Darkside_ A Novel - Belinda Bauer [110]
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.
And, more than anything, he needed a real drink to help him.
*
Jonas was pulling a ewe's head out of a tree.
He'd spent several minutes trying to get a good grip on the struggling, ice-covered sheep without luck, and made a new effort to focus before his hands got too cold to function.
The snow was falling again in a silent blizzard that threatened to obscure his view of Shipcott below. Jonas had done his best to get over to Edgcott to do his rounds but he'd had to turn back at the top of the hill when he lost the road completely. He'd spotted the sheep twenty yards away and decided to do his good deed for the day.
He spoke soothingly to the ewe but she didn't believe him for a second, and bleated in terror, while now and then raising her tail to vent hard marble-sized droppings in machine-gun bursts, as if paying out a shit jackpot.
Jonas Holly cursed under his breath but he understood the ewe's fear. He had learned to live with fear.
It didn't mean he wasn't scared.
All the time.
All the fucking time! He could hear Danny saying those words again.
Jonas felt that if he could only keep all his fear separate and compartmentalized, then he would be able to manage it, like a lion tamer performing tricks with just one lion at a time - carefully twisting his head into the sharp, fetid maw, feeling the prick of teeth on his cheek, and then herding the beast back to its cage, before bringing out the next lion, whose job was to jump through hoops.
At times, though, Jonas got the feeling that the catches on the cages were loose, that the lions were plotting behind his back - and that there was imminent danger of a great escape, during which he would be torn to pieces in his top hat and red tails.
Which was probably what this poor ewe thought was about to happen to her.
Don't be scared. I'll protect you. That's my job.
The words rushed at him from nowhere and for the first time in decades he remembered the face of the policeman who had told him that. The man had looked like a father. Not like his father, but like the kind of father Jonas had seen on TV - middle-aged, greying at the temples, slightly overweight. Jonas could even remember the shiny buttons on the policeman's tunic and being overwhelmed that this exciting uniform was actually in his mother's cramped little