Darkside

It amounted to withholding evidence in a murder investigation, and as soon as this case was over and Jonas Holly had outlived any modicum of usefulness, Marvel would file a complaint against him. Fuck the paperwork. Get the moron off the streets for good and stuck behind a desk up in Taunton, answering 999 calls for real cops.

Marvel had no compunction about it. Jonas had screwed up badly – and it wasn’t the first time. He’d potentially contaminated the first scene by pawing the vic, and allowing others to do the same. He’d moved the second body, and although that hadn’t really been his fault, Marvel was sore enough now to overlook that. The vomit had disappeared on Jonas Holly’s watch and then he’d shown an unexpected lack of control when he’d laid into Danny Marsh, who’d really only needed one good smack to jolt him out of his hysteria.

And he’d kept the notes secret when they were probably the best clue they now had to the identity of the killer.

Of course, he’d also scared Marvel at Margaret Priddy’s house, but he wasn’t taking that into consideration.

He was pretty sure he wasn’t.

Killers were a strange bunch. Some returned to the scene of the crime. Some took trophies and photos and kept detailed cuttings. Some tried to get involved with the investigation; tried to ‘help’ the police. Some were the police.

Now he had mentally laid out all Jonas Holly’s transgressions in a neat chronological list, Marvel was surprised by how much involvement he seemed to have had in this case, considering he’d spent most of it on a bloody doorstep.

The more he thought about those transgressions, the less they looked like incompetence and the more they looked like a deliberate attempt to mislead.

And the more deliberate they looked, the more suspicious Marvel became, until finally – half a bottle in – DCI John Marvel started to like Jonas Holly.

But not in a good way.

Four Days

‘You think we should pull Danny Marsh in?’

Reynolds broached the subject carefully because Marvel was only really receptive to his own ideas.

Marvel stared at him across the Calor gas, with eyes rimmed red from drink and lack of sleep.

Reynolds proceeded: ‘We’ve got the gloves in the garage and we’ve got the footprint on the window sill. You think that’s enough?’

Marvel continued to stare at him until Reynolds wondered if he’d had a stroke.

Finally Marvel stirred. ‘It’s not much.’

‘It’s more than we’ve got on anyone else now.’

Marvel nodded slowly. ‘Let’s talk to his father first.’

Reynolds nodded in relief and picked up the phone.

* * *

Jonas needed help.

He stood at the edge of the playing field and thought about the nature of evil.

The scenes he had witnessed at Sunset Lodge would never leave him. Margaret Priddy was sad, Yvonne Marsh was dramatic and pathetic. But the sheer cold brutality of the murders at the Lodge was something he couldn’t quite get a hold of. The slaughter of the old people, defenceless in their beds, the cool killing of Gary Liss, and the bravado of the body behind the piano.

Jonas’s brain skittered about the crime, peered around corners at it, ducked and dived, trying to get a better look, but ultimately was lost in the supermarket when it came to any kind of understanding of what it must take for a man to grow into a cold-blooded killer. He had spent most of a sleepless night running up and down the aisles of why? and it was only as he’d walked down the hill into the village that he had realized the only question he really needed to buy was who?

Without the killer in custody, he could theorize till the cows came home and never find the truth.

Jonas was convinced now that the killer was a local man. He had known that Margaret Priddy lay paralysed in the back bedroom of her home, he had left Yvonne Marsh in a stream that was barely visible from the road, and he had crawled through the only window at Sunset Lodge that Rupert Cooke had been too cheap to modernize, then bound Gary Liss’s corpse in a vast curtain which had been there for years but which was hardly visible, stuffed behind the piano as it was. Jonas vaguely remembered having seen it before – probably because Sunset Lodge was a regular part of his beat, along with schools, pubs and village halls.

The killer must be local, which meant Jonas must know him. He knew everybody.

What would he look like?

If Jonas could stare into enough eyes for long enough, would he glimpse the killer looking back? Would his gaze burn like Holy Water on a demon? Would Jonas feel cold jelly fill his bones, and recoil in recognition of evil?

He didn’t know.

How could he? He had no experience.

So he needed help.

A rhythmic sound and a pendulum blur in his vision brought him slowly back to the playing field and reminded him of why he had stopped here on his way to the mobile unit to report for whatever duty Marvel saw fit to assign him.