Darkside

Nineteen Days

Jonas was on Margaret Priddy’s doorstep by 8am, which meant a trickle of schoolchildren had nearly an hour to stare and whisper and giggle at him on their way to school. The cordon of tape had been attraction enough; Jonas standing there like the policeman outside 10 Downing Street was a black hole of fascination that sucked kids in from all over the village.

Linda Cobb from next door brought him a cup of tea at eight thirty. He accepted politely and then had to stand pointless guard while sipping now and then from a mug which read World’s Best Mum. It was just fuel on the irritating little fire that was the Schadenfreude of the mocking children. They were nice children; Jonas knew all of them. And he knew too that it was only the odd alignment of the murder, the cordon and his sudden silly vigil that had made them bratty – but right now he wished the lot of them would quietly disappear. His wish came true when the school bell dragged them to the other end of the village at a collective run.

At nine thirty it started to rain – icy droplets that drummed off his helmet. Jonas had worn his black waterproof windcheater but his legs from the thighs down were soon soaked. Linda Cobb collected the mug and brought him an umbrella. With flowers on it.

At 10.01am Jonas decided to walk the perimeter to keep warm. After all, he reasoned, if the killer returned to the scene he might just as easily return to the back of the house as the front.

He trudged through the muddy grass of the playing field at the side of Margaret Priddy’s home, and round the back – much as Marvel had the day before. Just as Marvel had done, he made his way up the garden, past a small pile of metal strips at the end, noting the old kennel as – right on cue – the terrier next door rushed the fence, its whole body quivering every time it barked.

‘Hello, Dixie,’ said Jonas calmly and the dog wagged and stopped barking to hear its name.

The wheelie bin was gone – to the lab, most likely – but in his mind’s eye he saw it there still beside the lean-to, the easy route on to the flat roof and from there through the bedroom window.

Call yourself a policeman?

Jonas swallowed hard. How easy it had been. Everything the killer needed was right there. Even the smaller steel dustbin that was left behind would probably have been enough to allow a fit man on to the lean-to roof. He took the lid off and turned it upside-down, then stepped on to it, keeping his feet close to the edges so he wouldn’t punch a hole right through the base, teetering like an elephant on a beach ball.

The felt of the lean-to roof was gritty under his hands but it was no great feat to pull himself on to it. Then he took a few creaking paces across to the window, where dusky fingerprint powder still clung to the paintwork. It was a sash-style window and the latch was at the limit of Jonas’s height. A shorter man – which he assumed the killer must be – would have had to work with his hands over his head, looking up. Awkward but possible. All it really required was a thin strip of metal forced between the paintwork and pushed against the latch to shove it aside. A knife – or a piece from the little collection of junk at the end of the garden might have done just as well. From here the grooves and nicks in the paint around the latch were more obvious than they had been from the inside, and Jonas noticed that flecks of lemon-coloured gloss had sifted to the dark roof below. Once the latch was conquered it would just be a matter of sliding the window up. Jonas put his hands against the frame to see what kind of resistance it afforded. Not much, but maybe this was an easy slider. His palms squeaked slightly against the glass. The window going up might have woken Margaret Priddy, but who cared? Even if she heard, she could not move, could not raise the alarm, could not call for help…

Horrific.

Jonas stepped back slowly, hardly seeing the window any more in his mind’s eye. He looked up to the sky to let the rain fall on to his face. Big drops on his eyelids. He opened his mouth and let it fill up, then walked to the edge of the roof and spat on to the garden, feeling cleansed.

As he swung himself off the roof back on to the upturned dustbin, Jonas noticed a small curve of something plastic in the gutter. He cocked his head to get a better look and saw it was a button lying half covered in the muck; if it hadn’t been at eye-level he wouldn’t have seen it. It was maybe half an inch across, four holes, black – very like the button on his own uniform trousers. He quickly checked that he had not pulled a button off while climbing on to the roof, but he was all present and correct. Jonas resisted the urge to pick the button up and turn it in his fingers, but he could see from here it was nothing special – apart from the fact that it was here on the roof outside the window of a room where a woman had been murdered. Apart from that.

‘Hello,’ said a voice and Jonas looked down to see a middle-aged, bespectacled man.

‘Mike Foster,’ the man said, with a cheerful smile. ‘I’ve come for the vomit.’

‘Vomit?’

‘Outside the back door, apparently,’ said Foster.

Jonas felt a pang of irritation that Marvel had not told him there was something back there; he could have stepped in it, ruined it.

‘Nobody told me,’ he confessed as he dropped back to the concrete.

They both looked for it, treading carefully now, exchanging pleasantries, mostly about the lousy weather.

Foster was remarkably upbeat for a man who’d come sixty miles in the rain for the sole purpose of scooping sick into a bag. Jonas said as much.

‘Oh, it’s lovely stuff, vomit!’ Foster exclaimed. ‘If the vomiter is a secretor then you can get DNA. Or diet, at the very least.’

‘Even after it’s been rained on?’

‘It’s not the rain so much as the age. The acid in the vomit eats at the DNA, fragments it. Still, you never know your luck.’

They couldn’t find it.

Foster called the office and then called Marvel, grimacing to try to hear the DCI over the terrible connection.

‘There is no bin lid,’ he said, looking questioningly at Jonas.

‘Only on the bin,’ said Jonas.

When Foster relayed this information to Marvel, Jonas could hear the man’s blood pressure rising with his voice. It was funny really, even though it was serious.

Foster listened and covered the mouthpiece. ‘He says he covered it with the bin lid.’

Jonas shrugged. ‘The lid was in place when I came round here. I had to take it off to turn the bin upside-down.’

Foster relayed this to Marvel, then frowned at his phone before saying to Jonas, ‘I think he got cut off.’

There was a short silence while Jonas felt bonded to Foster through the common experience of being hung up on by DCI Marvel, then Jonas told him about the button on the roof. Foster said he was the vomit guy really but then seemed quite excited about taking a look anyway.

He wasn’t short but neither was he fit, so Jonas cupped his hands and boosted him on to the roof and pointed out the relevant section of guttering.

‘Ooooh,’ said Foster with a happy smile. ‘Did you move it at all?’

‘No.’

‘Excellent.’

He asked Jonas to hand him his field bags and bemoaned his own stupidity at only bringing plastic instead of paper bags too.

‘Only expected vomit, you see?’ he reminded Jonas. ‘But you should always be prepared.’

He continued to chat happily as he took several minutes measuring and photographing the button in situ, then he picked it up with tweezers and put it in an evidence bag before lowering himself gingerly off the roof and on to the upturned bin which Jonas held steady for him.

He held the plastic bag up to the questionable light and they both examined the button as if it were a goldfish they’d won at the fair.

‘Nice spot,’ smiled Foster and, for the first time in days, Jonas felt like a real policeman.

‘It was right here!’ Marvel stood in the freezing rain holding the dustbin lid like a riot shield and pointing at his feet. ‘Right here!’

He glared at Jonas, who deflected the look to Mike Foster, who shrugged for them both.

‘Maybe someone moved it,’ said Foster in a helpful tone that showed Jonas he had no first-hand experience of DCI Marvel.

‘You think so?’ said Marvel furiously. ‘The lid’s on the grass covering the vomit. Then the lid’s on the bin and the vomit is all washed away. You think someone moved the lid? You think so? You’re wasted at this forensics shit! You should be a fucking psychic!’ He hurled the bin lid across the garden. Dixie rushed from his hidey-hole all noise and thunder and little white teeth as the lid rolled into the fence and toppled to a standstill.

‘Couldn’t we have fingerprinted that to find out who?’ said Reynolds tentatively.

‘Shit!’

While Marvel stomped across the wet grass to retrieve the bin lid, Jonas and Mike Foster exchanged guilty looks, as if they were jointly responsible for whatever it was Marvel wanted to blame them for.

‘I touched the lid,’ Jonas said quietly.

Reynolds rolled his eyes. ‘I’ll tell him.’

Marvel returned, holding the lid by an edge.

‘Jonas found a button on the roof,’ said Foster with just the right note of submission.

Reynolds raised an interested eyebrow, but it was wasted on Marvel.

‘I don’t give a shit if Jonas found the fucking Rosetta Stone on the roof. I want to know what happened to the vomit.’

‘I don’t know, sir,’ said Jonas when it became clear Marvel expected a response and that Foster was too cowed to give one.

‘It was your job to keep the scene secure. Your fucking job!’

Jonas flared a little. ‘With respect, sir, you said my job was to stand on the doorstep and wait for the killer to come back.’ From the corner of his eye, Jonas saw Foster and Reynolds exchange puzzled looks. Good. Let them know Marvel was a prick.

Marvel glared at him, then turned away dismissively and muttered darkly, ‘Can’t protect a puddle of fucking sick…’

Nobody knew what had happened – and no amount of haranguing from Marvel could enlighten them. Finally he jerked his head at Reynolds and stalked away down the garden in his porous shoes. When Reynolds caught him up and asked where they were going next, he told him they were going to put the squeeze on Peter Priddy.

Jonas helped Mike Foster put his bags into his car and almost felt like hugging him goodbye. He was the first sensible official Jonas had met on the case.

Squeezing Peter Priddy didn’t go quite to plan.

For a start, Peter Priddy blubbing in his dead mother’s kitchen while in search of Jaffa Cakes was a very different person from Prison Officer Priddy, angry, embarrassed and defensive about being pulled off shift on a wing full of nosey cons to speak to homicide detectives.

Marvel squeezed and Priddy pushed back and the worry lines on Reynolds’s brow got deeper and more indicative of imminent hair loss the more evident it became that they were really just there taking a flyer.

‘Of course my hairs are going to be on the bed!’ said Priddy. ‘She’s my mother! I don’t stand at the door and shout at her!’

‘But you didn’t visit her on Saturday night?’

‘I told you.’

‘Were you in Shipcott on Saturday at all?’

‘No! I told you!’

Marvel nodded slowly as if he agreed 100 per cent with what Peter Priddy had told them. ‘Because we have a witness who saw your car parked on Barnstaple Road at…’ He stopped for Reynolds to fill him in on the details but never took his eyes off Peter Priddy’s face, so was perfectly placed to see the big man’s fair skin flush a deep red.

‘Between 8.45pm and 6am,’ supplied Reynolds.

‘Bollocks!’ Priddy pushed his chair back from the staffroom table with a loud rasp.

‘We have a witness,’ said Marvel with a careless shrug.

‘Who? Where? They’re lying.’

‘No need to get agitated, Mr Priddy,’ said Marvel in a tone guaranteed to agitate.

‘Fuck off.’

‘Are you saying you weren’t there, Mr Priddy?’

‘Yes I am.’

Marvel raised his eyebrows in open disbelief. ‘Well, maybe they’re mistaken.’

‘Yes they bloody are. Or mischief-making.’

‘Why would anyone want to make mischief with you, Mr Priddy?’ said Marvel. ‘You’ve just lost your mother in the saddest of circumstances. Why would anyone want to make life harder for you?’

Peter Priddy got up, not looking at Marvel or Reynolds. ‘I don’t know. Like you said, people are sick. I have to get back to work.’

‘Mr Priddy,’ said Reynolds soothingly, ‘we’re just going through a process of elimination. We’re speaking to everybody like this.’

‘Bollocks.’

‘We are,’ said Reynolds, hoping it would be true before too long. He looked at Marvel for confirmation and got a grudging nod. ‘It’s our job. You’re in law enforcement, Mr Priddy; you understand. We’re on the same team here.’

The flattery worked and Priddy softened a little. ‘Yeah. OK.’

Some of the tension drained from the room.

Reynolds cleared his throat. ‘Before you go, I wonder if I could ask you for a DNA sample?’

Priddy stared at the two men with undisguised disgust. Reynolds looked away and got out the kit. In silence he got the swabs from the sterile plastic. In silence, Peter Priddy opened his mouth and allowed Reynolds to scrape the inside of his cheek.

‘I’ve got to get back to work. And you do too, because the more time you waste with me, the more time you’re not trying to catch the man who killed my mother. And that really pisses me off.’

In the silence that followed him slamming the door behind him, Reynolds closed his notebook, turned his palms upwards and sighed. ‘Can’t blame him, I suppose.’

‘I’ll blame him for whatever the bloody hell I want,’ snapped Marvel.

As if Reynolds didn’t know that.

On their way out, the prison staff were noticeably less friendly than they had been on the way in.