Darkside

Twenty-three Days

Margaret Priddy awoke to the brilliant beam of light she had been anticipating with fear and longing for years.

Finally, she thought, I’m dying. And tears of loss mingled with those of joy on her lined cheeks.

Ever since her fall she had lain here – or somewhere very like it – slack and immobile and dependent on other people for her most basic needs. Food, water, warmth. Toilet – which the nurses carried out as if her dignity were numbed, not her body. Company…

The nurses tried their best.

‘Morning, Margaret! Beautiful morning!’

‘Morning, Margaret! Sleep well?’

‘Morning, Margaret! Raining again!’

And then they would either run out of paltry inspiration or jabber on about their night out getting drunk, or their children’s seemingly endless achievements at school. A relentless rota of cheerful bustle with big busts and bingo wings. The break in silence was welcome at first but, in the face of inanity, Margaret quickly longed for solitude.

She was grateful. Of course she was. Grateful and polite – the way an English lady should be in the circumstances. They had no way of knowing about her gratitude, of course, but she tried to convey it in her eyes and she thought some of them understood. Peter did, but then Peter had always been a sensitive boy.

Now – as the light made her eyes burn – Margaret Priddy thought of her son and the tears of loss took precedence. Peter was forty-four years old but she still always thought of him first as a five-year-old in blue shorts and a Batman T-shirt, running down the shingle in Minehead on the first beach holiday they’d ever taken.

She was leaving her little boy alone.

She knew it was silly, but that’s how she felt about it.

She was dying and he’d be all alone.

But still she was dying. At last. And it was just as she’d imagined – white and wonderful and pain-free.

It was only when she sensed the press of weight on the bed that was her home that she realized this was not the start of her journey to the Hereafter, but someone in her room with a torch.

Someone uninvited, invading her home, her room, her bed, the very air in front of her face…

Every fibre of Margaret Priddy’s being screamed to respond to the danger.

Unfortunately, every fibre of her being below the neck had been permanently disconnected from her brain three years before when old Buster – the most reliable of horses – had stumbled to his knees on a patch of ice, throwing her head-first into a wooden telegraph pole.

So instead of screaming, punching and fighting for what was left of her life, she could only blink in terror as the killer placed a pillow over her face.

He didn’t want to hurt her. Only wanted her dead.

As he suffocated Margaret Priddy with her own well-plumped pillow, the killer felt a rush of released tension, like an old watch exploding, scattering a thousand intricate parts and sending tightly wound springs bouncing off into nowhere as the bounds of the casing broke open around him.

He sobbed in sudden relief.

The feel of the old lady’s head through the pillow was comfortingly distant and indistinct. The unnatural stillness of her body seemed like permission to continue and so he did. He pressed his weight on to the pillow for far longer than he knew was necessary.

When he finally removed it and shone his torch into her face, the only discernible change in Margaret Priddy was that the light in her eyes had gone out.

‘There,’ thought the killer. ‘That was easy.’

First Lucy – and now this.

PC Jonas Holly leaned against the wall and took off his helmet so that his suddenly clammy head could breathe.

The body on the bed had played the organ at his wedding. He’d known her since he was a boy.

He could remember being small enough not to care that it wasn’t cool to be impressed by anything, waving at Mrs Priddy as she went past on an impossibly big grey horse – and her waving back. Over the next twenty-five years that scene had been repeated dozens of times, with all the characters in it evolving. Margaret growing older, but always vibrant; he stretching and growing, coming and going – university, Portishead, home to visit his parents while they were still alive. Even the horse changed, from a grey through any number of similar animals until Buster came along. Mrs Priddy always liked horses that were too big for her; ‘The bigger they are, the kinder they are,’ she’d told him once as he’d squinted up into the sky at her, trying to avoid looking at Buster’s hot, quivery shoulder.

Now Margaret Priddy was dead. It was a blessing really – the poor woman. But right now Jonas Holly only felt disorientated and sick that somehow, during the night, some strange magic had happened to turn life into death, warmth into cold and this world into the next.

Whatever the next world was. Jonas had only ever had a vague irreligious notion that it was probably nice enough.

This was not his first body; as a village bobby, he’d seen his fair share. But seeing Margaret Priddy lying there had hit him unexpectedly hard. He heard the nurse coming up the stairs and put his helmet back on, hurriedly wiping his face on his sleeve, hoping he didn’t look as nauseous as he felt. He was six-four and people seemed to have an odd idea that the taller you were, the more metaphorical backbone you should have.

The nurse smiled at him and held the door open behind her for Dr Dennis, who wore khaki chinos and a polo shirt at all times – as if he was in an Aussie soap and about to be whisked off in a Cessna to treat distant patients for snakebite in the sweltering outback, instead of certifying the death of a pensioner in her cottage on a damp January Exmoor.

‘Hello, Jonas,’ he said.

‘Right, Mark.’

‘How’s Lucy?’

‘OK, thanks.’

‘Good.’

Jonas had once seen Mark Dennis vomit into a yard of ale after a rugby match, but right now the doctor was all business, his regular, tanned face composed into a professional mask of thoughtful compassion. He went over to the bed and checked Margaret Priddy.

‘Nice lady,’ he said, for something to say.

‘The best,’ said Jonas Holly, with feeling. ‘Probably a blessing that she’s gone. For her, I mean.’

The nurse smiled and nodded professionally at him but Mark Dennis said nothing, seeming to be very interested in Margaret Priddy’s face.

Jonas looked around the room. Someone had hung a cheap silver-foil angel over the bed, and it twirled slowly like a child’s mobile. On the dresser, half a dozen Christmas cards had been pushed haphazardly aside to make way for more practical things. One of the cards had fallen over and Jonas’s fingers itched to right it.

Instead he made himself look at the old lady’s body. Not that old, he reminded himself, only sixty-something. But being bedridden had made her seem older and far more frail.

He thought of Lucy one day being that frail and tried to focus on Margaret lying on the bed, not his beautiful wife.

Her lips flecked with bile and soggy painkillers…

Jonas pushed the image away hard and took a deep breath. He focused and tried to imagine what Margaret Priddy’s last words might have been before the accident that crushed her spine and her larynx in one crunching blow. Final words spoken in ignorance three years before the demise of the rest of her body. Jonas thought probably: ‘Get on, Buster!’

‘Glad you’re here, Jonas,’ said Mark Dennis – and when he turned to look at him, Jonas Holly could see concern in the doctor’s face. His instincts stirred uneasily.

‘Her nose is broken.’

They both looked at the nurse, whose smile disappeared in an instant. She hurried over and stood beside the doctor as he guided her fingers to the bridge of Margaret Priddy’s nose.

‘See?’

She nodded, a frown making her ugly.

‘There’s no break in the skin or apparent bruising,’ said Mark Dennis in the annoying, musing way he had. ‘I’m no CSI, but I’d say a sharp blow was not the cause.’

Jonas hated people who watched American television.

‘You want to feel, Jonas?’

Not really. Still, he was a policeman and he should…

He swallowed audibly and touched the nose. It was cold and gristly and made Jonas – an ardent vegetarian – think of raw pork chops. Mark Dennis guided him and Jonas felt the break in Margaret Priddy’s nose move grittily under his fingers. Gooseflesh sprouted up to his shoulders and he let go and stepped back. Unconsciously he wiped his hand on the dark-blue serge of his uniform trousers, before realizing that the silence – coupled with two pairs of eyes looking at him questioningly – meant he was supposed to take charge; was supposed to do something professional and policeman-like.

‘Yuk,’ he said.

The detectives from Taunton must watch a lot of American television, too, thought Jonas as he observed them striding through Margaret Priddy’s tiny home, bumping into antiques, clustering in the hallway, and thumping up and down the narrow stairs like US Marines invading a potting shed.

Despite their expertise in the field of suspicious death, Jonas secretly wished he’d never called them in. Of course, not calling them was not an option, but even so…

Jonas was equipped to handle nothing beyond the mundane. He was the sole representative of the Avon & Somerset police force in seven villages and across a good acreage of Exmoor, which rolled in waves like a green and purple sea towards the northern shore of the county, where it met the Bristol Channel coming the other way. The people here lived in the troughs, leaving the heather-covered peaks to the mercy of the sun, wind, rain, snow and the thick, brine-scented mists that crept off the ocean, careless that this was land and not water, and blurring the boundary between the two. People walked on the exposed peaks but their lives were properly conducted in the folds and creases of Exmoor, out of the view of prying eyes, and where sounds carried only as far as the next looming common before being smothered by a damp wall of heather and prickly gorse.

These shaded vales where people grew held hidden histories and forgotten secrets, like the big dark pebbles in the countless shallow streams that crossed the moor.

But the homicide team now filling the two-hundred-year-old, two-up-two-down cottage with noise and action never stopped to listen to the undercurrents.

Jonas didn’t like Detective Chief Inspector Marvel, not only because the spreading, florid DCI’s name sounded like some kind of infallible superhero cop, but because DCI Marvel had listened to his account of the finding of Margaret Priddy with a look on his lined face that told of a bad smell.

It was unfair. Jonas felt he had recovered well after launching the investigation with the ignominious ‘Yuk’.

He had ascertained that the nurse – a robust fifty-year-old called Annette Rogers – had checked on Mrs Priddy at 2am without noticing anything amiss, before finding her dead at 6.15am.

Despite the obvious answer, he had dutifully quizzed Mark Dennis on the possibility of a woman being able to somehow break her own nose during the act of sleeping while also paralysed from the neck down.

He had escorted Mark Dennis and Annette Rogers to the front door with minimal deviation to maintain the corridor of entry and exit to the scene.

He had checked the bedroom window and quickly found scrape-marks surrounding the latch. It was only a four-foot drop from the sill to the flat roof of the lean-to.

He had secured the scene. Which here in Shipcott meant shutting the front door and putting a note on it torn from his police-issue notebook. He’d considered the content of that note with care, running from the self-important ‘Crime Scene’ – which seemed merely laughable on a scrap of lined paper – through ‘Police! Do Not Pass’ (too bossy) and ‘No Entry’ (too vague), finally ending up with ‘Please Do Not Disturb’, which appealed to everybody’s better nature and which he felt confident would work. And it did.

He had alerted Tiverton to the fact that foul play may possibly be involved in the death of Mrs Margaret Priddy of Big Pot Cottage, Shipcott, and Tiverton had called on the services of Taunton CID.

Taunton Homicide was a team of frustrated detectives generally under-extended by drunken brawls gone wrong, and Jonas thought Marvel should have been grateful for the call, not openly disdainful of him. He understood that in police hierarchy the village bobby – or ‘community beat officer’ as he was officially called – was the lowest of the low. He also knew that his youth worked against him. Any policeman of his age worth his salt should be at the top of his game – swathed in Kevlar, armed with something shiny, clearing tall buildings in his pursuit of criminal masterminds and mad bombers – not walking the beat, ticking off children and corralling stray sheep in some sleepy backwater. That was a job for an old man and Jonas had only just turned thirty-one, so it smacked of laziness or stupidity. Therefore Jonas tried hard to appear neither lazy nor stupid as he ran through his notes with Marvel.

It made no difference.

Marvel listened to the young PC’s report with a glazed look in his eyes, then asked: ‘Did you touch her?’

Jonas blinked then nodded – reddening at the same time.

Marvel pursed his lips. ‘Where?’

‘Her nose. Dr Dennis said it was broken and I felt it.’

‘Why?’

Jonas felt his face burn as everyone in the room seemed to have stopped what they were doing to watch him being grilled.

‘I don’t know, sir. Just to see.’

‘Just for fun?’

‘No, sir, the doctor said it was broken and I checked.’

‘Because you needed to confirm his diagnosis? Are you more highly qualified than him? Medically speaking?’ Marvel dripped sarcasm from every pore, and from the corner of his eye Jonas saw the Taunton cops grin and roll their eyes at each other.

‘No, sir.’

‘Anyone else touch her?’

‘The nurse, sir.’

‘Was she more highly qualified than Dr Dennis?’

‘No, sir.’

Marvel sighed and flapped his arms once helplessly like a man who has given up chasing down a mugger. The flap said, ‘There’s only so much you can do.’

‘So the doctor touched her. Then you touched her. Then the nurse touched her.’

Jonas didn’t correct Marvel on the sequence of events.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Anyone else?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You sure? Not the milkman? The village idiot? You didn’t get one man and his dog up here to give her a little poke?’

There were snorts of amusement all round.

‘I’m sure, sir.’

Marvel sighed, then asked: ‘What’s your name?’

‘PC Holly, sir.’

‘Have you ever heard of a crime scene, Holly?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Jonas hated Marvel now. The man was grandstanding in front of his team and Jonas shouldn’t have touched Margaret Priddy’s nose, but still…

‘Have you ever heard of contaminating a crime scene, Holly?’

‘Yes, sir.’ The heat of embarrassment was leaving Jonas and being replaced by a cool and distant anger, which he found easy to hide but which he knew he would nurture forever in that very small and stony corner where he kept all that was not kind, responsible and selfless in his heart.

‘And you understand that it’s a bad thing, don’t you?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘A stupid thing.’

Jonas wanted to punch him.

‘Yes, sir.’

Marvel smiled slowly.

‘Then why would you do that?’

Jonas was eight years old and Pete Bryant had put a cricket ball through Mr Randall’s greenhouse roof. Pete had run, but Jonas had dithered – and Mr Randall had gripped him in a single meaty claw and shaken his arm while shouting that same question into his face. Eight-year-old Jonas could have told Mr Randall that it was Pete who had thrown the ball, but he didn’t. Not because he was scared; not because he wasn’t a rat; just because it was too late; the damage was already done. The glass was already shattered, Mr Randall already angry, his bicep already bruised, his tears already flowing and his self-worth already pricked. All that was left was for him to get home as quickly as possible so he could shut his bedroom door and cry at the unfairness of it all without alerting his mother.

Now the thirty-one-year-old Jonas swallowed that same bitter pill and unfocused his eyes so he could look straight over Marvel’s greying hair.

‘I’m very sorry, sir.’

Marvel regarded the tall young policeman with a little disappointment. He’d really have preferred the fool to have got defensive and angry. He loved a good fight. Instead PC Holly had rolled over like a puppy and shown the world his belly.

Ah well.

Marvel turned away before speaking.

‘You can go,’ he said.

In small defiance, Jonas bit back his ‘Yes, sir’ and left without another word. Halfway down the stairs he heard Marvel say something he didn’t catch, and the laughter of the big-town cops.

Some investigation, thought DCI John Marvel, as he stared out at the leaden Somerset sky. A dead old woman with a broken nose. Big deal. But a suspicious death was a suspicious death and helped to justify the funding that kept his Task Force (as he used to like to call it over late suppers with Debbie) in existence. So if they could whip suspicious death up into murder, then all well and good.

Marvel had spent twenty-five years as a homicide detective. Half his life. To Marvel there was no other crime worth investigating – nothing that came close to the sheer finality of death by the hand of another. It kicked assault’s arse, rode roughshod over robbery and even trumped rape in his book. Of course, there were degrees – and not every case was a thrill. Some were one long slog from beginning to end, some went off like firecrackers and turned into damp squibs, while others started off quietly and then spiralled wildly out of control. There was no telling at the start how it was going to finish, but the thing that kicked each one off was what sustained Marvel after all these years. The body. The corpse. That stabbed, strangled, beaten, shot, dismembered, poisoned used-to-be-person hung over his head every day like a cat toy – endlessly fascinating, tantalizing, taunting, always reminding him of why he was here and the job he had to do.

The burgled replaced their televisions, bruises healed on the beaten, and the raped kept living, kept going to work and buying groceries and sending postcards and singing in the choir.

The murdered were dead and stayed dead.

For ever.

How could any true copper not love the murdered and the challenge they threw down from beyond the grave?

AVENGE ME!

Marvel could never hear that ghostly voice in his head without also imagining some kind of broad, dark cape billowing in righteous vengeance.

It was stirring stuff.

And Marvel was always stirred.

Eventually.

Even by a case like this in a place like this, he knew he would be stirred once death by violence was confirmed. He had to sort of grow into being stirred.

But until then, he was just a bit cheesed off.

Marvel sighed.

Margaret Priddy’s body had been removed to civilization – or what passed for it in this neck of the yokel woods. He hated to be out of town. He’d been born and brought up in London. Battersea, to be precise, where the stunted lime trees grown through lifting, cracking pavement were all the green he felt anyone should suffer. Once he’d carved his name in the bark and been repelled by the damp, greenish flesh his penknife had exposed. Sometimes as a kid he’d hung around a bus stop close to the park, but had rarely ventured in. Only on the occasional Saturday for a kickabout, and even then he’d never warmed to the muddy, olive-green grass. Playing behind the garages or under the railway arches was cleaner and faster. Grass was overrated, in Marvel’s opinion, and it was his constant gripe that most of the Avon and Somerset force area where he’d ended up working was covered in it.

Now here he was in this shit-hole village in the middle of a moor that didn’t even have the niceties of fences or barns on it, with the miserable prospect of having to conduct a murder investigation surrounded by the vagaries of gorse, yokels and pony shit instead of the sensible amenities of self-service petrol stations, meaningful road-signs and his beloved Kings Arms.

The Divisional Surgeon had already found cuts and bruising inside Margaret Priddy’s mouth where her lips had been crushed against her teeth, and the pathologist might find even more. All it would take now was for the Scientific Investigations Department in Portishead to confirm that the saliva and mucus on the well-plumped pillow found lying next to Mrs Priddy belonged to the victim, and they would have their upgrade to murder and their murder weapon all in one neat forensic package.

Marvel looked at the empty bed over which three white-paper-clad CSIs crouched like folk off to a costume party dressed as sperm.

‘I like the son for this,’ Marvel told DS Reynolds. Marvel loved saying that he ‘liked’ someone for something. It made him feel as if he were in a Quentin Tarantino film. His south-London accent was a handicap but not a bar to such pronouncements.

‘Yes, sir,’ said DS Reynolds carefully.

‘Sick of watching his inheritance pour down the home-nursing drain.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So what have we got?’

‘So far? Hairs, fibres, fluids—

‘Semen?’

‘Doesn’t look like it, sir. Just what was on the pillow, and urine.’

‘I thought she was catheterized?’

‘I think the bag must’ve burst.’

‘So the perp could be covered in piss.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Lovely. Anything missing?’

‘Doesn’t look like a burglary, sir. If something was taken then the killer knew exactly what he was looking for and where to find it.’

Marvel glanced around the room with its old dark furniture. A lifetime of use was evidenced by the wear around the dull brass handles on the chest of drawers. Nothing looked disturbed; even the lace doily on the dresser was flat and un-mussed.

‘I want the names of all the nurses employed and hair samples from everyone at the scene.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Prints?’

‘Not so far.’

It was a bitterly cold January and the killer could have worn gloves for that reason alone. But Marvel hoped he was not just some opportunist burglar who had overreacted to finding a woman watching him silently from the bed in what he’d thought was an empty room. Marvel hoped he’d planned ahead. Whether he’d planned burglary or murder ahead was open to question, but the fact that it looked unlikely that they would find prints made the whole case more interesting to Marvel. He hated to waste his talents on the low and the stupid, and – since coming to Somerset – he’d started to tire a little of the flailing drunks who’d turned from nuisances to killers because of the unfortunate coming together of heads and kerbs, and of the glazed teenagers whose generosity in sharing their gear had been repaid by their ingrate friends dying curled around pub toilets with shit in their pants and in their veins.

No, the gloves made the killer a more worthwhile quarry in Marvel’s eyes.

Just how worthwhile remained to be seen.

Four hundred yards before the sign that read PLEASE DRIVE SLOWLY THROUGH SHIPCOTT was the house Jonas had grown up in, and from where his parents had been carried to their graves. Not house really, more cottage – although cottage sounded nicer than it really was, as if it were the picture on a box of souvenir fudge. This cottage was squat and tiled rather than thatched, and attached to its only neighbour like a conjoined twin. The pair of them sat and glared across the narrow road at the high hedge beyond it, which cut off both light and the view from the downstairs windows. Both twins had identical silvered-oak nameplates on their garden gates: Rose Cottage and Honeysuckle Cottage. The John and Mary of adjoining country homes. Rose for Jonas and Lucy, Honeysuckle for old Mrs Paddon next door.

Jonas parked the garish police Land Rover behind Lucy’s Beetle in the track beside Rose Cottage and felt his heart quicken.

He had to keep hold of himself.

Had to step out on to the dry, freezing mud slowly and walk normally through the front door, and clean the bathroom and fill the washer-dryer, and make the tea – just the way Mark Dennis had told him he must.

‘Lucy needs you. You can’t fall apart on her, Jonas. Now more than ever.’

He wouldn’t fall apart. He would keep hold of himself. Even though every day for the past three weeks he had walked up the cracked and un-weeded stone pathway with his heart squeezed into his throat with fear, and his keys jingling like wind chimes in his trembling hands. The dread was almost overwhelming – the dread that he would push open the front door and it would once more wedge softly against the body of his wife. Or that he would call her echoing name and finally find her in a bath of tepid, pink water. Or that he would walk into the house enclosed in winter darkness and feel her bare feet nudge his face as they dangled in the stairwell.

Jonas shook himself on the doorstep, forcing his breathing back to normal so he wouldn’t cry with relief when he saw her, and pushed open the door.

‘Yuk’ had made it home before him.

Lucy greeted him with the word and a single questioning eyebrow as he walked into the living room. If he’d had to hazard a guess he’d say that Mark Dennis had told his receptionist, who’d passed it on to Mr Jacoby or someone in Mr Jacoby’s shop. From there it could have been anyone who finally brought it to the Holly household. Steven the paper boy, old Will Bishop the milkman, or one of the several visitors Lucy received sometimes on her couch, between the horror movies which Jonas ordered by mail for her in a never-ending supply, and which she watched with indecent joy from behind her favourite tasselled cushion.

He gave a mock-sigh and shrugged expansively, making her laugh. It lit up her face. Lucy was always beautiful to Jonas, but when she smiled, that became a universal truth – even after the ravages of disease and the strain of recent weeks. Her boyish face with its upturned, freckled nose and widely spaced green eyes – together with her cap of cropped auburn hair – gave her an elfin look.

He kissed the top of her head and she took his hand and became serious.

‘Poor Margaret.’

Poor Margaret indeed. But it was a relief. A relief to speak of death like common gossips for whom it was merely a passing notion, instead of a time bomb in their pockets.

‘What have you heard?’ It was a village in the middle of Exmoor; she could have heard anything.

‘That somebody killed her.’

‘Possibly. Taunton have it now.’ He squeezed her hand, feeling with relief that it was warm and steady, then turned and sat down beside her on the edge of the couch. ‘How are you feeling, Lu?’

It was a question he’d been asking daily in one form or another for nearly three years. Sometimes it came out sounding strange to his ears, other times it was a studiedly casual ‘All right, Lu?’ He could reduce it to a mere questioning look from across the room, which she would answer with a smile or a shrug.

Sometimes he didn’t even have to ask.

Those were the days when he came home to find her curled and gasping in the rib-crunching spasms of the MS ‘hug’, or jabbing at a broken plate and spilled food with the dustpan and brush, her spastic hands that had caused the mess in the first place unable to make it right. Sometimes when he found her like that he pulled the rug over them both on the couch and tickled her arms languorously until she relaxed and finally slept; other times he held her while she shook and cried and slapped at her own failing body with her angry, twisted hands. Jonas had never cried with her – never given in to the self-pity that that would imply.

After she had been diagnosed, everything had changed – at home and at work. He had withdrawn an application for Anti-Terrorism and applied instead for this backwater posting where he was largely autonomous and could fit work around home rather than the other way round. They moved into Rose Cottage, which had been closed up after the death of his parents. Jonas had never wanted to come back but he knew the place; he knew the people; he knew it would be easier to do his job on Exmoor than learn the ropes somewhere new, and that that would make it easier to take care of Lucy.

But sometimes even the comfort of familiarity was not enough to ease his mind. Sometimes – as he gave walkers directions to Dunkery Beacon, or spoke to the parents of a teenager with a half-bottle of vodka and an attitude – Jonas would feel the almost overwhelming urge to jump in his car and race back to check on Lucy. The first time his heart had clenched that way he had given in to the impulse and driven home blindly through winding lanes at 60mph. He’d burst through the front door shouting her name and she’d come running down the stairs of their little cottage in a panic, almost tumbling the last few treads. He’d caught her at the bottom and babbled his usual question, ‘Are you OK?’ and she had thumped his arm for scaring her so.

That was when Lu could still go up and down stairs properly. Jonas wanted to get a loan for a stair lift, but she said she liked the couch and the TV through the days and liked the challenge of inching upstairs on her bottom to the bathroom.

‘Keeps my triceps in shape,’ she’d teased him at the time. ‘Other women pay a fortune for that kind of workout.’

He’d laughed to please her, and left the elephant in the room unremarked upon – that three years previously Lucy Holly could have walked upstairs on her hands if she’d fancied it. She’d been the fittest woman Jonas had ever met. Even straight out of training in Portishead he’d had to work to keep ahead of her on the five-mile runs they’d regularly taken together. Lucy was no gym-bore. She ran, she swam, she rode horses and bikes and, for the first winter after Jonas had got the posting back home on Exmoor, she’d turned out occasionally for the local girls’ football team, Blacklanders Ladies. Jonas smiled a little now at the memory of his petite wife going nose-to-nose with the ref, her eyes flashing and her pony-tail flicking until the cowed man reversed a poor penalty decision in her favour. Once a week for ninety minutes ‘Ladies’ was just a euphemism.

It seemed forever ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘And then you…?’ He left it hanging for her.

‘… had a nap,’ she finished dutifully and they both laughed ruefully.

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

‘Oh Jonas! On a day like this! It could have waited. It’s only the Symmetrel I’m out of.’

‘No trouble,’ he shrugged, although they both knew it was a thirty-mile round trip through narrow lanes to the nearest dispensing chemist’s in Dulverton. Jonas’s beat included a clutch of tiny villages and had to be covered by Land Rover, but edging out as far as Dulverton when a woman had died in Shipcott was still more than an inconvenience.

Still, he did it, and she appreciated it. That was how they worked at life. They cared for each other.

The very first time Lucy had met Jonas she’d recognized something in him that reminded her of the children she taught in kindergarten. Something that she knew any amount of gung-ho police training would never quite erase from him. There was a softness, a childlike uncertainty, a silly humour in Jonas that meant he would spend the day in riot gear fending off Molotov cocktails and then demonstrate to her at night wearing a pudding bowl and armed with a spatula. When he turned out for Police XV against Army, Lucy watched in embarrassment as Jonas joined his team-mates in a testosterone-packed pre-match ritual of chanting, grunting and chest-beating. Chest-beating! Like gorillas in shorts! Halfway through the spectacle, he’d caught her eye in the stands and they’d both dissolved in such helpless laughter that his captain was still bitching at him at half-time.

Jonas’s dark-brown eyes were too far apart, his nose too long and his mouth too full to be called handsome, but Lucy never could get enough of looking at him and craved more.When they’d first moved into his parents’ old home, she’d looked for photos of him as a boy. When she’d failed to find any, he’d joked about being ‘too ugly to show up on film’.

In her eyes, at least, it was far from true.

‘Who told you about Margaret?’ he asked, even though it didn’t matter.

‘Frank.’

Frank Tithecott. The postman. Of course. The postman and the milkman covered the same area as he did but without the same confidentiality. Jonas was suddenly glad Frank had brought his embarrassment home – at least it had made Lucy laugh for the first time in three weeks.

‘Are you going to be busy with that?’

‘I doubt it,’ he shrugged. ‘I don’t get the impression they’d welcome my assistance.’

‘Then they’re idiots and I hate them all,’ she said sharply, as if Jonas was a boy to be protected from playground bullies, and not a strapping six-foot-four officer of the law.

Jonas rolled his eyes at her sharp words but smiled to show he enjoyed her support, even if it was hopelessly biased. Lucy shifted her legs to make room for him on the couch and Jonas sat down, draped his legs over one end and lowered his long frame gently backwards into her arms. The chores could wait.

The TV was on, the sound down. For several minutes Jonas stroked Lucy’s arms with the backs of his nails as they idly watched a blood-spattered teenager being chased through a house by a man in a mask. Without screams and music it was hypnotically dull and soon their breathing slowed and synchronized in the way they both loved.

Lucy slid a single finger between the buttons of his white uniform shirt and ran it tenderly along a rib. The moment caught her unawares and her eyes burned with sudden tears.

To stop them before they could overwhelm her, she kissed his ear and murmured, ‘They don’t know what they’re missing.’

DCI Marvel knew exactly what he was missing.

Sky TV.

His team were billeted in quarters so basic that he was surprised no one had started whining.

But it was only a matter of time. Marvel liked to have little private wagers with himself. His money was on Grey, Pollard, Rice and Singh to start whining in that order. Rice and Singh were Elizabeth Rice and Armand Singh, and in his experience women and ethnics either never made waves or made effing great tsunamis. Rice and Singh were both pretty easy-going that way, although he had once seen DC Rice knee a grabby drunk in the balls when she thought no one was watching. Pollard was solid and stolid, and worked best when others did the thinking for him, but Grey was more bolshy and thought he had rights. Marvel wasn’t counting Reynolds. His sergeant was not with him but was too nervous to be against him. Like a whipped dog.

Police budgetary constraints meant they had been booked into a stable block outside Shipcott. Oh, sure, the sign at the end of the long and rutted track read ‘Farmhouse Accommodation’, but the low, ugly row of ‘cottages’ were no more than converted stables with window-boxes. And the owner, a bent and arthritic crone improbably named Joy Springer, apparently thought that tiny televisions and giant microwave ovens were enough to justify the tagline ‘All Mod Cons’.

At home he had Sky on a 48-inch screen, complete with a set of Acoustic Energy Aelite 3 home-cinema speakers. There were six in the set and they easily filled the spaces left by Debbie’s furniture. The precious 1970s Habitat suite she’d brought into their relationship was now squeezed uncomfortably into her mother’s house, elbowing the over-stuffed mock-leather into corners and competing for floor-space with the Formica coffee table. So he’d have somewhere to watch the TV from, Marvel had bought a cheap couch and taken pleasure in putting his feet all over it – often in his shoes.

Now he surfed through the channels for what felt like the hundredth time. It didn’t take long. BBC1, BBC2 and ITV1, though BBC2 was grainy and flickering. Channel 4 and Five were seemingly beyond the reach of this part of the moor. He imagined the second test match from Australia dancing and crackling somewhere above his head, searching forlornly for a receiver high enough to be welcomed by, before finally weakening and sputtering out over the heather, lost to him for ever.

Fucking Timbuktu.

He looked at his watch. Ten thirty pm.

The night was young.

Unfortunately, so were his team. They were like babies, the way they were all in bed by ten. Not like his days in the Met, where they’d roll off duty when they ran out of arms to twist and spend the rest of the night in Spearmint Rhino. DS Reynolds was a reasonable cop but Marvel couldn’t imagine his sergeant stuffing a twenty into a G-string any more than he could imagine him doing a shampoo ad. DS Reynolds’s hair grew on his head in unfortunate tufts. Sometimes they almost joined up; other times he was nearly bald. Reynolds claimed it was stress-related. Fucking nancy boy.

Marvel ran a hand through his own hair and wondered how long it would be before he was shedding like a Persian cat. His hair would go first, then his teeth. Then his joints, he imagined. Or maybe his eyesight. Already he needed to squint at the menu at McDonald’s drive-thru. Once he’d tried to order a McFury, imagining it must be some hellishly well-peppered new burger. He and the pimpled girl in the window had almost come to blows before she worked it out and told him with some degree of triumph that a McFlurry was a kiddies’ ice-cream. He’d ordered it just to spite her, and lobbed it vaguely towards a bin as he drove out.

Just imagining his teeth falling out made them twinge, so he stopped thinking about dying and concentrated on Margaret Priddy. He’d spoken to the nurse, Annette Rogers, and was reasonably satisfied she was in the clear. She seemed to be going through the motions of sympathy in a way he’d expect a professional nurse to – as if she was simultaneously wondering what she would have for tea. That was fine by Marvel; if she’d wept and wailed over Margaret Priddy’s death, he would have had her in custody before her ugly white shoes could touch the ground.

There were two other nurses who had split shifts with Annette Rogers. He had asked Reynolds to track them down for interview.

He pulled the flimsy file towards him and checked. Lynne Twitchett and Gary Liss. A male nurse. Marvel would have snorted if there’d been anyone in the room to hear him pass comment on male nurses. In his head he knew Gary Liss was large, soft, blond – and camp as a row of tents. He’d lay good money on it.

He lost focus on the TV while he thought of how the investigation would proceed, all the elements that he needed to ensure worked together. When it came to leading a homicide investigation, Marvel liked to think of himself as a swan, sailing majestically along while under the surface his team paddled like crazy to keep the whole thing moving smoothly in the right direction.

Marvel mused on Margaret Priddy. It was a strange one. He had been working murders since he was twenty-four years old and his instincts were pretty sharp, but they didn’t have to be honed to know that it’s hard for a mute and bedridden old woman to make enemies.

But he also knew that friends could be just as dangerous.

In the morning he’d speak to Margaret Priddy’s son.

After smothering Margaret Priddy, the killer had gone home, showered, and made himself a cheese and bacon sandwich. There was an old black-and-white film on TV – a wide-eyed Hayley Mills lying her earnest way out of trouble over the sound of his teeth on salty meat and sticky bread. He didn’t like to turn the volume up. He watched the girl clambering over rocks, spying on a church picnic, jumping on the back of a white pony. The killer switched off the TV and threw away what was left of his sandwich. He curled into a foetal ball on the couch, slept like a baby, and when he awoke he felt like a new man.