Belinda Bauer - Darkside

Marvel continued to stare at him until Reynolds wondered if he’d had a stroke.

Finally Marvel stirred. ‘It’s not much.’

‘It’s more than we’ve got on anyone else now.’

Marvel nodded slowly. ‘Let’s talk to his father first.’

Reynolds nodded in relief and picked up the phone.

Jonas needed help.

He stood at the edge of the playing field and thought about the nature of evil.

The scenes he had witnessed at Sunset Lodge would never leave him. Margaret Priddy was sad, Yvonne Marsh was dramatic and pathetic. But the sheer cold brutality of the murders at the Lodge was something he couldn’t quite get a hold of. The slaughter of the old people, defenceless in their beds, the cool killing of Gary Liss, and the bravado of the body behind the piano.

Jonas’s brain skittered about the crime, peered around corners at it, ducked and dived, trying to get a better look, but ultimately was lost in the supermarket when it came to any kind of understanding of what it must take for a man to grow into a cold-blooded killer. He had spent most of a sleepless night running up and down the aisles of why? and it was only as he’d walked down the hill into the village that he had realized the only question he really needed to buy was who?

Without the killer in custody, he could theorize till the cows came home and never find the truth.

Jonas was convinced now that the killer was a local man. He had known that Margaret Priddy lay paralysed in the back bedroom of her home, he had left Yvonne Marsh in a stream that was barely visible from the road, and he had crawled through the only window at Sunset Lodge that Rupert Cooke had been too cheap to modernize, then bound Gary Liss’s corpse in a vast curtain which had been there for years but which was hardly visible, stuffed behind the piano as it was. Jonas vaguely remembered having seen it before – probably because Sunset Lodge was a regular part of his beat, along with schools, pubs and village halls.

The killer must be local, which meant Jonas must know him. He knew everybody.

What would he look like?

If Jonas could stare into enough eyes for long enough, would he glimpse the killer looking back? Would his gaze burn like Holy Water on a demon? Would Jonas feel cold jelly fill his bones, and recoil in recognition of evil?

He didn’t know.

How could he? He had no experience.

So he needed help.

A rhythmic sound and a pendulum blur in his vision brought him slowly back to the playing field and reminded him of why he had stopped here on his way to the mobile unit to report for whatever duty Marvel saw fit to assign him.

On the half-pipe ramp, Steven Lamb swooped through lazy arcs, turning smoothly at each lip, accompanied only by the hypnotic rumble of the skateboard’s wheels. He had cleared the snow from the ramp with a rusted spade, which now stood upright in the resulting lumpy pile of white, with Steven’s anorak slung over it.

Jonas walked across the crunchy snow, wondering whether he was following in the footsteps of the killer. Today was overcast and promised more snow – very different from the shiny morning that had greeted the horror of Yvonne Marsh.

He stopped six feet from the ramp and said, ‘Hi.’

‘Hi,’ said Steven, his eyes always fixed on the next lip, the next turn, the next swoop. His face was serene with the rhythm of it all.

Jonas watched the boy swing back and forth with complete grace – the slight bend of the knees before each ascent the only visible effort in near-perpetual motion.

He wished he didn’t have to do this.

‘How are you?’ he asked.

‘Fine, thanks,’ said Steven.

‘Just thought I’d ask. After the other day.’ He thought again of Steven sinking to the ground beside the stream, his dark eyes huge in his white face.

Steven rolled to the lip of the pipe, was suspended there for a brief moment, straight-legged, defying gravity… and then flicked his board round and passed Jonas going the other way. Jonas noticed that his mouth had tightened, and that the lack of eye contact now looked more like avoidance.

‘I know what happened to you, Steven,’ he said quietly.

Although he’d never given any indication of it, Jonas knew that four years earlier, while trying to find the body of his missing Uncle Billy, Steven Lamb had almost died at the hands of a serial killer.

The boy didn’t make the turn this time. He let his board carry him backwards down the ramp and halfway up the opposite side, before slowly putting a foot down and pushing off once more.

‘Can we talk about it?’

Steven said nothing, his eyes fixed on the ramp, on the lip – but a new vertical frown-line had appeared between his brows.

‘I need your help.’

Steven continued to skate, but his rhythm had gone. The skateboard barely reached the lip – or overshot and made him teeter – and his arms were working now instead of hanging loosely at his sides.

‘I need to know…’ started Jonas. ‘I need to know what to look for. I need to know what you see in the eyes of a killer.’

The skateboard clattered noisily and flipped over as Steven stepped off it and took a few faltering steps to stop himself falling. It slid back down the ramp towards him. He bent and picked it up angrily, and headed for his spade and anorak.

‘Nothing,’ he said, not looking at Jonas. He tugged the spade free of the snow, and slung it over his shoulder, yanking his anorak off the handle as he did so. Every jerky angle of his body screamed at Jonas that he wanted to be left alone.

But Jonas couldn’t leave him alone. He spoke urgently to the boy. ‘I know you don’t want to remember it, Steven. I hate to ask you, believe me. But I have to know. Before he kills again, I have to know . Please!’

Steven made to go around him, and Jonas put out a hand to halt him, but the boy stopped before he could be touched. He looked away from Jonas, his chest heaving and his cheeks high with colour.

‘Nothing!’ he said with low vehemence. ‘You see nothing.’

Marvel and Reynolds sat side by side on a velveteen sofa so small that their thighs touched. Alan Marsh sat opposite in a matching easy chair.

Reynolds looked around the room.

The mantel held four or five sympathy cards and a couple of Christmas ones between family photos and a repeating motif of snub-nosed ceramic Dickensian boys, doing boy-stuff like whistling jauntily or selling newspapers. On the table there were more cards – opened but left in a pile. There was also an old photograph of Yvonne Marsh propped against a jumbled pile of clean laundry, like some kind of shrine to the memory of housework.

‘So what was that all about the other day with Danny and Jonas Holly?’ said Marvel, jerking his thumb randomly at the ugly striped wallpaper behind him.

Alan Marsh sighed and opened his hands in a ‘beats me’ gesture.

Elizabeth Rice had taken Danny Marsh to the pub. It wasn’t difficult – she’d told them he had a little crush on her and she’d promised to buy.

Marvel said nothing further, allowing the aching silence slowly to reveal to Alan Marsh that this was not a social call.

‘Well…’ the man started haltingly, then stopped. He was in overalls even though Rice had reported that he wasn’t working. Apparently the habit was just too much to break while his mind was already distracted by the murder of his wife. He was wearing slippers rather than steel toe-caps though, Reynolds noticed – as if he’d remembered halfway through dressing that his wife was dead and he wasn’t going to work after all.

Reynolds sighed and wondered why Marvel was going all round the houses before asking more relevant questions about Danny. It wasn’t like him.