Darkside

The photo was a tunnel in time. Danny was taller and bigger than the friend who would eventually tower over him and they held two proud little ponies – no doubt long dead. Lucy could see that this was a snapshot of the boys’ whole lives at that moment, plucked from the past and shown to her now: they were at a summer show; they had won; they were happy. That was all that shone from their faces.

Her heart wrenched to see them, so young and so vital together, when now Danny was cold on a slab and Jonas’s eyes were sunken with lack of sleep, and his body made too thin by work and fear and the burden of her; it seemed a fate too cruel to befall the two joyous children she held in her trembling hands.

‘How could you do this?’ she said.

‘Hmm?’ Marvel bent at the waist to hear her better.

‘How could you do this to him?’

‘I haven’t done anything to him.’

‘Look at him,’ she said, her voice starting to strengthen once more.

Lucy turned the photo to Marvel and he looked past it to where her eyes had gone dark with anger. Real anger this time – not feistiness.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said.

‘Look at him!’ she said again. ‘Look how happy he is! And look what you’ve done to him now! He’s a good man trying to do his job and you’re just trying to make him look bad because you can’t catch the killer!’

Lucy got to her unsteady feet as her voice gathered pace. ‘Putting him on a doorstep, humiliating him in front of the whole village, implying that he’d cover up for someone who had killed six people! It’s just sick! You’re sick.’

Sick.

Marvel snatched the photo from her hand, giving her a fright.

‘Fuck you!’ she hissed at him.

‘Fuck you!’ he spat back, making her flinch. ‘If your husband’s miserable it’s your fault, not mine! Someone in this shit-hole village has been taking out old people like seal pups, and your yokel husband is hiding something from me. So the last thing I need is some angry cripple telling me how to do my fucking job.’

He walked out and slammed the front door behind him as hard as he could.

Lucy swayed in his wake, breathless with shock, holding the arm of the couch for support – and viewed herself in Marvel’s words as if in the brightest mirror. She had seen herself reflected in Jonas’s loving eyes for so long that she had forgotten what she really was.

Some angry cripple.

* * *

Reynolds sat in the chilly mobile unit and compared Danny Marsh’s suicide note with the one Jonas Holly had found pinned to his garden gate.

There was not the slightest resemblance between the two hands. In the suicide note it was rounded and sprawling; in the other it was tight and spiky.

Reynolds was no expert, but they couldn’t get the notes to the expert, Bob Hamilton, until the snow cleared a little. They had emailed a scan so that he could start work but he’d need the originals to make a proper comparison. In the interim, they were all having a good look – although Reynolds didn’t need more than a glance to tell him that a match between the two notes was highly unlikely.

He looked up at Marvel with a shrug and a bottom lip that expressed that opinion.

‘It’s possible the writing in the gate note was disguised,’ said Marvel in a tone that invited no dissent. ‘Hamilton may well be able to make a match.’

‘He’d have to be a magician or an idiot,’ dissented Reynolds.

Grey sniggered and Marvel’s fist itched. Reynolds was always such a fucking clever clogs. Marvel knew the writing on the notes was never going to be a match. Hell, Stevie Wonder could see that. But as he saw it, it was Reynolds’s job to support his decisions and to pretend to be surprised and disappointed when the expert failed to make a connection – especially in front of other people. Of course, he’d long ceased to expect such support from his DS, but just once would be nice.

Especially in this case.

There was still a chance, of course, that the notes written to Jonas Holly had not come from the killer – although that seemed unlikely. But if the note left on Holly’s gate was written by the killer, and Danny Marsh hadn’t written it, then two plus two made four and Danny Marsh could not be the killer.

And that made Marvel feel that he might be going quietly crazy.

By this stage in an investigation, Marvel was used to feeling as though he were in complete control. But here he was so far from control that he couldn’t quite remember what control felt like.

It was the village; he was sure.

In Shipcott he felt cut off and lost. He was in this glorified horsebox, or he was staring at static in a stable. People told him everything and nothing. Everyone knew everyone else – except that nobody knew the killer. Evidence was there one day and gone the next. Suspects fell into his lap and then slipped through his fingers. Mobile connections were made and lost in the twinkling of an eye – and the cold, the rain, the snow were active and malicious participants in the slippery deception.

It was like investigating a murder in Brigadoon.