Darkside

The shame he’d felt as he read the note came back to Jonas hard, along with this new fear and a fresh wave of helplessness. He was the protector. He should be out there on the high seas hunting down the killer shark, when all he was doing was standing on the jetty with a shrimping net, hoping it would swim past and wave a fin. And if the killer was here to stay, then all he really wanted to do was stock up on canned goods, barricade the doors and wrap Lucy in his arms until it all went away.

Except that what Lucy really needed protecting from was never going to go away …

A loud sob escaped him and he clapped a hand over his mouth, feeling the tears heat his eyes as efficiently as the bath had heated his legs.

‘Jonas?’

He bent his knees and slid quickly down the enamel and under the water, so that when she came in, there would be a good reason why his face was wet.

* * *

The killer was angry.

Margaret Priddy had been unavoidable in a way, but Yvonne Marsh should never have had to happen. If Jonas had understood the first message, then he’d have done his job – and if Jonas had done his job, then Yvonne Marsh would still be alive.

To the killer it all seemed very simple.

He didn’t know why Jonas had to make it so complicated.

* * *

Marvel had rather grudgingly told him to take the rest of the day off, but Jonas knew he couldn’t stay at home and out of sight for all of it – not after a second murder in the village he was charged with the care of. He also didn’t want to leave Lucy alone. He knew he’d have to at some point, but today was too raw, too soon.

So that night he took her to the Red Lion, ostensibly for a drink, but they both knew it was so he could be seen; be seen to be part of things.

The mood in the pub was paradoxically sober and the moment they walked in Jonas knew it had been a bad idea to come. Everyone wanted to talk to him, everyone wanted to speculate and everyone wanted to know what the police were doing. This would have been bad enough if he’d been alone – telling them that all he was doing was standing on a doorstep, effectively doing nothing while villagers were being slaughtered – but with Lucy in tow, it was truly shaming. She squeezed his hand under the table at one point, which made it even worse. People weren’t rude about it, but he could see the esteem in which he’d been held slipping as they realized that, while they’d been treating him like one for years, he wasn’t a real policeman after all. All very well to drive about the place in a flashy Land Rover with bull bars and a winch, but when it came down to the nitty gritty, they might as well have a scarecrow for a village bobby, if all he was going to do was stand there.

Jonas felt a sweat starting and got up and went to the bathroom, just to get away from them all. He shut himself in a stall and tried to think clearly.

If he could only go back to his usual routine it wouldn’t be so bad. At least then he’d look as if he was doing what he did best while leaving the murder investigation to the experts. But Marvel wasn’t going to give him a break. He felt that instinctively. He may not keep him on the doorstep for ever, but there was no way he was going to release Jonas while he was still smarting over some imagined slight. He’d give him some other shit thing to do; keep punishing him. Jonas saw his days stretching out in front of him, pointless, boring, undermining his position in the community, and – most importantly – not helping to catch the killer. It was a grim picture.

He stepped out of the stall, still deep in thought, and went over to wash his hands. As he raised his eyes to his reflection in the scarred and pitted mirror over the basin, he noticed the writing on the door behind him. Graham Nash had painted all the toilet doors with blackboard paint inside and out, and provided chalk so customers could write on them. It was a nice idea and gave people something to read while taking a shit, but, of course, it always threw up a mixed bag of dirty limericks, four-letter words and local libel, which required that the whole lot was washed down and erased on a regular basis.

Jonas frowned and turned to look at the door to the stall he’d just come out of. There was a single message in an oddly familiar, spiky hand:

A cold prickle ran over his skin.

Who knew? Who the fuck knew that he’d cried in the bath? His mind scrabbled for purchase on the idea that someone had seen him, or heard him, or just plain knew that he’d sobbed like a little girl. The invasion of privacy felt total. The idea that someone could watch him naked and vulnerable – intrude on the safe cosiness of the bathroom he’d thought he shared with his wife alone. It seemed impossible. Their cottage was not overlooked and Mrs Paddon was their only neighbour. She was a genteel woman in her eighties and was the last person in the world Jonas could ever imagine spying on him and then sneaking into the gents’ at the Red Lion to scribble vicious accusations on the door.