Darkside

Jonas leaped off the gate into the field and ran down the hill. The bright morning suddenly seemed surreal. He shouldn’t be running with this fluttering in his guts on such a morning, with frost crackling under his feet. At the bottom of the field he vaulted the stile on to the playing field and ran faster. Now he was on the flat he couldn’t see the yellow thing any more, but he’d taken bearings in his mind, and ran straight and true past the swings and then the ramp, towards the crooked blackthorn that leaned drunkenly over the stream.

He reached the bank and there it was.

The body.

Yellow T-shirt bunched around the waist, pink knickers, blue-white skin.

He knew. He knew!

Jonas slithered down the bank, half falling, feeling the frozen mud on one cheek of his backside. The boots he’d worn that day for warmth cracked through the delicate plates of ice that had formed at the edges of the stream, and filled with water as he splashed the few feet to the body and turned it over.

‘Mrs Marsh! Yvonne!’

Jonas dropped to his knees in the icy water and cleared her mouth, then started to breathe into the woman he knew was already dead.

Shit.

He dragged her to the water’s edge. He couldn’t get her up the bank – not alone – but he needed a firm surface. He balanced her awkwardly, knelt over her and pumped her chest, then breathed into her again.

‘Mrs Marsh!’

He slapped her face hard, then breathed again, pumped her chest, then breathed again … felt everything in the world going awry.

The three boys from the ramp were above him, pale-faced and big-eyed.

‘Call an ambulance!’ he yelled.

The Tithecott boy fumbled his phone open and said, ‘No signal.’

‘Run to the houses!’ Jonas yelled, before forcing more air into Yvonne Marsh’s spongey lungs.

The boy took off, running. Without a word, Dougie Trewell slid down the mud into the stream and helped to keep Yvonne Marsh’s upper body on the bank while Jonas worked on her. Steven Lamb sank to his knees in the white grass and just watched.

Jonas knew it was pointless. Yvonne Marsh was dead and had probably been dead for hours. Now he thought about it, there had been a little crackling sound as he’d tugged her body over on to its back – the sound of ice breaking around it. She had been there for a while, held still by the branches of the blackthorn and by the delicate ice that had embraced her. Maybe overnight. Who knew?

Danny Marsh might know. Or his father. And even if they didn’t know that, thought Jonas wearily, they would know this for sure – that all their vigilance and their locks and their love and their care had not been enough to stop one vulnerable woman from wandering out into the freezing winter in bare feet, knickers and a baggy T-shirt, to drown in a freezing stream.

Everybody had to sleep some time, and that was the truth.

It was this thought that finally made Jonas give up. He looked across the stream at the rising moors, keeping all his air for himself now.

‘Is she dead?’ said Dougie Trewell tremulously.

‘Yes,’ said Jonas. All the energy he’d been filled with this morning had gone. ‘You’d better get out of the water, Dougie.’

Dougie let go of the body and Jonas felt how much of its weight he’d taken in trying to help. ‘Thanks,’ he said, and the boy nodded mutely. He was Ronnie Trewell’s younger brother and so always skirting the edges of delinquency – but he’d shown some character today. Something to hope for. Jonas turned to the other boy, who looked a million miles away. ‘You want to help Dougie home, Steven? Make sure he gets warm?’

Steven focused slowly on him again.

‘What?’

‘Help Dougie, Steven. Take him home.’

‘OK.’

Steven reached out and helped Dougie up the bank, and they walked away in a daze.

Jonas realized he hadn’t given them instructions on getting help for him. The ambulance could take ages on icy roads. The boys might not have the presence of mind to think about him. He tried to manoeuvre his phone from inside his jacket, but the operation proved impossible while he was holding Yvonne Marsh. Finally he knew he’d have to let go of her body to do it, so he did, and felt the slow current start to pull it away from him. Her legs were still in the water. Jonas clutched at the yellow T-shirt with one hand while he flipped open his phone. There was one bar of signal. Miraculous. Maybe he should make all his mobile-phone calls from running water. He had been half kneeling on the bank, but now stood up in the water; his legs almost gave way under him, they were so cold. He stood in the way of the body and called Marvel while the current pressed the dead Yvonne Marsh insistently against his legs.