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By Root 541 0

were all the green he felt anyone should suffer. Once he'd carved his name in the bark and been repelled by the damp, greenish flesh his penknife had exposed. Sometimes as a kid he'd hung around a bus stop close to the park, but had rarely ventured in. Only on the occasional Saturday for a kickabout, and even then he'd never warmed to the muddy, olive-green grass. Playing behind the garages or under the railway arches was cleaner and faster. Grass was overrated, in Marvel's opinion, and it was his constant gripe that most of the Avon and Somerset force area where he'd ended up working was covered in it.

Now here he was in this shit-hole village in the middle of a moor that didn't even have the niceties of fences or barns on it, with the miserable prospect of having to conduct a murder investigation surrounded by the vagaries of gorse, yokels and pony shit instead of the sensible amenities of self-service petrol stations, meaningful road-signs and his beloved Kings Arms.

The Divisional Surgeon had already found cuts and bruising inside Margaret Priddy's mouth where her lips had been crushed against her teeth, and the pathologist might find even more. All it would take now was for the Scientific Investigations Department in Portishead to confirm that the saliva and mucus on the well-plumped pillow found lying next to Mrs Priddy belonged to the victim, and they would have their upgrade to murder and their murder weapon all in one neat forensic package.

Marvel looked at the empty bed over which three white-paper-clad CSIs crouched like folk off to a costume party dressed as sperm.

'I like the son for this,' Marvel told DS Reynolds. Marvel loved saying that he 'liked' someone for something. It made him feel as if he were in a Quentin Tarantino film. His south-London accent was a handicap but not a bar to such pronouncements.

'Yes, sir,' said DS Reynolds carefully.

'Sick of watching his inheritance pour down the home-nursing drain.'

'Yes, sir.'

'So what have we got?'

'So far? Hairs, fibres, fluids--

'Semen?'

'Doesn't look like it, sir. Just what was on the pillow, and urine.'

'I thought she was catheterized?'

'I think the bag must've burst.'

'So the perp could be covered in piss.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Lovely. Anything missing?'

'Doesn't look like a burglary, sir. If something was taken then the killer knew exactly what he was looking for and where to find it.'

Marvel glanced around the room with its old dark furniture. A lifetime of use was evidenced by the wear around the dull brass handles on the chest of drawers. Nothing looked disturbed; even the lace doily on the dresser was flat and un-mussed.

'I want the names of all the nurses employed and hair samples from everyone at the scene.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Prints?'

'Not so far.'

It was a bitterly cold January and the killer could have worn gloves for that reason alone. But Marvel hoped he was not just some opportunist burglar who had overreacted to finding a woman watching him silently from the bed in what he'd thought was an empty room. Marvel hoped he'd planned ahead. Whether he'd planned burglary or murder ahead was open to question, but the fact that it looked unlikely that they would find prints made the whole case more interesting to Marvel. He hated to waste his talents on the low and the stupid, and - since coming to Somerset - he'd started to tire a little of the flailing drunks who'd turned from nuisances to killers because of the unfortunate coming together of heads and kerbs, and of the glazed teenagers whose generosity in sharing their gear had been repaid by their ingrate friends dying curled around pub toilets with shit in their pants and in their veins.

No, the gloves made the killer a more worthwhile quarry in Marvel's eyes.

Just how worthwhile remained to be seen.

*

Four hundred yards before the sign that read PLEASE DRIVE SLOWLY THROUGH SHIPCOTT was the house Jonas had grown up in, and from where his parents had been carried to their graves. Not house really, more cottage - although cottage sounded nicer than it really was, as if it were the picture