Belinda Bauer - Darkside

There was a pause. ‘He called me an angry cripple.’

Another long silence, which the words expanded to fill.

‘And are you disabled, Mrs Holly?’ asked Reynolds gently.

‘I have MS,’ she told him, filling up unexpectedly. ‘I use sticks to help me walk.’

‘I’m very sorry to hear that, Mrs Holly,’ said DS Reynolds. And Lucy was amazed to hear that he did sound sorry – not just as if he was giving a required response.

It allowed her to collect herself and deliver what she considered to be her pièce de résistance. She told him that throughout the encounter she could smell alcohol on Marvel’s breath.

‘Whiskey?’ inquired DS Reynolds, as if he had some experience of Marvel in drink.

‘No,’ said Lucy. ‘Something sweeter. But definitely alcohol.’

‘And what time was this?’

‘About nine. In the morning.’

DS Reynolds was quiet for a short while and Lucy assumed he was writing. She tried to keep a lid on her optimism; she still had a suspicion that her complaint would disappear into the black hole of Masonic secrecy that she believed held sway among senior officers. But at least she’d said her piece. Even if DS Reynolds now told her that he’d be sending her a complaints form, she’d still had that satisfaction.

But DS Reynolds didn’t say he’d send her a form. Instead he said in a serious voice, ‘Mrs Holly, would you be happy to make a sworn statement about these matters?’

Lucy almost laughed with surprise.

‘Happy?’ she said. ‘I’d be absolutely delirious.’

When Reynolds hung up on Lucy Holly he was actually shaking.

He had the contemporaneous notes in his notebook; he had his private logs, he had his own detailed reports showing that John Marvel was an unprofessional, bullying prick who shouldn’t be left in charge of a chimps’ tea party, let alone a murder inquiry, but until this very moment, he hadn’t had the damning independent evidence that would tip the balance in a disciplinary case against the DCI.

He’d always known it would come. Always. People who behaved like Marvel were on borrowed time. For a start, he knew that Marvel had left the Met under a cloud. Quite what kind of cloud he’d not been able to determine, but the police grapevine had whispered of Marvel squeezing the facts to make them fit a suspect – or squeezing that suspect to make him fit the facts. Reynolds believed it. He would have believed almost anything ill of Marvel. He hated the man’s archaic approach – his reliance on ‘hunches’, his relaxed attitude to procedure, his personal whims and illogical vendettas; his secret drinking – none of these had any place in modern law enforcement.

Since he’d started working with Marvel, Reynolds had been shocked by his fixation on certain ‘suspects’. In Weston last year, Marvel had held a nineteen-year-old homeless man for two days because he’d been near the scene of the crime and ‘looked guilty’. Before that the married boyfriend of a strangled Asian teenager was terrified into a confession which took seconds to collapse once the girl’s father haughtily confessed to the ‘honour’ killing a few days later.

Sure, Marvel did get results – even Reynolds had to admit that – and those results had kept him grudgingly secure ever since he’d left London. There was a kind of inferiority complex going on at the Avon & Somerset force which had allowed the big-city cop to bulldoze his way through conventional practice and on to cases that should have belonged to others. Even senior officers were only human, and – Reynolds knew – most just wanted things to run smoothly. Attempting to rein Marvel in and put him in his place would have taken more effort than any of the current incumbents were prepared to expend – even from behind a desk.

From his place at Marvel’s side, Reynolds had been convinced that the man deserved to be kicked out. But because of Marvel’s constant, dogged results, he’d always known he would also need to get good, sworn, hopefully civilian evidence of serious wrongdoing to bring the man down.

The kind of evidence that Lucy Holly had just dropped into his lap like manna from heaven. The kind of evidence that he could see the Independent Police Complaints Commission putting right at the top of the pile. The disabled wife of a serving officer alleging conduct unbecoming and being drunk on the job.

Superb.

Reynolds signed and dated his notes of the conversation and tucked them neatly into a folder with a sense of self-satisfaction. He was harassed and balding, trying to do his job and Marvel’s, but as soon as he had a spare moment, he would go and see Lucy Holly, take her sworn statement and add it to the rest of the case he had built against his DCI in the past year.

Sergio Leone, eat your heart out.

It was gone five o’clock and Marvel was in the Red Lion nursing half a pint of piss masquerading as alcohol-free lager.

He hadn’t invited anybody else along for an after-work drink. He was heartily sick of the lot of them and even more sick of being stuck here in Shipcott with what appeared to be trench foot.

Jos Reeves called to say that the prints inside the plastic bags they’d found in the courtyard were unidentifiable. Little more than muddy smears.

Marvel didn’t even have the energy to be rude to him.

Someone walked through his line of vision with a lurching gait and Marvel focused. The young man had the look of someone who had put his weight and his drink on fast – florid, and with all the excess fat around his belly and his chin.

‘What are you looking at?’ said Neil Randall.

‘You got a wooden leg?’ said Marvel.

The young man was taken aback. He was used to people blushing and stammering when he confronted them.

‘Yes,’ he said.

Then he remembered his hostility and added, ‘You want to make something of it?’

Marvel resisted the urge to snap back something about whittling a toy boat, and just shrugged. The young man was obviously defensive. Must be shit to lose your leg. Give up your job, maybe. Collect disability. Be a burden—

A burden. Margaret Priddy had been a burden. That was, after all, why he had ‘liked’ Peter Priddy so much, wasn’t it? Yvonne Marsh had been a burden to her husband and son. But the three victims at Sunset Lodge… couldn’t they also be considered burdens on their families? A financial drain, if nothing else?

Maybe the killer couldn’t bring himself to kill his own burden and was taking it out on others?

Marvel felt his skin actually tingle. He felt so sure that he was on the right track, and his instincts rarely let him down.

Hand in hand with that came the uncomfortable feeling that this was Reynolds’s territory. Reynolds and his beloved Kate Gulliver with their namby-pamby, touchy-feely bollocks about childhoods and transference and repression and guilt.

He stared unseeingly at Neil Randall’s gammy leg as the man limped across the pub and propped himself up in front of the fruit machine.

And then DCI John Marvel got another, even bigger tingle as he put two and two together and made what looked very much like four to him…

Wasn’t Lucy Holly a burden to her husband?

He put his so-called beer down on the table so fast that it slopped over the rim, and stood up.

He had to get back to his room. He had to be really alone so he could think about this clearly. He needed to write things down and draw little boxes and connect them with biro lines of reasoning. He needed to be absolutely sure before he exposed his theory to Reynolds, to give that bastard the smallest possible chance of poking holes in it.