Darkside

Sixteen Days

Mike Foster and his enthusiasm for vomit proved to be the highlight of Jonas’s first few days on the doorstep. Linda Cobb brought him increasingly infrequent cups of tea and his novelty quickly wore off with the schoolchildren. None came out of their way to stare at him and whisper at each other now, and the few who passed gave him barely a glance. He had tried to maintain the illusion, even in his own head, that he might at some point spot the killer, but he really wasn’t even rooting for himself. He felt it was a pointless exercise and had no wish for Marvel to be proven right through some weird fluke, even if it did mean catching the perpetrator of a horrible crime.

No, that wasn’t true, thought Jonas, shamed. Catching the killer of Margaret Priddy would be worth any kind of humiliation. But he’d prefer it if they caught him another way – a way that wouldn’t give Marvel the option of an ‘I told you so.’

It was a long, cold day.

Jonas got home to find Lucy asleep on the couch with the phone in her hand and Rosemary’s Baby playing silently on the TV.

‘How are you, Lu?’ he asked softly as she stirred.

She blinked in confusion for a few seconds and Jonas watched recognition float back into her eyes.

‘My legs hurt,’ she said grumpily. ‘And Margaret Priddy’s son called you. He didn’t say why.’

She shifted up and he sat down and pulled her bare legs on to his lap, covering them up again with the brown tartan rug.

Jonas started to massage her calves.

‘Are you going to call him back?’ she said.

‘In a minute.’ He shrugged.

Onscreen Mia Farrow was over-acting at the sight of the devil-child she’d spawned.

‘Let’s have a baby,’ said Lucy.

He didn’t stop massaging her, but he also didn’t answer her. Or even turn his eyes from the TV.

‘Jonas?’

‘Can we talk about it later?’ He still caressed her, but she could tell now that it was perfunctory.

‘I want to talk about it now.’

Jonas sighed and looked at her. ‘We’ve talked about it, Lu. You’re ill…’

‘That’s not it.’ She drew her legs up and away from him, and curled them under herself. Now it was her turn to look at the TV.

He said nothing. They had last had this conversation almost two years ago. He’d hoped they wouldn’t have it again.

But Lucy wanted it again. ‘You wanted children before we got married.’

‘I didn’t.’

He said it automatically and saw her eyes widen.

‘You said you did.’

There was no way out of it now. His mouth had betrayed him and he couldn’t take it back. ‘You said I did.’

‘You never said you didn’t.’

‘Well…’ shrugged Jonas with a helpless lift of one hand. ‘I don’t.’

Lucy bit her lip, determined to be an adult about this. This was an adult conversation between two adults. The fact that she wanted to slap him and cry on the floor like a child was an aberration.

‘Why?’ she said and hated the tremble in her own voice.

‘I just don’t.’

‘I think I deserve a better answer than that, Jonas.’

Jonas thought she did too. Knew she did. But stayed as silent as a coward, which he knew was his only defence.

Usually Lucy let it go. They never fought and weren’t quite sure how to, but tonight Lucy was finally hurt enough…

‘Don’t you want something to remember me by?’

Jonas stood up in an instant, and as soon as Lucy saw his face she wished she could take it back. For a second she was actually frightened.

He walked out of the room and she heard him pick up his car keys and phone from beside the flowers on the hall table.

She nearly called out to him, but then held her tongue.

She had a right to say what she was feeling! If things were the other way round, Lucy would have moved Heaven and Earth to have Jonas’s child. She could barely believe that – for once – he did not want the same thing as she did. Disagreeing was one thing, but refusal to even discuss such a vital issue was quite another. She felt her throat constrict in self-pity. She wasn’t dead yet! Her vote still counted!

Didn’t it?

She heard the front door shut quietly behind him.

Jonas drove away.

He had no idea how to tell her the truth: I can’t protect a child.

Because in his head he always heard her ask Why?

And then he’d have to tell the truth again.

Nobody can…

Marvel sat with an unopened bottle of Jameson whiskey in one hand, the TV bunny aerial in the other, and watched Coronation Street for the first time in about twenty years. He was shocked and confused to find that at some point Tracy Barlow had served time for murder, and while he was trying to work out how that could legally happen to a five-year-old girl, someone knocked on his door.

He hadn’t heard a car but he thought it might be Reynolds, who had taken the DNA swabs to Portishead. Marvel could have gone too, but had finally decided that going back to the future at this point would make it that much harder to return to Exmoor.

He was therefore more than a little surprised to find PC Jonas Holly standing in the dark.

‘I need to speak to you about Peter Priddy.’

Marvel held open the door by way of invitation, and immediately felt the cold night air invade his cottage, giving him an unexpected pang of empathy with Joy Springer and her jealous guardianship of warmth.

But Jonas didn’t come in. Instead he stood hesitantly in the yard, then asked if they could go to the pub. Marvel needed no second bidding. He abandoned Tracy Barlow to her fate and grabbed his coat.

It was warm in the Land Rover. Holly swung it round expertly in a tight turn. As he did, Marvel noticed Joy Springer peering at them from behind her kitchen curtain.

They turned right at the bottom of the drive – away from Shipcott – and headed up the hill across the moor.

‘Not going to the Red Lion?’

‘I thought it would be better to go somewhere away from the village to discuss work.’

Marvel nodded. Holly was different tonight. There was nothing of the junior officer about him. His manner was surprisingly brusque and he looked as if he was brooding about something.

‘I spoke to Peter Priddy. He’s got a right cob on.’

Marvel didn’t understand the reference but got the gist. ‘Mr Priddy doesn’t understand the process of elimination.’

‘He feels victimized.’

‘He had motive, opportunity and probably inclination.’

‘It’s his mother!’

‘You think nobody kills their mother? Or father? Or their own kids? What do you think this is, bloody Toytown? Grow up, Holly, for fuck’s sake!’

Jonas said nothing and put his foot down.

Marvel watched the empty ribbon of tarmac lined by dirty brown moor race at them out of blackness and disappear as soon as the lights had passed over it. It was like travelling through space, or a lower intestine. The blackness could have been infinite or claustrophobically close, there was no way of telling – and the motion was timeless and hypnotic.

‘Where’s the pub?’ he said.

‘Withypool,’ said Jonas just as curtly, as he stopped at a T-junction.

A porcupine of white wooden signposts bristled out of the opposite hedge.

‘Withypool two and a quarter!’ read Marvel in exasperation. ‘This place is like Middle fucking Earth.’

Jonas turned right and floored the accelerator again, his jaw set. Marvel was starting to enjoy needling him.

‘He was with a woman at the time. Not his wife.’

Marvel rubbed his hands together. ‘Now we’re talking! In Shipcott?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yeah, we had someone who saw his car on Saturday night. He with her all night?’

‘I guess so.’

‘Guessing so does not make it so. You spoken to her?’

‘No.’

‘A miracle! Someone you haven’t fucked about with before we could get there. Who is it?’

Jonas tightened his fists on the wheel. This wasn’t going as planned. He should have thought it through before calling Marvel. He’d thought he was doing Peter Priddy a favour… that Marvel would accept his word about an alibi, but now it was all getting away from him. His head had started to ache as soon as he’d walked out on Lucy and now it throbbed cruelly as the tunnel of road and moor rushed at him like a video game. He should never have gone to see Marvel when he felt this way but he’d needed something to take his mind off her words. He couldn’t bear to think about them – to think of her being gone. Of her being not there. Of having to have something to remember her by…

He’d had to stop thinking of it. He’d called Peter Priddy; he’d picked up Marvel. Now he tried to focus on what they’d said and what he’d said to them, piling words up like ashes on embers, but her words still glowed and flickered underneath. Now those words had been lit, he couldn’t imagine they’d ever go out, and he felt their burn at the base of his skull.

The pony came out of nowhere, filled his vision and struck the car all in the same frantic second. By the time Jonas hit the brakes, it was behind them.

The car slewed briefly and stalled with a lurch.

‘Shit!’ said Marvel.

The engine ticked quietly in the silence.

Marvel looked in his wing mirror and saw the dark shape of the animal in the road twenty yards behind them, lit faintly by their brake lights.

‘I think it’s still alive,’ he said. ‘We’d better go and see.’

He looked at Jonas but the younger man just stared at him blankly, as if he hadn’t heard.

‘We’d better go and look at it,’ he repeated, and this time Holly registered what he’d said and looked in his rear-view mirror. Then he backed up the car until they were just a few feet from the horse.

Marvel got out. It was much colder up here on the moor, and drying out too – as if the sky was sucking the moisture from the air and preparing for something much more spectacular than mere rain. He walked round to the back of the Land Rover. By the dull red of the tail lights, even Marvel could see that the pony’s front leg was broken at a sickening angle. The animal was trying to get up anyway, heaving itself on to its chest then flailing helplessly – its hoofs drubbing the tarmac and leaving pale scrapes in its surface – before collapsing back on to its side, snorting, ribs heaving under its shaggy winter coat, and its eye rolling wild and white around the edges.

‘Its leg’s broken,’ he said, looking up for a lead from Jonas, and surprised to find him not there. He looked round. Jonas had got out of the car with him but was still at the door of the Land Rover, silhouetted against the stars.

He raised his voice. ‘It’s got a broken leg.’

Through the vague red darkness he saw the silhouette nod its head.

‘What are we going to do?’ asked Marvel.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well you’re the bloody local! People must hit these buggers all the time.’

‘I’ll call the hunt,’ said Jonas after a pause.

‘What?’

‘I’ll call the hunt. They’ll come out and shoot it and take it for meat.’

‘Meat?’ Marvel was utterly confused.

‘For the hounds,’ said Jonas.

‘You’re fucking joking!’ said Marvel.

‘No,’ said Jonas, ‘I’m not.’

Marvel tried to regain a sense of normality. Two minutes ago, he had been off to the pub. Now he was confronted with a dying horse, a remote companion, and the mental image of a pack of hounds tearing the dark-brown hide from a still-warm beast, while faceless men in scarlet stood by laughing.

And he wasn’t even drunk.

Maybe he was in shock. Maybe Jonas Holly was too, with his monosyllabic responses.

He had to keep things in perspective. Be practical.

‘We should put it out of its misery,’ said Marvel, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to, but hoping that a countryman like Jonas would take control.

He knew nothing of horses. He wasn’t sure he’d ever touched one, but something made him hunch down now beside this pony’s head and reach out to it. The animal let out a shrill whinny, driving his hand away from it briefly. But because Jonas had already seen him scared at Margaret Priddy’s house, he reached out again.

This time he touched the horse’s neck. The coat was thick but surprisingly soft, and slightly damp. He let his hand sink into it until he could feel the hot skin.

For a moment his touch seemed to calm the beast and he felt the faint throb of the pulse under his fingers. Then it squealed and started to thrash about, knocking Marvel on to his backside in the road. Disorientated, he opened his eyes to see its hoofs blurring close to his face. He put up a protective hand and it was immediately kicked aside. He shouted in pain, then felt a rough tug at the scruff of his neck and was dragged out of range of the flailing hoofs.

His hand was agony. In his head he ran through every expletive he’d ever heard, but in reality he just bit his lip, laid his cheek on the cold tarmac, squeezed his hand in his armpit and tried to stem the tears of pain that threatened to drown his eyes.

Jonas stared numbly at the pony in its death throes. It must have been injured internally because blood was now spurting from its nose as it made bubbly, squealing sounds, still trying to heave itself upright in a pointless but instinctive bid for survival. In the wild, the horse that could not get up was doomed. This one was doomed anyway, but still tried to get to its feet in a terrified panic at being left behind by its herd to be picked off by predators.

To watch it suffering was sickening. To smell it was worse. Under the fear and the blood Jonas could smell its olde-worlde horse smell of dusty pelt and grass and sweet manure. For some reason he couldn’t explain, those smells disturbed him more than anything.

Finally it gave up.

Its head flopped heavily to the tarmac at Jonas’s feet while blood continued to run out of its nose. Its flanks heaved more shallowly, and its eye started to lose focus.

Jonas felt nauseous without the capacity for vomiting. He felt tired without the capacity to sleep. And the embers of the headache had flared to white heat in his brain.

Distantly, he watched the blood from the dying pony’s nose pool towards his shoe; in this light it looked black and oily. The animal grunted once, then sighed hugely as the last of its breath left it.

‘Is it dead?’ said Marvel.

The younger man said nothing; Marvel took that as a ‘yes’.

‘It kicked the shit out of my hand.’ Marvel’s voice was shaky and he leaned over to study his hand by the lights of the car. In the redness he couldn’t see anything wrong with it but it hurt all along its outer edge. He straightened up and looked left and right to where he knew the narrow ribbon of road draped over the moor.

‘Suppose we’d better get it out of the road.’ Marvel bent down. ‘You want to take a leg?’

Jonas didn’t bend down. ‘It’s too heavy,’ he said instead.

‘You think so?’ Marvel grabbed a hoof and leaned back. The leg stretched but the horse didn’t budge. ‘You going to help me?’

‘No.’

Marvel squinted at him as if he hadn’t heard Jonas correctly. ‘What?’

‘I said no. I don’t like horses.’

‘You don’t have to like it, for fuck’s sake! It’s dead! Just grab a bloody leg!’

Jonas didn’t move; Marvel dropped the leg and the hoof hit the road with a clunk. ‘We can’t just leave it here.’

Jonas shrugged.

Marvel nodded at the Land Rover. ‘You got a winch on that thing?’

While Jonas prepared the winch, Marvel had a cigarette. He didn’t smoke often – it was all so bloody awkward nowadays – but out here in the middle of the moor in the middle of the night, he puffed furiously, loving the way the end of the cigarette fired up in the darkness every time he sucked on it.

He thought about touching the pony’s living skin through its thick fur, and remembered Margaret Priddy. How warm she once was, and how cold she was now.

And there was the little stir he always got sooner or later. There was the moment when her death stopped being a job for him and became a personal crusade. It had taken a dying horse to remind him of how every murdered body he stared down at was once alive and terrified and facing lawless death. Marvel was relieved to find that rudder of personal affront, which he knew would keep him steady now throughout the investigation.

Jonas drove slowly and bumpily into the heather, then got out and walked around to free the pony, hardly noticing the deep, wet vegetation forcing water through his trousers, socks and work shoes. His only thought, drubbing in time to the jackhammer in his brain, was to get it over with before his head exploded. He wound out some slack and nudged the cable loose enough with his toe so he could lift it back over the muddy fetlock.

The pony lay stretched out as if bounding easily across the moor, looking strangely fleet of foot in death. Jonas knew that within hours foxes would have found it, and at first light the crows would take its eyes, which were already fading to dull grey pebbles in its skull.

He got back in the car and turned towards Shipcott.

‘What about the pub?’ Marvel said a little petulantly.

Jonas said nothing.

They drove in silence to the stables and the Land Rover swung round in the yard and gravelled to a halt.

Marvel snorted when he saw that Reynolds was back with the car. He could have waited an hour, avoided getting kicked by a dying horse, and still have had a couple of pints.

He got out of the Land Rover and peered back in at Jonas. He hoped he wasn’t going to start up about Peter Priddy again, but the man looked distant and tightly wound. Probably thinking about the paperwork he’d have to do tomorrow on the police Land Rover.

‘Thanks for the drink.’ Marvel was half joking, but because Jonas said nothing in ironic response, the words hung there and then soured into something far more sarcastic – even bullying.

What the fuck. The night had been a disaster from start to finish. He should have stuck with Tracy Barlow.

Marvel swung the door shut and watched the young policeman drive away.

It felt like four in the morning but it was only 10.30pm. Through a chink in Reynolds’s curtain he could see his DS was watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Marvel almost laughed out loud. Typical! The bloody clever clogs! Showing off even when he was alone! Still, he felt like company – felt like sharing his adventure. He was about to knock when he saw Joy Springer’s kitchen curtain twitch. On a whim he went over and knocked on her door instead. She opened it a hair’s breadth and glared at him.

‘We hit a horse up on the moor,’ he said.

‘So?’ she said, while ash drooped dangerously off the end of her cigarette.

Marvel wasn’t in the mood to beat about the bush.

‘I’m a bit shaken up. You got anything to drink?’

She poked her head outside so she could make sure he wasn’t about to bring in a whole legion of freeloaders, then opened the door.

The kitchen was stiflingly hot – just the way Marvel liked it. Joy Springer got two odd mugs off the dresser and poured from a bottle.

‘Sit down if you want,’ she said.

Underfoot were flagstones covered in a virtual rug of cat hair. There was a cat on the kitchen table and, with only a brief glance, Marvel noticed another four dotted about on various mismatched armchairs and a sofa. He chose one end of the sofa and almost fell through its sagging bottom. She handed him a drink and he took a sip and grimaced.

‘What the hell is that?’

‘Dubonnet,’ she said spikily. ‘If you don’t want it, you can pour it back in the bottle.’

He shrugged and took another sip. ‘I’ve got some Jameson’s in my room.’

‘We’ll have that tomorrow then,’ she declared.

The bathroom at Rose Cottage was quick to steam up and slow to clear, so that the moisture hung in the air for ages, like an extension of the moor itself. It was so thick that the windows were curtained with steam, and they never bothered with the blinds, even at night. Jonas stood utterly still and let the shower cleanse him of the night’s activities, just as he let the sound of the water drown out his memory, leaving him pristine and empty. He stood like that until he felt the chill of death leave every part of him, then turned the water off, grabbed a towel and stepped over his clothes, which lay in a damp pile on the bathroom floor.

He wrapped the towel around his waist and did his teeth. Habit made him stare into the mirror while he brushed, but the glass was opaque and he didn’t bother wiping it. Instead he watched the diffuse half-shape that was also him moving in time to his own ablutions. It was hypnotic and comforting, like a distant twin who was living another life behind the steam, similar but different to his, where all the edges were comfortingly fuzzy and nothing had to be faced in harsh focus. Jonas brushed for longer than normal, until his mouth burned with minty freshness. He stuffed his clothes into the laundry basket and – despite the hour – cleaned the bath and the basin. It was one thing to tick off his list of chores.

Lucy was asleep in bed. She liked to make the effort to get upstairs even if he wasn’t there to help her. Sometimes she could crawl up quite fast; sometimes it took her half an hour. She’d taken to leaving a book halfway up the stairs so she could stop and rest without getting bored. The book there at the moment was a novel called Fate Dictates. Like his woolly thinking on the afterlife, Jonas was unsure about whether or not he believed in Fate. Who knew how life was going to work out? What weirdness was just around the corner? Could it be controlled? And if it could, would you want to control it?

He towelled his short, dark hair hard and fast and slid into bed beside Lucy before he could lose the wonderful warmth of the shower.

As he did, she stirred and rolled towards him.

‘Where were you?’ she murmured sleepily.

‘Wet and cold and not with you,’ he whispered, stroking her hair.

‘I’m glad you’re home.’ He could hear the lazy little smile in her voice and felt her hand sneak on to his hip. He smiled in the darkness at the way it made the night’s events disappear behind him as if they’d never been.

She lifted his hand and placed it over her small round breast.

‘I’m glad you’re home too,’ he said, and kissed her with intent for the first time in months. At the same time, he whispered into her mouth: ‘I’m sorry.’