Darkside_ A Novel - Belinda Bauer [71]
Jonas nodded neutrally.
'Get a picture of Liss,' Marvel said as Jonas left, then added, 'preferably one where he's not wearing leather shorts.'
Reynolds and Marvel sat for a minute in the soporific heat of the garden room. God knew what it was like in the summer. Reynolds wrinkled his nose. The room was clean and tidy but it smelled of old things.
'Liss lied to us,' said Marvel.
'Only about his sexuality,' shrugged Reynolds. 'That's understandable in a small village.'
'Not in a fucking murder investigation, it's not.'
'Jonas seems to think it's beyond him,' said Reynolds cautiously.
'Bollocks to him. He's a boy scout.'
Several old ladies looked round at the language and Marvel lowered his voice. 'You think Liss didn't do it?'
'No, sir,' said Reynolds - and meant it. 'I was only keeping an open mind, that's all. As we haven't interviewed him yet.'
'Well when we have him behind bars, I'll keep an open mind too. Until then he's Jack the fucking Ripper in my book.'
One of the CSIs spoke from the door: 'We've got a trail.'
Reynolds got up, but Marvel didn't rise from the piano stool. Instead he pursed his lips and looked around at the remaining residents. They wept and held each other's hands - and stared into their own short futures with new fear.
'The old, the weak, the infirm,' he said in a low but harsh voice that Reynolds had to lean forward to hear ...
'This is not a killing - it's a cull.'
*
Jonas had no fear of going to Paul Angell's alone. He knew it wasn't Gary Liss. He couldn't have said how he knew it. It was the same way he knew it wasn't Peter Priddy, and the same way he'd known the identity of the body in the stream; the same way he knew that the killer of Margaret Priddy had also killed Yvonne Marsh. He just felt it.
Big deal, he berated himself under his breath, as he drove carefully through the snow to Withypool. He seemed to know an awful lot about who the killer wasn't. But he felt no closer to understanding who the killer was. And although he hadn't been involved in the investigation, he also had a gut feeling that Marvel had no more insight than he did. The man had the look of someone who has just realized he has wandered off a true path and into quicksand. Something in Jonas enjoyed knowing that the abrasive Marvel was suffering.
They were all suffering.
Jonas found it hard to grasp what was happening to his village; to his friends and neighbours; to the very life he had always known.
He had already called Lucy from Sunset Lodge. Woken her up to ask if she had the knife with her, less than an hour since he'd taken so much care not to wake her as he slipped out of bed in response to the vibration of his phone. She had asked him to repeat the question, and said crossly, 'Wait a mo.' She had taken ages to groggily turn on the light and look for the knife, and, while she did, Jonas had the nutty idea that he should attach it to her with a piece of elastic the way surfers did with their boards. If an intruder broke in, she wouldn't be able to ask him to 'wait a mo' while she groped about on the bedside table for her only means of defence.
Finally she'd said, 'Yes, why?' still sounding irritated. He didn't blame her. Even without being woken in the early hours and ordered to seek out random cutlery, Lucy's moods could be erratic nowadays. Dr Wickramsinghe told them it was 'to be expected', but Jonas never quite did expect it.
Briefly he'd told her what had happened, because not telling her would only have irritated her further, and she'd been shocked into silence.
'I'll be home as soon as I can,' he'd said.
'OK,' she'd answered in a voice that was not ratty or cross, only very small. 'Be careful, Jonas.'
*
'There's blood on the roof.'
Marvel followed the CSI's finger to what looked like a couple of thin smears on the glass between a small window above the garden room and the guttering over the water-butt. He wondered how they could tell from down here, or whether they'd already been on the roof.
'Might be the killer's,' said Reynolds