Darkside

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.

* * *