Darkside_ A Novel Part 1

DARKSIDE.

by BELINDA BAUER.

To Dad, too late

s.h.i.+pcott in bleak midwinter: a close-knit community where no stranger goes unnoticed. So when an elderly woman is murdered in her bed, village policeman Jonas Holly is doubly shocked. How could someone have entered, and killed, and left no trace?

Jonas finds himself sidelined as the investigation is s.n.a.t.c.hed away from him by an abrasive senior detective. Is his first murder investigation over before it's begun?

But this isn't the end for Jonas, because someone in the village blames him him for the tragedy. Someone seems to know every move he makes. Someone thinks he's not doing his job. And when the killer claims another vulnerable victim, these taunts turn into sinister threats. for the tragedy. Someone seems to know every move he makes. Someone thinks he's not doing his job. And when the killer claims another vulnerable victim, these taunts turn into sinister threats.

Blinded by rising paranoia, fear for his own invalid wife, and relentless snow, Jonas strikes out alone on a mystifying hunt. But the threats don't stop - and neither do the murders ...

Forty-six Days

The sounds of the hospital came back to Lucy m.u.f.fled and from far away. She became aware of a big hand holding hers - tough, dry and warm.

Jonas, she thought with a twist of guilt.

Stiffly she moved her head and opened her eyes, expecting to read worry, relief - even anger - in his eyes.

Instead, for one crazy moment, she found she had been sucked through a tear in time, and that she was married to a small boy wearing a look of such terror on his face that she flinched and clutched at his hand as if he he were the one who was falling. were the one who was falling.

'Jonas!'

Her throat burned and the word came out as a harsh caw, but it aged him like a slap in the face and immediately his eyes filled with all those emotions she'd expected to see when she first looked up at him - even the anger.

Lucy didn't care. She brimmed with tears. Jonas held her in his arms - a man again - and she overflowed into the crook of his elbow while he bent over her and said quiet, tender things into her hair.

'I didn't mean it,' she sobbed, but she couldn't even understand her own m.u.f.fled words.

And anyway, she wasn't certain they were true.

Twenty-three Days

Margaret Priddy awoke to the brilliant beam of light she had been antic.i.p.ating with fear and longing for years.

Finally, she thought, I'm dying. And tears of loss mingled with those of joy on her lined cheeks.

Ever since her fall she had lain here - or somewhere very like it - slack and immobile and dependent on other people for her most basic needs. Food, water, warmth. Toilet - which the nurses carried out as if her dignity were numbed, not her body. Company ...

The nurses tried their best.

'Morning, Margaret! Beautiful morning!'

'Morning, Margaret! Sleep well?'

'Morning, Margaret! Raining again!'

And then they would either run out of paltry inspiration or jabber on about their night out getting drunk, or their children's seemingly endless achievements at school. A relentless rota of cheerful bustle with big busts and bingo wings. The break in silence was welcome at first but, in the face of inanity, Margaret quickly longed for solitude.

She was grateful. Of course she was. Grateful and polite - the way an English lady should be in the circ.u.mstances. They had no way of knowing about her grat.i.tude, of course, but she tried to convey it in her eyes and she thought some of them understood. Peter did, but then Peter had always been a sensitive boy.

Now - as the light made her eyes burn - Margaret Priddy thought of her son and the tears of loss took precedence. Peter was forty-four years old but she still always thought of him first as a five-year-old in blue shorts and a Batman T-s.h.i.+rt, running down the s.h.i.+ngle in Minehead on the first beach holiday they'd ever taken.

She was leaving her little boy alone.

She knew it was silly, but that's how she felt about it.

She was dying and he'd be all alone.

But still she was was dying. At last. And it was just as she'd imagined - white and wonderful and pain-free. dying. At last. And it was just as she'd imagined - white and wonderful and pain-free.

It was only when she sensed the press of weight on the bed that was her home that she realized this was not the start of her journey to the Hereafter, but someone in her room with a torch.

Someone uninvited, invading her home, her room, her bed, the very air in front of her face ...

Every fibre of Margaret Priddy's being screamed to respond to the danger.

Unfortunately, every fibre of her being below the neck had been permanently disconnected from her brain three years before when old Buster - the most reliable of horses - had stumbled to his knees on a patch of ice, throwing her head-first into a wooden telegraph pole.

So instead of screaming, punching and fighting for what was left of her life, she could only blink in terror as the killer placed a pillow over her face.

He didn't want to hurt her. Only wanted her dead.

As he suffocated Margaret Priddy with her own well-plumped pillow, the killer felt a rush of released tension, like an old watch exploding, scattering a thousand intricate parts and sending tightly wound springs bouncing off into nowhere as the bounds of the casing broke open around him.

He sobbed in sudden relief.

The feel of the old lady's head through the pillow was comfortingly distant and indistinct. The unnatural stillness of her body seemed like permission to continue and so he did. He pressed his weight on to the pillow for far longer than he knew was necessary.

When he finally removed it and shone his torch into her face, the only discernible change in Margaret Priddy was that the light in her eyes had gone out.

'There,' thought the killer. 'That was easy.'

First Lucy - and now this this.

PC Jonas Holly leaned against the wall and took off his helmet so that his suddenly clammy head could breathe.

The body on the bed had played the organ at his wedding. He'd known her since he was a boy.

He could remember being small enough not to care that it wasn't cool to be impressed by anything, waving at Mrs Priddy as she went past on an impossibly big grey horse - and her waving back. Over the next twenty-five years that scene had been repeated dozens of times, with all the characters in it evolving. Margaret growing older, but always vibrant; he stretching and growing, coming and going - university, Portishead, home to visit his parents while they were still alive. Even the horse changed, from a grey through any number of similar animals until Buster came along. Mrs Priddy always liked horses that were too big for her; 'The bigger they are, the kinder they are,' she'd told him once as he'd squinted up into the sky at her, trying to avoid looking at Buster's hot, quivery shoulder.

Now Margaret Priddy was dead. It was a blessing really - the poor woman. But right now Jonas Holly only felt disorientated and sick that somehow, during the night, some strange magic had happened to turn life into death, warmth into cold and this world into the next.

Whatever the next world was. Jonas had only ever had a vague irreligious notion that it was probably nice enough.

This was not his first body; as a village bobby, he'd seen his fair share. But seeing Margaret Priddy lying there had hit him unexpectedly hard. He heard the nurse coming up the stairs and put his helmet back on, hurriedly wiping his face on his sleeve, hoping he didn't look as nauseous as he felt. He was six-four and people seemed to have an odd idea that the taller you were, the more metaphorical backbone you should have.

The nurse smiled at him and held the door open behind her for Dr Dennis, who wore khaki chinos and a polo s.h.i.+rt at all times - as if he was in an Aussie soap and about to be whisked off in a Cessna to treat distant patients for snakebite in the sweltering outback, instead of certifying the death of a pensioner in her cottage on a damp January Exmoor.

'h.e.l.lo, Jonas,' he said.

'Right, Mark.'

'How's Lucy?'

'OK, thanks.'

'Good.'

Jonas had once seen Mark Dennis vomit into a yard of ale after a rugby match, but right now the doctor was all business, his regular, tanned face composed into a professional mask of thoughtful compa.s.sion. He went over to the bed and checked Margaret Priddy.

'Nice lady,' he said, for something to say.

'The best,' said Jonas Holly, with feeling. 'Probably a blessing that she's gone. For her, I mean.'

The nurse smiled and nodded professionally at him but Mark Dennis said nothing, seeming to be very interested in Margaret Priddy's face.

Jonas looked around the room. Someone had hung a cheap silver-foil angel over the bed, and it twirled slowly like a child's mobile. On the dresser, half a dozen Christmas cards had been pushed haphazardly aside to make way for more practical things. One of the cards had fallen over and Jonas's fingers itched to right it.

Instead he made himself look at the old lady's body. Not that old, he reminded himself, only sixty-something. But being bedridden had made her seem older and far more frail.

He thought of Lucy one day being that frail and tried to focus on Margaret lying on the bed, not his beautiful wife.

Her lips flecked with bile and soggy painkillers ...

Jonas pushed the image away hard and took a deep breath. He focused and tried to imagine what Margaret Priddy's last words might have been before the accident that crushed her spine and her larynx in one crunching blow. Final words spoken in ignorance three years before the demise of the rest of her body. Jonas thought probably: 'Get on, Buster!'

'Glad you're here, Jonas,' said Mark Dennis - and when he turned to look at him, Jonas Holly could see concern in the doctor's face. His instincts stirred uneasily.

'Her nose is broken.'

They both looked at the nurse, whose smile disappeared in an instant. She hurried over and stood beside the doctor as he guided her fingers to the bridge of Margaret Priddy's nose.

'See?'

She nodded, a frown making her ugly.

'There's no break in the skin or apparent bruising,' said Mark Dennis in the annoying, musing way he had. 'I'm no CSI, but I'd say a sharp blow was not the cause.'

Jonas hated people who watched American television.

'You want to feel, Jonas?'

Not really. Still, he was a policeman and he should ...

He swallowed audibly and touched the nose. It was cold and gristly and made Jonas - an ardent vegetarian - think of raw pork chops. Mark Dennis guided him and Jonas felt the break in Margaret Priddy's nose move grittily under his fingers. Gooseflesh sprouted up to his shoulders and he let go and stepped back. Unconsciously he wiped his hand on the dark-blue serge of his uniform trousers, before realizing that the silence - coupled with two pairs of eyes looking at him questioningly - meant he was supposed to take charge; was supposed to do something professional and policeman-like.

'Yuk,' he said.

The detectives from Taunton must watch a lot of American television, too, thought Jonas as he observed them striding through Margaret Priddy's tiny home, b.u.mping into antiques, cl.u.s.tering in the hallway, and thumping up and down the narrow stairs like US Marines invading a potting shed.

Despite their expertise in the field of suspicious death, Jonas secretly wished he'd never called them in. Of course, not not calling them was not an option, but even so ... calling them was not an option, but even so ...

Jonas was equipped to handle nothing beyond the mundane. He was the sole representative of the Avon & Somerset police force in seven villages and across a good acreage of Exmoor, which rolled in waves like a green and purple sea towards the northern sh.o.r.e of the county, where it met the Bristol Channel coming the other way. The people here lived in the troughs, leaving the heather-covered peaks to the mercy of the sun, wind, rain, snow and the thick, brine-scented mists that crept off the ocean, careless that this was land and not water, and blurring the boundary between the two. People walked on the exposed peaks but their lives were properly conducted in the folds and creases of Exmoor, out of the view of prying eyes, and where sounds carried only as far as the next looming common before being smothered by a damp wall of heather and p.r.i.c.kly gorse.

These shaded vales where people grew held hidden histories and forgotten secrets, like the big dark pebbles in the countless shallow streams that crossed the moor.

But the homicide team now filling the two-hundred-year-old, two-up-two-down cottage with noise and action never stopped to listen to the undercurrents.

Jonas didn't like Detective Chief Inspector Marvel, not only because the spreading, florid DCI's name sounded like some kind of infallible superhero cop, but because DCI Marvel had listened to his account of the finding of Margaret Priddy with a look on his lined face that told of a bad smell.

It was unfair. Jonas felt he had recovered well after launching the investigation with the ignominious 'Yuk'.

He had ascertained that the nurse - a robust fifty-year-old called Annette Rogers - had checked on Mrs Priddy at 2am without noticing anything amiss, before finding her dead at 6.15am.

Despite the obvious answer, he had dutifully quizzed Mark Dennis on the possibility of a woman being able to somehow break her own nose during the act of sleeping while also paralysed from the neck down.

He had escorted Mark Dennis and Annette Rogers to the front door with minimal deviation to maintain the corridor of entry and exit to the scene.

He had checked the bedroom window and quickly found sc.r.a.pe-marks surrounding the latch. It was only a four-foot drop from the sill to the flat roof of the lean-to.

He had secured the scene. Which here in s.h.i.+pcott meant shutting the front door and putting a note on it torn from his police-issue notebook. He'd considered the content of that note with care, running from the self-important 'Crime Scene' - which seemed merely laughable on a sc.r.a.p of lined paper - through 'Police! Do Not Pa.s.s' (too bossy) and 'No Entry' (too vague), finally ending up with 'Please Do Not Disturb', which appealed to everybody's better nature and which he felt confident would work. And it did.

He had alerted Tiverton to the fact that foul play may possibly be involved in the death of Mrs Margaret Priddy of Big Pot Cottage, s.h.i.+pcott, and Tiverton had called on the services of Taunton CID.

Taunton Homicide was a team of frustrated detectives generally under-extended by drunken brawls gone wrong, and Jonas thought Marvel should have been grateful for the call, not openly disdainful of him. He understood that in police hierarchy the village bobby - or 'community beat officer' as he was officially called - was the lowest of the low. He also knew that his youth worked against him. Any policeman of his age worth his salt should be at the top of his game - swathed in Kevlar, armed with something s.h.i.+ny, clearing tall buildings in his pursuit of criminal masterminds and mad bombers - not walking the beat, ticking off children and corralling stray sheep in some sleepy backwater. That was a job for an old man and Jonas had only just turned thirty-one, so it smacked of laziness or stupidity. Therefore Jonas tried hard to appear neither lazy nor stupid as he ran through his notes with Marvel.