Darkside

It was a story of flames and smoke and panic and of murder, which the coroner had stupidly ruled misadventure, after hearing of how Robert Springer was both an ardent horseman and an ardent smoker – two hobbies that Marvel gathered should be kept apart, like wives and girlfriends.

Not only was the coroner a conspiratorial fool, but Danny Marsh was the killer, according to Joy Springer. She became loud and slurred about it without ever giving Marvel any real evidence, then lost her thread a bit and went off at a paranoid tangent that included the prick of an executor, the lousy job a local builder had done on the stable conversions, and some idiot vet who said her cats needed worming.

After three more glasses of Cinzano, Joy Springer suddenly got up and wobbled across to the Welsh dresser. She opened a door on an avalanche of paperwork, old magazines, cards and photographs.

‘Robert’s things,’ she mumbled. ‘I don’t like to throw them away. Memories.’

Marvel wondered again at the sheer tedium of those memories. Who the hell would want to mull over them?

Yet another tumbler allowed her to find what she was looking for, and she handed Marvel a photograph.

‘Tha’s Danny Marsh when her were a bay,’ she slurred. ‘Little sod would be in jail if your lot had done a proper job, not living here throwing it in my face!’

Although the photo was of two boys of about ten years old, Marvel recognized Danny immediately. The photo had been kept bright in the dresser, and Danny Marsh’s brown hair had apparently been given the same cut its entire life – short back and sides. He didn’t look like a little sod; he looked like a cheeky, happy kid, holding the reins of a shaggy red pony. The photo had been taken at a show and both boys were in white shirts and Pony Club ties. The second boy was smaller and holding a brown pony with a red rosette fluttering from its bridle.

Marvel’s fingers twitched as he recognized Jonas Holly. That wide brow, dark eyes and nose that was already too straight for its age. Only the mouth here was different, and Marvel realized it was because he’d never seen Jonas smile.

He thought instantly of the dead pony on the moor. Of the way Jonas Holly had been almost pathologically unwilling to touch it – had actually refused to take a leg and help pull the carcass out of the road. And yet here he was with one arm thrown casually over the pony’s neck, a hank of mane in his little hand, leaning into the animal like a friend. What did kids say nowadays? Best friend for ever. That’s what the brown pony looked like it meant to Jonas.

What changed?

What changed in Jonas Holly to turn him from a boy who loved horses into a man who couldn’t even bear to touch a dead one?

‘Can I keep this?’ he asked Joy Springer.

But he’d looked at the photo for so long that she’d fallen asleep and was snoring with her shiny-knuckled hand still around her empty glass.

From the shadows outside the kitchen window, Reynolds watched Marvel finish his drink, then ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ his way across the icy cobbles to his room.

* * *

Elizabeth Rice had been too embarrassed to ask Alan Marsh whether she could go through his dead son’s clothing looking for a missing button so that he could be more conclusively branded a killer. More conclusively than hanging himself and leaving a confessional note, she thought with no little irritation. But because that’s what Marvel had ordered her to do by tomorrow, she was doing it now, at almost midnight, by torchlight and in secret.

While Alan Marsh was next door in a sleep induced by the local surfer-cum-doctor and his magic needle, she crept into his dead son’s room and started to do her duty.

Danny Marsh had been surprisingly neat for a young man who’d never been in the army. He didn’t have many clothes. Maybe a dozen shirts and T-shirts, a winter jacket, a summer jacket, three or four pairs of jeans and a cheap black suit she remembered he’d worn at his mother’s funeral.

All buttons were present.

A pair of black Doc Martens with steel toecaps had matched the Polaroid of the dusty shoe-print that the CSI had taken off her window sill. Danny Marsh had passed her silently in the night. Going out and coming in. Hadn’t hurt her. Hadn’t even woken her.

It didn’t matter now.

She found a small stash of porn under his shirts. Magazines on busty blondes and MILFs. Mild, really, by today’s standards. Certainly milder than the stuff that Eric often failed to wipe clear of their computer’s history.

She’d liked Danny Marsh. He was a good listener. When they’d been to the pub together that one time, he’d made her laugh. Rice sat down on the bed. It was still up against the window where Danny had pulled it so he could tie the sheet to it before jumping out.

That was where Alan Marsh found her fifteen minutes later when her loud sobs pulled him from his magic sleep.