and letting winter rush in, ‘and we need to get our arses into gear, because something tells me that if we don’t stop him, he’s not finished.’

Lionel Chard’s room had been taped off as a crime scene.

Now as he stared into it from the doorway, Marvel felt like a visitor to a stately home. Here is the bed, ladies and gentlemen, where the King took the virginity of Catherine of Aragon; and here is the Sealy Posturepedic upon which Mr Chard was beaten to death by person or persons unknown.

Through the white window he could see flakes falling from the sky.

Even the snow was against him.

The manhunt had been stalled by snow, which could now only be traversed beyond the village boundaries by 4X4s.

The footprints outside the garden room had been methodically measured and photographed, but Marvel had seen more convincing yeti prints.

And finding a murder weapon in the snow was like… well, they might as well do it blindfolded. Grey had suggested as much after yet another Braille-like search of the graveyard, and Marvel had told him to do it again.

Marvel moved the few paces to the entrance to Gorse – Violet Eaves’s room. As he did so he thought of Gary Liss doing the same thing. He waved a casual hand across the doorway and heard the faint beep from downstairs. Lynne Twitchett and Jen Hardy had heard several beeps. They couldn’t agree on how many exactly. Had that stupid electronic sound been the straw that broke the camel’s back for Gary Liss? Had Violet Eaves sleepwalked one too many times, in his perverse view? Had his patience finally snapped and he’d hit her and then panicked, which had led to the massacre?

‘Shit,’ said Marvel. It didn’t fit with the careful murder of Margaret Priddy and the seemingly random choice of Yvonne Marsh.

If Gary Liss was not the killer, then that first beep may well have been the killer entering Violet’s room, rather than the old lady leaving it. Although she had left her room that night, one way or another.

From this stately doorway Marvel could see over the graveyard next door, where the picture-perfect snow had been made hectic and muddy by the search. They were just going through the motions out there. Liss was the key. They had to find him before he struck again – as Marvel had little doubt that he would.

He heard the doorbell and a minute later Singh came to say that Paul Angell was downstairs in the garden room and wanted to talk to him.

As he walked downstairs, someone started to play the piano. Not Lynne Twitchett – someone who could play. Marvel knew the tune. Something by Cole Porter. ‘Cheek To Cheek’, he thought. It made him melancholy to hear the song of dancing and romance played in this place where such things were long gone.

The garden room was its usual melting temperature and Marvel wrinkled his nose as he entered. The place smelled faintly of rotten… he couldn’t think of rotten what. No doubt Reynolds would call it generic rotten. He made a mental note to die before he could end up somewhere like this, smelling like that.

Paul Angell stopped playing and looked up at him, and several of the old ladies clapped and one said, ‘Lovely,’ and another said, ‘Do you remember that one, Trinny?’

Paul got up and started to ask about Gary. Paul had been helpful to the police, but wary, and Marvel wasn’t 100 per cent convinced that the man didn’t know where his lover was hiding, whatever the hell Jonas Holly said. He got the impression that Paul Angell thought the police had been somehow against Liss from the outset because he was gay, instead of because he’d gone on the run after a triple murder. Idiot. Marvel had been polite to him so far, but he hoped Angell’s homosexuality gave him the sensitivity to know that his well of manners was not a deep one.

Now Marvel found that, while Paul Angell asked why he hadn’t been kept advised of the status of the hunt for Gary, he was suddenly transfixed by the hand of the old lady who had asked Trinny if she remembered ‘Cheek To Cheek’. The hand had been clapping and Marvel had seen its palm. Just briefly. He wasn’t even sure why his eye had been caught. Now he listened with half an ear and answered Angell with half a brain, while both his eyes watched the old, lined hand touch the arm of the chair, then reach for the biscuit tin, then poke at the selection with one bony finger, then lift the biscuit to the old-lady mouth—

Marvel stepped around Angell and gripped her by the wrist.

‘Oh!’ she said and dropped the biscuit. It fell on her chest and then to her lap. A Bourbon.

Marvel turned her palm up as though he were about to read it. There was a dirty smudge in the middle of it. Red-brown. It might have been chocolate.

‘Reynolds!’

Marvel turned and looked at Angell. ‘Get my sergeant for me. Now!’

He looked back at the scared-looking old woman. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Mrs Betty Tithecott,’ she answered tremulously.

‘Here, leave her alone,’ said Trinny next door.

Marvel ignored Trinny and softened his tone, but still held the squirming hand in his. ‘I just need to have a look at your hand, all right, Betty? I’m not going to hurt you.’

She met his eyes and nodded. Her hand relaxed.

‘This mark,’ he said. ‘What have you touched?’

‘Nothing,’ said Betty, her eyes watery and confused.

There was a similar, smaller stain inside her thumb.

Lynne Twitchett approached a little nervously. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘No,’ said Marvel curtly and heard Reynolds hurrying into the room.

‘What’s up, sir?’

Marvel turned the hand up so Reynolds could see it, and was gratified to hear a surprised expletive. He rubbed his thumb across the smudge and a small amount of colour transferred itself. Whatever Betty had touched, she had touched it recently.

‘She says she hasn’t touched anything. Look around, will you?’

Reynolds did, checking the arms of the wing chair, the head-rest, the handles of a Zimmer which was on standby for take-off a few feet away.

‘Can you hold your hand up for me, Betty?’

She nodded and he let go of her wrist.

Everyone in the room was watching them now. Behind him Marvel could hear a hum of low mutterings: ‘What’s going on?’… ‘What’s he doing to Betty?’… ‘Where are the biscuits?’

Betty shifted in her seat, careful not to move her hand much, and Marvel saw her walking stick hooked over the arm of her chair, right near the back where it would be out of the way.

He looked around for something to pick it up with and started to lift the rug off Betty’s knees. Her smudged hand clapped down to her lap to keep her rug and her modesty in place, so instead he yanked his own tie off and used it carefully to pick up the stick.

‘Reynolds.’

Reynolds came over and Marvel held the walking stick up to the light. It was made of stout wood, the handle of tooled brass – stained brownish-red.

And near the end was a small but unmistakable clump of white hair.

He had his murder weapon.

He had his suspect.

Marvel thought of the line from ‘Amazing Grace’.

I once was lost, but now I’m found.

That was him. Lost, then found. Dark, then light. Drunk, then sober. The moment he saw those strands of white stuck to the end of the cane, Marvel knew he didn’t have to drink any more. He would, but he didn’t have to. Not on this case, at least.

It had been getting out of hand anyway. Last night he and Joy had had a barney because she’d got all maudlin about Something with an R and, instead of sympathizing, he’d asked if she had any ice. She’d thrown a glass at him and he’d said something mean about Dubonnet…

What the hell was he doing getting into an argument with some lonely old drunk over ice and Dubonnet? He should have his head examined.

Lost and found.

As long as things progressed in that order, Marvel felt he was doing a reasonable job with his life.

All day long, while he clambered over debris and peered through shed windows on the off-chance of finding Gary Liss, Jonas worried about the notes.

The first had been oblique: Call yourself a policeman?

The second had been personal: Do your job, crybaby.

The third – in the wake of a triple murder – could no longer be seen as anything but a warning: If you won’t do your job, then I’ll do it for you.

But he was doing his job! This time the killer was wrong! He’d started his night patrols, and now he was properly part of the investigation by day, too. They even had a suspect lined up. How could the killer – or anyone – accuse him of no longer doing his job?

But the threatening tone of this note was unmistakable, and Jonas knew he could no longer hide behind previous ambiguity.

The time had come to speak to Marvel.

The killer couldn’t keep hiding for ever. Things were closing in. Things were catching up with him. Memories pressed against the ceiling of his subconscious like desperate sailors in the hold of a doomed ship.

He was no longer sure he could hold it all together. Some part of him had once imagined some connection with the policeman/protector; there had been times when he had wondered if they might one day be on the same team. Work side by side.

But Jonas was still stubbornly ineffective where it really mattered.

The bodies were piling up.

The wrong people were dying and it just wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t right.

Something had to give.

Elizabeth Rice called Marvel – ostensibly to say she hadn’t yet had an opportunity to compare the Polaroid of the shoe-print with all the shoes in the Marshes’ house, but really to find out what was going on at Sunset Lodge.

Marvel told her not to bother. They had a suspect.

‘Does that mean I can join you up there?’

‘No,’ said Marvel. ‘Stay put for a bit. Might need you to break the news of an arrest to the Marshes.’

‘OK. Good,’ said Rice, although she felt like throwing something in frustration.

Preferably at Marvel.

When Jonas arrived, the residents of Sunset Lodge had just started to make their arduous journeys from the garden room to the dining room for supper.

Although it was dark already, the room was as hot as ever, and smelled of sweet decay under hairspray and talcum powder. After the bitter outdoors it was suffocating. He wondered if they ever opened the windows so people could breathe—

The memory hit him like a ghost train…

He and Danny Marsh had bought maggots for fishing from Mr Jacoby’s shop. In the late summer the stream behind the playing field had sticklebacks and the occasional brown trout, and there were schoolyard rumours of a pike that might – or might not – have eaten Annie Rossiter’s missing cat, Wobbles. Jonas did not really buy the Wobbles theory, because why would a cat be in the stream in the first place? But he did fantasize about catching a pike. Or a trout.

A stickleback would do, to be honest.

So he and Danny had bought a pot of maggots. A little white polystyrene cup with a not-quite-clear plastic lid, which had to be lifted to see the fat white worms properly. Mr Jacoby took them from the fridge – from a shelf alongside the cans of Coke and Dandelion & Burdock, which Jonas could never quite make up his mind whether he liked or not.

Jonas was stunned that he could recall such details. He even remembered now that the maggots had cost 55p and that Danny had paid because he’d owed Jonas for a comic.

They’d only had one rod between them – Jonas’s little starter rod which had come in a blister-pack last Christmas, with its fixed-spool reel already loaded with line and permanently attached between the cork grips, along with two red-and-white ball floats and a bag of small, unambitious hooks.

They’d fished for one long, hot day, eating cheese-and-pickle rolls and taking turns to hold the rod for when The Big One bit.

By the time dusk fell and they went home empty-handed, they had only used maybe twenty of the hundred or so maggots, most of which had simply wriggled off the hook and made a break for it, or had been discarded for becoming waterlogged, limp and – the boys agreed – unattractive to fish.

Probably because the rod was his, when they parted ways Jonas had taken the remaining maggots home with him and put them in the fridge for the next day.

They’d never gone fishing again.

Other stuff had happened.

The little white pot had first been hidden behind the jam and then pushed to the back of the fridge by yesterday’s spaghetti Bolognese.

And it was only weeks later, when his mother complained that that fridge – which was only four years old – was making a strange buzzing noise, that Jonas had remembered…

Through the cloudy lid of the pot, Jonas had seen that the pale maggots had been replaced by something amorphous, black and expansive, which now filled the pot so comprehensively that he could see darker patches under the plastic lid where things were actually pressing up against it. The whole pot vibrated in his nervous hand with a low, menacing buzz – and it was with a sick shock that Jonas realized that the small maggots had slowly turned to much bigger flies that were now squeezed together so tightly in the pot that they seemed to be one angry entity.

Angry at him.

He’d wanted to let them go. He was a good-hearted boy who loved animals. And flies were animals – of a sort. The thought of them inside the pot – packed so close that their wet wings could not even unfurl, while their neighbours ate them and vomited on them and ate them again – made him feel ill.

But they were angry at him. He could feel it in the vibrating fury running up his arm as he held the pot in his hand.

He had thrown it away without removing the lid. And until the bin men came three days later, Jonas could hear the angry thrum of the flies leading their short, trapped, nightmarish lives.

Jonas stopped thinking of it. He had to before it made him sick.

Standing at the threshold of the Sunset Lodge garden room, he wiped sweat off his face and forced himself to stop remembering…

‘It smells in here,’ he said from the doorway.

Marvel and Reynolds were sitting silently in the two wing chairs closest to the piano and both turned to look at him as he approached. Marvel with his sagging jowls, and Reynolds with his patchwork hair: Jonas thought they both looked quite at home.

‘Yes,’ said Reynolds. ‘It’s impending death.’

An old woman so doubled over her walking frame that she looked as if she was searching for a contact lens turned her head like a tortoise and fixed Reynolds with a withering glare.

‘We’re not all deaf, you know!’

Reynolds reddened and mumbled an apology and she continued on her way to the dining room, following the map of the carpet.

‘Plonker,’ Marvel told him.

‘We found a weapon,’ said Reynolds. Seeing Jonas’s surprised look, he continued, ‘Walking stick. He just took it from a bedroom, killed them all, and then put it back.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Jonas. ‘Prints?’

‘The lab’s got it now, but I doubt it. Still…’ Reynolds shrugged. ‘Any luck today?’

Marvel snorted sarcastically. ‘Yes, Reynolds, he’s just playing hard to get.’

‘No luck finding Gary,’ said Jonas. ‘But there’s something I need to tell you.’

There. He’d said it now and couldn’t back out. He took a deep breath and told them about the notes. He was deliberately vague about the content. He told them that the first had said ‘something about the police not protecting Margaret Priddy’ and the second had told him ‘Do your job.’ He was too ashamed to tell them about the ‘crybaby’ accusation. He handed the final note to Reynolds inside a plastic freezer bag he’d taken from the kitchen drawer.

He’d expected Marvel to be annoyed that he’d said nothing before now. He’d expected him to tear a strip off him. What he hadn’t expected was that the overweight, over-the-hill DCI would listen all the way through with a stony face – and then come out of his wing chair like Swamp Thing and knock him backwards into the piano with a clanging post-modernist crash. One second Jonas was telling his story, the next he was half sitting on the keys as Marvel jammed fistfuls of his shirt up under his chin, trembling with rage and shouting angry things that Jonas couldn’t quite comprehend. Behind Marvel, Reynolds was trying to pull his boss off, and behind him, Jonas was aware of a gaggle of old folk clutching each other’s forearms as the three of them wrestled on and around the piano. Jonas staggered as the instrument rolled sideways under the weight of the discord. He could have shoved Marvel off him easily enough, but he was his senior officer. Plus, he understood the man’s frustration, and couldn’t muster the necessary affront to get really strong with him. Even as Marvel jabbed his knuckles into his throat, some part of Jonas was thinking, ‘I deserve this.’

Staff rushed in, shouting and demanding a halt, but it was only when Mrs Betty Tithecott started a high, papery screaming and began pointing that they finally ended the shoving match and looked around, dishevelled and breathless.

Half wrapped in thick cloth – and stuffed between the now-displaced piano and the low wall of the garden room – was the body of Gary Liss.

Marvel was falling apart.

Reynolds had always known he would, but now that it was actually happening, the experience was more disconcerting than he’d expected it to be.

Even before their prime suspect had been found wrapped up like cod and chips and stuffed behind a piano, Marvel had been on a slippery slope. He’d seen Marvel’s hands shaking while they examined the Sunset Lodge bodies and bedrooms. Then there’d been the crying at the press conference. Reynolds had seen the shine in his eyes, and the light had had nothing to do with it.

And losing it with Jonas Holly like something out of The Sweeney.

It wasn’t shock and it wasn’t because Marvel cared so much.

He knew Marvel was off the wagon. Even though it was a wagon he’d only ever been hitched to, never really on. It didn’t take a genius to work it out when Marvel emerged from his cottage every morning smelling of booze and mint and covered in cat hair. Although if it had taken a genius, Reynolds liked to think he’d have been up to the task.

In Reynolds’s opinion – which was far from humble – Marvel had made some damaging decisions in this investigation.

Prime among these was his move from the occasional pint after work to the harder liquor when he was alone. Or with Joy Springer because, in Reynolds’s view, that was only being alone with somebody else in the room.

Another was his failure to use Jonas Holly.

In their business they relied on local plods like Jonas, and he and Marvel had done so in several investigations over the past year. Of course, Marvel always liked to show the locals right up front who was going to be boss. Rude, bullying, bulldozing – those were apparently Marvel’s guidelines for what he sarcastically called ‘First Contact’, as if local beat officers were some alien race whose sole purpose was to be subdued and bent to his will.

Something must have happened off-screen, as they said in the movies. One day Marvel had been merely rude to Jonas, the next Jonas was standing on a doorstep like an oversized garden gnome. If Marvel had employed a ducking stool he could hardly have humiliated the man more effectively.

Reynolds felt Jonas’s pain. Two cases back Marvel had been such a shit – and Reynolds had had to do so much damage control among the local constabulary – that his precious hair had fallen out in handfuls. Every night he had watched it swirling down the shower drain along with his self-esteem. He remembered vividly the rush of pure fury that had overtaken him as he watched it disappear. How he’d vowed to get revenge on Marvel, like some mythic hero in a Sergio Leone film.

Good old Sergio – he knew a dish served cold when he saw one.

And the dish Reynolds was preparing for Marvel was very cold indeed.

Jonas told Lucy about the notes. Now that he’d told Marvel he knew she’d hear about them sooner or later, and when she asked about the cut on his lip the moment he walked into the room, he couldn’t think of anything fast enough to divert her from the truth of what had happened and why. The only thing he didn’t say was that he had found the last note on their garden gate. He told her that one had also been under the wiper of the Land Rover. It was a small distinction, but Lucy was alone all day, and unwell; the last thing he needed was for her to feel even more nervous about the murders.

Everything he’d feared the notes might do to her, they did.

He saw the fear flash across her face, and then her concern was all for him, and Jonas watched miserably as the two emotions etched lines in her face that he’d never seen before. Jonas promised her he would be careful, promised not to take any risks – but those lines were there to stay.

Finally he told her that he’d informed Marvel – more to reassure her that he had police back-up than anything else.

‘What did he say?’ she demanded – at the same moment that Jonas realized he should have kept his mouth shut.

He was a lousy liar, so he told her the truth.

She was furious. He had to take the phone away from her to stop her calling 999.

‘It was an assault!’ she yelled.

‘It was just a bit of shoving. It was a disagreement, that’s all.’

Lucy shot him a fiery look that he hadn’t seen for ages. It reminded him of her soccer days, and he smiled, which only made her more furious.

‘It’s not funny, Jonas!’

‘No, it’s not,’ he agreed hastily. ‘You’re right.’

She gave him a circumspect stare that meant she knew he was placating her, but then allowed herself to feel a little placated anyway; she didn’t have the strength left to keep being angry.

‘I’d like to kick his arse,’ she told him seriously.

‘Me too,’ he sighed.

They were on the couch, he with his long legs stretched out and his big feet on an old tapestry footstool that showed the wear of his father before him, Lucy facing him with her back against the padded leather arm. Now she wiggled her toes under his thigh for added warmth, and he knew he was forgiven. For a minute they watched Tom Hanks having a mental breakdown on a desert island.

‘This is a bit cheerful for you, isn’t it, sweetheart?’

Lucy stuck out her tongue and dug her toes into him.

‘What job does he mean?’

‘What?’

‘In the notes he keeps going on about doing your job. What does it mean?’

He frowned and shrugged one shoulder. ‘Finding the killer, I suppose.’

Lucy nodded slowly, but Jonas could hear her brain ticking over from where he sat.

‘But you’re already doing that.’

‘Maybe he thinks I should be doing more.’

‘Maybe,’ she agreed tentatively, while Tom Hanks’s skin blistered off his face in the white-hot sun.

‘Or maybe,’ she shrugged, ‘that’s not the job he wants you to do.’

The day had passed in a blur for John Marvel.

Another body bag. Another crime scene. More hysterical crones. The decision to move all the residents after all, and the logistics of making that happen in a snowstorm while all roads out of the village were impassable by anything but a tractor or a four-wheel-drive.

Now – back in his little apartment with his inadequate travel kettle taking a week to boil – Marvel sat slumped and glum at the end of his bed.

So Gary Liss was a petty thief, but not a killer.

No doubt he had not been the intended target, but he’d probably been murdered for interrupting the killer – and then stuffed behind the garden-room piano like a surprise Christmas present. The thick old pile of heavy maroon curtaining had been wadded down the back of the piano for years, Rupert Cooke told them, white-faced with shock. He said it acted as a damper so the sound wasn’t too loud for the residents.

In Marvel’s brief experience with the residents, no sound could be loud enough for them.

But what it meant was that the killer had known about the curtains and therefore must be local. Not that that narrowed things down a lot – he imagined everyone in Shipcott had had a relative or friend at Sunset Lodge at some point in the past few years.

The killer had also dragged or carried Liss downstairs – close to the staffroom where the two women were – and had taken the time to wrap him up and hide him behind the piano. It spoke of great strength and it spoke of calmness, not panic. The killer had been interrupted, certainly – but he had also adapted to that interruption so brutally and so efficiently that Lynne Twitchett and Jen Hardy had never heard a sound from Liss.

This latest crime scene was now one that had been ravaged by heat and constant human traffic for the near forty-eight hours since the victim had died. No wonder the place had started to smell. If he hadn’t spent so much time there he’d have noticed it himself. And they didn’t even know yet where Gary Liss had been killed. Blood on the body was minimal – a single crusty smear over a depression fracture of the front of the skull, and smears on the throat where it looked as if he’d been manually strangled.

Yet another modus operandi…

I once was found, but now am lost.

Marvel sighed and put a tea bag into a mug, hoping that if he took the lead, the kettle might catch up.

His phone rang; it was Jos Reeves on a scratchy line. There were no prints on the walking stick, and the blood on the roof belonged not to the killer but to Lionel Chard, so it added nothing to their well of knowledge.

Marvel was so annoyed by the crappy news that he yelled, ‘I can’t hear you!’ and hung up on Reeves mid-sentence.

So it was back to square one. Only with more dead people.

Great.

Alan Marsh? Danny Marsh? Peter fucking Priddy? Marvel felt like having a tantrum. He’d ‘liked’ Peter Priddy so much; liked the hunchy feeling that he was the one – but now Peter Priddy felt like a best friend at school, whose name he barely remembered.

He switched off the kettle and opened a bottle of Jameson’s instead. It would help him think; it always had and always would. That was what Debbie had never understood. You’re sick, she’d told him once. You get drunk and lie around and think about murder. It’s sick!

He’d come close to hitting her.

Marvel knocked back the first two fingers and went for a slightly larger chaser, which he sipped more slowly while watching Newsnight with the sound down; it was better that way.

This case was already like musical chairs, and then Jonas Holly comes out with a critical piece of evidence he’d been hoarding like a fucking hamster while they were all chasing their own arses.

Just the thought of it sent Marvel’s blood pressure up again.

It amounted to withholding evidence in a murder investigation, and as soon as this case was over and Jonas Holly had outlived any modicum of usefulness, Marvel would file a complaint against him. Fuck the paperwork. Get the moron off the streets for good and stuck behind a desk up in Taunton, answering 999 calls for real cops.

Marvel had no compunction about it. Jonas had screwed up badly – and it wasn’t the first time. He’d potentially contaminated the first scene by pawing the vic, and allowing others to do the same. He’d moved the second body, and although that hadn’t really been his fault, Marvel was sore enough now to overlook that. The vomit had disappeared on Jonas Holly’s watch and then he’d shown an unexpected lack of control when he’d laid into Danny Marsh, who’d really only needed one good smack to jolt him out of his hysteria.

And he’d kept the notes secret when they were probably the best clue they now had to the identity of the killer.

Of course, he’d also scared Marvel at Margaret Priddy’s house, but he wasn’t taking that into consideration.

He was pretty sure he wasn’t.

Killers were a strange bunch. Some returned to the scene of the crime. Some took trophies and photos and kept detailed cuttings. Some tried to get involved with the investigation; tried to ‘help’ the police. Some were the police.

Now he had mentally laid out all Jonas Holly’s transgressions in a neat chronological list, Marvel was surprised by how much involvement he seemed to have had in this case, considering he’d spent most of it on a bloody doorstep.

The more he thought about those transgressions, the less they looked like incompetence and the more they looked like a deliberate attempt to mislead.

And the more deliberate they looked, the more suspicious Marvel became, until finally – half a bottle in – DCI John Marvel started to like Jonas Holly.

But not in a good way.