So Gary Liss was a petty thief, but not a killer.
No doubt he had not been the intended target, but he’d probably been murdered for interrupting the killer – and then stuffed behind the garden-room piano like a surprise Christmas present. The thick old pile of heavy maroon curtaining had been wadded down the back of the piano for years, Rupert Cooke told them, white-faced with shock. He said it acted as a damper so the sound wasn’t too loud for the residents.
In Marvel’s brief experience with the residents, no sound could be loud enough for them.
But what it meant was that the killer had known about the curtains and therefore must be local. Not that that narrowed things down a lot – he imagined everyone in Shipcott had had a relative or friend at Sunset Lodge at some point in the past few years.
The killer had also dragged or carried Liss downstairs – close to the staffroom where the two women were – and had taken the time to wrap him up and hide him behind the piano. It spoke of great strength and it spoke of calmness, not panic. The killer had been interrupted, certainly – but he had also adapted to that interruption so brutally and so efficiently that Lynne Twitchett and Jen Hardy had never heard a sound from Liss.
This latest crime scene was now one that had been ravaged by heat and constant human traffic for the near forty-eight hours since the victim had died. No wonder the place had started to smell. If he hadn’t spent so much time there he’d have noticed it himself. And they didn’t even know yet where Gary Liss had been killed. Blood on the body was minimal – a single crusty smear over a depression fracture of the front of the skull, and smears on the throat where it looked as if he’d been manually strangled.
Yet another modus operandi …
I once was found, but now am lost.
Marvel sighed and put a tea bag into a mug, hoping that if he took the lead, the kettle might catch up.
His phone rang; it was Jos Reeves on a scratchy line. There were no prints on the walking stick, and the blood on the roof belonged not to the killer but to Lionel Chard, so it added nothing to their well of knowledge.
Marvel was so annoyed by the crappy news that he yelled, ‘I can’t hear you!’ and hung up on Reeves mid-sentence.
So it was back to square one. Only with more dead people.
Great.
Alan Marsh? Danny Marsh? Peter fucking Priddy? Marvel felt like having a tantrum. He’d ‘liked’ Peter Priddy so much; liked the hunchy feeling that he was the one – but now Peter Priddy felt like a best friend at school, whose name he barely remembered.
He switched off the kettle and opened a bottle of Jameson’s instead. It would help him think; it always had and always would. That was what Debbie had never understood. You’re sick, she’d told him once. You get drunk and lie around and think about murder. It’s sick!
He’d come close to hitting her.
Marvel knocked back the first two fingers and went for a slightly larger chaser, which he sipped more slowly while watching Newsnight with the sound down; it was better that way.
This case was already like musical chairs, and then Jonas Holly comes out with a critical piece of evidence he’d been hoarding like a fucking hamster while they were all chasing their own arses.
Just the thought of it sent Marvel’s blood pressure up again.
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 expe
rience.
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.
On the half-pipe ramp, Steven Lamb swooped through lazy arcs, turning smoothly at each lip, accompanied only by the hypnotic rumble of the skateboard’s wheels. He had cleared the snow from the ramp with a rusted spade, which now stood upright in the resulting lumpy pile of white, with Steven’s anorak slung over it.
Jonas walked across the crunchy snow, wondering whether he was following in the footsteps of the killer. Today was overcast and promised more snow – very different from the shiny morning that had greeted the horror of Yvonne Marsh.
He stopped six feet from the ramp and said, ‘Hi.’
‘Hi,’ said Steven, his eyes always fixed on the next lip, the next turn, the next swoop. His face was serene with the rhythm of it all.
Jonas watched the boy swing back and forth with complete grace – the slight bend of the knees before each ascent the only visible effort in near-perpetual motion.
He wished he didn’t have to do this.
‘How are you?’ he asked.
‘Fine, thanks,’ said Steven.
‘Just thought I’d ask. After the other day.’ He thought again of Steven sinking to the ground beside the stream, his dark eyes huge in his white face.
Steven rolled to the lip of the pipe, was suspended there for a brief moment, straight-legged, defying gravity … and then flicked his board round and passed Jonas going the other way. Jonas noticed that his mouth had tightened, and that the lack of eye contact now looked more like avoidance.
‘I know what happened to you, Steven,’ he said quietly.
Although he’d never given any indication of it, Jonas knew that four years earlier, while trying to find the body of his missing Uncle Billy, Steven Lamb had almost died at the hands of a serial killer.
The boy didn’t make the turn this time. He let his board carry him backwards down the ramp and halfway up the opposite side, before slowly putting a foot down and pushing off once more.
‘Can we talk about it?’
Steven said nothing, his eyes fixed on the ramp, on the lip – but a new vertical frown-line had appeared between his brows.
‘I need your help.’
Steven continued to skate, but his rhythm had gone. The skateboard barely reached the lip – or overshot and made him teeter – and his arms were working now instead of hanging loosely at his sides.
‘I need to know …’ started Jonas. ‘I need to know what to look for. I need to know what you see in the eyes of a killer.’
The skateboard clattered noisily and flipped over as Steven stepped off it and took a few faltering steps to stop himself falling. It slid back down the ramp towards him. He bent and picked it up angrily, and headed for his spade and anorak.
‘Nothing,’ he said, not looking at Jonas. He tugged the spade free of the snow, and slung it over his shoulder, yanking his anorak off the handle as he did so. Every jerky angle of his body screamed at Jonas that he wanted to be left alone.
But Jonas couldn’t leave him alone. He spoke urgently to the boy. ‘I know you don’t want to remember it, Steven. I hate to ask you, believe me. But I have to know. Before he kills again, I have to know. Please!’
Steven made to go around him, and Jonas put out a hand to halt him, but the boy stopped before he could be touched. He looked away from Jonas, his chest heaving and his cheeks high with colour.
‘Nothing!’ he said with low vehemence. ‘You see nothing.’
*
Marvel and Reynolds sat side by side on a velveteen sofa so small that their thighs touched. Alan Marsh sat opposite in a matching easy chair.
Reynolds looked around the room.
The mantel held four or five sympathy cards and a couple of Christmas ones between family photos and a repeating motif of snub-nosed ceramic Dickensian boys, doing boy-stuff like whistling jauntily or selling newspapers. On the table there were more cards – opened but left in a pile. There was also an old photograph of Yvonne Marsh propped against a jumbled pile of clean laundry, like some kind of shrine to the memory of housework.
‘So what was that all about the other day with Danny and Jonas Holly?’ said Marvel, jerking his thumb randomly at the ugly striped wallpaper behind him.
Alan Marsh sighed and opened his hands in a ‘beats me’ gesture.
Elizabeth Rice had taken Danny Marsh to the pub. It wasn’t difficult – she’d told them he had a little crush on her and she’d promised to buy.
Marvel said nothing further, allowing the aching silence slowly to reveal to Alan Marsh that this was not a social call.
‘Well …’ the man started haltingly, then stopped. He was in overalls even though Rice had reported that he wasn’t working. Apparently the habit was just too much to break while his mind was already distracted by the murder of his wife. He was wearing slippers rather than steel toe-caps though, Reynolds noticed – as if he’d remembered halfway through dressing that his wife was dead and he wasn’t going to work after all.
Reynolds sighed and wondered why Marvel was going all round the houses before asking more relevant questions about Danny. It wasn’t like him.
He wished he couldn’t feel Marvel’s hip against his.
‘Them used to be friends. When ’em were nippers. Dunno what happened there …’
He trailed off again.
Marvel realized he was going to have to tweeze information out of Alan Marsh like splinters. It was a job he hated. He preferred blunter tools.
‘How old were they then?’
‘’Bout ten, I suppose.’
‘Were they very close?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, were they best friends?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Alan a little dismissively. ‘I was working mostly. Yvonne would know that.’
Yeah, but she’s dead, Marvel felt like pointing out, but didn’t. He could be pretty sensitive when he tried.
‘Would they play here much?’
Again Alan Marsh made an all-purpose gesture of ‘who knows?’ ‘It was a long time back,’ he said. ‘Seemed like it. Why do you want to know, anyway?’
Marvel hadn’t expected the question and was annoyed that he hadn’t anticipated it. He blustered a little. ‘We’re always concerned when a serving officer gets into a public brawl, Mr Marsh. Aren’t you?’
The man shrugged. ‘Danny was mazed. And he took the first swing.’
That was the countryside for you, Marvel supposed. In town, Jonas Holly would already have been suspended and have a lawsuit pending. Here the victim’s own father thought he deserved a good beating by the police.
Refreshing.
Reynolds sighed again and Marvel glared at him before turning back to Alan Marsh, who looked disinterested in life itself, let alone this particular conversation.
‘Have you ever seen Officer Holly behave in that way before, Mr Marsh?’
‘No, but I seen Danny behave like that plenty!’
‘Well, he’s just lost his mother in tragic circumstances.’
‘Bollocks to that,’ said Marsh. ‘Just the way he is. Has been for years.’
Marvel was surprised and looked it, so Alan Marsh went on.
‘He’d bin under the doctor sometimes. Psychiatrist. You know.’
Marvel did know. His nose for motive started to quiver.
‘What’s wrong with him, Mr Marsh?’
‘Not much. Just a bit here and there, you know. Not dangerous or nothing like that. Just a bit down sometimes, that’s all.’
‘Depressed?’
‘I suppose so. A bit down.’
‘Has he ever been hospitalized for depression or something like that?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Alan Marsh definitely. ‘He’s not a nutter, see? Just a bit up and then a bit
down.’
‘Manic depressive,’ suggested Reynolds, who thought he’d have to get up and leave if Alan Marsh said ‘a bit down’ one more time.
‘If that’s what you call it.’
‘Always?’
‘Not always,’ said Alan Marsh, looking as if he was thinking about it for the first time. ‘Since he were about twelve or thirteen. About then.’
‘And that’s about the time he and Jonas fell out?’ said Marvel, back on track.
‘Suppose so.’
‘Can you think of any specific reason?’ said Marvel, without one single ounce of hope that Alan Marsh would.
‘No.’
Of course he couldn’t. That would be too bloody easy.
They left.
‘What’s this interest in Jonas, sir?’
Marvel clamped his teeth together. Trust Reynolds to leap to the right conclusion.
He thought his left little toe was getting damp – just on the short walk to the car! He’d have to throw these shoes away. Beyond the village the snow was a Christmassy white blanket. Here it was just ridges of icy slush and running water. Wherever they went, whatever they did, they were accompanied by the gurgling of drains working overtime. At night it all froze again and made every step a hazard. Damn the doglegs that kept him from wellingtons and dry feet.
‘He bothers me.’
Reynolds smiled. ‘We like him now, do we, sir?’
Up until that very second, Marvel had only had a suspicion. A hunch. An intuitive feeling that all was not quite right with Jonas Holly.
But the moment Reynolds said that – in that amused, condescending tone – Marvel decided that he really did like Holly after all. Liked him a lot.
And that he was right.
And that he would do almost anything to prove Reynolds wrong.
*
It was over.
Danny Marsh knew it.
He’d known it the moment he’d run across the playing fields behind his father and seen his mother lying in the frost like a downed footballer waiting for a magic sponge or a stretcher.
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