Darkside

Then Paul nodded. ‘Yes. We must. He could have been kidnapped. He could be trapped somewhere, or injured.’

‘He could,’ agreed Jonas, and got a nasty underneath feeling in his belly.

* * *

The agency reporter arrived first and was Australian. Marvel found Australians unbearably cocky, so he told Pollard she’d have to wait until the TV news crews got there so that he could do just one press conference. The reporter – Marcie Meyrick – made such a fuss that even Pollard nearly caved in and told her everything she wanted to know right up front. Only a well-timed call from the ITN crew asking for directions kept him loyal.

By lunchtime Marvel had another six officers at his disposal: four uniforms and two DCs from Weston-super-Mare. He sent them all to assist in the search for the murder weapon.

They didn’t find it.

By 4pm the BBC and ITN had joined the fuming Marcie Meyrick, and at a press conference that Rupert Cooke offered to let them hold in the garden room while the residents were at tea, Marvel told them the names, ages and sex of the victims, the fact that they had suffered blunt-force trauma, and about the ‘concerning’ disappearance of Gary Liss. He then distributed the good, clear photograph Jonas Holly had brought back with him from Paul Angell – Gary Liss looking like a member of a comeback boy-band in jeans and a tight T-shirt. Nothing was said about the box of jewellery. The watch had belonged to Violet Eaves, and the Reverend Chard identified a signet ring of his father’s. When they found Gary Liss, it would be one of the few surprises they could spring on him.

The usual blah about what a terrible crime it was was said with far more than the usual vehemence by Marvel. Luckily for the two TV news crews, a trick of the light caught an ambiguous liquid shine in Marvel’s eyes and ‘A MURDER DETECTIVE WEEPS’ booked the story a top berth on both the evening news bulletins.

Marvel protested too much, Reynolds was faux sympathetic and Marcie Meyrick – whose photographer had been delayed by a snow-crash on the M5 – was enraged.

* * *

Elizabeth Rice felt thoroughly left out.

Family liaison was a get-out clause for every senior police officer who had women to deploy, and sometimes she wished she’d never done the additional training the position required.

Marvel acting as if Alan and Danny Marsh were both still suspects was a joke; if he seriously considered them to be suspects in the latest brutal murders then he would never have left her alone with them. Marvel was an arsehole but he wasn’t completely stupid – so why the hell couldn’t she abandon her assignment and get where the action was? All her fancy-pants high-falutin family-liaison status afforded her was a total lack of privacy, and the honour of sharing a bathroom with two men who were too unreconstructed to bother with the niceties of flushing, let alone putting the seat down.

They barely said a word to each other, and that gave her the creeps.

Alan Marsh sat for hours staring at inanimate objects, while Danny stayed in his bedroom and read, occasionally went to the Red Lion, or wandered from lounge to kitchen and back, twitching.

‘I suppose it was a release,’ Alan said at least one thousand times a day, usually after a long sigh. Sometimes Danny would grunt in reply; sometimes he would snort; sometimes he would jump to his feet and say ‘Bollocks!’ and leave the room. He would come back ten minutes later and they would resume their positions.

Their tiny terraced house smelled of sweat, mildew and something else which she took days to identify as a bag of onions liquefying in the vegetable rack. One part of her wanted so badly to scrub the place from top to bottom that she kept opening the cupboard under the sink and staring at the bleach; another part of her rebelled at the thought that, because she was a woman, she should clean the house. She had a degree in Criminal Psychology! She’d graduated top of her class at Portishead! She was a highly trained and highly effective officer of the law!

It sucked, because she really wanted to clean that house.

The Marshes weren’t under arrest; they were free to come and go – but they hardly did. By day Alan stared at The Jeremy