‘Bollocks. You do.’
Jonas shrugged. He didn’t. He didn’t want to.
He looked around. The cramped unit was dingy and dirty. He didn’t think he could work in a place like this. There was a calendar on the wall that was four years out of date. Four years ago, Lu could have walked upstairs on her hands. Four years ago, Jonas was following another path to another place. Four years ago would do him nicely, thank you very much, so he let his mind linger there instead of here, where Lucy was dying, Danny was dead, and DCI Marvel was being a prick.
‘… to him? Holly!’
Jonas came back, blinking. ‘What?’
‘What did you say to him?’
‘Say to who?’
‘Whom,’ said Reynolds. ‘Sorry.’
They both ignored him.
‘To Danny Marsh. When he was dying. Rice says you said something to him.’
‘I didn’t say anything.’
‘Bollocks. Again.’
Marvel pushed his chair away from Jonas and went over to the fridge. He opened it and took out a can of cola. Generic cola.
‘I think I said, “Thank you.”’
‘Why?’
Jonas frowned. ‘I don’t know.’
It was the truth. He had no idea. He’d taken his lips from Danny’s mouth and slid them round to his ear without any thought of why or of what he was going to say when he got there. There was just something inside him that had to be said. Had to be said. And when he’d said it, it had felt right.
Jonas!
The voice at the gate had been Danny Marsh, he was sure.
He’d wanted to talk to him.
Had Danny left him the note?
If so, what was the job Danny wanted him to do?
The dead eye of the pony. The prickle of hay against his cheek. The woman’s face at the dusty window …
Pfffftt! Marvel opened the cola and Jonas came back with a start to find him and Reynolds regarding him with interest.
‘He’s dead, Holly. You can’t protect him. Not if you call yourself a policeman.’
Jonas couldn’t breathe.
Call yourself a policeman?
How did he know? How did Marvel know? He’d never told him what the first note said!
Jonas sat there, staring wide-eyed at Marvel while his mind screamed at him, Don’t stare! Don’t look at him! He’ll know that you spotted the slip! But he couldn’t move – even his eyes.
‘Get out,’ Marvel said. ‘I’ll speak to you tomorrow.’
*
Lucy Holly was sitting halfway up the stairs when she felt death approaching.
She had known for a while that she was dying. Every new symptom was a reminder of the fact that she wasn’t going to just snap out of it one day; that this thing inside her had come to stay and planned to kill her, like a psycho in the spare room. That craziness had become routine.
But she had never felt like this before.
She did not often go up and down stairs during the day. It was a chore that could take half an hour sometimes. Jonas had plumbed a toilet into the little shed outside the back door of the old cottage, which she used in all but the coldest weather. But she had woken at 5am to find Jonas was not beside her. Immediately, she knew she would not get back to sleep, so she edged downstairs in the darkness to make tea and to get her book and then decided to take both back to bed with her.
On the bottom step she’d put the luggage for her journey – the cup of tea, her book, a new tube of toothpaste, and the knife Jonas had made her promise to keep with her, even though she felt like a neurotic New Yorker every time she touched it. The thought of having to answer the door to somebody while holding it filled her with English embarrassment. But she’d promised Jonas, and mostly remembered to carry it from room to room with her, even though she thought there was more chance of falling off her crutches on to the knife than there was of it being of any use in repelling an invader.
She’d leaned her downstairs sticks against the banisters, lowered herself to the third step and started her little adventure, moving each item up a step before she levered herself on to the next tread. She got into a nice rhythm – almost laughing at how silly it was to feel that way about inching upstairs on your backside. She had good days like this, where her arms and legs felt stronger, and it always made her happy. Ever the competitor, Lucy got faster and faster, moving, hoisting, sipping tea, moving, hoisting, sipping tea … until suddenly she slipped, lurching sideways and banging her arm and her head painfully into the wall. She’d put the heel of her hand on Fate Dictates, which had skidded off the stair and now lay open and face-down in the hallway.
‘Shit! ’ Lucy bit her lip while her funny bone grinningly punished her for being careless. She’d dropped the knife down a few treads too, and knocked her mug so that some tea had dotted the carpet.
Lucy had slipped before; she had fallen before; she had hurt herself worse than she was hurt now.
But this time … This time she understood death.
With the house wrapped in the cocoon of snow that made it quiet as a tomb, Lucy became aware that her own breathing was the only sound that demarcated her living from her dying.
She held it.
She sat halfway up the stairs and held her breath and let the silence assault her ears.
This was what it would be like.
Underneath the dirt.
Lying still and silent and helpless in a box waiting for nature to worm its way into her so that it could reclaim her for the greater good.
Lucy Holly was not stupid. She understood the cessation of consciousness that comes with death. She understood that if she were aware of anything it would be in a spiritual sense, and that her body was just meat. Meat rotting on young bones.
But this vivid preview was new. This feeling that she was lying in this house with her wedding ring on and a posy on her chest, and that death had finally arrived with the snow and was even now pressed against the windows, testing the chinks made by the mice and the sparrows, trying to slither inside to get at her while she sat halfway up the stairs without even Jonas’s knife to protect herself with. This was all new.
Before – before the pills – death had been an abstract notion, a way to be relieved of the pain. The relief of pain had been the goal – and she’d barely thought about the death that would facilitate that. Now she knew she’d turned a corner. She didn’t only know it was coming, she knew how it would feel when it did. How it would look. How it would taste.
It was overwhelming. And inconsequential.
She’d thought she would cry, but instead she got calm, calm, calm, as if someone had drugged her tea. She wished they had. She wished suddenly and fiercely that someone had drugged her tea and that she would fall asleep here on the stair that always creaked, and that they would come and kill her softly so she’d never have to bother with the rest of the stairs. They were a struggle and she was sick of them.
Her bum started to ache and she looked at her watch to see she had sat here for more than an hour. No wonder she was so cold and desperate for the loo.
She would go outside.
Lucy left the toothpaste and the mug of cold tea on the stairs.
She picked up the knife as she slid back down past it and, when she got to the bottom, she closed Fate Dictates and never opened it again.
*
Jonas walked home in a daze just before 6am.
He’d felt as if he were floating ever since Danny died in his arms. Like a spacewalking astronaut whose tether has been severed, Jonas felt himself drifting slowly away from everything, and off towards nothing.
How did Marvel know?
Jonas had not been specific about the wording of the first two notes. He hadn’t wanted to say the word ‘crybaby’, so had been fuzzy about the first note too, for the sake of appearing consistent, even if it was only consistently stupid. But Marvel’s words had snapped everything back into sharp relief.
Call yourself a policeman.
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Why had he said it? How did he know?
As sleet started to spit in Jonas’s face, his mind turned slow, gravity-free circles around Marvel, looking at him from new angles and with fresh eyes.
Marvel had never liked him. He wasn’t sure how, but he’d managed to piss the man off right from the start of this investigation.
Now he began to wonder why.
Even from his doorstep viewpoint, Jonas had the feeling that Marvel had been lost on the case, that he’d employed a scattergun approach to suspects, that there was no real sense of focus in his investigation.
The way he’d over-reacted to finding Jonas on the doorstep of Margaret Priddy’s told of a man who was floundering and insecure, and Jonas had thought he had smelled booze on the man’s breath. Or maybe just in his sweat.
When the alleged vomit had disappeared, Marvel had told him to do his job – and the way he’d said it, ‘crybaby’ was only a whisper away.
And now he’d repeated the first note almost word for word.
Had he seen it?
Had he written it?
It sounded stupid, even inside the privacy of his own head, but did Marvel have some kind of connection with the killer?
Jonas shuddered at the thought. He had Reynolds’s card still in his breast pocket. Would Reynolds be discreet if Jonas voiced his fears to him? He doubted it. Jonas had the impression that Reynolds did not like Marvel that much, but that didn’t necessarily mean he’d take sides against him.
He looked up into the sleet to see that he was almost at his gate.
He needed to speak to Lucy. Lucy’s brain worked faster than his at the best of times, and right now his brain was stuffed so full, and was nonetheless so empty of solutions, that it was as if a super-massive black hole was expanding slowly within his head, ready to burst out and swallow up the whole world in compressed nothingness.
Lucy was on the living-room floor, weeping and gnarled up with pain and with an unopened bottle of pills beside her.
In an instant the black hole in Jonas’s head shrank to a pinprick and his heart exploded into his throat with fear.
He dropped to the carpet beside her and tried to gather her into his arms, but she tucked up and resisted.
Her head was hot with tears, but the rest of her was icy from being on the floor. The fire was long burned out and had turned to white ashes. Jonas got her tartan rug and wrapped it around her, then lay down behind her and wrapped his arms around that. He could keep her warm, even if he couldn’t keep her well.
‘Did you take anything, Lu?’
‘No!’ she shouted. ‘No, I didn’t!’
He squeezed her into his chest. ‘I meant for the pain.’
‘If I had then it wouldn’t be hurting so much!’ she yelled at him – and started a new bout of hopeless crying.
An hour later they were in the same position but on the bed, where Lucy had allowed herself to be carried.
The silence was complete – what isolation and winter had not dampered, the snow had shushed as it fell.
Jonas had given her three painkillers and the worst of it was over.
‘How do you feel?’ he whispered.
‘Better,’ she said. Better than what she did not say, but Jonas understood that, and hoped she knew that he did.
Jonas stared unblinkingly at the opposite wall of what he would always think of as his parents’ room.
‘Tell me about your night,’ she said, still with the weary trace of a sob in her voice.
She needed to forget her own. He knew that.
‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
How could he tell her? He felt numb. He felt detached. He didn’t know any more where lines could be drawn between past and present, good and evil, right and wrong.
‘Jonas?’
Jonas felt it all starting to rise in him. Everything underneath was coming to the surface – however much he tried to keep it down.
Tigger for Danny, Taffy for him. The slide of polished leather against his knees and the grip-and-release wonder of a whole beast held in his little-boy hands; the bunching and bumping of muscles under his backside; watching Danny fly along beside him and hoping he looked as free as his best friend did; the eager little ears, between which he’d viewed his whole world. For a happy while.
Jonas remembered.
Although he’d spent a lifetime forgetting.
He remembered the heady smell of the coarse mix and hay; the quiet sounds of hoofs brushing straw over concrete, and the velvet breath of Taffy’s muzzle touching his hair, while all the time he was held down and ordered not to cry while unspeakable things were done to him.
Unspeakable.
He shuddered against Lucy’s back.
‘Jonas?’
But Danny had seen. Danny had known. Maybe Danny had even had the same thing happen to him. He knew that must have been true, because even though they’d never spoken of it – because it was unspeakable – Danny had done something about it.
He’d burned the place down.
Now, here, twenty years later, Jonas’s head pounded and he twitched, as he remembered like a dog.
Going down the row of smouldering stables, roofs caved in and doors thrown open for the ponies to escape. Someone had done that. Someone who loved them had thought of the ponies. But the ponies had not escaped. Terrified by the flames, the ponies had screamed and died in the fire, just as Robert Springer had. Seven sad carcasses still in their boxes. Some so charred that only their legs protruded from a pile of ash, some barely damaged, killed by smoke.
Tigger was half gone but Taffy was unmarked – collapsed against the back wall of his stable, with his legs tucked under his chest, his clever little head bowed gracefully, and his soft lips pressed against the concrete, as if he were lying in a summer meadow nibbling at daisies.
The eighth carcass had already been taken away in an ambulance with a sheet over its blackened, grinning face.
The smell of death was overwhelming.
Turning to his friend through a blur of tears to find comfort in shared misery, Jonas had instead seen pale shock – and guilt.
‘Why didn’t they run away, Jonas? They should have run away!’
The ponies had died because of him. Because he was too weak to stop it.
Jonas started to shake.
‘Sweetheart. What’s wrong?’
‘Danny Marsh is dead,’ he told her bluntly.
And then – finally – he started to cry.
*
‘I’m glad he’s gone,’ said Joy Springer. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.’
Marvel was so surprised that he sloshed Cinzano on the kitchen table. The stuff wasn’t so bad once you got a taste for it.
Joy sat on a kitchen chair, elbows on the table and her glass outstretched for a refill. The old woman’s frizzy grey bun had escaped its grips and she looked like Albert Einstein on a bad-hair day.
‘Why?’ he said – and Marvel didn’t often say that around Joy Springer. He’d soon learned in their almost nightly sessions not to use certain words. Why was high on the list, with its answering convolutions and explanations, although When was the real killer, as it allowed Joy to ramble back over what felt like the last 150 years of her life – none of it of the slightest interest to Marvel. One night she had held him hell-bound, running through the names of her friends from nursery school onwards. No stories, no descriptions, no insightful recollections or pivotal moments – just a litany of meaningless names like a bore of biblical begattings.
‘Nothing,’ she said after a pause, and waggled her glass at him.
Marvel was instantly fascinated. All of a sudden here was something Joy Springer didn’t want to talk about.
‘You knew Danny Marsh?’
‘Years back.’ She shrugged. ‘Something be wrong with your arm, bay?’
But Marvel withheld the bottle and took a deep breath. ‘When?’
The story Joy Springer told was a good one.
Everyone has to have one, Marvel reasoned, even if it was bullshit.
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.
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