Darkside

From this stately doorway Marvel could see over the graveyard next door, where the picture-perfect snow had been made hectic and muddy by the search. They were just going through the motions out there. Liss was the key. They had to find him before he struck again – as Marvel had little doubt that he would.

He heard the doorbell and a minute later Singh came to say that Paul Angell was downstairs in the garden room and wanted to talk to him.

As he walked downstairs, someone started to play the piano. Not Lynne Twitchett – someone who could play. Marvel knew the tune. Something by Cole Porter. ‘Cheek To Cheek’, he thought. It made him melancholy to hear the song of dancing and romance played in this place where such things were long gone.

The garden room was its usual melting temperature and Marvel wrinkled his nose as he entered. The place smelled faintly of rotten … he couldn’t think of rotten what. No doubt Reynolds would call it generic rotten. He made a mental note to die before he could end up somewhere like this, smelling like that.

Paul Angell stopped playing and looked up at him, and several of the old ladies clapped and one said, ‘Lovely,’ and another said, ‘Do you remember that one, Trinny?’

Paul got up and started to ask about Gary. Paul had been helpful to the police, but wary, and Marvel wasn’t 100 per cent convinced that the man didn’t know where his lover was hiding, whatever the hell Jonas Holly said. He got the impression that Paul Angell thought the police had been somehow against Liss from the outset because he was gay, instead of because he’d gone on the run after a triple murder. Idiot. Marvel had been polite to him so far, but he hoped Angell’s homosexuality gave him the sensitivity to know that his well of manners was not a deep one.

Now Marvel found that, while Paul Angell asked why he hadn’t been kept advised of the status of the hunt for Gary, he was suddenly transfixed by the hand of the old lady who had asked Trinny if she remembered ‘Cheek To Cheek’. The hand had been clapping and Marvel had seen its palm. Just briefly. He wasn’t even sure why his eye had been caught. Now he listened with half an ear and answered Angell with half a brain, while both his eyes watched the old, lined hand touch the arm of the chair, then reach for the biscuit tin, then poke at the selection with one bony finger, then lift the biscuit to the old-lady mouth—

Marvel stepped around Angell and gripped her by the wrist.

‘Oh!’ she said and dropped the biscuit. It fell on her chest and then to her lap. A Bourbon.

Marvel turned her palm up as though he were about to read it. There was a dirty smudge in the middle of it. Red-brown. It might have been chocolate.

‘Reynolds!’

Marvel turned and looked at Angell. ‘Get my sergeant for me. Now!’

He looked back at the scared-looking old woman. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Mrs Betty Tithecott,’ she answered tremulously.

‘Here, leave her alone,’ said Trinny next door.

Marvel ignored Trinny and softened his tone, but still held the squirming hand in his. ‘I just need to have a look at your hand, all right, Betty? I’m not going to hurt you.’

She met his eyes and nodded. Her hand relaxed.

‘This mark,’ he said. ‘What have you touched?’

‘Nothing,’ said Betty, her eyes watery and confused.

There was a similar, smaller stain inside her thumb.

Lynne Twitchett approached a little nervously. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘No,’ said Marvel curtly and heard Reynolds hurrying into the room.

‘What’s up, sir?’

Marvel turned the hand up so Reynolds could see it, and was gratified to hear a surprised expletive. He rubbed his thumb across the smudge and a small amount of colour transferred itself. Whatever Betty had touched, she had touched it recently.

‘She says she hasn’t touched anything. Look around, will you?’

Reynolds did, checking the arms of the wing chair, the head-rest, the handles of a Zimmer which was on standby for take-off a few feet away.

‘Can you hold your hand up for me, Betty?’

She nodded and he let go of her wrist.

Everyone in the room was watching them now. Behind him Marvel could hear a hum of low mutterings: ‘What’s going on?’ … ‘What’s he doing to Betty?’ … ‘Where are the biscuits?’

Betty shifted in her seat, careful not to move her hand much, and Marvel saw her walking stick hooked over the arm of her chair, right near the back where it would be out of the way.

He looked around for something to pick it up with and started to lift the rug off Betty’s knees. Her smudged hand clapped down to her lap to keep her rug and her modesty in place, so instead he yanked his own tie off and used it carefully to pick up the stick.

‘Reynolds.’

Reynolds came over and Marvel held the walking stick up to the light. It was made of stout wood, the handle of tooled brass – stained brownish-red.

And near the end was a small but unmistakable clump of white hair.

He had his murder weapon.

He had his suspect.

Marvel thought of the line from ‘Amazing Grace’.