Darkside

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.’