Belinda Bauer - Darkside

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?’