Darkside_ A Novel - Belinda Bauer [20]
By the time the school bell rang at nine, Jonas had covered about thirty houses, asking the same questions again and again and again up and down Barnstaple Road. What did you see? What did you hear? Anything suspicious? Anything that might help? Do you have my number?
All morning, as he made careful notes of random comments, Jonas had the uncomfortable feeling that he was being watched.
It was the note. The note bothered him. More than bothered him. There was no home that Jonas asked questions in where a little voice in his head did not ask another question: Was it him? Was it her? Did they write the note?
The very fact that he had not discussed it with Lucy was proof of how badly it had shaken him. Jonas was not in the habit of hiding things from his wife. So he knew that this guilty itch at the back of his neck and his urge to turn around suddenly was most likely due to keeping a secret from Lucy.
Since Monday morning when he'd found it, Jonas's jaw tightened every time he approached the Land Rover; his eyes swept the screen, fearing another accusation - another truth. And at night when he helped Lucy upstairs to bed, it was the note he thought of as often now as the way his wife was wasting away beneath his hands. She had been through the steroids that made her fat but now he could feel the ribs in her back, the knobs of her spine, the blade of her pelvis poking rudely at the place where her smooth and pretty hip used to be. His wife was disappearing and it was his job to keep her from falling backwards into the abyss.
Lucy needs you. Now more than ever.
She was going through the motions - getting up every day and getting dressed; planting daffodils and anemones too late in already-frozen ground, reading the Bugle and asking him about his day. But he knew it was all brittle brightness. The way she felt the need to smile at him when she caught him looking. The way she said 'I love you' with her lips while her eyes were always searching the perimeter wall for a way out.
The last thing she needed was to worry about him.
And if she knew how the note had made him feel, then she would worry. Because it had made him feel terrible.
Uneasy, guilty, paranoid.
Ashamed.
How could he tell her about the note? The weight of that cruel slip of paper might be enough to break her. Again.
No ... Lucy had enough to carry. He would carry the note alone.
*
Marvel didn't arrest Peter Priddy, of course. He didn't even see Peter Priddy. He told Reynolds to continue the house-to-house in Shipcott and then spent the morning shouting at various imbeciles at HQ in a bid to get a mobile incident room assigned. Stuck out in the middle of all this air and weather, Marvel needed the grubby confines of a glorified caravan to feel a sense of purpose.
By the afternoon Marvel's Task Force were all gossiped out. Unlike movie imaginings of the secretive, sinister life of a small village, Shipcott residents couldn't wait to give their opinions of whodunnit, and have their shaky recall tested by questions about what they saw on the night Margaret Priddy died. The team felt overloaded by pointless information. Snippets and digs, Miss Marple theories and bad blood.
As the light started to fade from the overcast winter sky, the Task Force met Marvel in the Red Lion to pool their information, and quickly discovered that their collective picture of a possible perpetrator amounted to a sole suspect in the shape of a local thief called Ronnie Trewell. To add insult to injury, between them at first they thought they had three promising leads. It took them nearly an hour to realize that Skew Ronnie, Ron Trewell and 'the boy what walks funny' were all the same person - and a mere car thief, to boot.
Despite that,