Belinda Bauer - Darkside

As he started to walk again, Jonas’s eye was caught by something yellow at the edge of the playing field. He backed up a couple of paces to regain the view through a gap in the hedge.

There was something in the stream that bordered the field close to the ramp. Probably a plastic bag, but Jonas’s gut stirred uneasily.

He hurried fifty yards down the hill to where the hedge was interrupted by a rusty five-bar gate, bent from the time Jack Biggins had roped a cow to it without using a baler-twine loop.

Now Jonas climbed those same bent bars until he’d gained another three feet to add to his existing six-four. From this height – and closer to the stream – he could see it was not a plastic bag.

Jonas leaped off the gate into the field and ran down the hill. The bright morning suddenly seemed surreal. He shouldn’t be running with this fluttering in his guts on such a morning, with frost crackling under his feet. At the bottom of the field he vaulted the stile on to the playing field and ran faster. Now he was on the flat he couldn’t see the yellow thing any more, but he’d taken bearings in his mind, and ran straight and true past the swings and then the ramp, towards the crooked blackthorn that leaned drunkenly over the stream.

He reached the bank and there it was.

The body.

Yellow T-shirt bunched around the waist, pink knickers, blue-white skin.

He knew. He knew!

Jonas slithered down the bank, half falling, feeling the frozen mud on one cheek of his backside. The boots he’d worn that day for warmth cracked through the delicate plates of ice that had formed at the edges of the stream, and filled with water as he splashed the few feet to the body and turned it over.

‘Mrs Marsh! Yvonne!’

Jonas dropped to his knees in the icy water and cleared her mouth, then started to breathe into the woman he knew was already dead.

Shit .

He dragged her to the water’s edge. He couldn’t get her up the bank – not alone – but he needed a firm surface. He balanced her awkwardly, knelt over her and pumped her chest, then breathed into her again.

‘Mrs Marsh !’

He slapped her face hard, then breathed again, pumped her chest, then breathed again… felt everything in the world going awry.

The three boys from the ramp were above him, pale-faced and big-eyed.

‘Call an ambulance!’ he yelled.

The Tithecott boy fumbled his phone open and said, ‘No signal.’

‘Run to the houses!’ Jonas yelled, before forcing more air into Yvonne Marsh’s spongey lungs.

The boy took off, running. Without a word, Dougie Trewell slid down the mud into the stream and helped to keep Yvonne Marsh’s upper body on the bank while Jonas worked on her. Steven Lamb sank to his knees in the white grass and just watched.

Jonas knew it was pointless. Yvonne Marsh was dead and had probably been dead for hours. Now he thought about it, there had been a little crackling sound as he’d tugged her body over on to its back – the sound of ice breaking around it. She had been there for a while, held still by the branches of the blackthorn and by the delicate ice that had embraced her. Maybe overnight. Who knew?

Danny Marsh might know. Or his father. And even if they didn’t know that , thought Jonas wearily, they would know this for sure – that all their vigilance and their locks and their love and their care had not been enough to stop one vulnerable woman from wandering out into the freezing winter in bare feet, knickers and a baggy T-shirt, to drown in a freezing stream.

Everybody had to sleep some time, and that was the truth.

It was this thought that finally made Jonas give up. He looked across the stream at the rising moors, keeping all his air for himself now.

‘Is she dead?’ said Dougie Trewell tremulously.

‘Yes,’ said Jonas. All the energy he’d been filled with this morning had gone. ‘You’d better get out of the water, Dougie.’

Dougie let go of the body and Jonas felt how much of its weight he’d taken in trying to help. ‘Thanks,’ he said, and the boy nodded mutely. He was Ronnie Trewell’s younger brother and so always skirting the edges of delinquency – but he’d shown some character today. Something to hope for. Jonas turned to the other boy, who looked a million miles away. ‘You want to help Dougie home, Steven? Make sure he gets warm?’

Steven focused slowly on him again.

‘What?’

‘Help Dougie, Steven. Take him home.’

‘OK.’

Steven reached out and helped Dougie up the bank, and they walked away in a daze.

Jonas realized he hadn’t given them instructions on getting help for him . The ambulance could take ages on icy roads. The boys might not have the presence of mind to think about him. He tried to manoeuvre his phone from inside his jacket, but the operation proved impossible while he was holding Yvonne Marsh. Finally he knew he’d have to let go of her body to do it, so he did, and felt the slow current start to pull it away from him. Her legs were still in the water. Jonas clutched at the yellow T-shirt with one hand while he flipped open his phone. There was one bar of signal. Miraculous. Maybe he should make all his mobile-phone calls from running water. He had been half kneeling on the bank, but now stood up in the water; his legs almost gave way under him, they were so cold. He stood in the way of the body and called Marvel while the current pressed the dead Yvonne Marsh insistently against his legs.

It wasn’t until he spoke to Marvel that Jonas realized he might be standing up to his knees in a crime scene. He’d only called him because he was police and there were no police closer to Shipcott than Marvel was, and he needed help getting the hell out of this water before his legs fell clean off. But Marvel was immediately suspicious. Jonas figured that was how it was to be a homicide detective – every death was guilty until proven innocent.

‘Don’t touch the body!’ Marvel snapped as soon as Jonas told him he’d found one.

Jonas said nothing, feeling guilty – and angry at himself for feeling that way.

‘You fucking touched it, didn’t you?’

‘I tried CPR.’

If there was a Scorn Olympics, Marvel could have sighed for England.

‘Well, don’t touch it again, for Christ’s sake! Stand by and wait for me!’

Jonas was wet, cold, traumatized and tired of being spoken to like a car-park attendant. ‘Listen, sir . I’m up to my arse in ice, trying to stop the body floating downstream, so either get down here fast and help me out, or I’m going to let it go and your crime scene’ll stretch all the way from here to bloody Tiverton!’

Jonas snapped his phone shut and hoped Marvel wouldn’t be churlish enough to take his time.

He wasn’t.

In less than five minutes, Marvel was watching Pollard and Reynolds help a shaky Jonas Holly out of the water.

He sent Grey and Singh down the icy bank to retrieve the body. There was little point in leaving it in situ now that Holly had already altered the scene by dragging it from the water.

The ambulance tipped off the village that something was happening down at the playing fields, and within ten minutes of its arrival the entire populace, made jumpy by one murder, was standing on the playing field, craning to see from behind the blue-and-white tape that Rice had rolled out from the lamp-post outside Margaret Priddy’s across to the far goalpost, making a single cordon which now encompassed two crime scenes.

Maybe.

Marvel was unsure for about sixty seconds, and then he nodded as Dr Mark Dennis pointed to the livid finger-shaped bruises under Yvonne Marsh’s wet hair.

‘Not the throat, see?’ Marvel told Reynolds. ‘He held her like this…’ He clawed his hands and hovered them over the back of the dead woman’s neck. ‘I think he held her face-down in the water and drowned her.’