Darkside_ A Novel - Belinda Bauer [77]
When Marvel called about the murders at Sunset Lodge, she had wanted to rush out of the house and up the snowy road to be part of it all. Missing the buzz of the scene of a triple murder was killing her. The thought of that idiot Pollard being there when she was not was especially hard to bear.
All day she was short and gloomy and that night she sat fuming on the easy chair beside the sofa, from where Alan and Danny stared sightlessly at Top Gear repeats. Even she had seen this one and she'd only been here nine days.
Alan went to bed at 10.30pm, Danny at twelve when she did. She said goodnight with forced cheerfulness; he didn't bother to force anything apart from a mumble, and closed his bedroom door.
She did her teeth and washed her face, trying hard not to touch the toothpaste-spotted taps or even the cracked and grimy pink soap, which looked as if it might have been a pre-war fixture along with the mottled tiles.
As she opened her bedroom door, she shivered.
She sidled towards the head of her bed and shivered again. The little room was always cold but there was a terrible draught coming from somewhere ...
As if in answer to an unspoken question, the open curtains wafted inwards.
The window was slightly open. 'Slightly' in this winter was enough for the cold to stab its way into the room and chill it like a fridge.
A cheap office desk lamp with a flexible neck was the only makeshift light in here. Rice turned it to the window.
On the sill was a footprint showing where someone had climbed from the roof of the lean-to and into her room.
Elizabeth Rice had watched enough teen horror flicks on the sofa with Eric to know that the killer was right behind her with a steak knife.
She turned on a stifled shriek, throwing up her hands to protect her throat.
Nobody there.
She took three lurching sideways steps towards her bedroom door to alert the Marshes that there had been an intruder, and then stopped dead, even though her mind continued to click through scenarios so fast that it felt like one of those flicker-books where a thousand static images make a jerky motion picture.
The print was coming in.
There was no print going out.
If this was the killer, then the killer was still in the house.
Rice looked down at the boxes of junk and selected an ugly blue vase. She weighed it in her hand. She had always been a supporter of the British police remaining un-armed apart from specialized units. She felt that the lack of a firearm enforced the tacit notion of policing by consent, and that - democratically speaking - that was a good thing.
But right now she would give her right arm for a big gun.
Rice walked through the house - quietly, but not quietly enough to scare herself - switching on lights, checking doors and rattling windows. She stood outside the other bedroom doors and listened to the Marshes breathe.
There was no intruder.
There was no smearing of the inward-bound print. Therefore Rice felt it was fair to deduce that whoever had climbed in through this window had not climbed out through it again - and therefore they must be in the house.
Unless the person who had come in through the window had climbed out of it first before they muddied their shoes.
In which case there were only two suspects ...
Neither Alan nor Danny Marsh had moved from the sofa today apart from brief visits to the bathroom or to the kitchen for tea.
Was it possible that between her checks last night - between midnight and 6am - one of the Marshes had crept past her bed and climbed out of her window?
Then back in?
Possible.
Improbable, of course, but Sherlock Holmes would base an entire case on improbable.
Her window was at the back of the house and there was a four-foot drop to the lean-to. With the downstairs doors and windows locked, it was the only viable route into or out of the house. It was, after all, the way the killer had entered Margaret Priddy's home.
The thought of someone in her bedroom while she slept was disturbing enough; the idea that someone might have passed through on their way to and from murdering three