Darkside

They were on the couch, he with his long legs stretched out and his big feet on an old tapestry footstool that showed the wear of his father before him, Lucy facing him with her back against the padded leather arm. Now she wiggled her toes under his thigh for added warmth, and he knew he was forgiven. For a minute they watched Tom Hanks having a mental breakdown on a desert island.

‘This is a bit cheerful for you, isn’t it, sweetheart?’

Lucy stuck out her tongue and dug her toes into him.

‘What job does he mean?’

‘What?’

‘In the notes he keeps going on about doing your job. What does it mean?’

He frowned and shrugged one shoulder. ‘Finding the killer, I suppose.’

Lucy nodded slowly, but Jonas could hear her brain ticking over from where he sat.

‘But you’re already doing that.’

‘Maybe he thinks I should be doing more.’

‘Maybe,’ she agreed tentatively, while Tom Hanks’s skin blistered off his face in the white-hot sun.

‘Or maybe,’ she shrugged, ‘that’s not the job he wants you to do.’

* * *

The day had passed in a blur for John Marvel.

Another body bag. Another crime scene. More hysterical crones. The decision to move all the residents after all, and the logistics of making that happen in a snowstorm while all roads out of the village were impassable by anything but a tractor or a four-wheel-drive.

Now – back in his little apartment with his inadequate travel kettle taking a week to boil – Marvel sat slumped and glum at the end of his bed.

So Gary Liss was a petty thief, but not a killer.

No doubt he had not been the intended target, but he’d probably been murdered for interrupting the killer – and then stuffed behind the garden-room piano like a surprise Christmas present. The thick old pile of heavy maroon curtaining had been wadded down the back of the piano for years, Rupert Cooke told them, white-faced with shock. He said it acted as a damper so the sound wasn’t too loud for the residents.

In Marvel’s brief experience with the residents, no sound could be loud enough for them.

But what it meant was that the killer had known about the curtains and therefore must be local. Not that that narrowed things down a lot – he imagined everyone in Shipcott had had a relative or friend at Sunset Lodge at some point in the past few years.

The killer had also dragged or carried Liss downstairs – close to the staffroom where the two women were – and had taken the time to wrap him up and hide him behind the piano. It spoke of great strength and it spoke of calmness, not panic. The killer had been interrupted, certainly – but he had also adapted to that interruption so brutally and so efficiently that Lynne Twitchett and Jen Hardy had never heard a sound from Liss.

This latest crime scene was now one that had been ravaged by heat and constant human traffic for the near forty-eight hours since the victim had died. No wonder the place had started to smell. If he hadn’t spent so much time there he’d have noticed it himself. And they didn’t even know yet where Gary Liss had been killed. Blood on the body was minimal – a single crusty smear over a depression fracture of the front of the skull, and smears on the throat where it looked as if he’d been manually strangled.

Yet another modus operandi …

I once was found, but now am lost.

Marvel sighed and put a tea bag into a mug, hoping that if he took the lead, the kettle might catch up.

His phone rang; it was Jos Reeves on a scratchy line. There were no prints on the walking stick, and the blood on the roof belonged not to the killer but to Lionel Chard, so it added nothing to their well of knowledge.

Marvel was so annoyed by the crappy news that he yelled, ‘I can’t hear you!’ and hung up on Reeves mid-sentence.

So it was back to square one. Only with more dead people.

Great.

Alan Marsh? Danny Marsh? Peter fucking Priddy? Marvel felt like having a tantrum. He’d ‘liked’ Peter Priddy so much; liked the hunchy feeling that he was the one – but now Peter Priddy felt like a best friend at school, whose name he barely remembered.

He switched off the kettle and opened a bottle of Jameson’s instead. It would help him think; it always had and always would. That was what Debbie had never understood. You’re sick, she’d told him once. You get drunk and lie around and think about murder. It’s sick!

He’d come close to hitting her.

Marvel knocked back the first two fingers and went for a slightly larger chaser, which he sipped more slowly while watching Newsnight with the sound down; it was better that way.

This case was already like musical chairs, and then Jonas Holly comes out with a critical piece of evidence he’d been hoarding like a fucking hamster while they were all chasing their own arses.

Just the thought of it sent Marvel’s blood pressure up again.