Belinda Bauer - Darkside

I love you , she wanted to say. Just for the hell of it.

But the phone just rang and rang.

Marvel would have to pass the cottage to get to the village from Springer Farm.

Before she had really thought about it, Lucy had seized her sticks, stamped her feet into her wellies and was out of the front door.

Jonas drove through Shipcott without stopping. He passed the mobile police unit and Danny Marsh’s house without looking at either.

His head was so profoundly numb that his thoughts were only wisps and fragments, like a blizzard on his tongue. Nothing was sticking – except for the weird feeling that with the snow, the white sky and this blankness of mind, he was moving slowly through the tunnel of light that leads to death.

At the brow of the steep slope leading down into Withypool, Jonas stamped on the brakes and the Land Rover slid to a halt. He got out and locked the door.

He put one foot in front of the other, watching the snow give way under him, hearing the soft, squeaky crunch, and the sound of his own breathing as he climbed the narrow track away from the houses towards the top of Withypool Hill.

Everything disappeared in the mist behind him. The car, the knee-high blackthorn halfway up the hill, the village itself. He could not even make out the matching lump of the high common across the way, it was all so white-on-white.

At the summit, the silence was a cotton-wool-covered heartbeat. Jonas felt nothing as he listened to it fill the void.

He called Peter Priddy on a fractured line.

‘Did you do it?’ he asked softly.

‘…alling?’

‘Did you kill them, Pete? Just tell me, please.’

Priddy was the only one who made any real sense now – and Jonas had vouched for him; diverted Marvel from him. Priddy had asked him for a favour and he had granted it out of a misplaced sense of loyalty.

Call yourself a policeman?

‘I understand if it was. I really do, Pete. But I have to know. Because it’s my job. That’s all.’ Jonas was in a dream, so there was no harm asking.

‘Sorr… c… hear… ou…’ lied Priddy through the static.

Jonas calmly threw his phone off Withypool Hill. It spun lazily through the air like a disobedient boomerang, and landed out of sight and without a sound somewhere in the mist that was rising around him like a sea of bleach. Jonas watched the dead black heather dissolve into white in front of his eyes. No wonder he couldn’t see the common.

He turned to go.

And was lost.

Just like that.

He had been here a hundred times, but he had no idea how to get back to the car. The blackthorn and the common were the only landmarks, and both were hidden by a conjurer’s cloth of white damp.

He stood and watched the mist swirl around his legs. His own feet were dimmed by it. Soon it would cover him like a tide and he would be gone.

The thought was calming.

He would be gone. He wouldn’t have to do his job any more – this job he was failing at so spectacularly.

Jonas closed his eyes.

Now that the adrenaline of the walk up here had worn off, he was bitterly cold. He had left his gloves in the car, along with the scratchy blanket.

No matter.

Jonas sat down.

It was cold and wet but the relief numbed him. The relief of calm acceptance.

He crossed his legs like a schoolboy and put his hands on his knees.

This was the end and it wasn’t so bad.

It was the easiest thing he’d ever done.

He wondered whether he would fall over, or remain sitting for hikers to find here like an icy Buddha.

Jonas smiled.

The mist stroked his cheek like a dead lover.

His phone rang.

Somewhere in the white nothingness, it rang its sensible old-fashioned telephone ring – like the phone they’d had when he was a child.

It rang and rang. Maybe it was Lucy. Maybe she needed him. Jonas got up to follow the sound.

He found his phone just as it stopped ringing. He picked it out of a depression in the snow, which his brain only slowly registered as his own footprint.

He followed his prints back to the car, then called Lucy, but there was no answer.

Jonas drove back towards Shipcott and the dream faded to white behind him.

As it did, he forgot all about the ice Buddha and all about Peter Priddy.

Marvel was late again. The cars were gone again. Déjà vu again.

He walked from Joy’s kitchen across the yard to his stable. His cottage. His cottage that used to be a stable.

He took a piss and did his teeth but didn’t bother changing his clothes.

They had left him the Honda this time, which was the best of the cars they’d brought with them.

Marvel was still bleary-eyed as he swung the car out of the farm driveway and on to the snowy road. Once again the slush had frozen overnight and the Honda immediately slid sideways a little. He corrected it easily and stayed in second down the hill.

Halfway down he saw someone stepping into the road ahead. Awkwardly. Someone was coming down the stone steps from the cottages into the lane. He started to brake and the car slowed gently.

He could see now that it was a woman on crutches. Not the old-fashioned under-the-armers, but those steel ones with a grip that went around the forearm. The woman was young, but her legs were crippled – he could see that much. And she didn’t appear to be wearing a coat, just a thick jumper over a floral skirt. And wellington boots. Everyone had those bastards but him!

Marvel expected the woman to turn and walk down the hill, close to the hedge. He thought he’d stop and give her a lift. It was against the rules, but fuck the rules. A woman on crutches in snow. You’d have to be a freak not to stop for her.

But instead of turning, the woman hobbled slowly into the middle of the narrow lane, then turned so that she was facing him, and just stood there!

Marvel braked more firmly.

Too firmly.

Wheels locked and the Honda slid sideways. He applied opposite lock and he thought he’d caught it, then the car gripped briefly and fishtailed away from him again. It slewed once more and – all in slow motion – started to slide down the lane broadside on. Marvel turned the wheel and braked, to no avail.

He looked out of his side window at the woman standing in the road, leaning on her crutches, watching his unusual approach. Part of him was embarrassed, but an increasingly larger part of him was starting to realize that she didn’t understand that he had no control of the car.

She just stood there! As if she was somehow expecting him to go around her!

Thirty yards from the woman, the Honda brushed the hedge and wavered, then kept on going at an only slightly different angle.

And still she stood there.

Marvel yelled, ‘Out of the way!’ through the closed window, then jammed the heel of his hand on to the horn.

She didn’t move. The lane was narrow; the car was wide; there was no way he wasn’t going to hit her unless she moved. For a surreal moment, Marvel looked into her eyes and realized how beautiful she was. And how calm.

Marvel’s entire future flashed before him: the ghastly bump of the car going over the woman, the horror of the eviscerated corpse, the flashing blue lights – and the red one on the breathalyser, the humiliation of the cell in his own nick, the smug look on Reynolds’s forever unpunched face, the collar of his good shirt tight around his neck as the jury foreman stood to condemn him, the slow-drip terror of a cop in prison, the halfway house, the bedsit, the menial office job he’d be lucky to get, the gel-haired teenaged boss who said things like ‘Whatever’ and ‘Facebook’…

The nightmare that his life would become in a single split second.