Darkside_ A Novel - Belinda Bauer [99]
The eighth carcass had already been taken away in an ambulance with a sheet over its blackened, grinning face.
The smell of death was overwhelming.
Turning to his friend through a blur of tears to find comfort in shared misery, Jonas had instead seen pale shock - and guilt.
'Why didn't they run away, Jonas? They should have run away!'
The ponies had died because of him. Because he was too weak to stop it.
Jonas started to shake.
'Sweetheart. What's wrong?'
'Danny Marsh is dead,' he told her bluntly.
And then - finally - he started to cry.
*
'I'm glad he's gone,' said Joy Springer. 'Good riddance to bad rubbish.'
Marvel was so surprised that he sloshed Cinzano on the kitchen table. The stuff wasn't so bad once you got a taste for it.
Joy sat on a kitchen chair, elbows on the table and her glass outstretched for a refill. The old woman's frizzy grey bun had escaped its grips and she looked like Albert Einstein on a bad-hair day.
'Why?' he said - and Marvel didn't often say that around Joy Springer. He'd soon learned in their almost nightly sessions not to use certain words. Why was high on the list, with its answering convolutions and explanations, although When was the real killer, as it allowed Joy to ramble back over what felt like the last 150 years of her life - none of it of the slightest interest to Marvel. One night she had held him hell-bound, running through the names of her friends from nursery school onwards. No stories, no descriptions, no insightful recollections or pivotal moments - just a litany of meaningless names like a bore of biblical begattings.
'Nothing,' she said after a pause, and waggled her glass at him.
Marvel was instantly fascinated. All of a sudden here was something Joy Springer didn't want to talk about.
'You knew Danny Marsh?'
'Years back.' She shrugged. 'Something be wrong with your arm, bay?'
But Marvel withheld the bottle and took a deep breath. 'When?'
The story Joy Springer told was a good one. Everyone has to have one, Marvel reasoned, even if it was bullshit.
It was a story of flames and smoke and panic and of murder, which the coroner had stupidly ruled misadventure, after hearing of how Robert Springer was both an ardent horseman and an ardent smoker - two hobbies that Marvel gathered should be kept apart, like wives and girlfriends.
Not only was the coroner a conspiratorial fool, but Danny Marsh was the killer, according to Joy Springer. She became loud and slurred about it without ever giving Marvel any real evidence, then lost her thread a bit and went off at a paranoid tangent that included the prick of an executor, the lousy job a local builder had done on the stable conversions, and some idiot vet who said her cats needed worming.
After three more glasses of Cinzano, Joy Springer suddenly got up and wobbled across to the Welsh dresser. She opened a door on an avalanche of paperwork, old magazines, cards and photographs.
'Robert's things,' she mumbled. 'I don't like to throw them away. Memories.'
Marvel wondered again at the sheer tedium of those memories. Who the hell would want to mull over them?
Yet another tumbler allowed her to find what she was looking for, and she handed Marvel a photograph.
'Tha's Danny Marsh when her were a bay,' she slurred. 'Little sod would be in jail if your lot had done a proper job, not living here throwing it in my face!'
Although the photo was of two boys of about ten years old, Marvel recognized Danny immediately. The photo had been kept bright in the dresser, and Danny Marsh's brown hair had apparently been given the same cut its entire life - short back and sides. He didn't look like a little sod; he looked like a cheeky, happy kid, holding the reins of a shaggy red pony. The photo had been taken at a show and both boys were in white shirts and Pony Club ties. The