Belinda Bauer - Darkside

‘No, sir.’

Marvel sighed and flapped his arms once helplessly like a man who has given up chasing down a mugger. The flap said, ‘There’s only so much you can do.’

‘So the doctor touched her. Then you touched her. Then the nurse touched her.’

Jonas didn’t correct Marvel on the sequence of events.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Anyone else?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You sure? Not the milkman? The village idiot? You didn’t get one man and his dog up here to give her a little poke?’

There were snorts of amusement all round.

‘I’m sure, sir.’

Marvel sighed, then asked: ‘What’s your name?’

‘PC Holly, sir.’

‘Have you ever heard of a crime scene, Holly?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Jonas hated Marvel now. The man was grandstanding in front of his team and Jonas shouldn’t have touched Margaret Priddy’s nose, but still…

‘Have you ever heard of contaminating a crime scene, Holly?’

‘Yes, sir.’ The heat of embarrassment was leaving Jonas and being replaced by a cool and distant anger, which he found easy to hide but which he knew he would nurture forever in that very small and stony corner where he kept all that was not kind, responsible and selfless in his heart.

‘And you understand that it’s a bad thing, don’t you?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘A stupid thing.’

Jonas wanted to punch him.

‘Yes, sir.’

Marvel smiled slowly.

‘Then why would you do that?’

Jonas was eight years old and Pete Bryant had put a cricket ball through Mr Randall’s greenhouse roof. Pete had run, but Jonas had dithered – and Mr Randall had gripped him in a single meaty claw and shaken his arm while shouting that same question into his face. Eight-year-old Jonas could have told Mr Randall that it was Pete who had thrown the ball, but he didn’t. Not because he was scared; not because he wasn’t a rat; just because it was too late; the damage was already done. The glass was already shattered, Mr Randall already angry, his bicep already bruised, his tears already flowing and his self-worth already pricked. All that was left was for him to get home as quickly as possible so he could shut his bedroom door and cry at the unfairness of it all without alerting his mother.

Now the thirty-one-year-old Jonas swallowed that same bitter pill and unfocused his eyes so he could look straight over Marvel’s greying hair.

‘I’m very sorry, sir.’

Marvel regarded the tall young policeman with a little disappointment. He’d really have preferred the fool to have got defensive and angry. He loved a good fight. Instead PC Holly had rolled over like a puppy and shown the world his belly.

Ah well.

Marvel turned away before speaking.

‘You can go,’ he said.

In small defiance, Jonas bit back his ‘Yes, sir’ and left without another word. Halfway down the stairs he heard Marvel say something he didn’t catch, and the laughter of the big-town cops.

Some investigation, thought DCI John Marvel, as he stared out at the leaden Somerset sky. A dead old woman with a broken nose. Big deal. But a suspicious death was a suspicious death and helped to justify the funding that kept his Task Force (as he used to like to call it over late suppers with Debbie) in existence. So if they could whip suspicious death up into murder, then all well and good.

Marvel had spent twenty-five years as a homicide detective. Half his life. To Marvel there was no other crime worth investigating – nothing that came close to the sheer finality of death by the hand of another. It kicked assault’s arse, rode roughshod over robbery and even trumped rape in his book. Of course, there were degrees – and not every case was a thrill. Some were one long slog from beginning to end, some went off like firecrackers and turned into damp squibs, while others started off quietly and then spiralled wildly out of control. There was no telling at the start how it was going to finish, but the thing that kicked each one off was what sustained Marvel after all these years. The body. The corpse. That stabbed, strangled, beaten, shot, dismembered, poisoned used-to-be-person hung over his head every day like a cat toy – endlessly fascinating, tantalizing, taunting, always reminding him of why he was here and the job he had to do.

The burgled replaced their televisions, bruises healed on the beaten, and the raped kept living, kept going to work and buying groceries and sending postcards and singing in the choir.

The murdered were dead and stayed dead.

For ever.

How could any true copper not love the murdered and the challenge they threw down from beyond the grave?

AVENGE ME!

Marvel could never hear that ghostly voice in his head without also imagining some kind of broad, dark cape billowing in righteous vengeance.

It was stirring stuff.

And Marvel was always stirred.

Eventually.

Even by a case like this in a place like this, he knew he would be stirred once death by violence was confirmed. He had to sort of grow into being stirred.

But until then, he was just a bit cheesed off.

Marvel sighed.

Margaret Priddy’s body had been removed to civilization – or what passed for it in this neck of the yokel woods. He hated to be out of town. He’d been born and brought up in London. Battersea, to be precise, where the stunted lime trees grown through lifting, cracking pavement were all the green he felt anyone should suffer. Once he’d carved his name in the bark and been repelled by the damp, greenish flesh his penknife had exposed. Sometimes as a kid he’d hung around a bus stop close to the park, but had rarely ventured in. Only on the occasional Saturday for a kickabout, and even then he’d never warmed to the muddy, olive-green grass. Playing behind the garages or under the railway arches was cleaner and faster. Grass was overrated, in Marvel’s opinion, and it was his constant gripe that most of the Avon and Somerset force area where he’d ended up working was covered in it.

Now here he was in this shit-hole village in the middle of a moor that didn’t even have the niceties of fences or barns on it, with the miserable prospect of having to conduct a murder investigation surrounded by the vagaries of gorse, yokels and pony shit instead of the sensible amenities of self-service petrol stations, meaningful road-signs and his beloved Kings Arms.

The Divisional Surgeon had already found cuts and bruising inside Margaret Priddy’s mouth where her lips had been crushed against her teeth, and the pathologist might find even more. All it would take now was for the Scientific Investigations Department in Portishead to confirm that the saliva and mucus on the well-plumped pillow found lying next to Mrs Priddy belonged to the victim, and they would have their upgrade to murder and their murder weapon all in one neat forensic package.

Marvel looked at the empty bed over which three white-paper-clad CSIs crouched like folk off to a costume party dressed as sperm.

‘I like the son for this,’ Marvel told DS Reynolds. Marvel loved saying that he ‘liked’ someone for something. It made him feel as if he were in a Quentin Tarantino film. His south-London accent was a handicap but not a bar to such pronouncements.

‘Yes, sir,’ said DS Reynolds carefully.

‘Sick of watching his inheritance pour down the home-nursing drain.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So what have we got?’

‘So far? Hairs, fibres, fluids—

‘Semen?’

‘Doesn’t look like it, sir. Just what was on the pillow, and urine.’

‘I thought she was catheterized?’

‘I think the bag must’ve burst.’

‘So the perp could be covered in piss.’