Darkside

by Belinda Bauer

  He wasted no time digging it out, just headed up towards the farm on foot, just as he always had as a boy.

  *

  Reynolds despised Marvel. Never more than now, when the man had elbowed him aside and rushed into flames in a display of stupid bravado fuelled by liquor.

  Part of him was horrified when his commanding officer disappeared through the door; the bigger part was just furious that when Marvel emerged he would be regarded as a hero instead of the selfish, stupid, alcoholic wanker that he undoubtedly was.

  He shouted for Marvel a few times, and set his face in a worried frown. His colleagues stood, open-mouthed, exchanging looks, carrying off their worried frowns with far more skill, in his eyes, while all silently asked each other the same question: Should we go after him?

  Grey yelled something unintelligible and ran off into the darkness.

  The kitchen window blew out as if a bomb had gone off inside. Bright new flames licked out of the cavity as the fire tried its best to escape the confines of the house and reach the courtyard and the cottages beyond.

  ‘No one go after him!’ Reynolds barked. ‘I don’t want anyone else hurt!’

  He saw their relief and was relieved in turn that no one was going to insist that they all do something heroic.

  Then someone rushed past his shoulder and into the house anyway.

  It was Jonas Holly.

  *

  Jonas had arrived just in time to hear Reynolds yell not to go after him, and knew there must be at least one person in that inferno.

  He ran into the farmhouse before he’d even decided to.

  The heat was like being hit in the face, and steam rose immediately from his wet clothes and hair. The smoke was debilitating. He stopped dead, then took a few blind paces – hands out in front of him in case of obstacles.

  He hit the table with his thigh and at the same time stepped on something hard yet yielding. He groped at his feet and found a slippery arm. He seized it with both hands, and backed out of the door with the body bumping along behind him.

  The others crowded round, helping him to drag it out of the danger zone.

  It was Marvel.

  Only half of one sleeve and the upper part of his coat still gave him much cover – his vest and shorts were just blackened rags. His left shin was a vivid mess of red and black, like the leading edge of a lava-flow, with the bedrock of bone showing through in places. The rest of that leg was livid and raw, with bubbles in the flesh of the thigh. His ever-damp shoes had protected his feet from the worst of it, but it was small comfort.

  Singh immediately dropped to his knees to check his vitals.

  ‘Not breathing,’ he said, and started CPR.

  Jonas coughed and spat before gasping, ‘Is there anyone else?’

  ‘Mrs Springer, we think,’ said Rice.

  Jonas turned to go back but Reynolds and Pollard barred his way.

  ‘She can’t be alive,’ said Reynolds. ‘Stay here.’

  ‘She might be!’ cried Jonas, bursting into a fresh bout of coughing and trying to go around them.

  ‘Stay here,’ said Reynolds. ‘That’s an order.’

  Jonas looked at him in fury and Reynolds almost put up a hand in self-defence.

  ‘It’s your job to protect people!’

  ‘Not dead people,’ said Reynolds – and although it was a good answer, he took no pleasure in saying it.

  ‘He’s coming back,’ said Singh with relief flooding his voice.

  They all turned to look down at Marvel, who was now breathing noisily and irregularly, and jerking his arms and legs as if trying to make angels in the snow.

  ‘Shit,’ said Grey. ‘You think he’s got brain damage?’

  ‘Where’s the fucking ambulance?’ cried Singh.

  ‘Call control and tell them we need an air ambulance,’ said Reynolds. ‘Tell them officer down.’

  Pollard opened his phone and scurried about the courtyard, seeking a signal.

  Jonas started to heap snow on to Marvel’s burned legs and Singh and Rice quickly did the same.

  ‘He’ll be fine,’ said Reynolds with more confidence than he felt. He leaned over Marvel and said, ‘Sir? John? Can you hear me, sir?’

  Marvel’s eyes flickered and rolled back in his head, then steadied and came to something like focus on his Task Force and Jonas Holly looking down at him.

  ‘Murder,’ he whispered hoarsely.

  ‘What, sir?’ Reynolds put his ear close to Marvel’s lips.

  ‘Murder,’ he mouthed again weakly.

  This time Reynolds got it.

  ‘He said murder.’

  The others looked at him, confused.

  Reynolds shrugged and – with a wholly inappropriate sense of dawning happiness – realized he was now in charge, due to the unforeseen incapacity of the Senior Investigating Officer. The fire was obviously beyond their control, even though Grey had finally arrived with a coil of heavy-duty yellow hosepipe over his shoulder. Now he needed to stop responding like a panicky man in pyjamas, and start responding like an SIO at a crime scene. He swelled visibly as he straightened up over Marvel’s prone figure half buried in snow.

  ‘Charlie, get that pipe hooked up and you and Dave do your best,’ he told Grey and Pollard, then pointed at Marvel. ‘Armand and Elizabeth, keep helping him. The whole area is a potential crime scene. Me and Jonas will take a look round, just in case.’ Jonas and I. Jonas and I. Jesus Christ! One man down and his grammar was all over the fucking place.

  ‘We’re just giving up on her, are we?’ said Jonas.

  ‘Yes,’ said Reynolds, thrilled by the horrible brutality of that truth. He looked Jonas square in the eye in case he was going to have trouble with him, but the young policeman just gave a tilt of his head that might have been assent, might have been a shrug. Either way, Reynolds strode away from the scene of the crime and fetched his torch and his back-up torch for Jonas, then led him across the courtyard.

  They left the orange glow and the heat that was turning the snowy courtyard into a giant puddle, and moved into the darkness behind the stables. Once away from the action, it was shockingly serene. Jonas felt quite removed from the horror of it all. The farmhouse burning down sounded like a jolly bonfire; the tiles blasting off the roof like rockets and bangers. The smell of roasting meat filled the air and Jonas shivered, but got a pang of hunger that disgusted the vegetarian in him.

  He felt strangely ambivalent about Joy Springer inside the burning house. He wondered if her cats had died too, and thought of the way their fur made him sneeze whenever he’d gone into the gloomy old kitchen with its towering dresser and Belfast sink.

  Reynolds switched his torch on; Jonas followed suit and immediately went blind, but for the two bright shafts of speckled light which showed tunnels of falling snow. He turned it off again, without bothering to explain to Reynolds why it was easier to see without it.

  They crossed the old hard standing with its ridged concrete, where the blacksmith used to shoe the ponies. Jonas could almost feel Taffy’s head, heavy in his arms as he dozed, while his neat little hoofs were shaved and shaped and scorched and hammered. That strangely comforting stink of burned hair, and the yard lurcher, Nelson, darting in to snatch the biggest bits of horn, which made his breath reek and gave him the runs …

  Reynolds said something Jonas didn’t hear.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘Could be anywhere,’ said Reynolds again, shining his torch across the field behind the stables.

  Jonas didn’t answer. From the corner of his eye he’d seen something regular at one edge of the concrete standing. Three or four darker patches in the snow which his memory could supply no immediate explanation for.

  He dropped back from Reynolds and walked over to check it out.

  Footprints.

  Now that he had found what he was looking for, Jonas switched his torch back on and examined the depressions in the snow.

  Although the snow was filling them
fast – softening them and making identification impossible – they were definitely footprints. Jonas shone his torch into them. There was no tread visible at the bottom of each twelve-inch-deep impression, just a delicate frosting of new flakes glittering in the false light.

  Jonas followed them with his torch.

  The prints led down the hill – straight towards Rose Cottage.

  ‘Lucy!’ he shouted into the night, as if she might hear him.

  Reynolds shone his torch in Jonas’s face and saw terror there.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘My house!’ cried Jonas and pointed to where the bathroom light shone square and yellow two fields away. ‘He’s gone to my house! My wife! She’s alone. I left her alone!’

  Then he started to run, bounding through the snow in long, awkward strides.

  Reynolds ran after him for a few paces, then stopped. ‘Jonas! Wait!’

  But Jonas ignored him.

  ‘Fuck!’ Reynolds turned and made his way back to the blackness behind the cottages. He needed reinforcements. If the killer was indeed at Jonas Holly’s house then he didn’t want to be the only back-up. Once back on the flat ground, he slipped and skidded around to the courtyard once more, almost surprised that things had been going on here without him. The house was still burning, Grey was still playing with the hosepipe, and Rice and Singh were still bent over Marvel and had started CPR again. Reynolds rushed straight to them.

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Dead,’ said Singh between compressions.

  ‘Shit,’ said Reynolds. ‘Shit fuck shit!’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ said Singh. ‘Should I stop?’

  Reynolds thought of the months of work he’d put into the file he’d hoped would see Marvel kicked off the force in disgrace and without a pension.

  Wasted.

  Now Marvel had instead died trying to rescue a civilian from a burning building.

  Die a hero, stay a hero.

  Nothing was fair.

  ‘Yes,’ he told Singh. ‘Stop.’

  Rice and Singh both stopped working on Marvel, and Grey stopped his own pointless task and came over and stood beside Rice. Singh remained kneeling in the sludge that the snow had become. He took off his jacket and laid it carefully over Marvel’s face. Then he noticed something sticking out of the inside pocket of Marvel’s coat and carefully removed a burned and crispy photograph.

  Two charred and blistered boys, damaged beyond recognition.

  ‘Did he have children?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t think so,’ said Grey.

  ‘Right,’ said Reynolds, before they could all get maudlin, ‘our man might be at Holly’s cottage down the hill. We all need to get there now!’

  ‘How?’ said Pollard, whose face was as black as a miner’s. ‘Even fire and ambulance can’t make it.’

  ‘Across the fields. You can see it from here. Everyone get a torch and a coat.’

  They all looked at each other.

  ‘Come on!’ yelled Reynolds, and they all scurried into their respective cottages and out again in seconds, Singh in just a sweater.

  ‘Get your jacket,’ Reynolds told him roughly. ‘You need it more than him.’

  Singh tentatively lifted his jacket off the body and pulled it on.

  Then Reynolds led his new team out of the courtyard, leaving DCI John Marvel to another, colder shroud, which covered him slowly from a pitch-black sky.

  *

  When Lucy woke there was dust on her lips and carpet-print on her cheek.

  She knew the sound of an empty house and this was it.

  The telephone was downstairs. She didn’t know how long she had, and couldn’t afford the time the return journey would take.

  She remembered her first line of defence and limped to the landing and tried to move the bookcase to the top of the stairs, but with her weakened hands and wrists it was a hopeless task which she was quickly forced to abandon.

  She thought of banging on the wall to alert Mrs Paddon, then decided not to. What could an eighty-nine-year-old woman possibly do to help? Lucy would only be placing her in danger. Instead she went into the back bedroom, picked up the gaff, opened the trapdoor into the attic and – after several wavering attempts – managed to hook the eye on the sliding ladder and tug it to the ground.

  Then Lucy put the knife that Jonas had insisted she carry into her back pocket, picked up the camping lantern from the bedside table and put an unsteady foot on the first rung.

  It took her almost fifteen minutes to climb the ladder. She slipped a dozen times – banging her elbows, grazing her fingers, once tearing a gash in her forearm – and had to take several gasping rests, clinging on to the upper rungs and kneeling on the lower ones to try to give her legs some respite. The longer she struggled and the higher she climbed, the more frantic she got to ascend into the square of darkness.

  The irony did not escape her. She had tried to kill herself. Still might. And yet here she was, trying to hide from a killer who would do the job for her.

  The instinct for self-preservation came as a shock to Lucy.

  When she finally made it and hauled herself into the dry, cold space that smelled of wood and feathers and mouse droppings, Lucy could not move again for ten minutes. She retched from effort and sobbed in pain.

  And then the kick in the teeth came when she found that she could not pull the ladder up behind her. She strained and wept, but her grip was limp and her arms feeble and the ladder didn’t seem to be designed for such a thing anyway. There was nothing she could do about it. She tried to move a heavy wooden packing case over the entrance but it stuck on a joist and she had expended the last of her energy. She cried again with frustration. She knew what she should be doing! In her head she had it all worked out! The Lucy Holly that she used to be would have run, jumped, set booby traps, armed herself, been prepared. That Lucy Holly would have kicked zombie butt and outwitted the very devil. But that Lucy was long gone. And with the new Lucy’s body the only one available to her now, it was all she could do to crawl into a corner with her unlit lantern and her knife, huddle in a musty old armchair, and wait for the killer to come home.

  *

  The killer did come home, although nobody would ever have guessed it.

  *

  Jonas was a fit man, but running through the foot-deep snow was exhausting. His lungs tore at his chest and his heart pounded his ribs like a madman in a cage. His boots and trousers were wet well past his knees and seemed to be made of something that stuck to snow and dragged at his legs every time he tried to lift them to place one foot in front of the other.

  Still, he made it across the first field lit only by the stars and a slim moon, his eyes adjusting so well that he even spotted the gap in the hedge that denoted a gate, which he clambered over so fast that his legs got left behind and he dropped face-first into the snow on the other side before getting up and running again.

  Despite the snow over uneven ground and the wind that drove the flakes into him, fear made him faster than he’d ever have thought possible and blurred the blizzard so that he was running through a snow globe as it was shaken up. He couldn’t tell which way was up, as flakes came at him from everywhere – now in his eyes, now in his ears, now slapping the back of his head like a teacher. The only guide was that bathroom light which – mercifully – he had left on in another time and place he barely even remembered now. It disappeared and jiggled and jerked on the inconstant horizon. If it weren’t for that he might have run to Withypool for all the sense of direction he had left in him.

  Now and then he saw the tracks he was following, but he didn’t really care about them any more. His target was that bathroom window. He didn’t care where the killer was going – as long as it wasn’t Rose Cottage. As long as it wasn’t to Lucy.

  Not Lucy! Not Lucy! Not Lucy! The words beat the rhythm of his headlong race across the snow.

  He pulled his phone from his pocket and looked at the display but there was no s
ignal. Big shock. He tossed it aside like ballast.

  The prints in the snow curved slowly to the right. The gate in the second field was off somewhere to his right and opened on to the lane. He couldn’t afford the detour and kept running straight down the hill. He would have to go over the hedge beside Rose Cottage. Or through it.

  Either way, it wasn’t stopping him.

  The hedge loomed, huge and black with its happy icing of snow. Because of his height, Jonas had done high jump at school. He wasn’t much good at it but he remembered the basics. He speeded up, turned in at the last moment, and threw himself at the hedge in a not-ungraceful arc. He landed high enough to be suspended there in uncomfortable limbo. He rolled on to his stomach, reaching for anything that would give him purchase, gripping handfuls of branches and thorns, dragging himself across the five-foot expanse, which sagged and dug and snapped under him like cruel water, before dropping to the ground in a heap on the other side, right next to Lucy’s Beetle. There was a crunch and he winced as he landed on his torch.

  He stood, jerked forward as if to rush into the house, and then stopped and caught his breath. The killer could be there. He couldn’t just rush in. He needed to think. He couldn’t afford to screw this up. Lucy needed him. Now more than ever.

  He couldn’t fall apart on her now.

  The front door was closed but unlocked. His fault. His fault. Leave it open for people so Lucy wouldn’t have to keep getting up. This was the countryside; his home village. They’d felt so safe! Leaving the door unlocked had become a dangerous habit, and a bedtime oversight.

  He sucked air into his burning lungs and pushed open the door.

  Everything was the same.

  He peered into the dark front room but the TV was off, although the fire still burned softly behind the guard.

  No light in the kitchen. He crossed quietly to it. It was empty, and the washing machine hummed.

  Up the dark stairs, pausing at every other step to listen for an intruder, missing the tread halfway up that creaked so badly.

  The bookcase at the top of the stairs had been moved slightly, which Jonas discovered painfully with his left shoulder. A little gasp of surprise escaped him before he could apprehend it.