Darkside

Marvel felt sick at the memory. They had left Gary Liss here. That meant they had left these poor people in the care of a serial killer. It was a miracle there were only three bodies, when you looked at it like that. Although he felt so far from a miracle right now that it would have taken Jesus Christ himself to come up the swirly stair carpet at Sunset Lodge and raise the victims from the dead before he’d be convinced of one.

‘Should we call Gulliver, sir?’ said Reynolds.

Kate Gulliver was a forensic psychologist based in Bristol and one of Marvel’s least favourite people, right up there with Jos Reeves. He felt the little prick of anger at the implication that Reynolds thought he was out of his depth. Immediately after that, he realized that he was out of his depth – or at least wading there fast. And refusing to consult Gulliver at this point would look territorial and negligent.

‘You call her.’ He nodded to Reynolds. He knew Reynolds would love that – and be good at it. Kate Gulliver was his kind of person – the young, bright, First-Class-Honours kind.

He was busy enough here.

He wished he could clear the entire home properly, but transporting twenty-two elderly and frail residents was easier said than done. When he’d suggested it, Rupert Cooke – who was wearing paisley pyjamas under his mackintosh, like someone from an episode of Poirot – had started to list what they’d need to take with them. Medications, walking sticks, Zimmer frames, wheelchairs, warm clothing, changes of underwear … When he’d got to incontinence pads, Marvel had put up a hand to stop him and had asked for them all to be moved into the garden room until the CSIs could examine the first floor and establish points of entry and exit.

He asked Rupert Cooke for the use of his office and got Reynolds to clear the desk so he had somewhere to put his elbows.

Grey said they had not yet found the murder weapon but confirmed that as soon as it was light they’d be moving outside the house to the grounds and the graveyard and starting on a grid until reinforcements arrived. Marvel told him to take Singh to Liss’s home in the meantime – just in case their man was stupid after all.

Then Dave Pollard lumbered in and said a local agency reporter had picked up the story from a loose-lipped control-room officer, and had already called him three times on her way to Shipcott. She had said something about getting there ‘before the circus starts’. Which Pollard ‘thought’ might mean they were about to be besieged by the press. Marvel mentally rolled his eyes at Pollard’s lack of imagination and had second thoughts about putting him in charge now that this thing looked like going national, but was too busy to start redeploying staff at this stage.

At 6am he called Elizabeth Rice to check on the Marshes. He didn’t want to start going after Liss if she told him both men had sneaked out in the night and come home covered in blood. He really hoped they had; everything would be so much easier. He held while she checked that they were still in bed. She said she had last checked on them at midnight and had personally locked the front and back doors and all the downstairs windows, and had kept the keys with her at all times.

‘Why, sir?’ she asked.

He told her there’d been three murders at Sunset Lodge, then the doorbell rang and Marvel heard the CSIs identifying themselves at the entrance. They had a huge job ahead of them.

‘Shall I come up to help, sir?’ said Rice hopefully.

Marvel thought of Reynolds’s tipping-point theory. If it was true then nobody was off the hook quite yet.

‘No,’ he told her. ‘You stay there.’

Downstairs, Jonas was sitting white-faced and dark-eyed in a chair with an undrunk cup of tea on his knee.

Around him the vast black windows of the garden room reflected the scene in all directions, making it seem that hundreds of people were standing around whispering, bending over each other; crying in relay in a cocktail party of mourning.

‘You take sugar?’ said Marvel.

Jonas raised his eyes slowly to Marvel’s. ‘What?’

‘Do you take sugar?’

Jonas looked dully at his cup and shook his head. Marvel picked the sugar bowl off a nearby tea trolley, put two heaped spoonfuls into Jonas’s tea and stirred it briskly, slopping it into the saucer.

‘Drink up,’ he said.

Jonas did, wincing at the sweetness. Marvel pulled the piano stool away from the piano and sat down facing him.

‘You know Gary Liss?’

‘Not well, but yeah, I know him. He lives here, so I know him.’

‘Tell me about him.’

Jonas stared down at his cup for a long moment. ‘I can’t believe he did this.’

Marvel spread his hands and said curtly, ‘You can’t believe anyone did it – but there are three dead people upstairs and Liss has taken off. It doesn’t look good.’

‘I know,’ said Jonas miserably.

‘He ever been in trouble?’