Belinda Bauer - Darkside

‘I think it’s still alive,’ he said. ‘We’d better go and see.’

He looked at Jonas but the younger man just stared at him blankly, as if he hadn’t heard.

‘We’d better go and look at it,’ he repeated, and this time Holly registered what he’d said and looked in his rear-view mirror. Then he backed up the car until they were just a few feet from the horse.

Marvel got out. It was much colder up here on the moor, and drying out too – as if the sky was sucking the moisture from the air and preparing for something much more spectacular than mere rain. He walked round to the back of the Land Rover. By the dull red of the tail lights, even Marvel could see that the pony’s front leg was broken at a sickening angle. The animal was trying to get up anyway, heaving itself on to its chest then flailing helplessly – its hoofs drubbing the tarmac and leaving pale scrapes in its surface – before collapsing back on to its side, snorting, ribs heaving under its shaggy winter coat, and its eye rolling wild and white around the edges.

‘Its leg’s broken,’ he said, looking up for a lead from Jonas, and surprised to find him not there. He looked round. Jonas had got out of the car with him but was still at the door of the Land Rover, silhouetted against the stars.

He raised his voice. ‘It’s got a broken leg.’

Through the vague red darkness he saw the silhouette nod its head.

‘What are we going to do?’ asked Marvel.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well you’re the bloody local! People must hit these buggers all the time.’

‘I’ll call the hunt,’ said Jonas after a pause.

‘What?’

‘I’ll call the hunt. They’ll come out and shoot it and take it for meat.’

‘Meat?’ Marvel was utterly confused.

‘For the hounds,’ said Jonas.

‘You’re fucking joking !’ said Marvel.

‘No,’ said Jonas, ‘I’m not.’

Marvel tried to regain a sense of normality. Two minutes ago, he had been off to the pub. Now he was confronted with a dying horse, a remote companion, and the mental image of a pack of hounds tearing the dark-brown hide from a still-warm beast, while faceless men in scarlet stood by laughing.

And he wasn’t even drunk.

Maybe he was in shock. Maybe Jonas Holly was too, with his monosyllabic responses.

He had to keep things in perspective. Be practical.

‘We should put it out of its misery,’ said Marvel, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to, but hoping that a countryman like Jonas would take control.

He knew nothing of horses. He wasn’t sure he’d ever touched one, but something made him hunch down now beside this pony’s head and reach out to it. The animal let out a shrill whinny, driving his hand away from it briefly. But because Jonas had already seen him scared at Margaret Priddy’s house, he reached out again.

This time he touched the horse’s neck. The coat was thick but surprisingly soft, and slightly damp. He let his hand sink into it until he could feel the hot skin.

For a moment his touch seemed to calm the beast and he felt the faint throb of the pulse under his fingers. Then it squealed and started to thrash about, knocking Marvel on to his backside in the road. Disorientated, he opened his eyes to see its hoofs blurring close to his face. He put up a protective hand and it was immediately kicked aside. He shouted in pain, then felt a rough tug at the scruff of his neck and was dragged out of range of the flailing hoofs.

His hand was agony. In his head he ran through every expletive he’d ever heard, but in reality he just bit his lip, laid his cheek on the cold tarmac, squeezed his hand in his armpit and tried to stem the tears of pain that threatened to drown his eyes.

Jonas stared numbly at the pony in its death throes. It must have been injured internally because blood was now spurting from its nose as it made bubbly, squealing sounds, still trying to heave itself upright in a pointless but instinctive bid for survival. In the wild, the horse that could not get up was doomed. This one was doomed anyway, but still tried to get to its feet in a terrified panic at being left behind by its herd to be picked off by predators.

To watch it suffering was sickening. To smell it was worse. Under the fear and the blood Jonas could smell its olde-worlde horse smell of dusty pelt and grass and sweet manure. For some reason he couldn’t explain, those smells disturbed him more than anything.

Finally it gave up.

Its head flopped heavily to the tarmac at Jonas’s feet while blood continued to run out of its nose. Its flanks heaved more shallowly, and its eye started to lose focus.

Jonas felt nauseous without the capacity for vomiting. He felt tired without the capacity to sleep. And the embers of the headache had flared to white heat in his brain.

Distantly, he watched the blood from the dying pony’s nose pool towards his shoe; in this light it looked black and oily. The animal grunted once, then sighed hugely as the last of its breath left it.

‘Is it dead?’ said Marvel.

The younger man said nothing; Marvel took that as a ‘yes’.

‘It kicked the shit out of my hand.’ Marvel’s voice was shaky and he leaned over to study his hand by the lights of the car. In the redness he couldn’t see anything wrong with it but it hurt all along its outer edge. He straightened up and looked left and right to where he knew the narrow ribbon of road draped over the moor.

‘Suppose we’d better get it out of the road.’ Marvel bent down. ‘You want to take a leg?’

Jonas didn’t bend down. ‘It’s too heavy,’ he said instead.

‘You think so?’ Marvel grabbed a hoof and leaned back. The leg stretched but the horse didn’t budge. ‘You going to help me?’

‘No.’

Marvel squinted at him as if he hadn’t heard Jonas correctly. ‘What?’

‘I said no. I don’t like horses.’

‘You don’t have to like it, for fuck’s sake! It’s dead! Just grab a bloody leg!’

Jonas didn’t move; Marvel dropped the leg and the hoof hit the road with a clunk. ‘We can’t just leave it here.’

Jonas shrugged.

Marvel nodded at the Land Rover. ‘You got a winch on that thing?’

While Jonas prepared the winch, Marvel had a cigarette. He didn’t smoke often – it was all so bloody awkward nowadays – but out here in the middle of the moor in the middle of the night, he puffed furiously, loving the way the end of the cigarette fired up in the darkness every time he sucked on it.

He thought about touching the pony’s living skin through its thick fur, and remembered Margaret Priddy. How warm she once was, and how cold she was now.

And there was the little stir he always got sooner or later. There was the moment when her death stopped being a job for him and became a personal crusade. It had taken a dying horse to remind him of how every murdered body he stared down at was once alive and terrified and facing lawless death. Marvel was relieved to find that rudder of personal affront, which he knew would keep him steady now throughout the investigation.

Jonas drove slowly and bumpily into the heather, then got out and walked around to free the pony, hardly noticing the deep, wet vegetation forcing water through his trousers, socks and work shoes. His only thought, drubbing in time to the jackhammer in his brain, was to get it over with before his head exploded. He wound out some slack and nudged the cable loose enough with his toe so he could lift it back over the muddy fetlock.

The pony lay stretched out as if bounding easily across the moor, looking strangely fleet of foot in death. Jonas knew that within hours foxes would have found it, and at first light the crows would take its eyes, which were already fading to dull grey pebbles in its skull.