Belinda Bauer - Darkside

Jonas Holly was supposed to be the protector.

If he had done what he was supposed to, then the killer would never have started – and might have been stopped.

The killer was here because Jonas was not doing his job.

And as long as he continued not doing his job, the killer would only get stronger.

Jonas got an anonymous call from Linda Cobb to say that Yvonne Marsh was on the swings in her knickers. He knew Linda’s voice and she knew that he knew it, but anonymity was hard to come by in a village as small as Shipcott, and he liked to respect it wherever possible. Nobody liked to be a tattle-tale.

Yvonne Marsh was indeed on the swings in her knickers. Despite the frozen ground, the dull brown sky and the stares of the boys on the nearby skate ramp, she sat slumped and flaccid in a greying bra and semi-matching briefs.

Not for the first time.

Jonas took a scratchy grey blanket from the Land Rover and walked towards the mother of his old school friend. As he got closer he could see her pale flesh raised in goose-bumps, mottled purple from the cold.

‘She’s been there half an hour!’ one of the skaters called to him. He looked over at them but couldn’t tell which of them had spoken, so just raised one hand in a vague gesture of acknowledgement. The boys – four of them – were lined up on the top of the ramp, watching, their fingers tucked into their armpits and pockets, their skateboards captured with easy dominance underfoot like dead colonial lions.

‘Hello, Mrs Marsh,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Bit nippy for swings, isn’t it?’

Her distant stare shifted to him without real focus. She didn’t recognize him and he was grateful for it. He thought of the day he and Danny had jumped out of the bathroom window holding Mrs Marsh’s brand-new Egyptian cotton sheets as parachutes. He could still feel the garden hitting his feet – the jar of it running up to his armpits – and Danny’s high-pitched yowling in the flower bed.

He focused.

Her breasts were almost on her thighs, the way she sat. In between were three distinct rolls of cold, pale fat.

‘Want a blanket?’ Jonas stepped forward and, when she did not object, draped it over her shoulders and gathered it at her throat. ‘Here, you hold on to that for me, Mrs Marsh,’ he said as he unfurled her left hand from the chain and moved it to the blanket. She gripped the wool, still vacant, and he straightened up.

‘Got the heater on in the car. And a flask of tea. You want to jump in there and warm up a bit?’

‘All right then,’ she said. ‘But I lost my sandals in the lake.’

‘No problem, Mrs Marsh, I’ll send one of my lads out to find them.’

There was no lake. He had no lads.

She staggered as she rose from the swing and he caught her with one arm around what used to be her waist, and helped her to the car – slowly because of her bare feet on the frosty grass and then the rough tarmac.

He settled Mrs Marsh into the passenger seat and leaned across her to fasten the seatbelt. He caught a scent of unwashed body and remembered a different Mrs Marsh sun-bathing in her tiny back garden, the sleek lines of her tanned skin, the smell of coconut lotion, the stolen peek at the swell of her full breasts and how they sloped away from her body to be captured by the meagre turquoise cups of her bikini…

‘I remember you, Jonas Holly,’ she said suddenly and with a sly lilt that made him blush as if they were back in that summer garden and it was that Mrs Marsh who had caught that long-gone boy peeking.

He said nothing, willing her to shut up.

‘Sticking gum in Danny’s hair!’ she teased, and fluttered her lashes at him. ‘And mud all over my best sheets that day he fell in the roses!’

Jonas hoped this wasn’t the start of a sudden shower of remembering after a long dry spell.

But she just laughed again and sighed. ‘You boys!’

He gave a rueful smile and shut the door on her. By the time he had walked round the back of the Land Rover and opened his own door, she had forgotten who he was.

Danny Marsh answered his knock and Jonas watched his expression flit from surprise to wariness and then to concern as he registered that Jonas had his near-naked mother in tow.

‘My sandals are in the lake,’ she said as he drew her indoors, gently handing her over to his tight-lipped father and watching them disappear into the kitchen, where it was always warm. Jonas could hear Alan Marsh murmuring quietly and his wife’s confused responses growing more muffled as they went.

For a moment he and Danny stood awkwardly, both looking down the hallway at nothing at all. Then Danny cleared his throat and said, ‘Thanks, mate.’

‘No problem.’

It was the first time they had spoken in twenty years.

While the rest of his team went on knocking on hopeless doors, Marvel drove to Margaret Priddy’s under a sky the colour of an old bruise. He wanted to be able to think, without Reynolds being clever beside him.

Three boys sitting hunched on a bench at the edge of the playing field shared a cigarette and watched him lock his car.

‘Double yellows there, mate,’ one of them pointed out.

‘Shouldn’t you be in school?’ he said and they all looked at him as if he were speaking Dutch. Shut them up, though.

Marvel faced the playing field. One hundred yards to his left was a sign saying THANK YOU FOR DRIVING SLOWLY THROUGH SHIPCOTT. He knew that the back of it read PLEASE SLOW DOWN THROUGH SHIPCOTT. Or something like that; it had been blurred when he’d passed it. He’d also driven by several cottages dotted singly or in pairs at the roadside, part of the village but separate from it. But Margaret Priddy’s home, with its dirty peach walls, was the first one inside the tenuous boundary marked by the sign. He wondered whether that was significant – whether the killer had come from the east and broken into the first house he reached. That would say something about his state of mind. It would speak of desperation and recklessness. But the killer had left no prints – not even shoe prints – which didn’t fit with recklessness.

The playing field had goalposts without nets, and sloped alarmingly towards the furthest corner flag. In London the flags would have been stolen. Behind the posts nearest the village were three swings, an old metal slide of the type that most council Health & Safety committees had long since sold for scrap, and a low half-pipe skateboard ramp with a railing along each end – presumably to keep the village children from loop-the-looping into the narrow stream that ran along the back of the field, marking the foot of the moor. While Marvel watched, a lone fat collie meandered over and took a shit on the penalty spot.

Marvel could see dark footprints in the frosty grass leading to and from the swings and more to the ramp. Skating before school. Or maybe instead of school. Truants? Drop-outs? Or something more sinister? Apart from his good nose for a killer, Marvel’s greatest gift was that he could see the bad in anyone. He had already seen enough in his career to justify a healthy dose of misanthropic suspicion and, in his mind, a half-pipe ramp and a crime scene in anything like close proximity was good enough reason to pull in any passing skater for a grilling. If the killer wasn’t Peter Priddy, he’d put good money on it being some zit-covered hoodie with his fake Calvin Kleins poking out of his half-mast jeans.

‘You skate?’ he asked the boys, then – when they looked confused – he jerked his thumb at the ramp. They all turned round and stared at it as if it had suddenly materialized from outer space.

‘Nah,’ said one. ‘We smoke.’