Darkside_ A Novel - Belinda Bauer [43]
Steven focused slowly on him again.
'What?'
'Help Dougie, Steven. Take him home.'
'OK.'
Steven reached out and helped Dougie up the bank, and they walked away in a daze.
Jonas realized he hadn't given them instructions on getting help for him. The ambulance could take ages on icy roads. The boys might not have the presence of mind to think about him. He tried to manoeuvre his phone from inside his jacket, but the operation proved impossible while he was holding Yvonne Marsh. Finally he knew he'd have to let go of her body to do it, so he did, and felt the slow current start to pull it away from him. Her legs were still in the water. Jonas clutched at the yellow T-shirt with one hand while he flipped open his phone. There was one bar of signal. Miraculous. Maybe he should make all his mobile-phone calls from running water. He had been half kneeling on the bank, but now stood up in the water; his legs almost gave way under him, they were so cold. He stood in the way of the body and called Marvel while the current pressed the dead Yvonne Marsh insistently against his legs.
It wasn't until he spoke to Marvel that Jonas realized he might be standing up to his knees in a crime scene. He'd only called him because he was police and there were no police closer to Shipcott than Marvel was, and he needed help getting the hell out of this water before his legs fell clean off. But Marvel was immediately suspicious. Jonas figured that was how it was to be a homicide detective - every death was guilty until proven innocent.
'Don't touch the body!' Marvel snapped as soon as Jonas told him he'd found one.
Jonas said nothing, feeling guilty - and angry at himself for feeling that way.
'You fucking touched it, didn't you?'
'I tried CPR.'
If there was a Scorn Olympics, Marvel could have sighed for England.
'Well, don't touch it again, for Christ's sake! Stand by and wait for me!'
Jonas was wet, cold, traumatized and tired of being spoken to like a car-park attendant. 'Listen, sir. I'm up to my arse in ice, trying to stop the body floating downstream, so either get down here fast and help me out, or I'm going to let it go and your crime scene'll stretch all the way from here to bloody Tiverton!'
Jonas snapped his phone shut and hoped Marvel wouldn't be churlish enough to take his time.
He wasn't.
In less than five minutes, Marvel was watching Pollard and Reynolds help a shaky Jonas Holly out of the water.
He sent Grey and Singh down the icy bank to retrieve the body. There was little point in leaving it in situ now that Holly had already altered the scene by dragging it from the water.
The ambulance tipped off the village that something was happening down at the playing fields, and within ten minutes of its arrival the entire populace, made jumpy by one murder, was standing on the playing field, craning to see from behind the blue-and-white tape that Rice had rolled out from the lamp-post outside Margaret Priddy's across to the far goalpost, making a single cordon which now encompassed two crime scenes.
Maybe.
Marvel was unsure for about sixty seconds, and then he nodded as Dr Mark Dennis pointed to the livid finger-shaped bruises under Yvonne Marsh's wet hair.
'Not the throat, see?' Marvel told Reynolds. 'He held her like this ...' He clawed his hands and hovered them over the back of the dead woman's neck. 'I think he held her face-down in the water and drowned her.'
'Could be,' said Mark Dennis.
'Pathologist will tell us for sure,' nodded Reynolds.
'I'm telling you for sure,' snapped Marvel. 'He'll just confirm it.'
Reynolds pursed his lips and tried hard, but finally couldn't help himself. 'Do we still like Peter Priddy, sir?'
'Fuck off, Reynolds.'
Reynolds withdrew a few paces from the scene and took out his notebook.
'That's F-U-C-K,' Marvel said and Reynolds put his notebook away again without writing in it.
'Pollard's in charge of the press,' Marvel told him.
'There is no press,' said Reynolds - and to all intents and purposes that was true. Marvel was all for the new breed