Darkside_ A Novel - Belinda Bauer [3]
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, bumping into antiques, clustering 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 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 shore 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 prickly 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,