Belinda Bauer - Darkside

‘Watchmefuckin head !’

‘You want me to pull it off or not?’ said Jonas.

‘No, leave it. Jus’ fucking leave it.’

Jonas let go of the leg and it splashed down in the slush in the road. He thought immediately of Marvel dropping the leg of the dead pony.

It made him brusque enough to walk round behind Neil and grasp him under the arms.

‘Leave off !’

Jonas ignored him and pulled him back on to the pavement and towards his house, as Neil twisted and flailed. ‘Bastard! Ge’yofuckinhands offme y’bastard! ’

Something hit Jonas hard in the side of the head, making him stagger sideways and fall to one knee, dragging Neil Randall with him. They both grunted at the fall and Jonas’s helmet landed in the snow.

Groggily he put one hand down to steady himself and touched his ear with the other, as he looked up and down the street to see who had hit him.

For a second he couldn’t grasp what he was seeing.

Then it all became horribly clear.

Suspended above the snow-covered, orange-flavoured street by what looked like a sheet was Danny Marsh. His kicking foot was what had caught Jonas in the ear.

Jonas got up in a dream.

A nightmare.

‘Jesus!’ said Neil Randall.

One second Jonas was just watching, the next he had Danny’s shoes and ankles in his big hands, trying to take his weight, trying to push him upwards and against the cottage wall as he jerked, and someone was shouting, loudly and incoherently, and Jonas knew it was him but he had no idea what he was saying because his whole world was a jumble as he held his old friend’s feet and tried to keep the pressure off his neck, tried to keep him alive, kept losing his grip… as Danny bobbed and writhed in the frozen air.

Jonas saw a yellow light and knew that the door had been opened.

He heard people shouting and rushing towards him.

He was dimly aware of Elizabeth Rice’s shouts to get to the bedroom and pull Danny up from there, and the sound of men thudding upstairs.

But before they even made it to the window, the kicks turned to spasms and he felt the hot trickle of piss running up his sleeves – and Jonas Holly knew that Danny Marsh was dead.

They lowered him from the window on his own bedsheet, recalling a less deadly childhood adventure, and Jonas felt his friend’s body pass solidly through his arms, head lolling and knees buckling as his feet touched the pavement.

Jonas knelt beside him in the icy snow and pumped the still-warm chest, and pinched the still-warm nose, and sealed his lips to the lips of the son, just as he had to the mother. All the while Neil Randall watched wide-eyed, propped on his elbows and with one leg six feet long.

Too late. Too late. Too late. The words ticked like a clock, low and calm inside his head, and finally Jonas heard them. And from somewhere, his neglected memory salvaged the fact that the hearing is the last sense to leave the dying consciousness.

He stopped trying to bring Danny back and instead – for the second time tonight – bent so close to a warm ear that he could feel his own breath coming back at him.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

Then Jonas Holly got slowly to his feet and asked whether someone had called an ambulance.

They had.

He took off his jacket and laid it over Danny Marsh’s face and asked people to please step back.

They did.

He watched Alan Marsh come out of his house, saw his eyes roll back and his knees buckle, just as his dead son’s had done mere moments before, then Jonas heard the soft crunch as the man’s head dropped almost silently into the snow.

There was a note.

‘What do you know about this?’

Jonas stared dumbly at the note they had found in Danny’s room, then slowly shook his head.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

It was 3am. They were in the mobile unit. The ambulance had taken Danny’s body away. Jonas’s sleeves were still wet up to the armpits with piss; he could feel it every time he moved and smell it every time he drew breath.

‘Bollocks,’ said Marvel. ‘You knew it was him all along.’

‘That’s not true!’

It wasn’t! Jonas felt panicky that Marvel could even think it! He was an officer of the law and if he was aware of wrongdoing, he would take action – whoever the hell it was doing the wrong.

Apart from Lucy.

Probably.

But that was all!

‘I don’t believe Danny killed anyone.’

‘He cracked,’ said Marvel. ‘Under the pressure from his mother going bananas. Killed Margaret Priddy as a kind of trial run most likely, then his own mother. Then the people up at Sunset Lodge.’

‘Why?’ said Jonas. ‘Why kill anyone after he’d killed his mother, if that was the problem?’

‘Maybe he passed the tipping point,’ said Marvel, pleased that he’d remembered without recourse to Reynolds. ‘Maybe once he cracked, the floodgates just opened. We were about to pull him in. The night of the killings at Sunset Lodge, he got out of a window at his house. We’ve got shoe prints on the sill. Didn’t know that , did you?’

‘No,’ said Jonas, and thought of the voice calling his name from the shadows beyond the garden gate that very same night, luring him out into the freezing dark…

Jonas!

It had sounded like Danny.

But it had been a dream. Hadn’t it?

If you won’t do your job…

He had no idea what Marvel meant.… then I’ll do it for you .

The mobile unit was cramped, damp and smelly. A flickering fluorescent strip made this feel like a Stasi interrogation.

‘Sir, even if I believed he killed those people, which I don’t, why would I cover it up?’

‘You two were mates. I saw you on the playing field after we dragged his mother out of the stream. Good mates, I’d say. If he had something to hide, I reckon either you knew about it, or you’ve got something to hide too.’

‘What?’ demanded Jonas. ‘What am I hiding?’

From the look on Reynolds’s face, he’d only just beaten him to the question. Reynolds looked embarrassed even to be there.

‘You tell me ,’ said Marvel, and sat back in his chair with an air of dogged certainty. ‘First,’ he continued when he got no response, ‘first tell me why you hit Danny Marsh the other day.’

‘He swung at me !’

‘So arrest him. Don’t beat the shit out of him!’

‘I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration, sir,’ said Reynolds, and refused to look at Marvel so he could not be disciplined by a glare.

Jonas barely heard him. He recalled that feeling of threat that had come off Danny. While he laughed and joked about old times, Jonas had been consumed with fear, desperate for him to back off and stop … In hindsight it seemed very minor.

‘I felt threatened, sir,’ he said truthfully. ‘If I over-reacted, that’s why.’

‘Why did you fall out with him?’

Jonas was confused. ‘Fall out ?’

‘When you were kids,’ Marvel insisted.

‘When we were kids ?’ Jonas gave a small laugh.

‘Yes,’ said Marvel, deadly serious. ‘When you were eleven or so.’

Jonas looked blank.

‘Ten or eleven. You were best mates. Then one day you weren’t. What happened?’

The smell of burned things. Burned wood… burned hair… burned flesh .

Only confusing fragments.

‘I don’t remember, sir.’

‘Bollocks. You do.’

Jonas shrugged. He didn’t. He didn’t want to.