Belinda Bauer - Darkside

‘Keeps my triceps in shape,’ she’d teased him at the time. ‘Other women pay a fortune for that kind of workout.’

He’d laughed to please her, and left the elephant in the room unremarked upon – that three years previously Lucy Holly could have walked upstairs on her hands if she’d fancied it. She’d been the fittest woman Jonas had ever met. Even straight out of training in Portishead he’d had to work to keep ahead of her on the five-mile runs they’d regularly taken together. Lucy was no gym-bore. She ran, she swam, she rode horses and bikes and, for the first winter after Jonas had got the posting back home on Exmoor, she’d turned out occasionally for the local girls’ football team, Blacklanders Ladies. Jonas smiled a little now at the memory of his petite wife going nose-to-nose with the ref, her eyes flashing and her pony-tail flicking until the cowed man reversed a poor penalty decision in her favour. Once a week for ninety minutes ‘Ladies’ was just a euphemism.

It seemed forever ago.

Just yesterday he’d found her white and drawn and although she’d insisted she was fine, he’d tasted the salt on her lips that told him she’d been crying.

Now – three weeks after the pills – the question he’d got so used to asking was fraught with new fear.

‘Good,’ replied Lucy, bringing him gently back to the present. ‘I’m good.’

He searched her eyes for the truth and found it had already been told. He felt the tension that had been squeezing his guts relax a little.

‘I planted bulbs. Daffs and tulips out front and anemones in the tubs.’

He studied her hand and saw the red-brown earth under her short, practical nails and knew the effort it must have taken for her to organize and complete that task. The bag of compost, the trowel twisting awkwardly in the weak hands and floppy wrists, the effort of breaking into the earth made hard by winter. He almost asked how long it had taken her, but knew it must have been most of the day. Instead he got up and went outside to look for himself. The fact that she didn’t get up to point things out to him was proof of how much it had taken out of her. He came back in, smiling.

‘And then you…?’ He left it hanging for her.

‘… had a nap,’ she finished dutifully and they both laughed ruefully.

‘I got your stuff,’ he said. They called it her ‘stuff’. Her analgesics, her anti-depressants, her anti-convulsants, her anti-virals, her job-lot hypodermics… the list seemed endless and ever-changing, which did not instil confidence in their efficacy. Just saying the names had become depressing – Decadron, Neurotin, Prothiaden, Symmetrel… ‘Stuff’ covered them all and had the power of robbing them of their doom-laden titles.

‘Oh Jonas! On a day like this! It could have waited. It’s only the Symmetrel I’m out of.’

‘No trouble,’ he shrugged, although they both knew it was a thirty-mile round trip through narrow lanes to the nearest dispensing chemist’s in Dulverton. Jonas’s beat included a clutch of tiny villages and had to be covered by Land Rover, but edging out as far as Dulverton when a woman had died in Shipcott was still more than an inconvenience.

Still, he did it, and she appreciated it. That was how they worked at life. They cared for each other.

The very first time Lucy had met Jonas she’d recognized something in him that reminded her of the children she taught in kindergarten. Something that she knew any amount of gung-ho police training would never quite erase from him. There was a softness, a childlike uncertainty, a silly humour in Jonas that meant he would spend the day in riot gear fending off Molotov cocktails and then demonstrate to her at night wearing a pudding bowl and armed with a spatula. When he turned out for Police XV against Army, Lucy watched in embarrassment as Jonas joined his team-mates in a testosterone-packed pre-match ritual of chanting, grunting and chest-beating. Chest-beating! Like gorillas in shorts! Halfway through the spectacle, he’d caught her eye in the stands and they’d both dissolved in such helpless laughter that his captain was still bitching at him at half-time.

Jonas’s dark-brown eyes were too far apart, his nose too long and his mouth too full to be called handsome, but Lucy never could get enough of looking at him and craved more.When they’d first moved into his parents’ old home, she’d looked for photos of him as a boy. When she’d failed to find any, he’d joked about being ‘too ugly to show up on film’.

In her eyes, at least, it was far from true.

‘Who told you about Margaret?’ he asked, even though it didn’t matter.

‘Frank.’

Frank Tithecott. The postman. Of course. The postman and the milkman covered the same area as he did but without the same confidentiality. Jonas was suddenly glad Frank had brought his embarrassment home – at least it had made Lucy laugh for the first time in three weeks.

‘Are you going to be busy with that?’

‘I doubt it,’ he shrugged. ‘I don’t get the impression they’d welcome my assistance.’

‘Then they’re idiots and I hate them all,’ she said sharply, as if Jonas was a boy to be protected from playground bullies, and not a strapping six-foot-four officer of the law.

Jonas rolled his eyes at her sharp words but smiled to show he enjoyed her support, even if it was hopelessly biased. Lucy shifted her legs to make room for him on the couch and Jonas sat down, draped his legs over one end and lowered his long frame gently backwards into her arms. The chores could wait.

The TV was on, the sound down. For several minutes Jonas stroked Lucy’s arms with the backs of his nails as they idly watched a blood-spattered teenager being chased through a house by a man in a mask. Without screams and music it was hypnotically dull and soon their breathing slowed and synchronized in the way they both loved.

Lucy slid a single finger between the buttons of his white uniform shirt and ran it tenderly along a rib. The moment caught her unawares and her eyes burned with sudden tears.

To stop them before they could overwhelm her, she kissed his ear and murmured, ‘They don’t know what they’re missing.’

DCI Marvel knew exactly what he was missing.

Sky TV.

His team were billeted in quarters so basic that he was surprised no one had started whining.

But it was only a matter of time. Marvel liked to have little private wagers with himself. His money was on Grey, Pollard, Rice and Singh to start whining in that order. Rice and Singh were Elizabeth Rice and Armand Singh, and in his experience women and ethnics either never made waves or made effing great tsunamis. Rice and Singh were both pretty easy-going that way, although he had once seen DC Rice knee a grabby drunk in the balls when she thought no one was watching. Pollard was solid and stolid, and worked best when others did the thinking for him, but Grey was more bolshy and thought he had rights. Marvel wasn’t counting Reynolds. His sergeant was not with him but was too nervous to be against him. Like a whipped dog.

Police budgetary constraints meant they had been booked into a stable block outside Shipcott. Oh, sure, the sign at the end of the long and rutted track read ‘Farmhouse Accommodation’, but the low, ugly row of ‘cottages’ were no more than converted stables with window-boxes. And the owner, a bent and arthritic crone improbably named Joy Springer, apparently thought that tiny televisions and giant microwave ovens were enough to justify the tagline ‘All Mod Cons’.

At home he had Sky on a 48-inch screen, complete with a set of Acoustic Energy Aelite 3 home-cinema speakers. There were six in the set and they easily filled the spaces left by Debbie’s furniture. The precious 1970s Habitat suite she’d brought into their relationship was now squeezed uncomfortably into her mother’s house, elbowing the over-stuffed mock-leather into corners and competing for floor-space with the Formica coffee table. So he’d have somewhere to watch the TV from, Marvel had bought a cheap couch and taken pleasure in putting his feet all over it – often in his shoes.