Darkside

Every morning he got up and drove down the hill into the village and was somehow surprised to find it still there. Every day was another dose of secrecy and fuzzy disconnection, and it was only his now nightly sessions with Joy Springer that seemed to anchor him in time or space.

He snatched the two notes from Reynolds, and when Pollard held out his hand for them, he ignored him and banged them back into the battered filing cabinet euphemistically marked ‘Evidence’.

* * *

Jonas got home and found that Lucy had changed into another person who wore Lucy’s smile and Lucy’s eyes like a poor facsimile of the real thing.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked her in bed.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I love you.’

He wanted to tell her not to change the subject, but couldn’t find it in his heart – not even in that very small and stony corner where he kept all that was not kind, responsible and selfless.

‘I love you too,’ he agreed sadly.

* * *

Jonas thought he was strong, but the killer knew her was as weak as a kitten.

You can’t fall apart now.

But Jonas was falling apart.

He left the house every morning and some nights to satisfy his own fragile ego in the name of protection – all the while leaving the most important person in the world alone and in peril. He seemed to have no idea about how to do his job. No idea who it was that he should really be protecting …

The killer got shivers at the thought.

Those shivers kept him focused – his eyes on the prize.

The killer liked Lucy Holly.

Loved her, in his own way.

But it didn’t mean he wouldn’t kill her given half a chance.

Two Days

As soon as Jonas left in the Land Rover the next morning, Lucy Holly got the number of the mobile unit from Taunton HQ, then called it. When a man picked up, she said she wanted to make a formal complaint about DCI Marvel.

There was a pregnant silence at the other end of the line and Lucy braced herself for a hostile request for her address so that the appropriate form could be sent. She was prepared to argue the toss; she didn’t want an appropriate form; she wanted to drop Marvel in shit right up to his foul, hurtful, bastard mouth.

Instead of turning cold and official, the policeman – who identified himself as DS Reynolds – started to ask her quite pertinent questions, which allowed her to vent in the most satisfying way imaginable. She told Reynolds about Marvel nearly hitting her with the car; she told him how he had snatched the photograph of Jonas from her; she took a deep breath and told him that Marvel had said, ‘Fuck you’ and called her a name.

‘What name?’ asked Reynolds.

‘A horrible name,’ said Lucy.

‘I am writing these things down,’ said Reynolds. ‘It would be helpful if you could be specific.’

There was a pause. ‘He called me an angry cripple.’

Another long silence, which the words expanded to fill.

‘And are you disabled, Mrs Holly?’ asked Reynolds gently.

‘I have MS,’ she told him, filling up unexpectedly. ‘I use sticks to help me walk.’

‘I’m very sorry to hear that, Mrs Holly,’ said DS Reynolds. And Lucy was amazed to hear that he did sound sorry – not just as if he was giving a required response.

It allowed her to collect herself and deliver what she considered to be her pièce de résistance. She told him that throughout the encounter she could smell alcohol on Marvel’s breath.

‘Whiskey?’ inquired DS Reynolds, as if he had some experience of Marvel in drink.

‘No,’ said Lucy. ‘Something sweeter. But definitely alcohol.’

‘And what time was this?’

‘About nine. In the morning.’

DS Reynolds was quiet for a short while and Lucy assumed he was writing. She tried to keep a lid on her optimism; she still had a suspicion that her complaint would disappear into the black hole of Masonic secrecy that she believed held sway among senior officers. But at least she’d said her piece. Even if DS Reynolds now told her that he’d be sending her a complaints form, she’d still had that satisfaction.

But DS Reynolds didn’t say he’d send her a form. Instead he said in a serious voice, ‘Mrs Holly, would you be happy to make a sworn statement about these matters?’

Lucy almost laughed with surprise.

‘Happy?’ she said. ‘I’d be absolutely delirious.’

When Reynolds hung up on Lucy Holly he was actually shaking.

He had the contemporaneous notes in his notebook; he had his private logs, he had his own detailed reports showing that John Marvel was an unprofessional, bullying prick who shouldn’t be left in charge of a chimps’ tea party, let alone a murder inquiry, but until this very moment, he hadn’t had the damning independent evidence that would tip the balance in a disciplinary case against the DCI.