‘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.
He’d always known it would come. Always. People who behaved like Marvel were on borrowed time. For a start, he knew that Marvel had left the Met under a cloud. Quite what kind of cloud he’d not been able to determine, but the police grapevine had whispered of Marvel squeezing the facts to make them fit a suspect – or squeezing that suspect to make him fit the facts. Reynolds believed it. He would have believed almost anything ill of Marvel. He hated the man’s archaic approach – his reliance on ‘hunches’, his relaxed attitude to procedure, his personal whims and illogical vendettas; his secret drinking – none of these had any place in modern law enforcement.
Since he’d started working with Marvel, Reynolds had been shocked by his fixation on certain ‘suspects’. In Weston last year, Marvel had held a nineteen-year-old homeless man for two days because he’d been near the scene of the crime and ‘looked guilty’. Before that the married boyfriend of a strangled Asian teenager was terrified into a confession which took seconds to collapse once the girl’s father haughtily confessed to the ‘honour’ killing a few days later.
Sure, Marvel did get results – even Reynolds had to admit that – and those results had kept him grudgingly secure ever since he’d left London. There was a kind of inferiority complex going on at the Avon & Somerset force which had allowed the big-city cop to bulldoze his way through conventional practice and on to cases that should have belonged to others. Even senior officers were only human, and – Reynolds knew – most just wanted things to run smoothly. Attempting to rein Marvel in and put him in his place would have taken more effort than any of the current incumbents were prepared to expend – even from behind a desk.
From his place at Marvel’s side, Reynolds had been convinced that the man deserved to be kicked out. But because of Marvel’s constant, dogged results, he’d always known he would also need to get good, sworn, hopefully civilian evidence of serious wrongdoing to bring the man down.
The kind of evidence that Lucy Holly had just dropped into his lap like manna from heaven. The kind of evidence that he could see the Independent Police Complaints Commission putting right at the top of the pile. The disabled wife of a serving officer alleging conduct unbecoming and being drunk on the job.
Superb.
Reynolds signed and dated his notes of the conversation and tucked them neatly into a folder with a sense of self-satisfaction. He was harassed and balding, trying to do his job and Marvel’s, but as soon as he had a spare moment, he would go and see Lucy Holly, take her sworn statement and add it to the rest of the case he had built against his DCI in the past year.
Sergio Leone, eat your heart out.
One Day
It was gone five o’clock and Marvel was in the Red Lion nursing half a pint of piss masquerading as alcohol-free lager.
He hadn’t invited anybody else along for an after-work drink. He was heartily sick of the lot of them and even more sick of being stuck here in Shipcott with what appeared to be trench foot.
Jos Reeves called to say that the prints inside the plastic bags they’d found in the courtyard were unidentifiable. Little more than muddy smears.
Marvel didn’t even have the energy to be rude to him.
Someone walked through his line of vision with a lurching gait and Marvel focused. The young man had the look of someone who had put his weight and his drink on fast – florid, and with all the excess fat around his belly and his chin.
‘What are you looking at?’ said Neil Randall.
‘You got a wooden leg?’ said Marvel.
The young man was taken aback. He was used to people blushing and stammering when he confronted them.
‘Yes,’ he said.
Then he remembered his hostility and added, ‘You want to make something of it?’
Marvel resisted the urge to snap back something about whittling a toy boat, and just shrugged. The young man was obviously defensive. Must be shit to lose your leg. Give up your job, maybe. Collect disability. Be a burden—
A burden. Margaret Priddy had been a burden. That was, after all, why he had ‘liked’ Peter Priddy so much, wasn’t it? Yvonne Marsh had been a burden to her husband and son. But the three victims at Sunset Lodge … couldn’t they also be considered burdens on their families? A financial drain, if nothing else?
Maybe the killer couldn’t bring himself to kill his own burden and was taking it out on others?
Marvel felt his skin actually tingle. He felt so sure that he was on the right track, and his instincts rarely let him down.
Hand in hand with that came the uncomfortable feeling that this was Reynolds’s territory. Reynolds and his beloved Kate Gulliver with their namby-pamby, touchy-feely bollocks about childhoods and transference and repression and guilt.
He stared unseeingly at Neil Randall’s gammy leg as the man limped across the pub and propped himself up in front of the fruit machine.
And then DCI John Marvel got another, even bigger tingle as he put two and two together and made what looked very much like four to him …
Wasn’t Lucy Holly a burden to her husband?
He put his so-called beer down on the table so fast that it slopped over the rim, and stood up.
He had to get back to his room. He had to be really alone so he could think about this clearly. He needed to write things down and draw little boxes and connect them with biro lines of reasoning. He needed to be absolutely sure before he exposed his theory to Reynolds, to give that bastard the smallest possible chance of poking holes in it.
And, more than anything, he needed a real drink to help him.
*
Jonas was pulling a ewe’s head out of a tree.
He’d spent several minutes trying to get a good grip on the struggling, ice-covered sheep without luck, and made a new effort to focus before his hands got too cold to function.
The snow was falling again in a silent blizzard that threatened to obscure his view of Shipcott below. Jonas had done his best to get over to Edgcott to do his rounds but he’d had to turn back at the top of the hill when he lost the road completely. He’d spotted the sheep twenty yards away and decided to do his good deed for the day.
He spoke soothingly to the ewe but she didn’t believe him for a second, and bleated in terror, while
now and then raising her tail to vent hard marble-sized droppings in machine-gun bursts, as if paying out a shit jackpot.
Jonas Holly cursed under his breath but he understood the ewe’s fear. He had learned to live with fear.
It didn’t mean he wasn’t scared.
All the time.
All the fucking time! He could hear Danny saying those words again.
Jonas felt that if he could only keep all his fear separate and compartmentalized, then he would be able to manage it, like a lion tamer performing tricks with just one lion at a time – carefully twisting his head into the sharp, fetid maw, feeling the prick of teeth on his cheek, and then herding the beast back to its cage, before bringing out the next lion, whose job was to jump through hoops.
At times, though, Jonas got the feeling that the catches on the cages were loose, that the lions were plotting behind his back – and that there was imminent danger of a great escape, during which he would be torn to pieces in his top hat and red tails.
Which was probably what this poor ewe thought was about to happen to her.
Don’t be scared. I’ll protect you. That’s my job.
The words rushed at him from nowhere and for the first time in decades he remembered the face of the policeman who had told him that. The man had looked like a father. Not like his father, but like the kind of father Jonas had seen on TV – middle-aged, greying at the temples, slightly overweight. Jonas could even remember the shiny buttons on the policeman’s tunic and being overwhelmed that this exciting uniform was actually in his mother’s cramped little kitchen.
The policeman had asked his parents to stay in the front room. Jonas had panicked then, and imagined the policeman taking him out of the back door to prison while his parents waited trustingly in front of the TV that was showing Grange Hill. Or he might hurt him to find out what he wanted to know. Jonas didn’t want to be hurt any more. But he also didn’t want to tell. If he told on Danny about the stables, it would all come out. All the horror and the shame would come out and everybody would know about it, even his parents. And nobody must ever know that Jonas even knew that pathetic child – let alone used to be him. Even he, Jonas, had learned to leave that weak little boy to his fate and go somewhere else while unspeakable things were happening.
The big policeman had bent his head and asked quiet questions about the fire. Jonas had told him the truth – that he knew nothing. But he didn’t tell him the truth of what he suspected.
Somehow the policeman had known that he was hiding something. Like magic, he knew. How? He had probed and prodded and gently persuaded until finally Jonas had burst into tears.
‘Are you scared, Jonas?’ he’d asked with great kindness.
Jonas had nodded with his fists in his eyes. The policeman had taken one of those hot, wet fists and engulfed it in his own.
‘Don’t be scared,’ he’d said. ‘I’ll protect you. That’s my job.’
It was tempting. So tempting. To blurt it all out and be done with it and let grown-ups take charge. But Jonas never told because he knew that there was only one way now to protect himself, and that was by protecting the other boy – even from the nice policeman …
Here and now, Jonas’s face was as flushed and hot as his hands were cold. He wished he could run away and never come back. He had failed the village and – now that he had cried – he had failed Lucy too. She had seen his weakness and could no longer call on him for strength.
He was falling apart on her.
The anger of that thought gave him strength and suddenly he managed to grasp the sheep’s ear and a handful of dirty wet fleece in just the right place so that he could lever the animal upwards and out from where it was wedged in the V of two branches. As he did, the ewe’s legs flailed wildly and caught him in the thigh. He bit his lip and grunted as he heaved it free and let it go.
After an initial panicky dash, the ewe turned and surveyed him with a supercilious yellow eye.
Jonas panted and rubbed his leg. His trousers had ripped and he could feel the cold touching his thigh. He’d have to go home and change. Again.
Even so, he wasn’t angry any more; he was grateful. The kick had brought him out of it. Out of that terrifying place where memories rose like dead fish breaking the calm surface of his mind.
He was here.
He was safe.
He was Jonas Holly, the protector, once more.
‘Don’t be scared,’ he told the sheep.
*
An abandoned Toyota had blocked the bottom of the lane to the house. Apparently the driver had been attempting to get up the hill but had slid sideways, and the car was now wedged between the spiny black winter hedges with their thick caps of soft-edged snow going grey in the fading daylight.
Jonas said, ‘Shit’ quietly and sat for a moment, hating the driver, who had no doubt wandered back to the village and was probably even now having steak-and-kidney pudding in the Red Lion, while trusting that someone would do something about his misfortune while he was gone.
No local would have left his car there, Jonas reckoned. Locals knew that even in conditions like this, farmers in tractors needed to reach livestock all over the moor. Locals had more sense and more courtesy.
Fuming silently, Jonas climbed out into the snow – and was bitingly reminded that he had only just managed to get warm again after the sheep episode.
He had to slide across the boot of the car to attach the winch, getting a wet arse for his pains.
As he dropped off the other side of the boot, the Toyota’s rear end broke free and the car lurched sideways, then started to slide slowly back down the hill.
Jonas took a few faltering paces, but then stopped and could only watch as the car arced gently into his Land Rover before skating on and coming to rest against a drift at the bottom of the hill.
‘Bastard,’ said Jonas quietly but with feeling. He was freezing cold, it had started to snow again, and now he’d have to fill out forms explaining how the Land Rover got damaged, when all he wanted was to get home, have a steaming hot bath and share supper with Lu.
As he started down through the churned snow where the Toyota had been, Jonas noticed what he assumed were the driver’s footprints leading not down the hill to the Red Lion, but up the lane towards Rose Cottage.
He stopped and shone his torch into the prints.
The new snow was starting to soften them a little, but Jonas could still see the tread pattern.
Herringbone.
Jonas switched off the torch and ran up the hill.
The footprints led straight to his front door.
He skidded on the path despite the grit, and skidded again in the porch, sending several loud logs tumbling off the neat pile.
Shit.
Any attempt at stealth ruined, Jonas burst through the front door.
‘Lucy!’
No answer.
Please be OK. Please, please, please.
He opened the door into the front room.
Lucy was on the couch under the friendly glow of the fire, her eyes closed and her head nestled on the tasselled cushion.
Jonas released a huge breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. She was safe. She was fine. The driver had probably asked to use the phone, that was all—
The back door closed quietly.
Jonas’s heart pumped a shot of pure ice into his system. He could even feel it in his teeth.
He grabbed the poker from beside the fire and rushed into the kitchen.
Empty.
Jonas crossed the room in three strides and yanked open the back door. By the light spilling out of the kitchen it was easy to make out the herringbone treads.
‘Jonas?’
Jonas ignored Lucy and ran into the night once more. As soon as he was beyond the reach of the kitchen light, he lost the tracks, but he ran anyway, past the Beetle domed with snow, out into the road and down the hill.
In the jerking beam of the torch, he saw the indistinct shape of t
he man running for his life through the fast-falling snow. He was fast, but Jonas was gaining.
And then he wasn’t.
He lost his footing and went down heavily, the torch flying out of his hand. He skidded again getting up and lurched sideways. It was crucial. Even as he rose, Jonas heard the car door slam. He ran blindly towards the sound as if through a snowy waterfall, but the super-reliable Japanese engine caught first time and revved furiously as the wheels spun and then caught. The lights were not switched on; Jonas never even saw the car go.
He stood panting at the foot of the hill. He hadn’t even taken down the car’s number earlier. Basic stuff. Basic.
He got into the Land Rover and rumbled back up the hill to home.
He came through the still-open back door.
‘Jonas?’ Lucy called from the other room, sounding scared.
‘It’s OK, Lu,’ he called and locked the door behind him. Now he had stopped reacting and started thinking, the shock of disaster averted hit him like a wall, and he had to put his hand on the counter and double over to get his breath.
The killer had been here.
Right here in Rose Cottage.
While Lucy slept unaware on the couch, the killer had come into their home.
Had he seen her?
Had he already stood over his victim in life and mused on how best to make her dead?
Had he touched her hair and known that this one was next?
He shivered and realized he was shaking uncontrollably.
He couldn’t fall apart on her now.
‘Jonas?’
He couldn’t tell her; it would scare the hell out of her. She must never know how badly he’d fucked up or how close she had come to being killed. He would stop going out at night. Hell, he would stop going out during the days if he possibly could! How could he have been so stupid? How could he have gone out to protect the village and left Lucy to protect herself? His most precious thing in the whole wide world! Was he fucking crazy?
Jonas suddenly thought that he might be crazy. Had maybe been crazy ever since he’d found Lucy behind the front door in her pink flannel pyjamas and the joke bunny slippers he’d bought her two Christmases ago. Or maybe before that – maybe when they’d sat together in that bastard doctor’s office and he’d told them that Lucy Holly, his perfect wife and best friend, was going to spend the next several years dying in front of his eyes. Or was it when his parents both left him alone? One minute here, the next minute gone – their immaculate little car turned into instant scrap by a head-on collision with an idiot driver who was halfway through a text to his wife at the time: On my wax CU soo— They had read it out at the inquest into all three deaths.
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