Darkside_ A Novel - Belinda Bauer [95]
'Bollocks,' said Marvel. 'You knew it was him all along.'
'That's not true!'
It wasn't! Jonas felt panicky that Marvel could even think it! He was an officer of the law and if he was aware of wrongdoing, he would take action - whoever the hell it was doing the wrong.
Apart from Lucy.
Probably.
But that was all!
'I don't believe Danny killed anyone.'
'He cracked,' said Marvel. 'Under the pressure from his mother going bananas. Killed Margaret Priddy as a kind of trial run most likely, then his own mother. Then the people up at Sunset Lodge.'
'Why?' said Jonas. 'Why kill anyone after he'd killed his mother, if that was the problem?'
'Maybe he passed the tipping point,' said Marvel, pleased that he'd remembered without recourse to Reynolds. 'Maybe once he cracked, the floodgates just opened. We were about to pull him in. The night of the killings at Sunset Lodge, he got out of a window at his house. We've got shoe prints on the sill. Didn't know that, did you?'
'No,' said Jonas, and thought of the voice calling his name from the shadows beyond the garden gate that very same night, luring him out into the freezing dark ...
Jonas!
It had sounded like Danny.
But it had been a dream. Hadn't it?
If you won't do your job ...
He had no idea what Marvel meant. ... then I'll do it for you.
The mobile unit was cramped, damp and smelly. A flickering fluorescent strip made this feel like a Stasi interrogation.
'Sir, even if I believed he killed those people, which I don't, why would I cover it up?'
'You two were mates. I saw you on the playing field after we dragged his mother out of the stream. Good mates, I'd say. If he had something to hide, I reckon either you knew about it, or you've got something to hide too.'
'What?' demanded Jonas. 'What am I hiding?'
From the look on Reynolds's face, he'd only just beaten him to the question. Reynolds looked embarrassed even to be there.
'You tell me,' said Marvel, and sat back in his chair with an air of dogged certainty. 'First,' he continued when he got no response, 'first tell me why you hit Danny Marsh the other day.'
'He swung at me!'
'So arrest him. Don't beat the shit out of him!'
'I think that's a bit of an exaggeration, sir,' said Reynolds, and refused to look at Marvel so he could not be disciplined by a glare.
Jonas barely heard him. He recalled that feeling of threat that had come off Danny. While he laughed and joked about old times, Jonas had been consumed with fear, desperate for him to back off and stop ... In hindsight it seemed very minor.
'I felt threatened, sir,' he said truthfully. 'If I over-reacted, that's why.'
'Why did you fall out with him?'
Jonas was confused. 'Fall out?'
'When you were kids,' Marvel insisted.
'When we were kids?' Jonas gave a small laugh.
'Yes,' said Marvel, deadly serious. 'When you were eleven or so.'
Jonas looked blank.
'Ten or eleven. You were best mates. Then one day you weren't. What happened?'
The smell of burned things. Burned wood ... burned hair ... burned flesh.
Only confusing fragments.
'I don't remember, sir.'
'Bollocks. You do.'
Jonas shrugged. He didn't. He didn't want to.
He looked around. The cramped unit was dingy and dirty. He didn't think he could work in a place like this. There was a calendar on the wall that was four years out of date. Four years ago, Lu could have walked upstairs on her hands. Four years ago, Jonas was following another path to another place. Four years ago would do him nicely, thank you very much, so he let his mind linger there instead of here, where Lucy was dying, Danny was dead, and DCI Marvel was being a prick.
'... to him? Holly!'
Jonas came back, blinking. 'What?'
'What did you say to him?'
'Say to who?'
'Whom,' said Reynolds. 'Sorry.'
They both ignored him.
'To Danny Marsh. When he was dying. Rice says you said something to him.'
'I didn't say anything.'