Darkside (2 page)

'Hello, Jonas,' he said.

'Right, Mark.'

'How's Lucy?'

'OK, thanks.'

'Good.'

Jonas had once seen Mark Dennis vomit into a yard of ale after a rugby match, but right now the doctor was all business, his regular, tanned face composed into a professional mask of thoughtful compassion. He went over to the bed and checked Margaret Priddy.

'Nice lady,' he said, for something to say.

'The best,' said Jonas Holly, with feeling. 'Probably a blessing that she's gone. For her, I mean.'

The nurse smiled and nodded professionally at him but Mark Dennis said nothing, seeming to be very interested in Margaret Priddy's face.

Jonas looked around the room. Someone had hung a cheap silver-foil angel over the bed, and it twirled slowly like a child's mobile. On the dresser, half a dozen Christmas cards had been pushed haphazardly aside to make way for more practical things. One of the cards had fallen over and Jonas's fingers itched to right it.

Instead he made himself look at the old lady's body. Not that old, he reminded himself, only sixty-something. But being bedridden had made her seem older and far more frail.

He thought of Lucy one day being that frail and tried to focus on Margaret lying on the bed, not his beautiful wife.

Her lips flecked with bile and soggy painkillers ...

Jonas pushed the image away hard and took a deep breath. He focused and tried to imagine what Margaret Priddy's last words might have been before the accident that crushed her spine and her larynx in one crunching blow. Final words spoken in ignorance three years before the demise of the rest of her body. Jonas thought probably: 'Get on, Buster!'

'Glad you're here, Jonas,' said Mark Dennis - and when he turned to look at him, Jonas Holly could see concern in the doctor's face. His instincts stirred uneasily.

'Her nose is broken.'

They both looked at the nurse, whose smile disappeared in an instant. She hurried over and stood beside the doctor as he guided her fingers to the bridge of Margaret Priddy's nose.

'See?'

She nodded, a frown making her ugly.

'There's no break in the skin or apparent bruising,' said Mark Dennis in the annoying, musing way he had. 'I'm no CSI, but I'd say a sharp blow was not the cause.'

Jonas hated people who watched American television.

'You want to feel, Jonas?'

Not really. Still, he was a policeman and he should ...

He swallowed audibly and touched the nose. It was cold and gristly and made Jonas - an ardent vegetarian - think of raw pork chops. Mark Dennis guided him and Jonas felt the break in Margaret Priddy's nose move grittily under his fingers. Gooseflesh sprouted up to his shoulders and he let go and stepped back. Unconsciously he wiped his hand on the dark-blue serge of his uniform trousers, before realizing that the silence - coupled with two pairs of eyes looking at him questioningly - meant he was supposed to take charge; was supposed to do something professional and policeman-like.

'Yuk,' he said.

*

The detectives from Taunton must watch a lot of American television, too, thought Jonas as he observed them striding through Margaret Priddy's tiny home, bumping into antiques, clustering in the hallway, and thumping up and down the narrow stairs like US Marines invading a potting shed.

Despite their expertise in the field of suspicious death, Jonas secretly wished he'd never called them in. Of
course,
not
calling them was not an option, but even so ...

Jonas was equipped to handle nothing beyond the mundane. He was the sole representative of the Avon & Somerset police force in seven villages and across a good acreage of Exmoor, which rolled in waves like a green and purple sea towards the northern shore of the county, where it met the Bristol Channel coming the other way. The people here lived in the troughs, leaving the heather-covered peaks to the mercy of the sun, wind, rain, snow and the thick, brine-scented mists that crept off the ocean, careless that this was land and not water, and blurring the boundary between the two. People walked on the exposed peaks but their lives were properly conducted in the folds and creases of Exmoor, out of the view of prying eyes, and where sounds carried only as far as the next looming common before being smothered by a damp wall of heather and prickly gorse.

These shaded vales where people grew held hidden histories and forgotten secrets, like the big dark pebbles in the countless shallow streams that crossed the moor.

But the homicide team now filling the two-hundred-year-old, two-up-two-down cottage with noise and action never stopped to listen to the undercurrents.

Jonas didn't like Detective Chief Inspector Marvel, not only because the spreading, florid DCI's name sounded like some kind of infallible superhero cop, but because DCI Marvel had listened to his account of the finding of Margaret Priddy with a look on his lined face that told of a bad smell.

It was unfair. Jonas felt he had recovered well after launching the investigation with the ignominious 'Yuk'.

He had ascertained that the nurse - a robust fifty-year-old called Annette Rogers - had checked on Mrs Priddy at 2am without noticing anything amiss, before finding her dead at 6.15am.

Despite the obvious answer, he had dutifully quizzed Mark Dennis on the possibility of a woman being able to somehow break her own nose during the act of sleeping while also paralysed from the neck down.

He had escorted Mark Dennis and Annette Rogers to the front door with minimal deviation to maintain the corridor of entry and exit to the scene.

He had checked the bedroom window and quickly found scrape-marks surrounding the latch. It was only a four-foot drop from the sill to the flat roof of the lean-to.

He had secured the scene. Which here in Shipcott meant shutting the front door and putting a note on it torn from his police-issue notebook. He'd considered the content of that note with care, running from the self-important 'Crime Scene' - which seemed merely laughable on a scrap of lined paper - through 'Police! Do Not Pass' (too bossy) and 'No Entry' (too vague), finally ending up with 'Please Do Not Disturb', which appealed to everybody's better nature and which he felt confident would work. And it did.

He had alerted Tiverton to the fact that foul play may possibly be involved in the death of Mrs Margaret Priddy of Big Pot Cottage, Shipcott, and Tiverton had called on the services of Taunton CID.

Taunton Homicide was a team of frustrated detectives generally under-extended by drunken brawls gone wrong, and Jonas thought Marvel should have been grateful for the call, not openly disdainful of him. He understood that in police hierarchy the village bobby - or 'community beat officer' as he was officially called - was the lowest of the low. He also knew that his youth worked against him. Any policeman of his age worth his salt should be at the top of his game - swathed in Kevlar, armed with something shiny, clearing tall
buildings in his pursuit of criminal masterminds and mad bombers - not walking the beat, ticking off children and corralling stray sheep in some sleepy backwater. That was a job for an old man and Jonas had only just turned thirty-one, so it smacked of laziness or stupidity. Therefore Jonas tried hard to appear neither lazy nor stupid as he ran through his notes with Marvel.

It made no difference.

Marvel listened to the young PC's report with a glazed look in his eyes, then asked: 'Did you touch her?'

Jonas blinked then nodded - reddening at the same time.

Marvel pursed his lips. 'Where?'

'Her nose. Dr Dennis said it was broken and I felt it.'

'Why?'

Jonas felt his face burn as everyone in the room seemed to have stopped what they were doing to watch him being grilled.

'I don't know, sir. Just to see.'

'Just for fun?'

'No, sir, the doctor said it was broken and I checked.'

'Because you needed to confirm his diagnosis? Are you more highly qualified than him? Medically speaking?' Marvel dripped sarcasm from every pore, and from the corner of his eye Jonas saw the Taunton cops grin and roll their eyes at each other.

'No, sir.'

'Anyone else touch her?'

'The nurse, sir.'

'Was
she
more highly qualified than Dr Dennis?'

'No, sir.'

Marvel sighed and flapped his arms once helplessly like a man who has given up chasing down a mugger. The flap said, 'There's only so much you can do.'

'So the doctor touched her. Then you touched her. Then the nurse touched her.'

Jonas didn't correct Marvel on the sequence of events.

'Yes, sir.'

'Anyone else?'

'No, sir.'

'You sure? Not the milkman? The village idiot? You didn't get one man and his dog up here to give her a little poke?'

There were snorts of amusement all round.

'I'm sure, sir.'

Marvel sighed, then asked: 'What's your name?'

'PC Holly, sir.'

'Have you ever heard of a crime scene, Holly?'

'Yes, sir.' Jonas hated Marvel now. The man was grandstanding in front of his team and Jonas shouldn't have touched Margaret Priddy's nose, but still ...

'Have you ever heard of
contaminating
a crime scene, Holly?'

'Yes, sir.' The heat of embarrassment was leaving Jonas and being replaced by a cool and distant anger, which he found easy to hide but which he knew he would nurture forever in that very small and stony corner where he kept all that was not kind, responsible and selfless in his heart.

'And you understand that it's a
bad
thing, don't you?'

'Yes, sir.'

'A stupid thing.'

Jonas wanted to punch him.

'Yes, sir.'

Marvel smiled slowly.

'Then why would you do that?'

Jonas was eight years old and Pete Bryant had put a cricket ball through Mr Randall's greenhouse roof. Pete had run, but Jonas had dithered - and Mr Randall had gripped him in a
single meaty claw and shaken his arm while shouting that same question into his face. Eight-year-old Jonas could have told Mr Randall that it was Pete who had thrown the ball, but he didn't. Not because he was scared; not because he wasn't a rat; just because it was too late; the damage was already done. The glass was already shattered, Mr Randall already angry, his bicep already bruised, his tears already flowing and his self-worth already pricked. All that was left was for him to get home as quickly as possible so he could shut his bedroom door and cry at the unfairness of it all without alerting his mother.

Now the thirty-one-year-old Jonas swallowed that same bitter pill and unfocused his eyes so he could look straight over Marvel's greying hair.

'I'm very sorry, sir.'

Marvel regarded the tall young policeman with a little disappointment. He'd really have preferred the fool to have got defensive and angry. He loved a good fight. Instead PC Holly had rolled over like a puppy and shown the world his belly.

Ah well.

Marvel turned away before speaking.

'You can go,' he said.

In small defiance, Jonas bit back his 'Yes, sir' and left without another word. Halfway down the stairs he heard Marvel say something he didn't catch, and the laughter of the big-town cops.

*

Some investigation, thought DCI John Marvel, as he stared out at the leaden Somerset sky. A dead old woman with a
broken nose. Big deal. But a suspicious death was a suspicious death and helped to justify the funding that kept his Task Force (as he used to like to call it over late suppers with Debbie) in existence. So if they could whip suspicious death up into murder, then all well and good.

Marvel had spent twenty-five years as a homicide detective. Half his life. To Marvel there was no other crime worth investigating - nothing that came close to the sheer finality of death by the hand of another. It kicked assault's arse, rode roughshod over robbery and even trumped rape in his book. Of course, there were degrees - and not every case was a thrill. Some were one long slog from beginning to end, some went off like firecrackers and turned into damp squibs, while others started off quietly and then spiralled wildly out of control. There was no telling at the start how it was going to finish, but the thing that kicked each one off was what sustained Marvel after all these years. The body. The corpse. That stabbed, strangled, beaten, shot, dismembered, poisoned used-to-be-person hung over his head every day like a cat toy - endlessly fascinating, tantalizing, taunting, always reminding him of why he was here and the job he had to do.

The burgled replaced their televisions, bruises healed on the beaten, and the raped kept living, kept going to work and buying groceries and sending postcards and singing in the choir.

The murdered were dead and stayed dead.

For ever.

How could any true copper not love the murdered and the challenge they threw down from beyond the grave?

AVENGE ME!