Darkside

By the time dusk fell and they went home empty-handed, they had only used maybe twenty of the hundred or so maggots, most of which had simply wriggled off the hook and made a break for it, or had been discarded for becoming waterlogged, limp and – the boys agreed – unattractive to fish.

Probably because the rod was his, when they parted ways Jonas had taken the remaining maggots home with him and put them in the fridge for the next day.

They’d never gone fishing again.

Other stuff had happened.

The little white pot had first been hidden behind the jam and then pushed to the back of the fridge by yesterday’s spaghetti Bolognese.

And it was only weeks later, when his mother complained that that fridge – which was only four years old – was making a strange buzzing noise, that Jonas had remembered …

Through the cloudy lid of the pot, Jonas had seen that the pale maggots had been replaced by something amorphous, black and expansive, which now filled the pot so comprehensively that he could see darker patches under the plastic lid where things were actually pressing up against it. The whole pot vibrated in his nervous hand with a low, menacing buzz – and it was with a sick shock that Jonas realized that the small maggots had slowly turned to much bigger flies that were now squeezed together so tightly in the pot that they seemed to be one angry entity.

Angry at him.

He’d wanted to let them go. He was a good-hearted boy who loved animals. And flies were animals – of a sort. The thought of them inside the pot – packed so close that their wet wings could not even unfurl, while their neighbours ate them and vomited on them and ate them again – made him feel ill.

But they were angry at him. He could feel it in the vibrating fury running up his arm as he held the pot in his hand.

He had thrown it away without removing the lid. And until the bin men came three days later, Jonas could hear the angry thrum of the flies leading their short, trapped, nightmarish lives.

Jonas stopped thinking of it. He had to before it made him sick.

Standing at the threshold of the Sunset Lodge garden room, he wiped sweat off his face and forced himself to stop remembering …

‘It smells in here,’ he said from the doorway.

Marvel and Reynolds were sitting silently in the two wing chairs closest to the piano and both turned to look at him as he approached. Marvel with his sagging jowls, and Reynolds with his patchwork hair: Jonas thought they both looked quite at home.

‘Yes,’ said Reynolds. ‘It’s impending death.’

An old woman so doubled over her walking frame that she looked as if she was searching for a contact lens turned her head like a tortoise and fixed Reynolds with a withering glare.

‘We’re not all deaf, you know!’

Reynolds reddened and mumbled an apology and she continued on her way to the dining room, following the map of the carpet.

‘Plonker,’ Marvel told him.

‘We found a weapon,’ said Reynolds. Seeing Jonas’s surprised look, he continued, ‘Walking stick. He just took it from a bedroom, killed them all, and then put it back.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Jonas. ‘Prints?’

‘The lab’s got it now, but I doubt it. Still …’ Reynolds shrugged. ‘Any luck today?’

Marvel snorted sarcastically. ‘Yes, Reynolds, he’s just playing hard to get.’

‘No luck finding Gary,’ said Jonas. ‘But there’s something I need to tell you.’

There. He’d said it now and couldn’t back out. He took a deep breath and told them about the notes. He was deliberately vague about the content. He told them that the first had said ‘something about the police not protecting Margaret Priddy’ and the second had told him ‘Do your job.’ He was too ashamed to tell them about the ‘crybaby’ accusation. He handed the final note to Reynolds inside a plastic freezer bag he’d taken from the kitchen drawer.

He’d expected Marvel to be annoyed that he’d said nothing before now. He’d expected him to tear a strip off him. What he hadn’t expected was that the overweight, over-the-hill DCI would listen all the way through with a stony face – and then come out of his wing chair like Swamp Thing and knock him backwards into the piano with a clanging post-modernist crash. One second Jonas was telling his story, the next he was half sitting on the keys as Marvel jammed fistfuls of his shirt up under his chin, trembling with rage and shouting angry things that Jonas couldn’t quite comprehend. Behind Marvel, Reynolds was trying to pull his boss off, and behind him, Jonas was aware of a gaggle of old folk clutching each other’s forearms as the three of them wrestled on and around the piano. Jonas staggered as the instrument rolled sideways under the weight of the discord. He could have shoved Marvel off him easily enough, but he was his senior officer. Plus, he understood the man’s frustration, and couldn’t muster the necessary affront to get really strong with him. Even as Marvel jabbed his knuckles into his throat, some part of Jonas was thinking, ‘I deserve this.’