Darkside

Twenty-one Days

The heating in the stable was on the blink and short flurries of overnight snow seemed to have come through the TV aerial because even the few available channels were now only visible through a white swirl of static. After cursing the tepid water and aborting a shave, Marvel decided he needed to yell at someone, so called Jos Reeves a good hour before he was due to arrive at the lab.

‘Well,’ said Reeves calmly at the other end of the line – and Marvel itched as he heard the man light up a cigarette before continuing – ‘we’ve got seven hairs, dozens of fibres and we rushed through the saliva on the pillow.’

Marvel didn’t acknowledge the rush. ‘Is it hers?’

‘Yes. Looks like you have your murder.’

‘Good,’ said Marvel, devoid of tact. ‘Prints?’

‘No fingers, no feet.’

‘Fuck,’ said Marvel. ‘Semen?’

‘Nope. No blood, no semen. Some urine though.’

‘She had a bag. It burst.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Reeves.

Marvel was now irritated anew by the fact that he’d chosen to call and yell at one of the few people he couldn’t intimidate. Jos Reeves was so laid back he was supine. Not for the first time, Marvel wondered about the contents of the cigarette he could hear Reeves sucking on now and then. He wished he’d called Reynolds instead and demanded something unreasonable. Watch his head get all patchy. He told Reeves to keep him updated when they had results on the hairs and fibres and hung up while he still had a reasonable reserve of vitriol.

Marvel walked across the wet concrete courtyard and knocked officiously on Joy Springer’s door. Even though it was 7am and still dark, the old woman was up and dressed and had a hand-rolled cigarette clamped in her drawstring mouth. Another setback in his quest for the upper hand.

‘There’s no hot water,’ he snapped.

‘Well it’s not cold, is it?’ she snapped back.

Marvel was wrong-footed. ‘It’s lukewarm,’ he said feebly.

‘Lukewarm in’t cold. Did you let it run?’

‘No,’ he said grudgingly.

‘You got to give it a chance to come through, bay. Specially when there’s a freeze on.’

Marvel glanced past her and saw the bottle on the kitchen table. It looked like breakfast.

Joy Springer saw his gaze and moved forward to hustle him backwards. She clutched her big old woollen cardigan with leather buttons together at her wrinkled throat and gestured at the open door with one gnarled hand. ‘And now you’m be letting my heat out.’

Marvel withdrew gracelessly and went back to his quarters, wishing he could start the morning again. He let the water run and it finally came through hot, but only if he almost closed the tap to a trickle. Finally he boiled the inadequate travel kettle and shaved with the proceeds.

He banged on Reynolds’s door half an hour before they’d agreed, but his DS was ready to go.

‘I’m arresting Priddy,’ Marvel said by way of good morning.

Reynolds knew better than to openly disagree. ‘OK,’ he said neutrally as they walked to the car.

‘If it was burglary gone wrong then the killer knew the nurses’ routines and he knew what he was looking for, in which case it’s got to be one of the nurses or a friend or family. If it was murder, then it’s personal and ditto.’

Marvel glared at Reynolds, daring him to protest. When he didn’t, his own theory lost some of its shine and he dumped the clutch irritably.

‘I suppose we can always ask him for a DNA sample once the results on hairs and fibres are in,’ said Reynolds with a mild-mannered shrug. ‘Confirm it then.’

Marvel gripped the steering wheel more tightly. Trust Reynolds to ruin everything with his slavish devotion to the niceties of evidence. Nobody played a hunch any more.

Marvel could go and screw himself.

That was the thought that kept rolling around Jonas Holly’s brain. This was his patch, these were his neighbours, and Margaret Priddy has been his responsibility.

And if Marvel wasn’t going to let him on the team, he would simply fly solo. He had his usual work to do and no one – neither Marvel nor anyone else – could keep him from asking a few questions, keeping his eyes peeled, and responding to whatever he heard or saw. That was the job he was paid to do, after all.

After a restless night, Jonas rose at 5.45am, kissed a sleeping Lucy goodbye at 6.30, checked that Mrs Paddon had taken her milk in and was therefore still alive, walked down the pitch-dark road into the village, and knocked on his first door at 6.45am to be sure of catching the four or five residents he knew would shortly be off to work themselves, leaving empty houses behind them for the day.

By the time the school bell rang at nine, Jonas had covered about thirty houses, asking the same questions again and again and again up and down Barnstaple Road. What did you see? What did you hear? Anything suspicious? Anything that might help? Do you have my number?

All morning, as he made careful notes of random comments, Jonas had the uncomfortable feeling that he was being watched.

It was the note. The note bothered him. More than bothered him. There was no home that Jonas asked questions in where a little voice in his head did not ask another question: Was it him? Was it her? Did they write the note?

The very fact that he had not discussed it with Lucy was proof of how badly it had shaken him. Jonas was not in the habit of hiding things from his wife. So he knew that this guilty itch at the back of his neck and his urge to turn around suddenly was most likely due to keeping a secret from Lucy.

Since Monday morning when he’d found it, Jonas’s jaw tightened every time he approached the Land Rover; his eyes swept the screen, fearing another accusation – another truth. And at night when he helped Lucy upstairs to bed, it was the note he thought of as often now as the way his wife was wasting away beneath his hands. She had been through the steroids that made her fat but now he could feel the ribs in her back, the knobs of her spine, the blade of her pelvis poking rudely at the place where her smooth and pretty hip used to be. His wife was disappearing and it was his job to keep her from falling backwards into the abyss.

Lucy needs you. Now more than ever.

She was going through the motions – getting up every day and getting dressed; planting daffodils and anemones too late in already-frozen ground, reading the Bugle and asking him about his day. But he knew it was all brittle brightness. The way she felt the need to smile at him when she caught him looking. The way she said ‘I love you’ with her lips while her eyes were always searching the perimeter wall for a way out.

The last thing she needed was to worry about him.

And if she knew how the note had made him feel, then she would worry. Because it had made him feel terrible.

Uneasy, guilty, paranoid.

Ashamed.

How could he tell her about the note? The weight of that cruel slip of paper might be enough to break her. Again.

No… Lucy had enough to carry. He would carry the note alone.

Marvel didn’t arrest Peter Priddy, of course. He didn’t even see Peter Priddy. He told Reynolds to continue the house-to-house in Shipcott and then spent the morning shouting at various imbeciles at HQ in a bid to get a mobile incident room assigned. Stuck out in the middle of all this air and weather, Marvel needed the grubby confines of a glorified caravan to feel a sense of purpose.

By the afternoon Marvel’s Task Force were all gossiped out. Unlike movie imaginings of the secretive, sinister life of a small village, Shipcott residents couldn’t wait to give their opinions of whodunnit, and have their shaky recall tested by questions about what they saw on the night Margaret Priddy died. The team felt overloaded by pointless information. Snippets and digs, Miss Marple theories and bad blood.

As the light started to fade from the overcast winter sky, the Task Force met Marvel in the Red Lion to pool their information, and quickly discovered that their collective picture of a possible perpetrator amounted to a sole suspect in the shape of a local thief called Ronnie Trewell. To add insult to injury, between them at first they thought they had three promising leads. It took them nearly an hour to realize that Skew Ronnie, Ron Trewell and ‘the boy what walks funny’ were all the same person – and a mere car thief, to boot.

Despite that, Reynolds made a dutiful note of the name, wrote ‘alias, Skew Ronnie (limp?)’ next to it in his book and felt like one of the Famous Five doing it.

The team also reported that several residents had been short with them because they’d already spoken to the local bobby.

‘That idiot who waggled the vic’s nose?’ frowned Marvel.

‘I suppose so,’ said Reynolds. ‘PC Holly.’

‘Very festive,’ said Elizabeth Rice, and Grey over-laughed as if he thought she just might sleep with him for doing so.

Marvel’s already lined face got even more rumpled and he flicked a fingernail repeatedly against his glass of bitter lemon as if all would be well with the world if only he had a proper pint.

No one had had anything to report from Saturday night that was out of the ordinary because by now they all knew as well as any local that Neil Randall getting drunk and falling over was a regular occurrence, and – as they’d heard from at least four separate sources – that in the throes of passion, Angela Stirk in Bellbow Cottage always yipped like a dog.

‘Got an Asbo for it, apparently,’ said Grey with just a hint of admiration. ‘And her husband’s away on the rigs!’

Marvel stared into his drink as the reality dawned on him.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘They’ve told us precisely nothing.’

‘Maybe there was nothing to tell,’ said Reynolds placatingly.

‘Or maybe they told it all to their mate Holly already.’

‘It’s a possibility,’ said Singh mildly.

‘Fucking yokels,’ said Marvel too loudly, and Reynolds glanced guiltily at the regulars at the bar and hogging the fire. None of them appeared to have heard. At least, no one was coming at Marvel with a pitchfork.

‘Seems Mrs Priddy had no enemies,’ Reynolds shrugged, steering them back to the victim. It always helped to be reminded of the victim in these cases – made everyone focus again when they were drifting or bickering.

‘Yeah. I’m starting to think it was a random thing,’ said Rice, downing her lemonade and wiping her mouth in a way that made Marvel wonder if she was a lesbian.

‘Nothing is random,’ he told her. ‘There will be a reason – even if that reason makes no sense to anyone but the killer.’

The killer observed Jonas with a cold eye as he made his calls. Saw him bang his head against Will Bishop’s odd logic, saw him step off the narrow pavement for Chantelle Cox with her ugly ginger baby in its cheap buggy, despised the way he scanned the street for the watcher he could feel but not see.

Jonas Holly was supposed to be the protector.

If he had done what he was supposed to, then the killer would never have started – and might have been stopped.

The killer was here because Jonas was not doing his job.

And as long as he continued not doing his job, the killer would only get stronger.