*
Jonas got to Withypool a little before eight, having taken twenty-five minutes to make the ten-minute journey. He dropped off the common and down the steep hill into the village, on a sweeping road of virgin snow. He hoped he’d be able to get back up it, but at least the Land Rover would give him every chance.
Like Shipcott, Withypool looked as if it had tumbled down the sides of the moor and landed haphazardly at the bottom. Houses stood where they fell – a few here, a few there, a dozen scattered along the river either side of the stone-walled humpbacked bridge that was sneakily only wide enough for one car at a time, despite the broad approaches.
Paul Angell was already in his shed. Jonas knew he would be as soon as his knock went unanswered. He went round the side of the cottage, but not before he’d cupped his hands around his eyes and peered through the downstairs windows. Paul had Venetian blinds rather than nets, so it was easy to see between the slats. Jonas had no expectation of seeing any sign of Gary Liss, but it was only sensible to be wary. He watched nothing move for five minutes before going down the narrow alleyway into the garden.
The shed was warm and smelled of gas and glue. Paul was hunched over an old school desk wearing a torch on his forehead and a magnifying visor which made the top half of his face look cartoonishly big and brainy; the bottom half was covered by an impressive salt-and-pepper beard. Jonas’s eyes were drawn to a 00-gauge model of the Flying Scotsman that Paul held in his left hand. The desk was covered with tools, and the interior walls of the shed had been cleverly contoured and customized so that various trains ran around them in layers, each tier with a different landscape and different type of train. Jonas was no enthusiast but even he could identify the Orient Express on one circuit and an old Western locomotive with a cow-catcher, pulling cattle wagons and a caboose through a painted landscape of buttes and marauding
Apaches. Paul Angell’s shed was a 00-gauge Guggenheim for geeks.
Paul was fifty-eight – a retired lecturer in Astrophysics. Jonas had asked him about it once and then stood in a nebula of confusion as Paul had talked for fifteen minutes straight about string theory. Jonas had loved the sciences at school, but all he’d managed to cobble together from Paul’s big-eyed excitement was a vague idea that all matter was made up of little vibrating hula-hoops. By the end he’d just been nodding, smiling and thinking of what he’d cook for tea. Cheese on toast, most likely.
Now Paul’s magnified eyes lit up as Jonas opened the door, then changed fast when he saw his face.
‘Hi, Paul. You know where Gary is?’
‘Work,’ said Paul. ‘He doesn’t get off until three. Why?’
Jonas took a breath; there was no easy way to break the news. ‘There’s been some trouble at the Lodge,’ he said. ‘Three residents are dead and Gary is missing.’
Paul said nothing. His huge eyes blinked at Jonas.
Jonas waited but still Paul did not respond, although the Flying Scotsman shook almost imperceptibly in his hand.
‘Paul?’ he inquired softly.
‘Yes,’ said Paul – then after another long pause, ‘I don’t know what to say. What can I say? I don’t know. Or to think. What do you mean? What am I supposed to think?’ He put the little engine down without looking at it and repeated, ‘What am I supposed to think?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Jonas. ‘It’s quite possible Gary wasn’t involved, but I think we should do everything we can to find him as quickly as we can, don’t you?’
‘He’s a suspect?’ Paul was confused, with an edge of outrage. ‘That’s ridiculous!’
He got up suddenly and Jonas realized he had been holding a tack hammer in his other hand; Jonas took a slow step backwards.
‘I thought you meant you were concerned for his safety! He wouldn’t do anything to harm those people, Jonas. Never.’
‘I know that, Paul.’ Jonas badly wanted to glance at the tack hammer but stayed focused on the man’s face. ‘And I am concerned for his safety. Truly. That’s why we need to find him.’
He thought of Marvel’s offer of back-up and felt a twinge of regret that he’d been too keen to wait for it.
Paul seemed unaware that he was holding the hammer. He stood stock still for at least a minute. Jonas gave him the time. Didn’t know what else he could do really.
Then Paul nodded. ‘Yes. We must. He could have been kidnapped. He could be trapped somewhere, or injured.’
‘He could,’ agreed Jonas, and got a nasty underneath feeling in his belly.
*
The agency reporter arrived first and was Australian. Marvel found Australians unbearably cocky, so he told Pollard she’d have to wait until the TV news crews got there so that he could do just one press conference. The reporter – Marcie Meyrick – made such a fuss that even Pollard nearly caved in and told her everything she wanted to know right up front. Only a well-timed call from the ITN crew asking for directions kept him loyal.
By lunchtime Marvel had another six officers at his disposal: four uniforms and two DCs from Weston-super-Mare. He sent them all to assist in the search for the murder weapon.
They didn’t find it.
By 4pm the BBC and ITN had joined the fuming Marcie Meyrick, and at a press conference that Rupert Cooke offered to let them hold in the garden room while the residents were at tea, Marvel told them the names, ages and sex of the victims, the fact that they had suffered blunt-force trauma, and about the ‘concerning’ disappearance of Gary Liss. He then distributed the good, clear photograph Jonas Holly had brought back with him from Paul Angell – Gary Liss looking like a member of a comeback boy-band in jeans and a tight T-shirt. Nothing was said about the box of jewellery. The watch had belonged to Violet Eaves, and the Reverend Chard identified a signet ring of his father’s. When they found Gary Liss, it would be one of the few surprises they could spring on him.
The usual blah about what a terrible crime it was was said with far more than the usual vehemence by Marvel. Luckily for the two TV news crews, a trick of the light caught an ambiguous liquid shine in Marvel’s eyes and ‘A MURDER DETECTIVE WEEPS’ booked the story a top berth on both the evening news bulletins.
Marvel protested too much, Reynolds was faux sympathetic and Marcie Meyrick – whose photographer had been delayed by a snow-crash on the M5 – was enraged.
*
Elizabeth Rice felt thoroughly left out.
Family liaison was a get-out clause for every senior police officer who had women to deploy, and sometimes she wished she’d never done the additional training the position required.
Marvel acting as if Alan and Danny Marsh were both still suspects was a joke; if he seriously considered them to be suspects in the latest brutal murders then he would never have left her alone with them. Marvel was an arsehole but he wasn’t completely stupid – so why the hell couldn’t she abandon her assignment and get where the action was? All her fancy-pants high-falutin family-liaison status afforded her was a total lack of privacy, and the honour of sharing a bathroom with two men who were too unreconstructed to bother with the niceties of flushing, let alone putting the seat down.
They barely said a word to each other, and that gave her the creeps.
Alan Marsh sat for hours staring at inanimate objects, while Danny stayed in his bedroom and read, occasionally went to the Red Lion, or wandered from lounge to kitchen and back, twitching.
‘I suppose it was a release,’ Alan said at least one thousand times a day, usually after a long sigh. Sometimes Danny would grunt in reply; sometimes he would snort; sometimes he would jump to his feet and say ‘Bollocks!’ and leave the room. He would come back ten minutes later and they would resume their positions.
Their tiny terraced house smelled of sweat, mildew and something else which she took days to identify as a bag of onions liquefying in the vegetable rack. One part of her wanted so badly to scrub the place from top to bottom that she kept opening the cupboard under the sink and staring at the bleach; another part
of her rebelled at the thought that, because she was a woman, she should clean the house. She had a degree in Criminal Psychology! She’d graduated top of her class at Portishead! She was a highly trained and highly effective officer of the law!
It sucked, because she really wanted to clean that house.
The Marshes weren’t under arrest; they were free to come and go – but they hardly did. By day Alan stared at The Jeremy
Kyle Show and Homes under the Hammer as if he had common ground with unwed slags and millionaire property developers. Danny would slouch down at breakfast and attempt to make small talk over the cornflakes. Very small talk. He was no talker, Danny Marsh, but he was a surprisingly good listener. He would ask her something and then just let her keep talking while he poured milk and sprinkled sugar and crunched cereal. Now and then he would look up and make eye-contact; now and then he would grunt; now and then he would nod. It was the only encouragement she needed. Sometimes she found herself telling him things about her own life that she hadn’t even told her boyfriend, Eric. Sometimes she told him things about Eric! Afterwards she was always sorry she’d been disloyal, but Danny Marsh’s grunts and nods seemed to open her eyes to certain aspects of Eric’s personality that she had to admit she’d never noticed before. Or if she had, they had never bothered her before. It had taken Danny Marsh and his objectivity to make her see …
She locked them all in every night. Back door, front door and all the downstairs windows. Alan Marsh was too out of it to notice, but Danny had watched her do it the first night and had asked, ‘Are you locking someone out, or locking us in?’
‘Someone out, of course,’ she’d said, but she could feel her cheeks grow warm and hoped he hadn’t noticed.
Every night she kept the keys under her pillow while she slept in the tiny box room they had cleared for her. ‘Cleared’ was a euphemism for shoving everything that apparently wouldn’t fit in the attic against the opposite wall, and Rice had to turn sideways to approach the bed at nights, down a narrow pathway of ugly green carpet.
She crab-walked down that pathway around midnight every night and woke at six. She checked on the Marshes as soon as she woke – but for the rapid application of mascara to her pale lashes, because that was next to waking like cleanliness is next to godliness – and she checked by pressing an ear against their bedroom doors and listening to them breathe. Alan snored; his son did not, but in the still darkness of dawn she could always hear him breathe eventually, once she focused and calmed her own breathing.
From day three onwards she had inquired of Alan and Danny whether they might like to return to work at the ramshackle little garage behind their home. She’d gathered that they kept half the cars on Exmoor running from the dingy corrugated-iron shed, and was more than prepared to jump around and stamp her feet to stay warm if only it took them all out of this stuffy little house. But no amount of encouragement would shift them into any action that was not slow or short-lived. Danny went to the pub now and then, but constantly forgot that he was supposed to have bought something for tea, and eventually Rice chose female submission over starvation and stormed down to the Spar to keep them all in the most mundane of foods – beans, toast, eggs, toast, cheese, toast and more toast. Her low-carb diet was a thing of the past and she felt the old white-bread addiction gripping her like crack, the longer her pointless occupation of the Marsh home continued.
When Marvel called about the murders at Sunset Lodge, she had wanted to rush out of the house and up the snowy road to be part of it all. Missing the buzz of the scene of a triple murder was killing her. The thought of that idiot Pollard being there when she was not was especially hard to bear.
All day she was short and gloomy and that night she sat fuming on the easy chair beside the sofa, from where Alan and Danny stared sightlessly at Top Gear repeats. Even she had seen this one and she’d only been here nine days.
Alan went to bed at 10.30pm, Danny at twelve when she did. She said goodnight with forced cheerfulness; he didn’t bother to force anything apart from a mumble, and closed his bedroom door.
She did her teeth and washed her face, trying hard not to touch the toothpaste-spotted taps or even the cracked and grimy pink soap, which looked as if it might have been a pre-war fixture along with the mottled tiles.
As she opened her bedroom door, she shivered.
She sidled towards the head of her bed and shivered again. The little room was always cold but there was a terrible draught coming from somewhere …
As if in answer to an unspoken question, the open curtains wafted inwards.
The window was slightly open. ‘Slightly’ in this winter was enough for the cold to stab its way into the room and chill it like a fridge.
A cheap office desk lamp with a flexible neck was the only makeshift light in here. Rice turned it to the window.
On the sill was a footprint showing where someone had climbed from the roof of the lean-to and into her room.
Elizabeth Rice had watched enough teen horror flicks on the sofa with Eric to know that the killer was right behind her with a steak knife.
She turned on a stifled shriek, throwing up her hands to protect her throat.
Nobody there.
She took three lurching sideways steps towards her bedroom door to alert the Marshes that there had been an intruder, and then stopped dead, even though her mind continued to click through scenarios so fast that it felt like one of those flicker-books where a thousand static images make a jerky motion picture.
The print was coming in.
There was no print going out.
If this was the killer, then the killer was still in the house.
Rice looked down at the boxes of junk and selected an ugly blue vase. She weighed it in her hand. She had always been a supporter of the British police remaining un-armed apart from specialized units. She felt that the lack of a firearm enforced the tacit notion of policing by consent, and that – democratically speaking – that was a good thing.
But right now she would give her right arm for a big gun.
Rice walked through the house – quietly, but not quietly enough to scare herself – switching on lights, checking doors and rattling windows. She stood outside the other bedroom doors and listened to the Marshes breathe.
There was no intruder.
There was no smearing of the inward-bound print. Therefore Rice felt it was fair to deduce that whoever had climbed in through this window had not climbed out through it again – and therefore they must be in the house.
Unless the person who had come in through the window had climbed out of it first before they muddied their shoes.
In which case there were only two suspects …
Neither Alan nor Danny Marsh had moved from the sofa today apart from brief visits to the bathroom or to the kitchen for tea.
Was it possible that between her checks last night – between midnight and 6am – one of the Marshes had crept past her bed and climbed out of her window?
Then back in?
Possible.
Improbable, of course, but Sherlock Holmes would base an entire case on improbable.
Her window was at the back of the house and there was a four-foot drop to the lean-to. With the downstairs doors and windows locked, it was the only viable route into or out of the house. It was, after all, the way the killer had entered Margaret Priddy’s home.
The thought of someone in her bedroom while she slept was disturbing enough; the idea that someone might have passed through on their way to and from murdering three people at Sunset Lodge made her feel sick.
She dragged one of the boxes of junk across the room and against the bedroom door. It wouldn’t stop anyone, but it would slow them down.
Then she sat on the bed cross-legged, fully clothed, with the blue vase in one hand and her phone in the other, and called DCI Marvel.
*
Jonas got home so late and so weary that when Lucy told him she’d made supper he could have kissed her f
eet. It was only spaghetti with tomatoes and basil but it tasted fantastic, and she’d put out a bottle of smooth red wine for him to open. She sat and watched him eat.
‘You want to talk about it, sweetheart?’ she said quietly.
He stared across the kitchen in silence.
‘He beat them to death.’
Lucy bit her lip and her eyes filled with tears.
‘Then put pillows over their faces.’
‘Like with Margaret?’
Jonas shook his head but did not drop his sightless thousand-yard stare at the washing machine.
‘I don’t think he meant to smother them.’
‘Why, then?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe so he couldn’t see their faces.’
Lucy hated to ask, but the images in her head begged the question.
‘Did they … was there a struggle?’
‘I don’t think so. They all looked quite … peaceful. I think he hit them while they were asleep. They died quickly. I hope they did.’
Lucy put her hand over Jonas’s and looked down at the knife he’d given her, lying on the table between them. It had seemed a silly thing at first, but since his early-morning call from Sunset Lodge, she’d barely let it go.
She shuddered and her movement made Jonas blink. He focused on the washing machine and remembered it needed emptying. And there was a basket of ironing to do. Work shirts mostly, and a couple of pairs of uniform trousers. And the one or two tops that Lucy couldn’t wear if they were wrinkled. Jonas was bad at ironing and they always tried to buy wisely so he wouldn’t have to do much.
Lucy stroked his hand. ‘Eat, sweetheart.’
Jonas dutifully picked up his fork again.
He noticed that there was new mail propped against the fruit bowl. They’d been without mail for a few days, but now that Marvel’s team and Jonas had been up and down the hill on several occasions, turning snow to slush, apparently Frank Tithecott’s old red Royal Mail van was up to the challenge once more.
Darkside Page 18