Darkside

Four Days

‘You think we should pull Danny Marsh in?’

Reynolds broached the subject carefully because Marvel was only really receptive to his own ideas.

Marvel stared at him across the Calor gas, with eyes rimmed red from drink and lack of sleep.

Reynolds proceeded: ‘We’ve got the gloves in the garage and we’ve got the footprint on the window sill. You think that’s enough?’

Marvel continued to stare at him until Reynolds wondered if he’d had a stroke.

Finally Marvel stirred. ‘It’s not much.’

‘It’s more than we’ve got on anyone else now.’

Marvel nodded slowly. ‘Let’s talk to his father first.’

Reynolds nodded in relief and picked up the phone.

Jonas needed help.

He stood at the edge of the playing field and thought about the nature of evil.

The scenes he had witnessed at Sunset Lodge would never leave him. Margaret Priddy was sad, Yvonne Marsh was dramatic and pathetic. But the sheer cold brutality of the murders at the Lodge was something he couldn’t quite get a hold of. The slaughter of the old people, defenceless in their beds, the cool killing of Gary Liss, and the bravado of the body behind the piano.

Jonas’s brain skittered about the crime, peered around corners at it, ducked and dived, trying to get a better look, but ultimately was lost in the supermarket when it came to any kind of understanding of what it must take for a man to grow into a cold-blooded killer. He had spent most of a sleepless night running up and down the aisles of why? and it was only as he’d walked down the hill into the village that he had realized the only question he really needed to buy was who?

Without the killer in custody, he could theorize till the cows came home and never find the truth.

Jonas was convinced now that the killer was a local man. He had known that Margaret Priddy lay paralysed in the back bedroom of her home, he had left Yvonne Marsh in a stream that was barely visible from the road, and he had crawled through the only window at Sunset Lodge that Rupert Cooke had been too cheap to modernize, then bound Gary Liss’s corpse in a vast curtain which had been there for years but which was hardly visible, stuffed behind the piano as it was. Jonas vaguely remembered having seen it before – probably because Sunset Lodge was a regular part of his beat, along with schools, pubs and village halls.

The killer must be local, which meant Jonas must know him. He knew everybody.

What would he look like?

If Jonas could stare into enough eyes for long enough, would he glimpse the killer looking back? Would his gaze burn like Holy Water on a demon? Would Jonas feel cold jelly fill his bones, and recoil in recognition of evil?

He didn’t know.

How could he? He had no experience.

So he needed help.

A rhythmic sound and a pendulum blur in his vision brought him slowly back to the playing field and reminded him of why he had stopped here on his way to the mobile unit to report for whatever duty Marvel saw fit to assign him.

On the half-pipe ramp, Steven Lamb swooped through lazy arcs, turning smoothly at each lip, accompanied only by the hypnotic rumble of the skateboard’s wheels. He had cleared the snow from the ramp with a rusted spade, which now stood upright in the resulting lumpy pile of white, with Steven’s anorak slung over it.

Jonas walked across the crunchy snow, wondering whether he was following in the footsteps of the killer. Today was overcast and promised more snow – very different from the shiny morning that had greeted the horror of Yvonne Marsh.

He stopped six feet from the ramp and said, ‘Hi.’

‘Hi,’ said Steven, his eyes always fixed on the next lip, the next turn, the next swoop. His face was serene with the rhythm of it all.

Jonas watched the boy swing back and forth with complete grace – the slight bend of the knees before each ascent the only visible effort in near-perpetual motion.

He wished he didn’t have to do this.

‘How are you?’ he asked.

‘Fine, thanks,’ said Steven.

‘Just thought I’d ask. After the other day.’ He thought again of Steven sinking to the ground beside the stream, his dark eyes huge in his white face.

Steven rolled to the lip of the pipe, was suspended there for a brief moment, straight-legged, defying gravity… and then flicked his board round and passed Jonas going the other way. Jonas noticed that his mouth had tightened, and that the lack of eye contact now looked more like avoidance.

‘I know what happened to you, Steven,’ he said quietly.

Although he’d never given any indication of it, Jonas knew that four years earlier, while trying to find the body of his missing Uncle Billy, Steven Lamb had almost died at the hands of a serial killer.

The boy didn’t make the turn this time. He let his board carry him backwards down the ramp and halfway up the opposite side, before slowly putting a foot down and pushing off once more.

‘Can we talk about it?’

Steven said nothing, his eyes fixed on the ramp, on the lip – but a new vertical frown-line had appeared between his brows.

‘I need your help.’

Steven continued to skate, but his rhythm had gone. The skateboard barely reached the lip – or overshot and made him teeter – and his arms were working now instead of hanging loosely at his sides.

‘I need to know…’ started Jonas. ‘I need to know what to look for. I need to know what you see in the eyes of a killer.’

The skateboard clattered noisily and flipped over as Steven stepped off it and took a few faltering steps to stop himself falling. It slid back down the ramp towards him. He bent and picked it up angrily, and headed for his spade and anorak.

‘Nothing,’ he said, not looking at Jonas. He tugged the spade free of the snow, and slung it over his shoulder, yanking his anorak off the handle as he did so. Every jerky angle of his body screamed at Jonas that he wanted to be left alone.

But Jonas couldn’t leave him alone. He spoke urgently to the boy. ‘I know you don’t want to remember it, Steven. I hate to ask you, believe me. But I have to know. Before he kills again, I have to know. Please!’

Steven made to go around him, and Jonas put out a hand to halt him, but the boy stopped before he could be touched. He looked away from Jonas, his chest heaving and his cheeks high with colour.

‘Nothing!’ he said with low vehemence. ‘You see nothing.’

Marvel and Reynolds sat side by side on a velveteen sofa so small that their thighs touched. Alan Marsh sat opposite in a matching easy chair.

Reynolds looked around the room.

The mantel held four or five sympathy cards and a couple of Christmas ones between family photos and a repeating motif of snub-nosed ceramic Dickensian boys, doing boy-stuff like whistling jauntily or selling newspapers. On the table there were more cards – opened but left in a pile. There was also an old photograph of Yvonne Marsh propped against a jumbled pile of clean laundry, like some kind of shrine to the memory of housework.

‘So what was that all about the other day with Danny and Jonas Holly?’ said Marvel, jerking his thumb randomly at the ugly striped wallpaper behind him.

Alan Marsh sighed and opened his hands in a ‘beats me’ gesture.

Elizabeth Rice had taken Danny Marsh to the pub. It wasn’t difficult – she’d told them he had a little crush on her and she’d promised to buy.

Marvel said nothing further, allowing the aching silence slowly to reveal to Alan Marsh that this was not a social call.

‘Well…’ the man started haltingly, then stopped. He was in overalls even though Rice had reported that he wasn’t working. Apparently the habit was just too much to break while his mind was already distracted by the murder of his wife. He was wearing slippers rather than steel toe-caps though, Reynolds noticed – as if he’d remembered halfway through dressing that his wife was dead and he wasn’t going to work after all.

Reynolds sighed and wondered why Marvel was going all round the houses before asking more relevant questions about Danny. It wasn’t like him.

He wished he couldn’t feel Marvel’s hip against his.

‘Them used to be friends. When ’em were nippers. Dunno what happened there…’

He trailed off again.

Marvel realized he was going to have to tweeze information out of Alan Marsh like splinters. It was a job he hated. He preferred blunter tools.

‘How old were they then?’

‘’Bout ten, I suppose.’

‘Were they very close?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, were they best friends?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Alan a little dismissively. ‘I was working mostly. Yvonne would know that.’

Yeah, but she’s dead, Marvel felt like pointing out, but didn’t. He could be pretty sensitive when he tried.

‘Would they play here much?’

Again Alan Marsh made an all-purpose gesture of ‘who knows?’ ‘It was a long time back,’ he said. ‘Seemed like it. Why do you want to know, anyway?’

Marvel hadn’t expected the question and was annoyed that he hadn’t anticipated it. He blustered a little. ‘We’re always concerned when a serving officer gets into a public brawl, Mr Marsh. Aren’t you?’

The man shrugged. ‘Danny was mazed. And he took the first swing.’

That was the countryside for you, Marvel supposed. In town, Jonas Holly would already have been suspended and have a lawsuit pending. Here the victim’s own father thought he deserved a good beating by the police.

Refreshing.

Reynolds sighed again and Marvel glared at him before turning back to Alan Marsh, who looked disinterested in life itself, let alone this particular conversation.

‘Have you ever seen Officer Holly behave in that way before, Mr Marsh?’

‘No, but I seen Danny behave like that plenty!’

‘Well, he’s just lost his mother in tragic circumstances.’

‘Bollocks to that,’ said Marsh. ‘Just the way he is. Has been for years.’

Marvel was surprised and looked it, so Alan Marsh went on.

‘He’d bin under the doctor sometimes. Psychiatrist. You know.’

Marvel did know. His nose for motive started to quiver.

‘What’s wrong with him, Mr Marsh?’

‘Not much. Just a bit here and there, you know. Not dangerous or nothing like that. Just a bit down sometimes, that’s all.’

‘Depressed?’

‘I suppose so. A bit down.’

‘Has he ever been hospitalized for depression or something like that?’

‘Oh, no,’ said Alan Marsh definitely. ‘He’s not a nutter, see? Just a bit up and then a bit down.’

‘Manic depressive,’ suggested Reynolds, who thought he’d have to get up and leave if Alan Marsh said ‘a bit down’ one more time.

‘If that’s what you call it.’

‘Always?’

‘Not always,’ said Alan Marsh, looking as if he was thinking about it for the first time. ‘Since he were about twelve or thirteen. About then.’

‘And that’s about the time he and Jonas fell out?’ said Marvel, back on track.

‘Suppose so.’

‘Can you think of any specific reason?’ said Marvel, without one single ounce of hope that Alan Marsh would.

‘No.’

Of course he couldn’t. That would be too bloody easy.

They left.

‘What’s this interest in Jonas, sir?’

Marvel clamped his teeth together. Trust Reynolds to leap to the right conclusion.

He thought his left little toe was getting damp – just on the short walk to the car! He’d have to throw these shoes away. Beyond the village the snow was a Christmassy white blanket. Here it was just ridges of icy slush and running water. Wherever they went, whatever they did, they were accompanied by the gurgling of drains working overtime. At night it all froze again and made every step a hazard. Damn the doglegs that kept him from wellingtons and dry feet.

‘He bothers me.’

Reynolds smiled. ‘We like him now, do we, sir?’

Up until that very second, Marvel had only had a suspicion. A hunch. An intuitive feeling that all was not quite right with Jonas Holly.

But the moment Reynolds said that – in that amused, condescending tone – Marvel decided that he really did like Holly after all. Liked him a lot.

And that he was right.

And that he would do almost anything to prove Reynolds wrong.

It was over.

Danny Marsh knew it.

He’d known it the moment he’d run across the playing fields behind his father and seen his mother lying in the frost like a downed footballer waiting for a magic sponge or a stretcher.

Danny had known it was the beginning of the end for him; that he would never make it alone.

His mother had known him. One of only two people who did.

For years she had let him know – by her look, by her touch, by the stories she pointed out casually in newspapers – that she knew, and even understood. And although they’d never discussed it properly, knowing that had helped.

She would toss down the newspaper beside him on the table and mutter darkly, ‘Got what he deserved!’ or ‘Poor boy. If only he’d told someone.’

Danny would say nothing. He had nothing he cared to tell. Just knowing she still loved him was enough. All through the bitter tears, the dark-tempered years and the razor-blade at the wrist, she loved him. While others started to walk away from him in the schoolyard, stopped passing him the ball, whispered as he left a room… Through all that, Yvonne Marsh had loved him like a big anchor on a small boat in a wild sea.

And then she’d started to just… forget.

Forget that she loved him.

Forget that they shared a secret.

Forget even that she was his mother and he was her son.

It happened slowly and in patches, but it happened. And Danny found that he was supposed to be the anchor now. Dressing her, feeding her, watching her, locking her in, following her out, fetching her back…

A boat is not an anchor. Yvonne Marsh was deep beneath the waves with a broken rope that swayed with the tides. Sometimes he could grasp that rope and feel the old tug of her. But, mostly, once his mother’s mind was lost at sea, Danny Marsh was set adrift.

Even Jonas had let go of the line that had tethered him to the rest of the world.

Now, as Danny sat in the little room where he had grown up – where the back of the door still showed a faded poster of Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction – he thought about Jonas Holly.

Instead of a secret strengthening their bond, Jonas had been the first to withdraw.

No more fishing, no more crazy dares, no more galloping about the moors. Once, when Jonas had brought an injured baby rabbit to school in a shoebox, he’d looked wary and turned away so that Danny couldn’t stroke it the way all the other kids had.

When Danny had finally summoned up the guts to ask him what was wrong – even though he knew – Jonas had bitten his lip and tried to go around him. Jonas was smaller then, younger by almost a year, and Danny had stopped him with a hand in his chest. Jonas had knocked the hand away, and before Danny realized it, they were fighting. A proper fight. Not some spat over a penalty kick or a broken Tamagotchi – a fight with bruises and blood and kicking and gouging, which went on long enough for teachers to be summoned and then to arrive. Even after Mr Yates the PE teacher had yanked them apart, they had both tried their hardest to lash out with their feet, and Jonas had pulled a handful of change from the pocket of his grey flannels and hurled it at Danny.

Nothing had ever hurt him so much. Not then, at least. Not until the day his demented mother had screamed in terror and threatened to call the police if he didn’t get out of her house.

He could still feel the coin slicing his brow and the feeling of shock and the sheer unfairness of it all. He knew he’d done the right thing. Even if it had been in the wrong way. It wasn’t his fault it had all got fucked up. Why couldn’t Jonas see it like that?

Danny sighed and got up now and looked in the cracked mirror of the wardrobe. The scar was still there above his left eye.

Danny wondered if Jonas still remembered that, at least. He always acted like he didn’t remember anything, but surely the scar would remind him of that? Remind him of being friends, and of what that really meant. It wasn’t just for good times, it was for bad times too. It was about sticking together and sacrifice. It was about doing something for somebody and expecting nothing in return.

Except maybe gratitude.

Danny Marsh stared into the mirror and watched his face fight tears. Despite her inconstant love, losing his mother was like losing the last part of himself that was a blameless boy. There was nobody else in the world he could turn to now. Not even his father, who could not be expected to catch up with reality so late in life.

And Jonas Holly – who owed him everything – had never even thanked him.

Jonas gave Lucy her stuff. He’d got better at it over the years, but it was never routine to finish the washing up and then plunge needles into your wife’s hip. The little bruises never faded, just went brown and got covered up by new ones.

He looked down at her now, lying curled on her side with her bruised backside exposed, and could hardly bear her vulnerability. He wished Dr Wickramsinghe could be here, wished he could feel what he felt when he looked down at Lucy, wished he could feel the fear that simmered inside him that he never dared show.

She raised her head and looked round at him, a gentle smile on her lips.

‘Stop looking at my bum, pervert!’

Jonas smiled. He pulled her pyjamas back up her hip, then slid on to the couch behind her, tucking his long legs against hers, tugging her tummy towards him so they were touching everywhere. She covered his hand with hers and he buried his nose in the back of her neck. She smelled like fresh laundry.

‘Are you still going out?’ she said softly.

Jonas froze. Why was she asking? Was she planning something? He experienced a moment of pure panic as his memory of that day crashed through his brain like a breaker in a rock-pool. Her half-open eyes and her cold, cold hands, and the lifetime it took for the ambulance to come, while all the time he sat on the floor behind the front door and begged her not to leave him. The memory was so strong that he felt his stomach flip-flop in fear and tears burn his eyes.

He cleared his throat and made a huge effort to sound normal. ‘I don’t have to go.’

‘I don’t mind,’ she said, squeezing the back of his hand.

It sounded like the truth, but who could be sure?

They lay like that for a while and he knew that they were thinking different things in different ways and that a universe separated their minds even while their bodies shared heat.

‘I love you,’ he whispered, so low that if his lips hadn’t been against her ear she would never have heard him.

She paused almost imperceptibly, then said, ‘I love you too.’

It had snowed and stopped again during the afternoon, leaving just a couple of inches on the ground. The moon was getting big and the fields looked ice blue under its gaze, but in the village itself the snow had been trampled to slush which had then frozen in the dropping night temperature, making for treacherous conditions.

Jonas walked carefully up the street, past the pub and the church and Mr Jacoby’s shop to the school, without seeing anyone.

On the way back he stopped at the shop and looked in the window at the little cards stuck there advertising free kittens and bikes for sale. They made him think of the note that had been left under his wiper, and once again he got that unpleasant feeling of being watched. He turned but saw no one. Then, feeling slightly foolish, he backed into the alleyway beside the shop, where he could not be seen. From there he looked at the houses opposite.

Straight across the road was the Marsh home – a little two up, two down, which he knew was pale green but which looked merely grubby in the orange light of the streetlamps.

There was a light on behind the curtains in Danny’s bedroom – or what used to be Danny’s bedroom when they were boys; Jonas thought it probably still was. Next door to that was Angela Stirk’s house, where Jonas knew Peter Priddy spent every Saturday night that her husband was away. Jonas guessed it was one of her neighbours who had split on him to Marvel, sick of the noise. On the other side of the Marshes was the home of Ted Randall, who grew giant vegetables for the county show, then the Peters’ house, to which Billy Peters had never returned and where Steven Lamb lived now like a replacement… Jonas realized he could travel right down the street with his eyes, naming the residents of each little home, knowing their stories, keeping their secrets.

He saw Neil Randall limping his way home from the pub on the opposite pavement. He wondered what it was like to wake up in the sand and see your leg beside your head, which is what he’d heard had happened to Neil. How curious. How strange. How much easier to tie your shoelaces. Jonas smiled, and felt guilty.

He looked back up the street, but all was calm.

‘Shit!’

The word was accompanied by a scrape and a thud, and Jonas looked across the road to see Neil on his back in the gutter between two parked cars. He hurried over.

‘All right, Neil?’ said Jonas, offering his hand.

Neil looked at it, then ignored it and tried to sit up by himself. Jonas withdrew his hand and let him struggle. The smell of booze came off him in waves, over an undertow of profanity.

Jonas remembered Neil Randall at school. He had been a star on the football field – quick on his feet and tough in a tackle. That was with two legs, of course.

‘Fuck,’ said Neil, and Jonas became aware that he was groping at his own thigh. He looked down and saw that Neil’s right leg had grown about a foot longer than the left. For a second his brain couldn’t adjust to the anomaly – then he realized that Neil Randall’s prosthetic limb had come loose and was slowly working its way out of his trouser leg. By the orange light of the streetlamp he could see the edge of a thick sock and the start of a shiny plastic shin.

Jonas bent and started to try to push it back up, but it just bunched Neil’s jeans at the empty hip.

‘No’tha’way!’ slurred Neil, shoving his hands off. ‘Take it off.’

Feeling surreal, Jonas pulled carefully on the slush-covered boot. The limb came so far and then stopped, the thigh caught in the narrow leg of Neil Randall’s jeans.

‘It’s stuck,’ he informed him.

‘What?’ said Neil aggressively, as if it was all his fault.

‘It’s stuck in your jeans, mate. You want me to push it back inside?’

‘Get it off!’ said Neil.

‘It’s stuck,’ said Jonas, getting impatient. He was supposed to be on anti-killer patrol, not playing tug-of-war with a fake leg.

‘Fuck you, get it off!’

Jonas stood up and yanked hard. Neil Randall bumped off the kerb and into the road on his back with the violence of the tug, but his leg stayed in his jeans.

‘Watchmefuckinhead!’

‘You want me to pull it off or not?’ said Jonas.

‘No, leave it. Jus’ fucking leave it.’

Jonas let go of the leg and it splashed down in the slush in the road. He thought immediately of Marvel dropping the leg of the dead pony.

It made him brusque enough to walk round behind Neil and grasp him under the arms.

‘Leave off!’

Jonas ignored him and pulled him back on to the pavement and towards his house, as Neil twisted and flailed. ‘Bastard! Ge’yofuckinhandsoffme y’bastard!’

Something hit Jonas hard in the side of the head, making him stagger sideways and fall to one knee, dragging Neil Randall with him. They both grunted at the fall and Jonas’s helmet landed in the snow.

Groggily he put one hand down to steady himself and touched his ear with the other, as he looked up and down the street to see who had hit him.

For a second he couldn’t grasp what he was seeing.

Then it all became horribly clear.

Suspended above the snow-covered, orange-flavoured street by what looked like a sheet was Danny Marsh. His kicking foot was what had caught Jonas in the ear.

Jonas got up in a dream.

A nightmare.

‘Jesus!’ said Neil Randall.

One second Jonas was just watching, the next he had Danny’s shoes and ankles in his big hands, trying to take his weight, trying to push him upwards and against the cottage wall as he jerked, and someone was shouting, loudly and incoherently, and Jonas knew it was him but he had no idea what he was saying because his whole world was a jumble as he held his old friend’s feet and tried to keep the pressure off his neck, tried to keep him alive, kept losing his grip… as Danny bobbed and writhed in the frozen air.

Jonas saw a yellow light and knew that the door had been opened.

He heard people shouting and rushing towards him.

He was dimly aware of Elizabeth Rice’s shouts to get to the bedroom and pull Danny up from there, and the sound of men thudding upstairs.

But before they even made it to the window, the kicks turned to spasms and he felt the hot trickle of piss running up his sleeves – and Jonas Holly knew that Danny Marsh was dead.

They lowered him from the window on his own bedsheet, recalling a less deadly childhood adventure, and Jonas felt his friend’s body pass solidly through his arms, head lolling and knees buckling as his feet touched the pavement.

Jonas knelt beside him in the icy snow and pumped the still-warm chest, and pinched the still-warm nose, and sealed his lips to the lips of the son, just as he had to the mother. All the while Neil Randall watched wide-eyed, propped on his elbows and with one leg six feet long.

Too late. Too late. Too late. The words ticked like a clock, low and calm inside his head, and finally Jonas heard them. And from somewhere, his neglected memory salvaged the fact that the hearing is the last sense to leave the dying consciousness.

He stopped trying to bring Danny back and instead – for the second time tonight – bent so close to a warm ear that he could feel his own breath coming back at him.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

Then Jonas Holly got slowly to his feet and asked whether someone had called an ambulance.

They had.

He took off his jacket and laid it over Danny Marsh’s face and asked people to please step back.

They did.

He watched Alan Marsh come out of his house, saw his eyes roll back and his knees buckle, just as his dead son’s had done mere moments before, then Jonas heard the soft crunch as the man’s head dropped almost silently into the snow.

There was a note.

‘What do you know about this?’

Jonas stared dumbly at the note they had found in Danny’s room, then slowly shook his head.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

It was 3am. They were in the mobile unit. The ambulance had taken Danny’s body away. Jonas’s sleeves were still wet up to the armpits with piss; he could feel it every time he moved and smell it every time he drew breath.

‘Bollocks,’ said Marvel. ‘You knew it was him all along.’

‘That’s not true!’

It wasn’t! Jonas felt panicky that Marvel could even think it! He was an officer of the law and if he was aware of wrongdoing, he would take action – whoever the hell it was doing the wrong.

Apart from Lucy.

Probably.

But that was all!

‘I don’t believe Danny killed anyone.’

‘He cracked,’ said Marvel. ‘Under the pressure from his mother going bananas. Killed Margaret Priddy as a kind of trial run most likely, then his own mother. Then the people up at Sunset Lodge.’

‘Why?’ said Jonas. ‘Why kill anyone after he’d killed his mother, if that was the problem?’

‘Maybe he passed the tipping point,’ said Marvel, pleased that he’d remembered without recourse to Reynolds. ‘Maybe once he cracked, the floodgates just opened. We were about to pull him in. The night of the killings at Sunset Lodge, he got out of a window at his house. We’ve got shoe prints on the sill. Didn’t know that, did you?’

‘No,’ said Jonas, and thought of the voice calling his name from the shadows beyond the garden gate that very same night, luring him out into the freezing dark…

Jonas!

It had sounded like Danny.

But it had been a dream. Hadn’t it?

If you won’t do your job…

He had no idea what Marvel meant.… then I’ll do it for you.

The mobile unit was cramped, damp and smelly. A flickering fluorescent strip made this feel like a Stasi interrogation.

‘Sir, even if I believed he killed those people, which I don’t, why would I cover it up?’

‘You two were mates. I saw you on the playing field after we dragged his mother out of the stream. Good mates, I’d say. If he had something to hide, I reckon either you knew about it, or you’ve got something to hide too.’

‘What?’ demanded Jonas. ‘What am I hiding?’

From the look on Reynolds’s face, he’d only just beaten him to the question. Reynolds looked embarrassed even to be there.

‘You tell me,’ said Marvel, and sat back in his chair with an air of dogged certainty. ‘First,’ he continued when he got no response, ‘first tell me why you hit Danny Marsh the other day.’

‘He swung at me!’

‘So arrest him. Don’t beat the shit out of him!’

‘I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration, sir,’ said Reynolds, and refused to look at Marvel so he could not be disciplined by a glare.

Jonas barely heard him. He recalled that feeling of threat that had come off Danny. While he laughed and joked about old times, Jonas had been consumed with fear, desperate for him to back off and stop… In hindsight it seemed very minor.

‘I felt threatened, sir,’ he said truthfully. ‘If I over-reacted, that’s why.’

‘Why did you fall out with him?’

Jonas was confused. ‘Fall out?’

‘When you were kids,’ Marvel insisted.

‘When we were kids?’ Jonas gave a small laugh.

‘Yes,’ said Marvel, deadly serious. ‘When you were eleven or so.’

Jonas looked blank.

‘Ten or eleven. You were best mates. Then one day you weren’t. What happened?’

The smell of burned things. Burned wood… burned hair… burned flesh.

Only confusing fragments.

‘I don’t remember, sir.’

‘Bollocks. You do.’

Jonas shrugged. He didn’t. He didn’t want to.

He looked around. The cramped unit was dingy and dirty. He didn’t think he could work in a place like this. There was a calendar on the wall that was four years out of date. Four years ago, Lu could have walked upstairs on her hands. Four years ago, Jonas was following another path to another place. Four years ago would do him nicely, thank you very much, so he let his mind linger there instead of here, where Lucy was dying, Danny was dead, and DCI Marvel was being a prick.

‘… to him? Holly!’

Jonas came back, blinking. ‘What?’

‘What did you say to him?’

‘Say to who?’

‘Whom,’ said Reynolds. ‘Sorry.’

They both ignored him.

‘To Danny Marsh. When he was dying. Rice says you said something to him.’

‘I didn’t say anything.’

‘Bollocks. Again.’

Marvel pushed his chair away from Jonas and went over to the fridge. He opened it and took out a can of cola. Generic cola.

‘I think I said, “Thank you.”’

‘Why?’

Jonas frowned. ‘I don’t know.’

It was the truth. He had no idea. He’d taken his lips from Danny’s mouth and slid them round to his ear without any thought of why or of what he was going to say when he got there. There was just something inside him that had to be said. Had to be said. And when he’d said it, it had felt right.

Jonas!

The voice at the gate had been Danny Marsh, he was sure.

He’d wanted to talk to him.

Had Danny left him the note?

If so, what was the job Danny wanted him to do?

The dead eye of the pony. The prickle of hay against his cheek. The woman’s face at the dusty window…

Pfffftt! Marvel opened the cola and Jonas came back with a start to find him and Reynolds regarding him with interest.

‘He’s dead, Holly. You can’t protect him. Not if you call yourself a policeman.’

Jonas couldn’t breathe.

Call yourself a policeman?

How did he know? How did Marvel know? He’d never told him what the first note said!

Jonas sat there, staring wide-eyed at Marvel while his mind screamed at him, Don’t stare! Don’t look at him! He’ll know that you spotted the slip! But he couldn’t move – even his eyes.

‘Get out,’ Marvel said. ‘I’ll speak to you tomorrow.’

Lucy Holly was sitting halfway up the stairs when she felt death approaching.

She had known for a while that she was dying. Every new symptom was a reminder of the fact that she wasn’t going to just snap out of it one day; that this thing inside her had come to stay and planned to kill her, like a psycho in the spare room. That craziness had become routine.

But she had never felt like this before.

She did not often go up and down stairs during the day. It was a chore that could take half an hour sometimes. Jonas had plumbed a toilet into the little shed outside the back door of the old cottage, which she used in all but the coldest weather. But she had woken at 5am to find Jonas was not beside her. Immediately, she knew she would not get back to sleep, so she edged downstairs in the darkness to make tea and to get her book and then decided to take both back to bed with her.

On the bottom step she’d put the luggage for her journey – the cup of tea, her book, a new tube of toothpaste, and the knife Jonas had made her promise to keep with her, even though she felt like a neurotic New Yorker every time she touched it. The thought of having to answer the door to somebody while holding it filled her with English embarrassment. But she’d promised Jonas, and mostly remembered to carry it from room to room with her, even though she thought there was more chance of falling off her crutches on to the knife than there was of it being of any use in repelling an invader.

She’d leaned her downstairs sticks against the banisters, lowered herself to the third step and started her little adventure, moving each item up a step before she levered herself on to the next tread. She got into a nice rhythm – almost laughing at how silly it was to feel that way about inching upstairs on your backside. She had good days like this, where her arms and legs felt stronger, and it always made her happy. Ever the competitor, Lucy got faster and faster, moving, hoisting, sipping tea, moving, hoisting, sipping tea… until suddenly she slipped, lurching sideways and banging her arm and her head painfully into the wall. She’d put the heel of her hand on Fate Dictates, which had skidded off the stair and now lay open and face-down in the hallway.

‘Shit! ’ Lucy bit her lip while her funny bone grinningly punished her for being careless. She’d dropped the knife down a few treads too, and knocked her mug so that some tea had dotted the carpet.

Lucy had slipped before; she had fallen before; she had hurt herself worse than she was hurt now.

But this time… This time she understood death.

With the house wrapped in the cocoon of snow that made it quiet as a tomb, Lucy became aware that her own breathing was the only sound that demarcated her living from her dying.

She held it.

She sat halfway up the stairs and held her breath and let the silence assault her ears.

This was what it would be like.

Underneath the dirt.

Lying still and silent and helpless in a box waiting for nature to worm its way into her so that it could reclaim her for the greater good.

Lucy Holly was not stupid. She understood the cessation of consciousness that comes with death. She understood that if she were aware of anything it would be in a spiritual sense, and that her body was just meat. Meat rotting on young bones.

But this vivid preview was new. This feeling that she was lying in this house with her wedding ring on and a posy on her chest, and that death had finally arrived with the snow and was even now pressed against the windows, testing the chinks made by the mice and the sparrows, trying to slither inside to get at her while she sat halfway up the stairs without even Jonas’s knife to protect herself with. This was all new.

Before – before the pills – death had been an abstract notion, a way to be relieved of the pain. The relief of pain had been the goal – and she’d barely thought about the death that would facilitate that. Now she knew she’d turned a corner. She didn’t only know it was coming, she knew how it would feel when it did. How it would look. How it would taste.

It was overwhelming. And inconsequential.

She’d thought she would cry, but instead she got calm, calm, calm, as if someone had drugged her tea. She wished they had. She wished suddenly and fiercely that someone had drugged her tea and that she would fall asleep here on the stair that always creaked, and that they would come and kill her softly so she’d never have to bother with the rest of the stairs. They were a struggle and she was sick of them.

Her bum started to ache and she looked at her watch to see she had sat here for more than an hour. No wonder she was so cold and desperate for the loo.

She would go outside.

Lucy left the toothpaste and the mug of cold tea on the stairs.

She picked up the knife as she slid back down past it and, when she got to the bottom, she closed Fate Dictates and never opened it again.

Jonas walked home in a daze just before 6am.

He’d felt as if he were floating ever since Danny died in his arms. Like a spacewalking astronaut whose tether has been severed, Jonas felt himself drifting slowly away from everything, and off towards nothing.

How did Marvel know?

Jonas had not been specific about the wording of the first two notes. He hadn’t wanted to say the word ‘crybaby’, so had been fuzzy about the first note too, for the sake of appearing consistent, even if it was only consistently stupid. But Marvel’s words had snapped everything back into sharp relief.

Call yourself a policeman.

Why had he said it? How did he know?

As sleet started to spit in Jonas’s face, his mind turned slow, gravity-free circles around Marvel, looking at him from new angles and with fresh eyes.

Marvel had never liked him. He wasn’t sure how, but he’d managed to piss the man off right from the start of this investigation.

Now he began to wonder why.

Even from his doorstep viewpoint, Jonas had the feeling that Marvel had been lost on the case, that he’d employed a scattergun approach to suspects, that there was no real sense of focus in his investigation.

The way he’d over-reacted to finding Jonas on the doorstep of Margaret Priddy’s told of a man who was floundering and insecure, and Jonas had thought he had smelled booze on the man’s breath. Or maybe just in his sweat.

When the alleged vomit had disappeared, Marvel had told him to do his job – and the way he’d said it, ‘crybaby’ was only a whisper away.

And now he’d repeated the first note almost word for word.

Had he seen it?

Had he written it?

It sounded stupid, even inside the privacy of his own head, but did Marvel have some kind of connection with the killer?

Jonas shuddered at the thought. He had Reynolds’s card still in his breast pocket. Would Reynolds be discreet if Jonas voiced his fears to him? He doubted it. Jonas had the impression that Reynolds did not like Marvel that much, but that didn’t necessarily mean he’d take sides against him.

He looked up into the sleet to see that he was almost at his gate.

He needed to speak to Lucy. Lucy’s brain worked faster than his at the best of times, and right now his brain was stuffed so full, and was nonetheless so empty of solutions, that it was as if a super-massive black hole was expanding slowly within his head, ready to burst out and swallow up the whole world in compressed nothingness.

Lucy was on the living-room floor, weeping and gnarled up with pain and with an unopened bottle of pills beside her.

In an instant the black hole in Jonas’s head shrank to a pinprick and his heart exploded into his throat with fear.

He dropped to the carpet beside her and tried to gather her into his arms, but she tucked up and resisted.

Her head was hot with tears, but the rest of her was icy from being on the floor. The fire was long burned out and had turned to white ashes. Jonas got her tartan rug and wrapped it around her, then lay down behind her and wrapped his arms around that. He could keep her warm, even if he couldn’t keep her well.

‘Did you take anything, Lu?’

‘No!’ she shouted. ‘No, I didn’t!’

He squeezed her into his chest. ‘I meant for the pain.’

‘If I had then it wouldn’t be hurting so much!’ she yelled at him – and started a new bout of hopeless crying.

An hour later they were in the same position but on the bed, where Lucy had allowed herself to be carried.

The silence was complete – what isolation and winter had not dampered, the snow had shushed as it fell.

Jonas had given her three painkillers and the worst of it was over.

‘How do you feel?’ he whispered.

‘Better,’ she said. Better than what she did not say, but Jonas understood that, and hoped she knew that he did.

Jonas stared unblinkingly at the opposite wall of what he would always think of as his parents’ room.

‘Tell me about your night,’ she said, still with the weary trace of a sob in her voice.

She needed to forget her own. He knew that.

‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

How could he tell her? He felt numb. He felt detached. He didn’t know any more where lines could be drawn between past and present, good and evil, right and wrong.

‘Jonas?’

Jonas felt it all starting to rise in him. Everything underneath was coming to the surface – however much he tried to keep it down.

Tigger for Danny, Taffy for him. The slide of polished leather against his knees and the grip-and-release wonder of a whole beast held in his little-boy hands; the bunching and bumping of muscles under his backside; watching Danny fly along beside him and hoping he looked as free as his best friend did; the eager little ears, between which he’d viewed his whole world. For a happy while.

Jonas remembered.

Although he’d spent a lifetime forgetting.

He remembered the heady smell of the coarse mix and hay; the quiet sounds of hoofs brushing straw over concrete, and the velvet breath of Taffy’s muzzle touching his hair, while all the time he was held down and ordered not to cry while unspeakable things were done to him.

Unspeakable.

He shuddered against Lucy’s back.

‘Jonas?’

But Danny had seen. Danny had known. Maybe Danny had even had the same thing happen to him. He knew that must have been true, because even though they’d never spoken of it – because it was unspeakable – Danny had done something about it.

He’d burned the place down.

Now, here, twenty years later, Jonas’s head pounded and he twitched, as he remembered like a dog.

Going down the row of smouldering stables, roofs caved in and doors thrown open for the ponies to escape. Someone had done that. Someone who loved them had thought of the ponies. But the ponies had not escaped. Terrified by the flames, the ponies had screamed and died in the fire, just as Robert Springer had. Seven sad carcasses still in their boxes. Some so charred that only their legs protruded from a pile of ash, some barely damaged, killed by smoke.

Tigger was half gone but Taffy was unmarked – collapsed against the back wall of his stable, with his legs tucked under his chest, his clever little head bowed gracefully, and his soft lips pressed against the concrete, as if he were lying in a summer meadow nibbling at daisies.

The eighth carcass had already been taken away in an ambulance with a sheet over its blackened, grinning face.

The smell of death was overwhelming.

Turning to his friend through a blur of tears to find comfort in shared misery, Jonas had instead seen pale shock – and guilt.

‘Why didn’t they run away, Jonas? They should have run away!’

The ponies had died because of him. Because he was too weak to stop it.

Jonas started to shake.

‘Sweetheart. What’s wrong?’

‘Danny Marsh is dead,’ he told her bluntly.

And then – finally – he started to cry.

‘I’m glad he’s gone,’ said Joy Springer. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.’

Marvel was so surprised that he sloshed Cinzano on the kitchen table. The stuff wasn’t so bad once you got a taste for it.

Joy sat on a kitchen chair, elbows on the table and her glass outstretched for a refill. The old woman’s frizzy grey bun had escaped its grips and she looked like Albert Einstein on a bad-hair day.

‘Why?’ he said – and Marvel didn’t often say that around Joy Springer. He’d soon learned in their almost nightly sessions not to use certain words. Why was high on the list, with its answering convolutions and explanations, although When was the real killer, as it allowed Joy to ramble back over what felt like the last 150 years of her life – none of it of the slightest interest to Marvel. One night she had held him hell-bound, running through the names of her friends from nursery school onwards. No stories, no descriptions, no insightful recollections or pivotal moments – just a litany of meaningless names like a bore of biblical begattings.

‘Nothing,’ she said after a pause, and waggled her glass at him.

Marvel was instantly fascinated. All of a sudden here was something Joy Springer didn’t want to talk about.

‘You knew Danny Marsh?’

‘Years back.’ She shrugged. ‘Something be wrong with your arm, bay?’

But Marvel withheld the bottle and took a deep breath. ‘When?’

The story Joy Springer told was a good one. Everyone has to have one, Marvel reasoned, even if it was bullshit.

It was a story of flames and smoke and panic and of murder, which the coroner had stupidly ruled misadventure, after hearing of how Robert Springer was both an ardent horseman and an ardent smoker – two hobbies that Marvel gathered should be kept apart, like wives and girlfriends.

Not only was the coroner a conspiratorial fool, but Danny Marsh was the killer, according to Joy Springer. She became loud and slurred about it without ever giving Marvel any real evidence, then lost her thread a bit and went off at a paranoid tangent that included the prick of an executor, the lousy job a local builder had done on the stable conversions, and some idiot vet who said her cats needed worming.

After three more glasses of Cinzano, Joy Springer suddenly got up and wobbled across to the Welsh dresser. She opened a door on an avalanche of paperwork, old magazines, cards and photographs.

‘Robert’s things,’ she mumbled. ‘I don’t like to throw them away. Memories.’

Marvel wondered again at the sheer tedium of those memories. Who the hell would want to mull over them?

Yet another tumbler allowed her to find what she was looking for, and she handed Marvel a photograph.

‘Tha’s Danny Marsh when her were a bay,’ she slurred. ‘Little sod would be in jail if your lot had done a proper job, not living here throwing it in my face!’

Although the photo was of two boys of about ten years old, Marvel recognized Danny immediately. The photo had been kept bright in the dresser, and Danny Marsh’s brown hair had apparently been given the same cut its entire life – short back and sides. He didn’t look like a little sod; he looked like a cheeky, happy kid, holding the reins of a shaggy red pony. The photo had been taken at a show and both boys were in white shirts and Pony Club ties. The second boy was smaller and holding a brown pony with a red rosette fluttering from its bridle.

Marvel’s fingers twitched as he recognized Jonas Holly. That wide brow, dark eyes and nose that was already too straight for its age. Only the mouth here was different, and Marvel realized it was because he’d never seen Jonas smile.

He thought instantly of the dead pony on the moor. Of the way Jonas Holly had been almost pathologically unwilling to touch it – had actually refused to take a leg and help pull the carcass out of the road. And yet here he was with one arm thrown casually over the pony’s neck, a hank of mane in his little hand, leaning into the animal like a friend. What did kids say nowadays? Best friend for ever. That’s what the brown pony looked like it meant to Jonas.

What changed?

What changed in Jonas Holly to turn him from a boy who loved horses into a man who couldn’t even bear to touch a dead one?

‘Can I keep this?’ he asked Joy Springer.

But he’d looked at the photo for so long that she’d fallen asleep and was snoring with her shiny-knuckled hand still around her empty glass.

From the shadows outside the kitchen window, Reynolds watched Marvel finish his drink, then ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ his way across the icy cobbles to his room.

Elizabeth Rice had been too embarrassed to ask Alan Marsh whether she could go through his dead son’s clothing looking for a missing button so that he could be more conclusively branded a killer. More conclusively than hanging himself and leaving a confessional note, she thought with no little irritation. But because that’s what Marvel had ordered her to do by tomorrow, she was doing it now, at almost midnight, by torchlight and in secret.

While Alan Marsh was next door in a sleep induced by the local surfer-cum-doctor and his magic needle, she crept into his dead son’s room and started to do her duty.

Danny Marsh had been surprisingly neat for a young man who’d never been in the army. He didn’t have many clothes. Maybe a dozen shirts and T-shirts, a winter jacket, a summer jacket, three or four pairs of jeans and a cheap black suit she remembered he’d worn at his mother’s funeral.

All buttons were present.

A pair of black Doc Martens with steel toecaps had matched the Polaroid of the dusty shoe-print that the CSI had taken off her window sill. Danny Marsh had passed her silently in the night. Going out and coming in. Hadn’t hurt her. Hadn’t even woken her.

It didn’t matter now.

She found a small stash of porn under his shirts. Magazines on busty blondes and MILFs. Mild, really, by today’s standards. Certainly milder than the stuff that Eric often failed to wipe clear of their computer’s history.

She’d liked Danny Marsh. He was a good listener. When they’d been to the pub together that one time, he’d made her laugh. Rice sat down on the bed. It was still up against the window where Danny had pulled it so he could tie the sheet to it before jumping out.

That was where Alan Marsh found her fifteen minutes later when her loud sobs pulled him from his magic sleep.

He sat down beside her and took her hand in his and hushed her gently the way he always had Yvonne, whenever she remembered that she’d lost her mind. They sat there for a long time – the weeping police officer and the bereaved husband and father – their joined hands resting in her lap on a dog-eared copy of Big Jugs.