Darkside_ A Novel - Belinda Bauer [100]
Marvel's fingers twitched as he recognized Jonas Holly. That wide brow, dark eyes and nose that was already too straight for its age. Only the mouth here was different, and Marvel realized it was because he'd never seen Jonas smile.
He thought instantly of the dead pony on the moor. Of the way Jonas Holly had been almost pathologically unwilling to touch it - had actually refused to take a leg and help pull the carcass out of the road. And yet here he was with one arm thrown casually over the pony's neck, a hank of mane in his little hand, leaning into the animal like a friend. What did kids say nowadays? Best friend for ever. That's what the brown pony looked like it meant to Jonas.
What changed?
What changed in Jonas Holly to turn him from a boy who loved horses into a man who couldn't even bear to touch a dead one?
'Can I keep this?' he asked Joy Springer.
But he'd looked at the photo for so long that she'd fallen asleep and was snoring with her shiny-knuckled hand still around her empty glass.
From the shadows outside the kitchen window, Reynolds watched Marvel finish his drink, then 'shit' and 'fuck' his way across the icy cobbles to his room.
*
Elizabeth Rice had been too embarrassed to ask Alan Marsh whether she could go through his dead son's clothing looking for a missing button so that he could be more conclusively branded a killer. More conclusively than hanging himself and leaving a confessional note, she thought with no little irritation. But because that's what Marvel had ordered her to do by tomorrow, she was doing it now, at almost midnight, by torchlight and in secret.
While Alan Marsh was next door in a sleep induced by the local surfer-cum-doctor and his magic needle, she crept into his dead son's room and started to do her duty.
Danny Marsh had been surprisingly neat for a young man who'd never been in the army. He didn't have many clothes. Maybe a dozen shirts and T-shirts, a winter jacket, a summer jacket, three or four pairs of jeans and a cheap black suit she remembered he'd worn at his mother's funeral.
All buttons were present.
A pair of black Doc Martens with steel toecaps had matched the Polaroid of the dusty shoe-print that the CSI had taken off her window sill. Danny Marsh had passed her silently in the night. Going out and coming in. Hadn't hurt her. Hadn't even woken her.
It didn't matter now.
She found a small stash of porn under his shirts. Magazines on busty blondes and MILFs. Mild, really, by today's standards. Certainly milder than the stuff that Eric often failed to wipe clear of their computer's history.
She'd liked Danny Marsh. He was a good listener. When they'd been to the pub together that one time, he'd made her laugh. Rice sat down on the bed. It was still up against the window where Danny had pulled it so he could tie the sheet to it before jumping out.
That was where Alan Marsh found her fifteen minutes later when her loud sobs pulled him from his magic sleep.
He sat down beside her and took her hand in his and hushed her gently the way he always had Yvonne, whenever she remembered that she'd lost her mind. They sat there for a long time - the weeping police officer and the bereaved husband and father - their joined hands resting in her lap on a dog-eared copy of Big Jugs.
Three Days
Lucy Holly hated John Marvel, and it felt good.
She was so used to hating her hands, hating her legs, hating her memory, hating her disease, that to hate something external and tangible that might actually be able to give a shit about her hatred was invigorating in a dour, angry way.
Jonas had told her that Marvel obviously thought he had been protecting Danny Marsh in some way; that Danny was the killer, and that that made Jonas somehow complicit in the murders. And he'd told her of Marvel's repetition of the words that had been contained in the first note.
Call yourself a policeman?
That bastard.
The thought of Jonas or Danny being involved was laughable. Or would be if