Darkside

Kyle Show and Homes under the Hammer as if he had common ground with unwed slags and millionaire property developers. Danny would slouch down at breakfast and attempt to make small talk over the cornflakes. Very small talk. He was no talker, Danny Marsh, but he was a surprisingly good listener. He would ask her something and then just let her keep talking while he poured milk and sprinkled sugar and crunched cereal. Now and then he would look up and make eye-contact; now and then he would grunt; now and then he would nod. It was the only encouragement she needed. Sometimes she found herself telling him things about her own life that she hadn’t even told her boyfriend, Eric. Sometimes she told him things about Eric! Afterwards she was always sorry she’d been disloyal, but Danny Marsh’s grunts and nods seemed to open her eyes to certain aspects of Eric’s personality that she had to admit she’d never noticed before. Or if she had, they had never bothered her before. It had taken Danny Marsh and his objectivity to make her see …

She locked them all in every night. Back door, front door and all the downstairs windows. Alan Marsh was too out of it to notice, but Danny had watched her do it the first night and had asked, ‘Are you locking someone out, or locking us in?’

‘Someone out, of course,’ she’d said, but she could feel her cheeks grow warm and hoped he hadn’t noticed.

Every night she kept the keys under her pillow while she slept in the tiny box room they had cleared for her. ‘Cleared’ was a euphemism for shoving everything that apparently wouldn’t fit in the attic against the opposite wall, and Rice had to turn sideways to approach the bed at nights, down a narrow pathway of ugly green carpet.

She crab-walked down that pathway around midnight every night and woke at six. She checked on the Marshes as soon as she woke – but for the rapid application of mascara to her pale lashes, because that was next to waking like cleanliness is next to godliness – and she checked by pressing an ear against their bedroom doors and listening to them breathe. Alan snored; his son did not, but in the still darkness of dawn she could always hear him breathe eventually, once she focused and calmed her own breathing.

From day three onwards she had inquired of Alan and Danny whether they might like to return to work at the ramshackle little garage behind their home. She’d gathered that they kept half the cars on Exmoor running from the dingy corrugated-iron shed, and was more than prepared to jump around and stamp her feet to stay warm if only it took them all out of this stuffy little house. But no amount of encouragement would shift them into any action that was not slow or short-lived. Danny went to the pub now and then, but constantly forgot that he was supposed to have bought something for tea, and eventually Rice chose female submission over starvation and stormed down to the Spar to keep them all in the most mundane of foods – beans, toast, eggs, toast, cheese, toast and more toast. Her low-carb diet was a thing of the past and she felt the old white-bread addiction gripping her like crack, the longer her pointless occupation of the Marsh home continued.

When Marvel called about the murders at Sunset Lodge, she had wanted to rush out of the house and up the snowy road to be part of it all. Missing the buzz of the scene of a triple murder was killing her. The thought of that idiot Pollard being there when she was not was especially hard to bear.

All day she was short and gloomy and that night she sat fuming on the easy chair beside the sofa, from where Alan and Danny stared sightlessly at Top Gear repeats. Even she had seen this one and she’d only been here nine days.

Alan went to bed at 10.30pm, Danny at twelve when she did. She said goodnight with forced cheerfulness; he didn’t bother to force anything apart from a mumble, and closed his bedroom door.

She did her teeth and washed her face, trying hard not to touch the toothpaste-spotted taps or even the cracked and grimy pink soap, which looked as if it might have been a pre-war fixture along with the mottled tiles.

As she opened her bedroom door, she shivered.

She sidled towards the head of her bed and shivered again. The little room was always cold but there was a terrible draught coming from somewhere …

As if in answer to an unspoken question, the open curtains wafted inwards.

The window was slightly open. ‘Slightly’ in this winter was enough for the cold to stab its way into the room and chill it like a fridge.

A cheap office desk lamp with a flexible neck was the only makeshift light in here. Rice turned it to the window.

On the sill was a footprint showing where someone had climbed from the roof of the lean-to and into her room.

Elizabeth Rice had watched enough teen horror flicks on the sofa with Eric to know that the killer was right behind her with a steak knife.