Darkside_ A Novel - Belinda Bauer [45]
'You can't watch her all the fucking time!' Danny shouted suddenly. 'Every fucking DAY!'
Jonas touched Danny's shoulder. His hand was knocked away but he put it back and this time Danny let it stay. He led Danny away from the crowd and towards the stream. The two of them stood and stared across the singing water at the white-frosted moor. Jonas didn't look at Danny as he cried. There was very little sound from behind them, considering the whole village was just a hundred yards away. The morning was still beautiful - facing this way, at least - and Jonas was seized with a sudden notion to take Danny by the arm and lead him through the stream and up on to the moorland opposite and just keep walking, leaving everything behind them and never looking back to see the horror of reality.
He didn't, of course, but he could taste in his mouth what it would be like to do it.
Finally Danny spoke softly.
'She hated being that way.'
Jonas nodded.
'You remember what she was like?'
'Of course,' said Jonas and Danny sighed.
'Sometimes she remembered. How she'd been. That was the worst part, you know? Not her going nuts, but her knowing that she was going nuts.'
Jonas nodded. He understood.
'At least that's over now,' Danny said, and turned back towards the surreal scene of his mother lying dead near the corner flag while the whole village watched silently from the far touchline, as if they'd come to see a match and stayed to watch a murder. His father was in the back of the ambulance now, with the two paramedics fussing over him.
Jonas saw that someone had put a blanket over Mrs Marsh's body and he was stupidly grateful, because it was a cold day, despite the sunshine.
Danny sniffed, sighed, and shook a B&H out of a crumpled pack he found in his jeans.
'You all right, Jonas?'
Jonas glanced at him, perplexed. He was all right! He wasn't the one whose dead mother had just been hauled out of a frozen stream like an Arctic seal. Why the hell would Danny ask him that?
He said nothing and Danny didn't ask again.
Nearby a blackbird burst into song and Jonas allowed it to fill him up. With his back to the body there was nothing but beauty in the world.
Danny squinted as he blew the only cloud into the clear blue sky. 'We should have a drink,' he said.
'Some time,' said Jonas, and hoped Danny realized that that meant 'never'.
Danny smoked half the cigarette and flicked the rest into the stream. 'Yeah,' he said. 'I'll see you soon, Jonas.'
Marvel watched Danny Marsh walk away from Jonas Holly and back to his father. Without averting his gaze, he spoke quietly to Reynolds, who stood beside him with that damned notebook open.
'What's the link?'
'Pardon, sir?'
'The link. Between Margaret Priddy and ...' He nodded at the corpse.
'Yvonne Marsh.'
'Yes. Assuming this is murder and it's the same killer. What's the link?'
Reynolds thought for a second. 'Both in their sixties. Both women ...' He dried up.
Marvel looked at Reynolds directly now. 'Both a burden on their families, wouldn't you say?'
Reynolds nodded his thoughtful agreement.
'Could be two families finally snapping. But if it's not, then what's the link? More important, who's the link?'
'I don't know, sir.'
'Well nor do I,' said Marvel. 'Yet.'
He told Pollard to bag up PC Holly's clothes for Jos Reeves at the lab. The crime scene here was a joke - in the open air and on a field that half the village used, trampled by Holly and the skateboarders at the very least, and the body had been in water and then moved, just to add to the complications - but he might as well preserve everything he could, if only for the purpose of elimination. He walked back towards the car, his feet making a satisfying crunching sound on the frosty field, and called Jos Reeves to tell him to be sure to compare forensics in the Yvonne Marsh case with Margaret Priddy's. Reeves got in a huff with him. Got all offended that Marvel thought he didn't know his own job. Prima donna. Next time he'd have Reynolds call Reeves.
He sent Singh, Pollard and Grey to do another house-to-house,