Darkside

‘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.