Darkside

The Final Day

Jonas raised his face to the sky and felt the feathery snow turn slowly to needles of hot water on his skin. He opened his eyes and was surprised to find himself in the shower in the bathroom of Rose Cottage.

He shook himself. He must have drifted off and dreamed.

He noticed with surprise that he hadn’t drawn the blinds on the two little windows. It had become his habit since he had stood on the stile across the valley and seen into this very room. But still, it was late; past midnight, he guessed – although he didn’t know when he had last checked the time – and the bathroom was thick with steam.

He must have been standing under the shower for a good long time.

He was hungry. Starving. Even under the hiss of the water he could hear his stomach rumbling.

He turned slowly, blinking the water out of his eyes, then wiped them and looked again at the window that faced away from the moor and towards Springer Farm. Although the black pane of glass reflected only the lit bathroom, something flickered at its centre. Puzzled, Jonas looked over his shoulder to see what might give such reflection but all that was behind him was the mirrored cabinet made opaque by the steam.

Jonas stepped out of the stream of water and wiped a stripe of condensation off the little side window.

Through it he could see quite clearly that Springer Farm was on fire.

The missing button changed everything for Lucy.

She looked at the loose thread above the button’s surviving twin, and was stunned that it could be so. That this – this twist of lonely black thread – was what could make her doubt the man she loved with all her heart, when the slap had failed to do so.

It made no sense. That Jonas would hand in a button from his own uniform trousers as evidence if he were trying to cover Danny’s tracks. It had made no sense when she’d said that to Marvel and it made no sense now.

Unless Jonas hadn’t known what he was doing.

Or what he had done.

Was that possible?

Lucy sat utterly still and stared at the place were the button used to be. She groped for sanity – for a fingerhold on any reality that did not sound like the plot of one of her horror movies.

The Exorcist flashed to her mind. The child trapped inside the ranting demon desperately pushing the words Help Me up through the tender skin of her midriff. It made her think of Jonas’s face at her hospital bedside. The face of a frightened child staring into the void.

Or out of it.

Help me.

She shivered.

She had briefly covered cases of multiple personalities in her Abnormal Psychology lectures. Patients who lived their lives as two, three – even more – distinct and different people. Alters, they were called, she remembered now. One man had even beaten prison on a rape charge after the court accepted that he was unaware that one of his alters had committed the crime.

Was Jonas such a case? Had something terrible happened to him as a boy that had caused his personality to fracture into several brittle parts?

She thought of the photo of the carefree child. Something had changed Jonas; some trauma. Was it something to do with Danny Marsh? With the fire at the farm? With horses? Had Marvel actually been right? Lucy shuddered at the thought.

Jonas had been under pressure for years. His parents’ death, her diagnosis, starting a new job all alone. And then she’d failed to kill herself, so that he’d had to come home from work every day not knowing whether he would find her alive or dead. Then Margaret Priddy had been murdered and Marvel had treated him like shit, and someone had started to leave him notes telling him to do his job…

Any one of those things could have pulled the trigger on the loaded gun of a damaged psyche.

Did Jonas clear up the vomit? Or did an alter do it without his knowledge?

Did an alter lose the button and Jonas merely find it?

She believed Jonas was telling the truth. Then again, maybe his truth was not the truth.

She still didn’t fear Jonas. She trusted him with her life.

But she did fear the stranger inside him.

She stood up suddenly and nearly fell. The jelly in her legs was not all the disease. She tried not to be sure. In her head, in her intellect, she tried to rationalize, to hypothesize, to justify Jonas’s contradictions so that she could disprove her own conclusions. But her body overrode her and made her shake with adrenaline.

Hollywood had been preparing Lucy for this for years. She had learned from the mistakes of air-headed heroines, and determined to be different. But now that the fantasy was made real, it made her feel sick, and numb with confusion.

She heard the front door open.

Jonas.

Her panic was only outweighed by her indecision. She had to hide from him! And yet that seemed ridiculous. Hide from Jonas? She would just feel like a fool.

He didn’t call from the door. He always called from the door, to let her know it was him.

Maybe it wasn’t him.

The thought spurred her to action.

She slid to the floor with the trousers still in her hands, and rolled under the bed.

She heard the middle stair creak and felt fear trickle down her spine. Jonas always took care to miss that tread.

Who was it that was coming up the stairs towards her?

Suddenly, rolling under the bed seemed the smartest thing she’d ever done, even though she felt horribly vulnerable. If he saw her, she had no defence. He would lean down and grip her ankles and drag her out like a pig in a slaughterhouse.

The man walked down the landing and into the bedroom.

Lucy held her breath.

She saw only his black trousers and boots, still with snow clinging to them. Jonas never wore his boots upstairs. Taking them off at the foot of the stairs was second nature to him.

The man crossed the room as if he owned it. There was no hesitation, no caution, no fear that he might be detected.

Lucy heard a drawer open and shut, and watched the boots leave.

After a few moments, she heard the shower go on.

She frowned.

It must be Jonas!

Relief made her shake.

And yet something stopped her from coming out from underneath the bed. It wasn’t the fact that he had hit her. Somehow that seemed almost incidental now. It was something else. The missing button, the silent entrance, the boots upstairs, those things meant more to her now. Something – maybe something learned from years of horror films – made her lie there on the dusty carpet, hiding from the husband she loved until, at last, the exhaustion of fear – coupled with the familiar and homely sound of the shower – lulled her to an unlikely sleep.

Marvel awoke to the sound of flames.

It was not the sound of a fire in the hearth, but the crackling roar of a furnace, accompanied by what sounded like small-arms fire.

He checked his watch: 2am. He rolled out of bed and staggered straight into the wall-mounted TV, knocking himself over and almost out. His stomach protested the sudden activity and he burped the sophisticated aroma of Cinzano into his nose.

He regained his feet and yanked the curtain aside to see two or three silhouetted figures backlit by the burning farmhouse. A section of tiles exploded off the roof in a volley of shots and arced into the white-spotted snow-sky like fireworks.

He fumbled his damp shoes off the radiator, threw his coat over his vest and shorts, and ran outside – another stagger giving away just how recently he had left the house that was now an inferno.

Reynolds, Rice and Grey were throwing water at the front-door handle – apparently in an attempt to cool it down enough to open it. They were using what looked like flower pots, and scooping water from an old trough in the yard. Singh staggered about in the snow with a ladder that was too short to do anything more than be a hazard to all, while Pollard shouted, ‘Mrs Springer!’ repeatedly and randomly at the house between staring at the flames, mouth agape like a tourist.

What a bunch of fucking babies!

‘Where is she?’ yelled Marvel above the roar, but Pollard just shook his head.

‘Fire brigade?’ yelled Marvel again, with the obligatory mime of a phone at his ear, and Reynolds shouted, ‘On their way!’

They’ll never make it, thought Marvel. Not in this snow.

The snow had continued to fall and was knee deep in places. Great plumes of steam joined the smoke pumping from the roof of the house, as flakes sizzled and spat off the tiles like fat in a pan.

‘Help them!’ he yelled at Pollard, pointing at the others, then ran to the trough, stripping off his coat. He plunged it into the water, which was sharp with broken ice, then pulled it on once more, barely noticing the freezing cold against his bare skin. He pulled the coat up over his head, then rushed at the front door just as Singh and Grey broke it open with the ladder.

Reynolds tried to stop him, standing in his way, grabbing at his coat like a fan.

‘You’re drunk,’ he shouted in Marvel’s face, without even the nicety of a ‘sir’.

Marvel elbowed him in the nose – it wasn’t a punch, but it was something – then barged past him shouting, ‘Out of the way!’ and ran inside.

Inside was an oasis of calm compared to the courtyard and for a moment Marvel stopped and swayed and took it all in.

The flames were up the curtains and walls, but the flagstone floor was a daunting foe to fire. The bottles and the glasses he’d left just a few hours before were still on the table. Smoke obscured much of his view, and – not content with blinding him – now reached down Marvel’s throat with long, sharp nails and started to claw at his lungs.

From outside he could hear Reynolds hoarsely shouting ‘Sir!’ with an irritable air – as if Marvel were a dog that wouldn’t come back – and Grey yelling something about hosepipes. They sounded shockingly close for people in another universe.

He coughed and spat and shielded his face from the heat coming at him from the far end of the room as he edged closer to where he knew the sofa was.

He staggered once and caught his thigh a painful blow on the kitchen table.

Halfway there, Marvel thought maybe he shouldn’t be doing this. The smoke was making it hard to breathe and steam was rising off his coat, while his exposed hands, arms and legs were uncomfortably hot.

He dithered.

He almost turned back.

But the thought of staggering back into the snow with nothing to show for his derring-do but a bit of a cough was anathema.

Buoyed by bloody-mindedness and sweet vermouth, he carried on inching his way across the room until he could make out Joy Springer lying face-down on the hairy sofa with her four cats running frantically up and down her body as though she were the last piece of flotsam in the wake of a shipwreck.

He reached out to take her arm and the big grey fluffy cat shot out a razor-sharp claw to keep him at bay.

Fuck.

Marvel dropped to his knees and huddled under his coat for a moment and he coughed until he retched – his eyes and nose and mouth streaming with fluids as his body tried to reject the killing smoke.

Down here the air was clearer, and Marvel bent and touched his head to the flagstones as if praying, so he could breathe better. When he had refreshed himself he looked up blearily and saw the writing on the wall behind the sofa.

He recognized it immediately, even though it was a foot high and on a wall. How he could ever have thought it might be a match for Danny Marsh’s hand was ridiculous. He saw that, now that it was writ so large. And in what appeared to be blood.

Marvel grabbed Joy Springer’s arm and yanked her unceremoniously on to the floor. Three of the cats leaped clear and disappeared; the grey one came with her – its claws firmly lodged in the wool of her old cardigan. It glared at Marvel and growled menacingly before darting away.

He rolled Joy on to her back and recoiled at the bloody sockets where her eyes had been.

He thought of Ang Nu. He thought of cocktail-onion jokes. He thought of Danny Marsh.

Danny Marsh was not the killer. The killer had been here.

The bastard had killed Joy Springer right under his nose!

Suddenly there was not enough air. He gulped for it, needing even more than usual to combat his shock, and finding so much less than he wanted that his shock became panic in a hot, blinding second.

He had to get out!

He half stood, staggered, banged his head on the table, fell to his knees, rolled, crawled, gasped at the floor, lungs bursting, head about to pop, lost his way to the door, and finally curled into a ball and retched Cinzano-flavoured bile on to his own hands.

He had to get out. He had to tell Reynolds. He had to—

Breathe. He had to breathe…

But he couldn’t.

He couldn’t—

And the door at the far end of the kitchen suddenly blew off its hinges and let in a fireball that incinerated Joy Springer and the hairy sofa as if they were one big ball of tinder, and then rolled across the room towards Marvel.

The Land Rover only took Jonas so far.

The blizzard was blinding and he did his best but he needed to get there fast and he tried too hard. Halfway up the driveway to Springer Farm it came to a sudden lurching halt in a ditch that Jonas couldn’t even see until after he’d climbed out and gone round to the front of the car.

He wasted no time digging it out, just headed up towards the farm on foot, just as he always had as a boy.

Reynolds despised Marvel. Never more than now, when the man had elbowed him aside and rushed into flames in a display of stupid bravado fuelled by liquor.

Part of him was horrified when his commanding officer disappeared through the door; the bigger part was just furious that when Marvel emerged he would be regarded as a hero instead of the selfish, stupid, alcoholic wanker that he undoubtedly was.

He shouted for Marvel a few times, and set his face in a worried frown. His colleagues stood, open-mouthed, exchanging looks, carrying off their worried frowns with far more skill, in his eyes, while all silently asked each other the same question: Should we go after him?

Grey yelled something unintelligible and ran off into the darkness.

The kitchen window blew out as if a bomb had gone off inside. Bright new flames licked out of the cavity as the fire tried its best to escape the confines of the house and reach the courtyard and the cottages beyond.

‘No one go after him!’ Reynolds barked. ‘I don’t want anyone else hurt!’

He saw their relief and was relieved in turn that no one was going to insist that they all do something heroic.

Then someone rushed past his shoulder and into the house anyway.

It was Jonas Holly.

Jonas had arrived just in time to hear Reynolds yell not to go after him, and knew there must be at least one person in that inferno.

He ran into the farmhouse before he’d even decided to.

The heat was like being hit in the face, and steam rose immediately from his wet clothes and hair. The smoke was debilitating. He stopped dead, then took a few blind paces – hands out in front of him in case of obstacles.

He hit the table with his thigh and at the same time stepped on something hard yet yielding. He groped at his feet and found a slippery arm. He seized it with both hands, and backed out of the door with the body bumping along behind him.

The others crowded round, helping him to drag it out of the danger zone.

It was Marvel.

Only half of one sleeve and the upper part of his coat still gave him much cover – his vest and shorts were just blackened rags. His left shin was a vivid mess of red and black, like the leading edge of a lava-flow, with the bedrock of bone showing through in places. The rest of that leg was livid and raw, with bubbles in the flesh of the thigh. His ever-damp shoes had protected his feet from the worst of it, but it was small comfort.

Singh immediately dropped to his knees to check his vitals.

‘Not breathing,’ he said, and started CPR.

Jonas coughed and spat before gasping, ‘Is there anyone else?’

‘Mrs Springer, we think,’ said Rice.

Jonas turned to go back but Reynolds and Pollard barred his way.

‘She can’t be alive,’ said Reynolds. ‘Stay here.’

‘She might be!’ cried Jonas, bursting into a fresh bout of coughing and trying to go around them.

‘Stay here,’ said Reynolds. ‘That’s an order.’

Jonas looked at him in fury and Reynolds almost put up a hand in self-defence.

‘It’s your job to protect people!’

‘Not dead people,’ said Reynolds – and although it was a good answer, he took no pleasure in saying it.

‘He’s coming back,’ said Singh with relief flooding his voice.

They all turned to look down at Marvel, who was now breathing noisily and irregularly, and jerking his arms and legs as if trying to make angels in the snow.

‘Shit,’ said Grey. ‘You think he’s got brain damage?’

‘Where’s the fucking ambulance?’ cried Singh.

‘Call control and tell them we need an air ambulance,’ said Reynolds. ‘Tell them officer down.’

Pollard opened his phone and scurried about the courtyard, seeking a signal.

Jonas started to heap snow on to Marvel’s burned legs and Singh and Rice quickly did the same.

‘He’ll be fine,’ said Reynolds with more confidence than he felt. He leaned over Marvel and said, ‘Sir? John? Can you hear me, sir?’

Marvel’s eyes flickered and rolled back in his head, then steadied and came to something like focus on his Task Force and Jonas Holly looking down at him.

‘Murder,’ he whispered hoarsely.

‘What, sir?’ Reynolds put his ear close to Marvel’s lips.

‘Murder,’ he mouthed again weakly.

This time Reynolds got it.

‘He said murder.’

The others looked at him, confused.

Reynolds shrugged and – with a wholly inappropriate sense of dawning happiness – realized he was now in charge, due to the unforeseen incapacity of the Senior Investigating Officer. The fire was obviously beyond their control, even though Grey had finally arrived with a coil of heavy-duty yellow hosepipe over his shoulder. Now he needed to stop responding like a panicky man in pyjamas, and start responding like an SIO at a crime scene. He swelled visibly as he straightened up over Marvel’s prone figure half buried in snow.

‘Charlie, get that pipe hooked up and you and Dave do your best,’ he told Grey and Pollard, then pointed at Marvel. ‘Armand and Elizabeth, keep helping him. The whole area is a potential crime scene. Me and Jonas will take a look round, just in case.’ Jonas and I. Jonas and I. Jesus Christ! One man down and his grammar was all over the fucking place.

‘We’re just giving up on her, are we?’ said Jonas.

‘Yes,’ said Reynolds, thrilled by the horrible brutality of that truth. He looked Jonas square in the eye in case he was going to have trouble with him, but the young policeman just gave a tilt of his head that might have been assent, might have been a shrug. Either way, Reynolds strode away from the scene of the crime and fetched his torch and his back-up torch for Jonas, then led him across the courtyard.

They left the orange glow and the heat that was turning the snowy courtyard into a giant puddle, and moved into the darkness behind the stables. Once away from the action, it was shockingly serene. Jonas felt quite removed from the horror of it all. The farmhouse burning down sounded like a jolly bonfire; the tiles blasting off the roof like rockets and bangers. The smell of roasting meat filled the air and Jonas shivered, but got a pang of hunger that disgusted the vegetarian in him.

He felt strangely ambivalent about Joy Springer inside the burning house. He wondered if her cats had died too, and thought of the way their fur made him sneeze whenever he’d gone into the gloomy old kitchen with its towering dresser and Belfast sink.

Reynolds switched his torch on; Jonas followed suit and immediately went blind, but for the two bright shafts of speckled light which showed tunnels of falling snow. He turned it off again, without bothering to explain to Reynolds why it was easier to see without it.

They crossed the old hard standing with its ridged concrete, where the blacksmith used to shoe the ponies. Jonas could almost feel Taffy’s head, heavy in his arms as he dozed, while his neat little hoofs were shaved and shaped and scorched and hammered. That strangely comforting stink of burned hair, and the yard lurcher, Nelson, darting in to snatch the biggest bits of horn, which made his breath reek and gave him the runs…

Reynolds said something Jonas didn’t hear.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘Could be anywhere,’ said Reynolds again, shining his torch across the field behind the stables.

Jonas didn’t answer. From the corner of his eye he’d seen something regular at one edge of the concrete standing. Three or four darker patches in the snow which his memory could supply no immediate explanation for.

He dropped back from Reynolds and walked over to check it out.

Footprints.

Now that he had found what he was looking for, Jonas switched his torch back on and examined the depressions in the snow.

Although the snow was filling them fast – softening them and making identification impossible – they were definitely footprints. Jonas shone his torch into them. There was no tread visible at the bottom of each twelve-inch-deep impression, just a delicate frosting of new flakes glittering in the false light.

Jonas followed them with his torch.

The prints led down the hill – straight towards Rose Cottage.

‘Lucy!’ he shouted into the night, as if she might hear him.

Reynolds shone his torch in Jonas’s face and saw terror there.

‘What?’ he said.

‘My house!’ cried Jonas and pointed to where the bathroom light shone square and yellow two fields away. ‘He’s gone to my house! My wife! She’s alone. I left her alone!’

Then he started to run, bounding through the snow in long, awkward strides.

Reynolds ran after him for a few paces, then stopped. ‘Jonas! Wait!’

But Jonas ignored him.

‘Fuck!’ Reynolds turned and made his way back to the blackness behind the cottages. He needed reinforcements. If the killer was indeed at Jonas Holly’s house then he didn’t want to be the only back-up. Once back on the flat ground, he slipped and skidded around to the courtyard once more, almost surprised that things had been going on here without him. The house was still burning, Grey was still playing with the hosepipe, and Rice and Singh were still bent over Marvel and had started CPR again. Reynolds rushed straight to them.

‘How is he?’

‘Dead,’ said Singh between compressions.

‘Shit,’ said Reynolds. ‘Shit fuck shit!’

‘Yeah, I know,’ said Singh. ‘Should I stop?’

Reynolds thought of the months of work he’d put into the file he’d hoped would see Marvel kicked off the force in disgrace and without a pension.

Wasted.

Now Marvel had instead died trying to rescue a civilian from a burning building.

Die a hero, stay a hero.

Nothing was fair.

‘Yes,’ he told Singh. ‘Stop.’

Rice and Singh both stopped working on Marvel, and Grey stopped his own pointless task and came over and stood beside Rice. Singh remained kneeling in the sludge that the snow had become. He took off his jacket and laid it carefully over Marvel’s face. Then he noticed something sticking out of the inside pocket of Marvel’s coat and carefully removed a burned and crispy photograph.

Two charred and blistered boys, damaged beyond recognition.

‘Did he have children?’ he asked.

‘Don’t think so,’ said Grey.

‘Right,’ said Reynolds, before they could all get maudlin, ‘our man might be at Holly’s cottage down the hill. We all need to get there now!’

‘How?’ said Pollard, whose face was as black as a miner’s. ‘Even fire and ambulance can’t make it.’

‘Across the fields. You can see it from here. Everyone get a torch and a coat.’

They all looked at each other.

‘Come on!’ yelled Reynolds, and they all scurried into their respective cottages and out again in seconds, Singh in just a sweater.

‘Get your jacket,’ Reynolds told him roughly. ‘You need it more than him.’

Singh tentatively lifted his jacket off the body and pulled it on.

Then Reynolds led his new team out of the courtyard, leaving DCI John Marvel to another, colder shroud, which covered him slowly from a pitch-black sky.

When Lucy woke there was dust on her lips and carpet-print on her cheek.

She knew the sound of an empty house and this was it.

The telephone was downstairs. She didn’t know how long she had, and couldn’t afford the time the return journey would take.

She remembered her first line of defence and limped to the landing and tried to move the bookcase to the top of the stairs, but with her weakened hands and wrists it was a hopeless task which she was quickly forced to abandon.

She thought of banging on the wall to alert Mrs Paddon, then decided not to. What could an eighty-nine-year-old woman possibly do to help? Lucy would only be placing her in danger. Instead she went into the back bedroom, picked up the gaff, opened the trapdoor into the attic and – after several wavering attempts – managed to hook the eye on the sliding ladder and tug it to the ground.

Then Lucy put the knife that Jonas had insisted she carry into her back pocket, picked up the camping lantern from the bedside table and put an unsteady foot on the first rung.

It took her almost fifteen minutes to climb the ladder. She slipped a dozen times – banging her elbows, grazing her fingers, once tearing a gash in her forearm – and had to take several gasping rests, clinging on to the upper rungs and kneeling on the lower ones to try to give her legs some respite. The longer she struggled and the higher she climbed, the more frantic she got to ascend into the square of darkness.

The irony did not escape her. She had tried to kill herself. Still might. And yet here she was, trying to hide from a killer who would do the job for her.

The instinct for self-preservation came as a shock to Lucy.

When she finally made it and hauled herself into the dry, cold space that smelled of wood and feathers and mouse droppings, Lucy could not move again for ten minutes. She retched from effort and sobbed in pain.

And then the kick in the teeth came when she found that she could not pull the ladder up behind her. She strained and wept, but her grip was limp and her arms feeble and the ladder didn’t seem to be designed for such a thing anyway. There was nothing she could do about it. She tried to move a heavy wooden packing case over the entrance but it stuck on a joist and she had expended the last of her energy. She cried again with frustration. She knew what she should be doing! In her head she had it all worked out! The Lucy Holly that she used to be would have run, jumped, set booby traps, armed herself, been prepared. That Lucy Holly would have kicked zombie butt and outwitted the very devil. But that Lucy was long gone. And with the new Lucy’s body the only one available to her now, it was all she could do to crawl into a corner with her unlit lantern and her knife, huddle in a musty old armchair, and wait for the killer to come home.

The killer did come home, although nobody would ever have guessed it.

Jonas was a fit man, but running through the foot-deep snow was exhausting. His lungs tore at his chest and his heart pounded his ribs like a madman in a cage. His boots and trousers were wet well past his knees and seemed to be made of something that stuck to snow and dragged at his legs every time he tried to lift them to place one foot in front of the other.

Still, he made it across the first field lit only by the stars and a slim moon, his eyes adjusting so well that he even spotted the gap in the hedge that denoted a gate, which he clambered over so fast that his legs got left behind and he dropped face-first into the snow on the other side before getting up and running again.

Despite the snow over uneven ground and the wind that drove the flakes into him, fear made him faster than he’d ever have thought possible and blurred the blizzard so that he was running through a snow globe as it was shaken up. He couldn’t tell which way was up, as flakes came at him from everywhere – now in his eyes, now in his ears, now slapping the back of his head like a teacher. The only guide was that bathroom light which – mercifully – he had left on in another time and place he barely even remembered now. It disappeared and jiggled and jerked on the inconstant horizon. If it weren’t for that he might have run to Withypool for all the sense of direction he had left in him.

Now and then he saw the tracks he was following, but he didn’t really care about them any more. His target was that bathroom window. He didn’t care where the killer was going – as long as it wasn’t Rose Cottage. As long as it wasn’t to Lucy.

Not Lucy! Not Lucy! Not Lucy! The words beat the rhythm of his headlong race across the snow.

He pulled his phone from his pocket and looked at the display but there was no signal. Big shock. He tossed it aside like ballast.

The prints in the snow curved slowly to the right. The gate in the second field was off somewhere to his right and opened on to the lane. He couldn’t afford the detour and kept running straight down the hill. He would have to go over the hedge beside Rose Cottage. Or through it.

Either way, it wasn’t stopping him.

The hedge loomed, huge and black with its happy icing of snow. Because of his height, Jonas had done high jump at school. He wasn’t much good at it but he remembered the basics. He speeded up, turned in at the last moment, and threw himself at the hedge in a not-ungraceful arc. He landed high enough to be suspended there in uncomfortable limbo. He rolled on to his stomach, reaching for anything that would give him purchase, gripping handfuls of branches and thorns, dragging himself across the five-foot expanse, which sagged and dug and snapped under him like cruel water, before dropping to the ground in a heap on the other side, right next to Lucy’s Beetle. There was a crunch and he winced as he landed on his torch.

He stood, jerked forward as if to rush into the house, and then stopped and caught his breath. The killer could be there. He couldn’t just rush in. He needed to think. He couldn’t afford to screw this up. Lucy needed him. Now more than ever.

He couldn’t fall apart on her now.

The front door was closed but unlocked. His fault. His fault. Leave it open for people so Lucy wouldn’t have to keep getting up. This was the countryside; his home village. They’d felt so safe! Leaving the door unlocked had become a dangerous habit, and a bedtime oversight.

He sucked air into his burning lungs and pushed open the door.

Everything was the same.

He peered into the dark front room but the TV was off, although the fire still burned softly behind the guard.

No light in the kitchen. He crossed quietly to it. It was empty, and the washing machine hummed.

Up the dark stairs, pausing at every other step to listen for an intruder, missing the tread halfway up that creaked so badly.

The bookcase at the top of the stairs had been moved slightly, which Jonas discovered painfully with his left shoulder. A little gasp of surprise escaped him before he could apprehend it.

No answering sound.

The light was on under the bathroom door. Jonas went in.

The air was still slightly warm and heavy with moisture from his earlier shower.

Jonas’s gut lurched. There was blood on the tap.

There was blood.

On the tap.

He went closer to the basin. The smear of blood was unmistakable – as if someone had turned the tap on or off with a bloodstained hand. A little drip ran down the porcelain.

He frantically looked around with eyes attuned to this one thing, and found more. Two drops on the floor, a smear near the laundry basket, what looked like half a handprint on the outer edge of the basin – four slightly splayed strips where someone had rested their printless fingers.

Jonas turned sharply to go and caught a movement close to his head that made him flinch and put up a hand in self-defence.

He almost laughed. He’d jumped at his own fuzzy reflection in the cabinet mirror!

He stopped dead.

In the lingering condensation on the cold glass mirror was a message he had no doubt was meant for him.

‘Lucy!’ he cried in strangled horror, and ran to the bedroom, slapping on lights. She was not there. He ran into the box room. Empty. Jonas was no longer looking for, or afraid of, the killer. He only wanted to see his wife.

The back bedroom. His childhood room. She wasn’t there but, behind the door, the loft ladder had been dropped from the attic.

‘Lucy?’ he hissed. He was wary again now. He couldn’t see how Lu could have extended the ladder, let alone gone up it, without help.

Or without being forced.

Halfway up the ladder was a long smear of blood.

He bit his lip to keep himself quiet. He peered up into the black hole. There was no light in the attic; they used a camping lantern. A lantern that was no longer in its usual place on the bedside table.

Jonas gripped the ladder and slowly climbed into the dark.

From his secret place the killer watched with a dispassionate eye as Jonas Holly warily ascended the ladder. He knew what he would find up there, and knew that this would soon be over.

It was sad, but it was the way things had to be.

Reynolds and his team were lost.

They had run across the fields more slowly than Jonas because they did not have a wife in danger on the other side and because they were not as fit, as fast or as tall as him. The snow was a problem – both that which was deep underfoot and the fresh flakes that were whipped stingingly into their faces.

They followed Jonas’s tracks to where they appeared to run straight into a hedge.

‘Shit,’ said Reynolds.

They could see the lighted window in the cottage on the other side of the hedge, but there seemed to be no way to get to it.

‘There must be a gate,’ Reynolds said, and so they started to look for it, splitting into two groups, each going in opposite directions down the hedge-line.

Singh tried to find a place to burrow through, but learned a quick lesson in blackthorn and sheep wire.

They reconvened at the place where Jonas’s tracks were now filling with new snow, and Reynolds turned towards the lane and started a methodical circumnavigation of the field in an attempt to find a way out.

Lucy jumped at the rattle of the ladder. The yellow patch of light in the attic floor was darkened by a shadow and she got out of the armchair, groping for the knife.

She saw the silhouette of a man’s head rise into the attic space and held the blade out towards him in hands that shook uncontrollably.

‘Who’s there?’ she said in a tremulous voice.

‘It’s me!’ Jonas sounded hugely relieved. ‘Are you OK, Lu?’

‘Don’t come up here!’

His head and shoulders were already in the attic and she could see him cocking his head, trying to squint into the darkness to make her out.

‘Sweetheart, what’s wrong?’

He stepped up another rung so he was up to his waist in the attic.

‘Stay there!’

Jonas stopped dead. Lucy’s head spun. This was ridiculous. This was Jonas. He had come to help her, not to harm her. But she needed some… explanations.

‘I found the missing button!’ she cried.

Of all the things he’d expected Lucy to say next, that was the stone-cold last. Jonas almost laughed. Would have, if he hadn’t been able to hear the shake and the fear in Lucy’s voice.

‘What button?’

‘The button you found on Margaret Priddy’s roof. It came off your trousers.’

‘No it didn’t. I checked when I found it. What’s this all about, Lu? How did you get up here?’

‘It did, Jonas! I found a pair of your uniform trousers tonight with a button missing.’

Jonas still failed to see how that would scare his wife so badly she would hide in the attic. She’d always been so objective and sensible. He couldn’t understand—

Panic suddenly made him tingle all over.

‘Lu? Did you take anything? Did you take any… thing?’

‘No! Jonas! Something’s going on here, but it’s with you, not me! I think… I think something’s not right with you, Jonas.’

He was not convinced. The note of hysteria in her voice worried him. He started to move up as if to make the final climb into the attic, but her scream cut him short.

‘Stay there!’

‘OK. OK, Lu. I’m not moving. I’m staying right here.’

A sob of relief came from the darkness.

‘Lu, do you have the lantern?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you turn it on, baby? So I can see you? So we can talk?’

She hesitated, then he heard her fumble around in the darkness, sniffing back tears. He was careful not to make a move while she was distracted; she sounded brittle enough to snap at any moment.

The lantern glowed an unnatural white beside her, and made her haggard face look ghostly, while the knife in her hand glittered.

He saw the cut on her swollen lip.

‘Lucy! What happened? Did you fall? There’s blood in the bathroom.’

She touched her lip with one shaking finger. ‘You did this, Jonas. When you hit me.’

‘What?’

Lucy’s voice was small and childlike. ‘Earlier tonight.’

‘I never hit you, Lu! I never would! What the hell’s going on?’

‘You don’t remember,’ she whispered.

‘Lucy, please, you’re scaring me. Please tell me what’s happened. Why are you up here? Did he come back? Did he hurt you, Lu?’

‘Who?’

‘The killer! The man I chased out of the back door! Did he come back? Lucy, tell me!’

‘You don’t remember,’ she said. ‘You don’t remember what happened. You were somebody else.’

‘Lucy, I’m me. I’m just me.’

He didn’t know what else to say. Lucy must have taken something. He didn’t want to engage in some weird drug-induced conversation with her. He was the protector. He needed to get her to come out of the attic with him and downstairs so he could check her over and get her to vomit. Maybe he’d have to take her to hospital. The Land Rover might make it.

‘Lu, I’m coming up, OK?’

‘No!’

‘Sweetheart, I have to, I—’

‘NO! Stay there!’

He stopped again, still on the ladder but now more in the attic than out of it.

She tried to control the wobble in her voice. ‘Jonas, you have to listen to me. Please.’

‘I’m listening,’ he said, although really he was wondering if he could rush her, or whether it might be dangerous with her waving that knife around in front of her.

‘Jonas,’ she began – then started to cry. ‘Jonas, I think you lost your button the night you killed Margaret Priddy.’

‘Lucy!—’

‘Listen! You said you’d listen to me!’

‘I am,’ he said, and this time he really was.

‘It wasn’t really you, Jonas. I know you’d never, ever hurt anyone. I don’t just believe it, I know it. But I think some… part of you killed Margaret and Yvonne and the others. I don’t know why, but you’ve been under such pressure, Jonas! Your parents and the job and then me, being such a burden to you… And then… and then when I couldn’t even kill myself…’ Lucy trailed off, but gathered herself up again and went on. ‘I know how scared you were, Jonas. I saw it on your face! You were like a frightened little boy, like a—’

‘Shut up!’

Lucy stopped, shocked, at Jonas’s words, which came out with a thick, low vehemence she’d never heard from him before.

‘Jonas?’ she said cautiously.

‘Shut up! You’ll wake him!’

Lucy swayed in disbelief. The voice was not Jonas’s. It was rougher and older, and his face had changed. Lucy sought the softness in Jonas’s eyes and found only black nothingness.

‘Who’s there?’ she whispered.

‘None of your business,’ he snapped.

‘Who will I wake up?’

‘The boy. We let him sleep.’

‘Who’s we?’

‘Me and Jonas. Although he’s been no fucking use. Won’t do his job.’

Lucy caught her breath.

Do your job, crybaby.

‘What’s Jonas’s job?’

‘Protecting the boy, of course. That’s always been his job. He’s the protector.’

‘And who are you?’

There was a long pause.

‘I am the killer.’

Something in Lucy hoped she might be dreaming, but the cold and the smell of mouse droppings and the knife in her hands all felt very real to her. She made a huge effort to speak simply and gently so as not to provoke the person who was no longer her husband.

‘Who is the boy?’

‘The boy is us. He’s who we used to be.’

‘What do you need to protect him from?’

Silence.

‘How can Jonas protect the boy?’

The man who wasn’t Jonas shrugged, but looked sly. He knew.

‘Why does the boy need protection? What happened to him?’

‘Shut up!’ The man who was not her husband put an angry foot up on to the floor of the attic. ‘You’ll wake him!’

Lucy spoke quickly and gently, trying to talk her way past the killer to reach Jonas. ‘Was it something to do with the fire, Jonas? What happened to you and Danny up at the farm? Did somebody hurt you, sweetheart? Did somebody—’

‘Don’t! Please don’t!’

Huge tears welled in Jonas’s eyes and his face instantly relaxed into something so young and vulnerable that Lucy gasped. That little boy who’d been at her hospital bedside was suddenly standing here in her attic as if by magic.

‘Jonas?’ she whispered.

The boy/man shook his head and pushed his tears away with the heel of a rough hand. ‘Please don’t talk about it. Please don’t make me say.’ Then he covered his face with his hands and his young voice was muffled. ‘Where is this? I don’t want to be here. Don’t make me be here.’

It broke her heart. She actually felt a pain, as if that tender organ was being torn in two, and she put a hand to her breast, knotting the blue sweater in her fist.

‘Jonas,’ she whispered, her voice hoarse with emotion.

Jonas slowly took his hands from his face and looked at her, and Lucy gave a huge sob of relief to see her husband standing there once more.

‘I wouldn’t hurt anyone, Lu. You know that!’

It was as if the last two minutes had never happened. No killer with his cold, dead eyes, no boy-Jonas tortured by the memory of something so terrible that it had split him apart. Those fragments of the whole lived separate lives – the boy sleeping, Jonas protecting him, the killer dormant until the stress that she had caused threatened to reawaken the horror he’d already lived once. If something had gone wrong with that delicate balance, the only person to blame was herself. She had been the tipping point.

Lucy burned with shame and selfishness.

With one self-obsessed handful of pills, she had made Jonas start to fall apart.

Despite the shock of the truth, Lucy felt a sudden surge of pride in Jonas. There was one thing he had done supremely well: he had protected the boy within him like a tigress does a cub. He had become a protector both personally and professionally; his whole life – conscious and subconscious – had been devoted to keeping that small child from having to face whatever it was that had been done to him.

She realized with a sharp pang that Jonas had been more of a parent than she would ever be. He had worked so hard and done so well. The boy had grown up into a good man, had got a good job and had loved her like no other. He had suffered setbacks and sadness and nothing had broken him.

Until she had tried to kill herself.

And now she understood everything.

Tears started to blur her vision.

‘I know you love me, Jonas.’

‘Of course I love you!’

‘But protecting me is making you hurt other people instead, sweetheart. The notes you wrote: Call yourself a policeman?… Do your job… You knew you were hurting the wrong people…’

Jonas looked confused. ‘What do you mean?’

Her tears were coming thick and fast now – as she knew in her heart the truth of what she was about to say.

‘Jonas… There’s somebody inside you who wants me dead.’

‘What?’

‘It’s OK. I understand. You have to protect the boy. He needs you to be strong, Jonas. Now more than ever.’

‘Lucy, honey, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please come downstairs…’

He held out his hand to her – the way he had at the altar. She had given him her hand then and he had slid the ring on to her finger and vowed to love her for ever.

‘You killed the wrong people, Jonas.’

She had lost it.

‘I didn’t kill anyone, Lu. I swear to you. Sweetheart, please just come downstairs with me, so we can talk properly. It’s freezing up here. Please, Lu? Please?’

Lucy stared at his outstretched hand and then looked up into his eyes with an expression of such helpless agony on her face that he flinched.

‘Jonas,’ she choked, ‘you’re still wearing the gloves.’

Jonas looked down at his hand. It shone, stretched and strange in the white light of the lantern, and he held it up so he could see it better.

He was wearing a near-translucent surgical glove.

Why?

Why?

He frowned stupidly at his own fingers, all smooth and pale and plastic. He raised his other hand and saw it was the same. He felt disorientated. Why would he be wearing these gloves? It made no sense.

‘I love you with all my heart, but you can’t protect me any more. It has to stop.’ Lucy’s voice was a dull whisper. It had lost all hope.

Jonas said nothing – still consumed by the sight of his own shining fingers.

‘This is the job you were meant to do, Jonas,’ Lucy said, and – with hands that did not shake – slid the knife into her own throat.

‘NO! NO! NO!’

Jonas reached her in two seconds and caught her before she fell. The knife was lodged in her jugular, blood beat from her neck in time to her heart, while she made a very small mewling sound, like a kitten in a box.

Jonas made all the noise. He screamed her name and screamed for help and tried to stop the blood with his hands, then dragged her towards the hatch. He had to get her to hospital. He barely touched the ladder, dropping on to the landing in a heap with his wife in his arms, then down the stairs, slipping halfway, banging his head, and falling to the hallway, holding on to Lucy in a tangled mess of blood and arms and legs.

He raised his face from the cold flagstones, sat up and pulled her on to his lap, repeating her name like a talisman against bad things. If only he kept saying Lucy then she would not die. Would not.

Her copper hair was darkened by thick blood, and her face was spattered and smeared. Her eyes were still open and found his.

‘LucyLucyLucyLucy…’

She looked away from him then and into a future where he could not follow.

‘Don’t go,’ he begged her. ‘Please don’t go.’

But he could do nothing but hold her and watch the light in her eyes go out.

Here on the cold floor behind the front door – where Lucy Holly had already tried to end her life once – she finally succeeded.

Jonas laid her head gently on his knees and pulled the knife from her neck. Then he plunged it into his belly.

‘GET OUT!’ he screamed. ‘GET OUT!’

Jonas repeatedly sought the killer inside him, but his job was done and he was nowhere to be found.

The walls were thick and stone, but Mrs Paddon was woken by Jonas’s shout of ‘NO! NO! NO!’

She was eighty-nine, but she had been through the war, so she got out of bed and pulled on her coat and boots.

She heard Jonas screaming ‘GET OUT!’ as she approached the front door, but nobody burst past her, so she went inside.

She found Lucy dead and Jonas still alive, so she fetched towels to staunch the blood.

She saw the knife lying nearby, so she didn’t touch it in case it was evidence.

She called the police and the ambulance and told them two people had been attacked in their home and stabbed.

She went back to help Jonas and noticed with a puzzled frown the surgical gloves on his hands.

She had known Jonas Holly since he came home from the hospital in his proud father’s arms, and she knew he was a good boy.

There could be no doubt about that.

So she pulled them off and threw them in the embers of the fire, where they stank and smoked and then melted into flames just as Reynolds and his team finally burst through the front door.