Darkside

One Day

It was gone five o’clock and Marvel was in the Red Lion nursing half a pint of piss masquerading as alcohol-free lager.

He hadn’t invited anybody else along for an after-work drink. He was heartily sick of the lot of them and even more sick of being stuck here in Shipcott with what appeared to be trench foot.

Jos Reeves called to say that the prints inside the plastic bags they’d found in the courtyard were unidentifiable. Little more than muddy smears.

Marvel didn’t even have the energy to be rude to him.

Someone walked through his line of vision with a lurching gait and Marvel focused. The young man had the look of someone who had put his weight and his drink on fast – florid, and with all the excess fat around his belly and his chin.

‘What are you looking at?’ said Neil Randall.

‘You got a wooden leg?’ said Marvel.

The young man was taken aback. He was used to people blushing and stammering when he confronted them.

‘Yes,’ he said.

Then he remembered his hostility and added, ‘You want to make something of it?’

Marvel resisted the urge to snap back something about whittling a toy boat, and just shrugged. The young man was obviously defensive. Must be shit to lose your leg. Give up your job, maybe. Collect disability. Be a burden—

A burden. Margaret Priddy had been a burden. That was, after all, why he had ‘liked’ Peter Priddy so much, wasn’t it? Yvonne Marsh had been a burden to her husband and son. But the three victims at Sunset Lodge… couldn’t they also be considered burdens on their families? A financial drain, if nothing else?

Maybe the killer couldn’t bring himself to kill his own burden and was taking it out on others?

Marvel felt his skin actually tingle. He felt so sure that he was on the right track, and his instincts rarely let him down.

Hand in hand with that came the uncomfortable feeling that this was Reynolds’s territory. Reynolds and his beloved Kate Gulliver with their namby-pamby, touchy-feely bollocks about childhoods and transference and repression and guilt.

He stared unseeingly at Neil Randall’s gammy leg as the man limped across the pub and propped himself up in front of the fruit machine.

And then DCI John Marvel got another, even bigger tingle as he put two and two together and made what looked very much like four to him…

Wasn’t Lucy Holly a burden to her husband?

He put his so-called beer down on the table so fast that it slopped over the rim, and stood up.

He had to get back to his room. He had to be really alone so he could think about this clearly. He needed to write things down and draw little boxes and connect them with biro lines of reasoning. He needed to be absolutely sure before he exposed his theory to Reynolds, to give that bastard the smallest possible chance of poking holes in it.

And, more than anything, he needed a real drink to help him.

Jonas was pulling a ewe’s head out of a tree.

He’d spent several minutes trying to get a good grip on the struggling, ice-covered sheep without luck, and made a new effort to focus before his hands got too cold to function.

The snow was falling again in a silent blizzard that threatened to obscure his view of Shipcott below. Jonas had done his best to get over to Edgcott to do his rounds but he’d had to turn back at the top of the hill when he lost the road completely. He’d spotted the sheep twenty yards away and decided to do his good deed for the day.

He spoke soothingly to the ewe but she didn’t believe him for a second, and bleated in terror, while now and then raising her tail to vent hard marble-sized droppings in machine-gun bursts, as if paying out a shit jackpot.

Jonas Holly cursed under his breath but he understood the ewe’s fear. He had learned to live with fear.

It didn’t mean he wasn’t scared.

All the time.

All the fucking time! He could hear Danny saying those words again.

Jonas felt that if he could only keep all his fear separate and compartmentalized, then he would be able to manage it, like a lion tamer performing tricks with just one lion at a time – carefully twisting his head into the sharp, fetid maw, feeling the prick of teeth on his cheek, and then herding the beast back to its cage, before bringing out the next lion, whose job was to jump through hoops.

At times, though, Jonas got the feeling that the catches on the cages were loose, that the lions were plotting behind his back – and that there was imminent danger of a great escape, during which he would be torn to pieces in his top hat and red tails.

Which was probably what this poor ewe thought was about to happen to her.

Don’t be scared. I’ll protect you. That’s my job.

The words rushed at him from nowhere and for the first time in decades he remembered the face of the policeman who had told him that. The man had looked like a father. Not like his father, but like the kind of father Jonas had seen on TV – middle-aged, greying at the temples, slightly overweight. Jonas could even remember the shiny buttons on the policeman’s tunic and being overwhelmed that this exciting uniform was actually in his mother’s cramped little kitchen.

The policeman had asked his parents to stay in the front room. Jonas had panicked then, and imagined the policeman taking him out of the back door to prison while his parents waited trustingly in front of the TV that was showing Grange Hill. Or he might hurt him to find out what he wanted to know. Jonas didn’t want to be hurt any more. But he also didn’t want to tell. If he told on Danny about the stables, it would all come out. All the horror and the shame would come out and everybody would know about it, even his parents. And nobody must ever know that Jonas even knew that pathetic child – let alone used to be him. Even he, Jonas, had learned to leave that weak little boy to his fate and go somewhere else while unspeakable things were happening.

The big policeman had bent his head and asked quiet questions about the fire. Jonas had told him the truth – that he knew nothing. But he didn’t tell him the truth of what he suspected.

Somehow the policeman had known that he was hiding something. Like magic, he knew. How? He had probed and prodded and gently persuaded until finally Jonas had burst into tears.

‘Are you scared, Jonas?’ he’d asked with great kindness.

Jonas had nodded with his fists in his eyes. The policeman had taken one of those hot, wet fists and engulfed it in his own.

‘Don’t be scared,’ he’d said. ‘I’ll protect you. That’s my job.’

It was tempting. So tempting. To blurt it all out and be done with it and let grown-ups take charge. But Jonas never told because he knew that there was only one way now to protect himself, and that was by protecting the other boy – even from the nice policeman…

Here and now, Jonas’s face was as flushed and hot as his hands were cold. He wished he could run away and never come back. He had failed the village and – now that he had cried – he had failed Lucy too. She had seen his weakness and could no longer call on him for strength.

He was falling apart on her.

The anger of that thought gave him strength and suddenly he managed to grasp the sheep’s ear and a handful of dirty wet fleece in just the right place so that he could lever the animal upwards and out from where it was wedged in the V of two branches. As he did, the ewe’s legs flailed wildly and caught him in the thigh. He bit his lip and grunted as he heaved it free and let it go.

After an initial panicky dash, the ewe turned and surveyed him with a supercilious yellow eye.

Jonas panted and rubbed his leg. His trousers had ripped and he could feel the cold touching his thigh. He’d have to go home and change. Again.

Even so, he wasn’t angry any more; he was grateful. The kick had brought him out of it. Out of that terrifying place where memories rose like dead fish breaking the calm surface of his mind.

He was here.

He was safe.

He was Jonas Holly, the protector, once more.

‘Don’t be scared,’ he told the sheep.

An abandoned Toyota had blocked the bottom of the lane to the house. Apparently the driver had been attempting to get up the hill but had slid sideways, and the car was now wedged between the spiny black winter hedges with their thick caps of soft-edged snow going grey in the fading daylight.

Jonas said, ‘Shit’ quietly and sat for a moment, hating the driver, who had no doubt wandered back to the village and was probably even now having steak-and-kidney pudding in the Red Lion, while trusting that someone would do something about his misfortune while he was gone.

No local would have left his car there, Jonas reckoned. Locals knew that even in conditions like this, farmers in tractors needed to reach livestock all over the moor. Locals had more sense and more courtesy.

Fuming silently, Jonas climbed out into the snow – and was bitingly reminded that he had only just managed to get warm again after the sheep episode.

He had to slide across the boot of the car to attach the winch, getting a wet arse for his pains.

As he dropped off the other side of the boot, the Toyota’s rear end broke free and the car lurched sideways, then started to slide slowly back down the hill.

Jonas took a few faltering paces, but then stopped and could only watch as the car arced gently into his Land Rover before skating on and coming to rest against a drift at the bottom of the hill.

‘Bastard,’ said Jonas quietly but with feeling. He was freezing cold, it had started to snow again, and now he’d have to fill out forms explaining how the Land Rover got damaged, when all he wanted was to get home, have a steaming hot bath and share supper with Lu.

As he started down through the churned snow where the Toyota had been, Jonas noticed what he assumed were the driver’s footprints leading not down the hill to the Red Lion, but up the lane towards Rose Cottage.

He stopped and shone his torch into the prints.

The new snow was starting to soften them a little, but Jonas could still see the tread pattern.

Herringbone.

Jonas switched off the torch and ran up the hill.

The footprints led straight to his front door.

He skidded on the path despite the grit, and skidded again in the porch, sending several loud logs tumbling off the neat pile.

Shit.

Any attempt at stealth ruined, Jonas burst through the front door.

‘Lucy!’

No answer.

Please be OK. Please, please, please.

He opened the door into the front room.

Lucy was on the couch under the friendly glow of the fire, her eyes closed and her head nestled on the tasselled cushion.

Jonas released a huge breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. She was safe. She was fine. The driver had probably asked to use the phone, that was all—

The back door closed quietly.

Jonas’s heart pumped a shot of pure ice into his system. He could even feel it in his teeth.

He grabbed the poker from beside the fire and rushed into the kitchen.

Empty.

Jonas crossed the room in three strides and yanked open the back door. By the light spilling out of the kitchen it was easy to make out the herringbone treads.

‘Jonas?’

Jonas ignored Lucy and ran into the night once more. As soon as he was beyond the reach of the kitchen light, he lost the tracks, but he ran anyway, past the Beetle domed with snow, out into the road and down the hill.

In the jerking beam of the torch, he saw the indistinct shape of the man running for his life through the fast-falling snow. He was fast, but Jonas was gaining.

And then he wasn’t.

He lost his footing and went down heavily, the torch flying out of his hand. He skidded again getting up and lurched sideways. It was crucial. Even as he rose, Jonas heard the car door slam. He ran blindly towards the sound as if through a snowy waterfall, but the super-reliable Japanese engine caught first time and revved furiously as the wheels spun and then caught. The lights were not switched on; Jonas never even saw the car go.

He stood panting at the foot of the hill. He hadn’t even taken down the car’s number earlier. Basic stuff. Basic.

He got into the Land Rover and rumbled back up the hill to home.

He came through the still-open back door.

‘Jonas?’ Lucy called from the other room, sounding scared.

‘It’s OK, Lu,’ he called and locked the door behind him. Now he had stopped reacting and started thinking, the shock of disaster averted hit him like a wall, and he had to put his hand on the counter and double over to get his breath.

The killer had been here.

Right here in Rose Cottage.

While Lucy slept unaware on the couch, the killer had come into their home.

Had he seen her?

Had he already stood over his victim in life and mused on how best to make her dead?

Had he touched her hair and known that this one was next?

He shivered and realized he was shaking uncontrollably.

He couldn’t fall apart on her now.

‘Jonas?’

He couldn’t tell her; it would scare the hell out of her. She must never know how badly he’d fucked up or how close she had come to being killed. He would stop going out at night. Hell, he would stop going out during the days if he possibly could! How could he have been so stupid? How could he have gone out to protect the village and left Lucy to protect herself? His most precious thing in the whole wide world! Was he fucking crazy?

Jonas suddenly thought that he might be crazy. Had maybe been crazy ever since he’d found Lucy behind the front door in her pink flannel pyjamas and the joke bunny slippers he’d bought her two Christmases ago. Or maybe before that – maybe when they’d sat together in that bastard doctor’s office and he’d told them that Lucy Holly, his perfect wife and best friend, was going to spend the next several years dying in front of his eyes. Or was it when his parents both left him alone? One minute here, the next minute gone – their immaculate little car turned into instant scrap by a head-on collision with an idiot driver who was halfway through a text to his wife at the time: On my wax CU soo— They had read it out at the inquest into all three deaths.

On my wax.

If that wasn’t enough to drive anyone crazy, Jonas didn’t know what was.

Or maybe it was even before that. Maybe he’d always been crazy. Who the hell knew? Right now he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt completely sane.

Jonas picked up his hand to watch it shake.

Then his eyes refocused on the kitchen counter beyond it.

Between the kettle and the toaster were two mugs. Wisps of steam still rose from them and the tea bags floated just under the surface of the dark liquid like two little drowning victims.

The killer had been making tea.

One for himself and one for Lucy.

That made no sense.

No sense at all.

Why would a killer—

With a hollow jolt, Jonas realized the man he’d chased from his home could not have been the killer.

Then who the fuck was he?

Steven Lamb liked delivering newspapers. He’d had this job for almost three years now – ever since Skew Ronnie Trewell had got his driver’s licence and lost interest in the Exmoor Bugle and the Daily Mail as a means to an end.

Steven liked the early mornings in the summer, and bore them in the winter. He liked the smell of the newspapers as Mr Jacoby cut the plastic tape that bound the quires, and he liked the fleeting snapshots of world news he glimpsed as he helped Mr Jacoby stuff each paper with shiny brochures advertising debt consolidation and credit cards.

Most of all he liked the £11.50 he got every week.

That was the reason he’d wanted the job in the first place, of course. What boy doesn’t want to earn money and start buying? He’d had to fight for it though. Not other applicants, because Mr Jacoby had told him the job was his if he wanted it. No, Steven had had to fight his mother and grandmother to be allowed to do the job. They didn’t want him getting up and walking to Mr Jacoby’s shop in the dark; they didn’t want him knocking on doors of a winter’s evening and asking for payment; they didn’t want him outside at all really – day or night.

They said it was dangerous.

Most boys his age would have scoffed and whined and dismissed them both as fussy old hens, but Steven understood that it was dangerous. That he knew as well as anyone and better than most.

He also knew in his secret heart that if he didn’t have to go out into the world every day, he might never leave the house again; might cringe indoors and think too much about what might have been and what very nearly was.

His mum and nan had finally bowed to the sheer weight of his persistence and Steven had lain awake all night before his first day, shaking with apprehension.

He’d had therapy. He didn’t know who had paid for it, but he suspected it was not his mum or his nan, because they encouraged him to go as often as possible.

But Steven Lamb still knew what fear was.

He recognized it when it whispered from the high hedges that hemmed the narrow lanes; when it made him shudder alone on the moor on a warm summer’s evening; when it visited his dreams and settled over his sleep in a visceral veil. But he’d also grown adept at throwing it off, at staring it down – and at turning his back on it and daring it to do its worst. Every time he hoisted the weighty DayGlo sack over his shoulder, and every furled newspaper he pushed through springy letter boxes helped him to thumb his nose at fear.

As did the Fracture Snub skateboard he’d bought with the first £60 he’d managed to save; and the secondhand iPod shuffle he clipped to his jeans; and the first real grown-up present he’d bought his mother for her birthday – a slim gold chain with a tiny green birthstone on it.

Something in Steven understood that each of these was a trophy he awarded himself for living his life and kicking fear’s ass.

And now – as the winter made day into early night – he was doing it again.

Jonas stared into the cooling tea for what seemed like lifetimes while his brain tried so hard to think that a headache blossomed inside it like a mushroom cloud of pain.

‘Jonas?’

He looked up to see Lucy standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. She was in jeans and her favourite blue sweater.

She had got dressed for the man.

She rarely got dressed for him any more unless she planned to leave the house; mostly she just wore pyjamas, her bunny slippers and a fleece.

‘Who was that?’ he said bluntly.

‘What?’

He could see in her eyes that she knew exactly what he meant.

‘Here. Just now. Who was it?’

He didn’t want to hear her answer. He had to ask the question, but if he could have, he’d have defied the laws of physics to have missed the man so he would never have to be here now, asking again… ‘Who was he, Lu?’

‘Jonas—’ she started and then stopped and thought hard before going on. ‘It’s not what you’re thinking.’

‘I come in the front door and a strange man runs out the back. What am I thinking?’

She was having an affair. She couldn’t say it. The thought made Jonas unbearably sad. He’d have thought he would be furious, but he wasn’t. He just felt like sobbing.

‘Come and sit down.’ She held out her hand for his but he didn’t give it. Instead he tucked both hands into his armpits, as if the forearms crossed on his chest might protect his heart from the truth.

‘Please, Jonas. Can we sit down?’

He recognized the tone from the few times he had been to pick Lucy up from the kindergarten before they moved. Although then she would be crouching, so she could look into the face of a tearful child.

Now he realized he was close to tears himself, and felt the image was not far removed from reality, despite the fact that she had to look up to meet his eyes. He still saw love in her face, but his heart twisted as he saw pity there too. Pity for him. Pity because she was going to hurt him.

He bit his lip and wished it were already over; that he already knew the worst and didn’t have to go through the sordid shock of hearing it.

Numb with foreboding, Jonas followed her into the front room.

They sat on the sofa, but not as they always had before. This time they sat at either end, prim and upright, half turned towards each other, like insurance salesmen. The room was dark but for the silent television which tonight showed A Nightmare on Elm Street.

‘I’ve been wanting to tell you…’ she started.

He couldn’t look at her. Instead he watched Freddy Krueger’s arms grow impossibly long and chillingly inescapable in a silent nightmare.

‘… I just didn’t know how.’

She was stalling. It was torture. He couldn’t bear it.

‘What’s his name?’

She looked perplexed that he’d ask.

‘Brian Connor.’

‘How long have you been seeing him?’ Every word sounded wrong to Jonas’s ears, all the emphasis, all the syntax, as if the sentence had been cobbled together by robots, syllable by syllable, from sound bites found in some alien archive. He’d had no concept that he would or could ever say them to his wife.

‘I’m not having an affair with him, Jonas.’

Was she going to deny the fact now? Or had he just caught them before anything could happen?

She slid her eyes from his gaze, which made him suspect the latter. Jonas felt himself unwind just a little bit. It was hardly any better, but it was something—

‘He’s run from me twice, Lucy.’

‘He knows who you are. He didn’t want to… get into a conversation.’

I’ll bet, he thought. Some suitably outraged, angry and cuckolded words swirled in his head for a second but never got the energy to make it out of his mouth. He just gave up on them.

‘He’s from Exit, Jonas.’

She glanced at him to see his response, but he looked blank. She cleared her throat and made a gesture with her hands that was half shrug, half pleading.

‘They help… I mean… they support… voluntary euthanasia.’

Jonas made a sound that had never come out of his mouth before. Pain and shock and fury. He stood up as if ejected and stared down at Lucy, whose face was bathed in a pale-blue TV flicker.

‘NO!’ he shouted. ‘NO!’

Lucy Holly would have been Steven Lamb’s favourite customer even if her husband hadn’t been tipping him £5 a month to keep watch over her.

He liked the companionship of sitting down with her in her cosy front room where the fire was almost always alight and smelled wonderfully of warmth and winter. He liked the fact that she rarely tried to make conversation. Everybody always wanted to make conversation – to ask him how he was and what he was doing and whether he was all right. Even his best friend Lewis sometimes put out feelers. But Steven always felt that they were tiptoeing around the subject that surrounded him like a moat.

He didn’t like it.

He didn’t like to be reminded.

So sitting in silence with Lucy Holly while fake fear played out on the TV was oddly comforting for Steven. The scenes of horror rarely affected him and when they might he closed his eyes. But the warm silence calmed him and sometimes even made a bit of conversation pop into his own head. Over the years he had shared with Mrs Holly extracts from his life, and learned that he could be of interest to someone outside his family, for reasons other than that he was still alive when – really – he should be dead.

Now, as he struggled up the hill in the snow towards Rose and Honeysuckle cottages, Steven hoped Mrs Holly was watching something good – but not so good that he felt bad about interrupting with a titbit about his little brother, Davey, who had just this morning accidentally swallowed his last remaining baby tooth and who was therefore down to the last fifty-pence piece he was ever likely to earn from their nan for doing absolutely nothing. As Davey had already spent the money at least ten times over in his head, the tragedy was compounded for him, while that only increased the humour of it for Steven.

The snow was shin-deep in the lane and Steven wore wellies and his black waterproof trousers and kept his head down as he trudged uphill, staring at the crystalline surface he was about to break with each step, smooth and pale grey in the fast dark of winter.

He passed the telegraph pole halfway up the hill and heard it creak under the weight of snow and ice on the lines. Creepy.

The DayGlo sack on his shoulder held only junk mail tonight. Frank Tithecott gave him a fiver a week so that he didn’t have to bother stuffing leaflets through letter boxes himself, and Steven kept it for the nights when he collected the newspaper money from his customers. He liked to make Mrs Holly’s his last call of the day so that he knew he could go straight home afterwards and didn’t have to rush.

He finally looked up to see that he had made it to the gate of Honeysuckle Cottage. Mrs Paddon didn’t get a paper delivered. He’d knocked at her door once to see if she would like to order one from him but she had waved him away as if he were a Jehovah’s Witness, and told him, ‘We don’t want that kind of thing here.’ Steven still pondered on what on earth she might have thought she heard come out of his mouth instead of ‘Would you like to order the Western Morning News?’ After all this time, he’d never been able to come up with anything that sounded even remotely unsavoury.

Steven went up the three stone steps to the second gate and fumbled in the dark for the catch. As he did he heard something coming from Rose Cottage. He held his breath so he could hear better.

There it was again. Raised voices.

Steven was surprised. He was used to hearing customers shouting at each other as he opened the letter box on their lives for a brief moment. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d opened the Randalls’ letter box and not heard Neil yelling something at his father.

But he’d never heard raised voices at Rose Cottage.

He stood for a moment, undecided in the cold and dark.

He liked Lucy Holly very much. He liked Mr Holly too – even though he’d splashed about in the moat of Steven’s memory. Steven hadn’t liked that, but he’d understood that it was the policeman’s job to ask. Plus Mr Holly was a source of income for him.

So even though he decided to open the gate and walk the few paces to the porch of Rose Cottage, Steven had not yet made up his mind whose side he should be on when he got there.

Lucy’s bottom lip trembled but she sat up straight and determined.

‘It’s my life, Jonas. It’s my right.’

‘No!’

This was worse than an affair. So much worse! If Jonas had come home to find Brian Connor buried inside his wife, if she had eloped and sent him a postcard from Hawaii, it would not have been one millionth as bad as this. How could she do this to him? How? After the pills? After the tears? After they’d worked so hard and come so far? After they’d held each other and made love and whispered I love you in the bed where his parents had loved each other too? After everything he’d done for her? After he’d protected her…

She still wanted to die.

He shook his head stupidly, seeing horror in his mind the way he’d never seen it in a movie.

Lucy stood up almost straight and spoke quietly.

‘It’s my choice.’

He hit her.

He hit her with a heavy hand on the end of a long arm that swung fast. The blow spun her round and knocked her on to her knees on the couch – her face bouncing off the wall they’d repainted together the week they moved in. Summer Dawn, the colour was called. And as Lucy curled, sobbing, Jonas noticed with detachment the smear of blood that now sullied the horizon above the back of the couch.

He leaned over her, putting one hand on the wall beside the blood, the other on the arm of the couch.

‘No,’ he said again.

‘Stop!’

Jonas looked around to see Steven Lamb in the hallway.

The boy stood there tightly clutching the strap of the DayGlo sack on his shoulder with both hands, as if it was keeping him from falling from a great height. Even from across the room and in semi-darkness, Jonas could see he was shaking.

‘Just stop!’ he cried again, the words vibrating and cracked with fear.

‘Steven, get out!’ Lucy wept at him from between her hands.

But he didn’t. He just stood there and shook, staring at Jonas.

‘Leave her alone!’

Jonas stood up and Lucy hunched away from him.

He had to go.

Without even looking at her again, he strode across the room.

Steven Lamb backed into the hall table and knocked over the vase of drooping carnations. He watched Jonas coming with a look of resigned terror on his face, then at the last second he stepped aside as he realized he was not coming for him.

Jonas brushed past him without a glance, and closed the front door quietly behind him.

Steven sank slowly to the cold flagstone floor, with his back against the banister, and hugged his knees to his chest.

Lucy looked up from the couch and saw that Jonas was gone and Steven was sitting in the hallway.

She touched her mouth where warm salt leaked from her lip, and tried to stop sobbing.

She backed off the couch awkwardly and dropped to her knees and crawled across the floor, not trusting her legs to carry her across the room. She knelt beside the boy in the hallway and put her arms around him.

‘It’s OK,’ she told them both. ‘It’s OK. Jonas was just upset, sweetheart. He didn’t mean it. He was just very upset and frightened.’

But Steven didn’t respond to her touch or even appear to see her. His eyes were still fixed in the middle distance, a deep frown splitting his forehead. Lucy felt liquid soaking her knees. She looked down and realized it was the water from the flowers. He was sitting in it.

‘Steven,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong?’

He did not respond and Lucy started to worry seriously about something other than herself and Jonas. She shook him by the shoulders and saw him blink, so did it again and raised her voice, making it sharp – her playground-duty voice.

‘Steven! Talk to me, please! What happened? What’s wrong?’

Finally the boy turned his haunted eyes towards her.

His lips trembled as he whispered:

‘Nothing.’

Reynolds laid out his case on the cheap brown bedspread.

He had almost everything he needed.

He could hardly wait until the case here was officially closed so that he could go and see the Chief Super with his damning evidence. The thought of how that interview would unfold consumed Reynolds like porn.

‘Sir, could I speak to you on a matter of some delicacy?’

He knew there might not be an actual promotion in snitching on his boss, but he was sure there would be some benefits for him somewhere down the line.

He anticipated taking Lucy Holly’s statement with pure pleasure. At last, hearing critical words coming out of a mouth other than his. Around colleagues he’d always been discreet, but every little eye-roll, every murmur of discontent, every sudden cessation of chatter when Marvel walked past, he’d squirrelled away like winter nuts to sustain him whenever he felt he was all alone and that nobody else noticed what was going on. Even now the Senior Investigating Officer was probably knocking it back in the musty farmhouse with Joy Springer. It made Reynolds ashamed to be a policeman.

He hoped Lucy Holly would remember lots more about her confrontation with Marvel when she made her statement. What she had told him on the phone was good enough, but he would draw more from her. Nuances, looks, implied threats. Reynolds wanted them all, like an egg collector wants to shake a rare bird through a tiny hole in a shell.

He put his notes and Lucy’s statement away in their folder, then turned on Mastermind.

Steven sat at the kitchen table with his hands around the first cup of tea he had ever accepted from Lucy Holly.

He was wearing a pair of Jonas’s trousers. She had told him where to find some in the bedroom cupboard. It had been strange opening the Hollys’ wardrobe, but no stranger than opening their front door. He’d tried several pairs before he found some newly washed jeans which were only too big, rather than ridiculous, and rolled them up, then cinched them with his school belt.

He’d put his trousers and underwear in the laundry basket, as she’d told him to, and gone back downstairs to the sound of the kettle whistling.

Now they sat on opposite sides of the table and Steven watched Mrs Holly pretending she was OK. He knew she wasn’t. He’d seen her hands shake while making tea and he’d seen her wince as she put her cup to her broken lip.

He had registered these things but had detached himself from thinking about them too hard. Instead he had become a vague little ball with a shiny shell, so that he could protect himself. He knew now that that was his job, and his alone.

She smiled faintly at him, so he moved his mouth in response.

‘You haven’t drunk your tea,’ she said.

It was no longer hot, but Steven drank it anyway – for her – and saw that this gift made her smile much better.

‘I want you to have this,’ she said, getting up and rummaging in a cupboard. She took out a tin and removed the lid with difficulty, then handed him a thick wad of £20 notes, so he took it, even though it made his stomach roll over. It made him think of his nan sellotaping names to her nick-nacks, so they’d all know who was getting what when she died.

Then Mrs Holly said ‘thank you’ and ‘goodbye’ and hugged him so hard that it squeezed tears from his eyes, which slid down his nose and fell on to her blue sweater.

Halfway down the hill Steven stopped and took the notes out of his pocket and fanned them out. Even in the dark he could see there was about £600.

He drew his arm back and threw the notes hard into the night sky, where the biting wind whipped them away.

Then he put his head down and walked on through a blizzard of snow and money.

After Steven left, Lucy took the knife Jonas had given her, and inched slowly upstairs with it.

Steven had left the cupboard open and several pairs of Jonas’s uniform trousers on the bed. Leaning her sticks against the wall, Lucy started to fold them back into the wardrobe, the familiar effort of the task making her feel warm and calm.

An errant sob emptied her of the final breath of unexpected drama.

She didn’t blame him.

He had worked so hard, under such pressure, to keep her going. Nobody could have done a better job than Jonas. He was so strong, so patient.

The pills had been a bitter blow and her sense of having failed him was all-embracing. Her shame was almost unbearable. She couldn’t live properly and she hadn’t even been able to die properly.

And for a while she had almost believed she would never try again. Contacting Exit had only been insurance at first. So she would know better how to do it if things got unbearable. Brian Connor had talked through her options and it was a relief not to pretend that she would never consider it. But she tucked the thought away and kept going. Kept battling. Kept telling her mother she was feeling better all the time. Kept being the Lucy that everyone knew and loved.

And then Marvel had said that thing.

And she had understood how the world saw her. That at some indeterminate point she had ceased to be Lucy Holly – teacher, daughter, athlete, friend, wife, lover – and had become that thing. She couldn’t even think the words. She was amazed she had been able to get them out to Reynolds, and thought she must have been more angry than she’d ever been in her whole life to do so.

She hoped Jonas would come home soon. He was the only one who had never made her feel that way. She knew he’d hit her out of fear, and the pain of her split lip was nothing compared to the pain she knew he must feel at her planning to leave him alone. At the thought that she could want to leave him alone.

She ached with sadness and pressed a pair of his uniform trousers to her cheek, feeling her lashes brush the rough serge.

As she raised her head and lifted the trousers to put them away, Lucy noticed they were missing a button.