Darkside (27 page)

No, Liss would soon be discovered, and then they would know the truth within seconds. A single killing might be concealed for a short while, but five was the work of a madman, and
this
time Marvel would be able to sniff it on Liss like a dog trained by having a murder-rag rubbed over its nose. He could almost smell it now, the sour fear of a man trapped by the enormity of his own crimes; the self-justification for unjustifiable deeds. Marvel's jaw clenched in anger, even before he had anyone to take it out on.

'... in which case the killer may not even be aware of what he's doing. She also says some killers just stop. They reach saturation point and don't feel the need to kill again for years - maybe even never - depending on ...' Reynolds tapered off lamely under Marvel's glare.

'I stopped listening to you,' said Marvel bluntly, and Reynolds shrugged. He'd gathered that.

Marvel got up and picked up the car keys. 'This is bullshit.
All these fucking theories aren't getting us any closer to finding Liss. All we know for sure is that this bastard is escalating - fast.'

Reynolds nodded. 'Knowing him is not the same as stopping him.'

'That's right,' said Marvel, yanking open the unit door and letting winter rush in, 'and we need to get our arses into gear, because something tells me that if we don't stop him, he's not finished.'

*

Lionel Chard's room had been taped off as a crime scene.

Now as he stared into it from the doorway, Marvel felt like a visitor to a stately home. Here is the bed, ladies and gentlemen, where the King took the virginity of Catherine of Aragon; and here is the Sealy Posturepedic upon which Mr Chard was beaten to death by person or persons unknown.

Through the white window he could see flakes falling from the sky.

Even the snow was against him.

The manhunt had been stalled by snow, which could now only be traversed beyond the village boundaries by 4X4s.

The footprints outside the garden room had been methodically measured and photographed, but Marvel had seen more convincing yeti prints.

And finding a murder weapon in the snow was like ... well, they might as well do it blindfolded. Grey had suggested as much after yet another Braille-like search of the graveyard, and Marvel had told him to do it again.

Marvel moved the few paces to the entrance to Gorse - Violet Eaves's room. As he did so he thought of Gary Liss
doing the same thing. He waved a casual hand across the doorway and heard the faint beep from downstairs. Lynne Twitchett and Jen Hardy had heard several beeps. They couldn't agree on how many exactly. Had that stupid electronic sound been the straw that broke the camel's back for Gary Liss? Had Violet Eaves sleepwalked one too many times, in his perverse view? Had his patience finally snapped and he'd hit her and then panicked, which had led to the massacre?

'Shit,' said Marvel. It didn't fit with the careful murder of Margaret Priddy and the seemingly random choice of Yvonne Marsh.

If Gary Liss was
not
the killer, then that first beep may well have been the killer entering Violet's room, rather than the old lady leaving it. Although she
had
left her room that night, one way or another.

From
this
stately doorway Marvel could see over the graveyard next door, where the picture-perfect snow had been made hectic and muddy by the search. They were just going through the motions out there. Liss was the key. They had to find him before he struck again - as Marvel had little doubt that he would.

He heard the doorbell and a minute later Singh came to say that Paul Angell was downstairs in the garden room and wanted to talk to him.

As he walked downstairs, someone started to play the piano. Not Lynne Twitchett - someone who
could
play. Marvel knew the tune. Something by Cole Porter. 'Cheek To Cheek', he thought. It made him melancholy to hear the song of dancing and romance played in this place where such things were long gone.

The garden room was its usual melting temperature and Marvel wrinkled his nose as he entered. The place smelled
faintly of rotten ... he couldn't think of rotten
what
. No doubt Reynolds would call it
generic
rotten. He made a mental note to die before he could end up somewhere like this, smelling like that.

Paul Angell stopped playing and looked up at him, and several of the old ladies clapped and one said, 'Lovely,' and another said, 'Do you remember that one, Trinny?'

Paul got up and started to ask about Gary. Paul had been helpful to the police, but wary, and Marvel wasn't 100 per cent convinced that the man didn't know where his lover was hiding, whatever the hell Jonas Holly said. He got the impression that Paul Angell thought the police had been somehow against Liss from the outset because he was gay, instead of because he'd gone on the run after a triple murder. Idiot. Marvel had been polite to him so far, but he hoped Angell's homosexuality gave him the sensitivity to know that his well of manners was not a deep one.

Now Marvel found that, while Paul Angell asked why he hadn't been kept advised of the status of the hunt for Gary, he was suddenly transfixed by the hand of the old lady who had asked Trinny if she remembered 'Cheek To Cheek'. The hand had been clapping and Marvel had seen its palm. Just briefly. He wasn't even sure why his eye had been caught. Now he listened with half an ear and answered Angell with half a brain, while both his eyes watched the old, lined hand touch the arm of the chair, then reach for the biscuit tin, then poke at the selection with one bony finger, then lift the biscuit to the old-lady mouth--

Marvel stepped around Angell and gripped her by the wrist.

'Oh!' she said and dropped the biscuit. It fell on her chest and then to her lap. A Bourbon.

Marvel turned her palm up as though he were about to read
it. There was a dirty smudge in the middle of it. Red-brown. It might have been chocolate.

'Reynolds!'

Marvel turned and looked at Angell. 'Get my sergeant for me. Now!'

He looked back at the scared-looking old woman. 'What's your name?'

'Mrs Betty Tithecott,' she answered tremulously.

'Here, leave her alone,' said Trinny next door.

Marvel ignored Trinny and softened his tone, but still held the squirming hand in his. 'I just need to have a look at your hand, all right, Betty? I'm not going to hurt you.'

She met his eyes and nodded. Her hand relaxed.

'This mark,' he said. 'What have you touched?'

'Nothing,' said Betty, her eyes watery and confused.

There was a similar, smaller stain inside her thumb.

Lynne Twitchett approached a little nervously. 'Is something wrong?'

'No,' said Marvel curtly and heard Reynolds hurrying into the room.

'What's up, sir?'

Marvel turned the hand up so Reynolds could see it, and was gratified to hear a surprised expletive. He rubbed his thumb across the smudge and a small amount of colour transferred itself. Whatever Betty had touched, she had touched it recently.

'She says she hasn't touched anything. Look around, will you?'

Reynolds did, checking the arms of the wing chair, the head-rest, the handles of a Zimmer which was on standby for take-off a few feet away.

'Can you hold your hand up for me, Betty?'

She nodded and he let go of her wrist.

Everyone in the room was watching them now. Behind him Marvel could hear a hum of low mutterings:
'What's going on?'
...
'What's he doing to Betty?'
...
'Where are the biscuits?'

Betty shifted in her seat, careful not to move her hand much, and Marvel saw her walking stick hooked over the arm of her chair, right near the back where it would be out of the way.

He looked around for something to pick it up with and started to lift the rug off Betty's knees. Her smudged hand clapped down to her lap to keep her rug and her modesty in place, so instead he yanked his own tie off and used it carefully to pick up the stick.

'Reynolds.'

Reynolds came over and Marvel held the walking stick up to the light. It was made of stout wood, the handle of tooled brass - stained brownish-red.

And near the end was a small but unmistakable clump of white hair.

He had his murder weapon.

He had his suspect.

Marvel thought of the line from 'Amazing Grace'.

I once was lost, but now I'm found
.

That was him. Lost, then found. Dark, then light. Drunk, then sober. The moment he saw those strands of white stuck to the end of the cane, Marvel knew he didn't have to drink any more. He
would
, but he didn't
have
to. Not on this case, at least.

It had been getting out of hand anyway. Last night he and Joy had had a barney because she'd got all maudlin about Something with an R and, instead of sympathizing, he'd asked if she had any ice. She'd thrown a glass at him and he'd said something mean about Dubonnet ...

What the hell was he doing getting into an argument with some lonely old drunk over ice and Dubonnet? He should have his head examined.

Lost and found.

As long as things progressed in that order, Marvel felt he was doing a reasonable job with his life.

All day long, while he clambered over debris and peered through shed windows on the off-chance of finding Gary Liss, Jonas worried about the notes.

The first had been oblique:
Call yourself a policeman?

The second had been personal:
Do your job, crybaby
.

The third - in the wake of a triple murder - could no longer be seen as anything but a warning:
If you won't do your job, then I'll do it for you
.

But he
was
doing his job! This time the killer was wrong! He'd started his night patrols, and now he was properly part of the investigation by day, too. They even had a suspect lined up. How could the killer - or anyone - accuse him of no longer doing his job?

But the threatening tone of this note was unmistakable, and Jonas knew he could no longer hide behind previous ambiguity.

The time had come to speak to Marvel.

*

The killer couldn't keep hiding for ever. Things were closing in. Things were catching up with him. Memories pressed against the ceiling of his subconscious like desperate sailors in the hold of a doomed ship.

He was no longer sure he could hold it all together. Some part of him had once imagined some connection with the
policeman/protector; there had been times when he had wondered if they might one day be on the same team. Work side by side.

But Jonas was still stubbornly ineffective where it really mattered.

The bodies were piling up.

The wrong people were dying and it just wasn't
fair
. It just wasn't
right
.

Something had to give.

*

Elizabeth Rice called Marvel - ostensibly to say she hadn't yet had an opportunity to compare the Polaroid of the shoe-print with all the shoes in the Marshes' house, but really to find out what was going on at Sunset Lodge.

Marvel told her not to bother. They had a suspect.

'Does that mean I can join you up there?'

'No,' said Marvel. 'Stay put for a bit. Might need you to break the news of an arrest to the Marshes.'

'OK. Good,' said Rice, although she felt like throwing something in frustration.

Preferably at Marvel.

When Jonas arrived, the residents of Sunset Lodge had just started to make their arduous journeys from the garden room to the dining room for supper.

Although it was dark already, the room was as hot as ever, and smelled of sweet decay under hairspray and talcum powder. After the bitter outdoors it was suffocating. He wondered if they ever opened the windows so people could breathe--

The memory hit him like a ghost train ...

He and Danny Marsh had bought maggots for fishing from Mr Jacoby's shop. In the late summer the stream behind the playing field had sticklebacks and the occasional brown trout, and there were schoolyard rumours of a pike that might - or might not - have eaten Annie Rossiter's missing cat, Wobbles. Jonas did not really buy the Wobbles theory, because why would a cat be in the stream in the first place? But he
did
fantasize about catching a pike. Or a trout.

A stickleback would do, to be honest.

So he and Danny had bought a pot of maggots. A little white polystyrene cup with a not-quite-clear plastic lid, which had to be lifted to see the fat white worms properly. Mr Jacoby took them from the fridge - from a shelf alongside the cans of Coke and Dandelion & Burdock, which Jonas could never quite make up his mind whether he liked or not.

Jonas was stunned that he could recall such details. He even remembered now that the maggots had cost 55p and that Danny had paid because he'd owed Jonas for a comic.

They'd only had one rod between them - Jonas's little starter rod which had come in a blister-pack last Christmas, with its fixed-spool reel already loaded with line and permanently attached between the cork grips, along with two red-and-white ball floats and a bag of small, unambitious hooks.