Darkside_ A Novel - Belinda Bauer [65]
The room was dark and Lucy was breathing so low that he strained to hear her at all. He glanced at the alarm clock. Just gone 3am.
Moving carefully, he rearranged the covers with his feet, and his breathing started to calm a little as his nightmare fragmented behind him.
'Jonas!'
He froze.
He took Lucy's arm from across his chest and slid out from beneath it, laying it gently on the warm sheet and covering it with the duvet.
In the flannel pyjama bottoms and T-shirt he wore to bed in the winter, Jonas crossed to the window and looked down at the front garden, glimmering pale under the stars.
Nothing.
His eye caught a movement in the lane beyond the gate.
Somebody?
Or something?
Something watching the house. Something watching him.
Something underneath.
His mind lolled between sleep and wakefulness, blurring the edges of both, as his overworked eyes sought the caller of his name.
In his gut he knew it was Danny Marsh. Come to talk in the dead of a snowy night. He felt once again the threat that had come off Danny in waves. Part of him wanted to go down there now - right now. To run out into the snow and finish what he'd started in the street. Beat him to a pulp. End it.
He must have stood half-dozing at the window a long, long time, because when he finally went back to bed and spooned up behind the wife he loved so fiercely, the first light of the late dawn was turning the world grey.
*
Jonas Holly liked to think of himself as the protector, but the killer was a protector too, in his own way.
They were trying to protect different people, that was all.
Not for the first time, he wondered whether he should speak to Jonas. Maybe a face-to-face would be useful. Let Jonas see who he was dealing with; see if they could come to some kind of agreement. He was not an unreasonable man.
Even though the killer despised Jonas for his weakness, somehow the policeman still kept getting in the way. He had been diverted twice now because of Jonas, and gave him grudging credit for that.
Still, the policeman might not be doing his job, but he couldn't keep the killer from doing his for ever.
He glanced at his watch and saw it was 4am. He snapped on a pair of surgical gloves and slid a souvenir letter-opener out of his pocket. By the moonlight he could see the glint of fake gold-enamel lettering on the handle: A Gift from Weston-Super-Mare.
He had noticed this first-floor window in the big old building. The only one that had not been replaced with plastic double glazing. He'd noticed it years ago. He'd noticed a lot of things over the years but had never really felt the need to use them before.
Now he felt the need.
He climbed on to the water butt and from there he swung easily on to the toughened glass roof. He braced his feet against the struts for purchase and slipped the letter-opener between the old wooden frames.
Then the killer pushed aside the catch, slid the sash up - and quietly climbed through the window into the Sunset Lodge Retirement Home.
*
Gary Liss liked the nights at Sunset Lodge. The days were all bustle but the nights made him think of old war movies where nurses moved quietly between softly coughing patients, carrying candles.
At night there were just three members of staff on duty. That was usually plenty. Mostly the residents slept through, with only occasional calls for help with the commode. They had one sleepwalker at present. Mrs Eaves had scared the shit out of him the first time he'd seen her tottering towards him in her flowing white nightie. Now he quite enjoyed the break in routine that was the silent little dance he occasionally performed with Mrs Eaves on the landing while he tried to head her off at the pass so she wouldn't dance straight down the wide stairwell with its thick, swirly carpet that hid the stains so well. Mr Cooke had invested in an infrared alarm which fired a clever red beam across Mrs Eaves's bedroom door and beeped loudly in the staffroom whenever she took to wandering through the