Darkside

The others crowded round, helping him to drag it out of the danger zone.

It was Marvel.

Only half of one sleeve and the upper part of his coat still gave him much cover – his vest and shorts were just blackened rags. His left shin was a vivid mess of red and black, like the leading edge of a lava-flow, with the bedrock of bone showing through in places. The rest of that leg was livid and raw, with bubbles in the flesh of the thigh. His ever-damp shoes had protected his feet from the worst of it, but it was small comfort.

Singh immediately dropped to his knees to check his vitals.

‘Not breathing,’ he said, and started CPR.

Jonas coughed and spat before gasping, ‘Is there anyone else?’

‘Mrs Springer, we think,’ said Rice.

Jonas turned to go back but Reynolds and Pollard barred his way.

‘She can’t be alive,’ said Reynolds. ‘Stay here.’

‘She might be!’ cried Jonas, bursting into a fresh bout of coughing and trying to go around them.

‘Stay here,’ said Reynolds. ‘That’s an order.’

Jonas looked at him in fury and Reynolds almost put up a hand in self-defence.

‘It’s your job to protect people!’

‘Not dead people,’ said Reynolds – and although it was a good answer, he took no pleasure in saying it.

‘He’s coming back,’ said Singh with relief flooding his voice.

They all turned to look down at Marvel, who was now breathing noisily and irregularly, and jerking his arms and legs as if trying to make angels in the snow.

‘Shit,’ said Grey. ‘You think he’s got brain damage?’

‘Where’s the fucking ambulance?’ cried Singh.

‘Call control and tell them we need an air ambulance,’ said Reynolds. ‘Tell them officer down.’

Pollard opened his phone and scurried about the courtyard, seeking a signal.

Jonas started to heap snow on to Marvel’s burned legs and Singh and Rice quickly did the same.

‘He’ll be fine,’ said Reynolds with more confidence than he felt. He leaned over Marvel and said, ‘Sir? John? Can you hear me, sir?’

Marvel’s eyes flickered and rolled back in his head, then steadied and came to something like focus on his Task Force and Jonas Holly looking down at him.

‘Murder,’ he whispered hoarsely.

‘What, sir?’ Reynolds put his ear close to Marvel’s lips.

‘Murder,’ he mouthed again weakly.

This time Reynolds got it.

‘He said murder.’

The others looked at him, confused.

Reynolds shrugged and – with a wholly inappropriate sense of dawning happiness – realized he was now in charge, due to the unforeseen incapacity of the Senior Investigating Officer. The fire was obviously beyond their control, even though Grey had finally arrived with a coil of heavy-duty yellow hosepipe over his shoulder. Now he needed to stop responding like a panicky man in pyjamas, and start responding like an SIO at a crime scene. He swelled visibly as he straightened up over Marvel’s prone figure half buried in snow.

‘Charlie, get that pipe hooked up and you and Dave do your best,’ he told Grey and Pollard, then pointed at Marvel. ‘Armand and Elizabeth, keep helping him. The whole area is a potential crime scene. Me and Jonas will take a look round, just in case.’ Jonas and I. Jonas and I. Jesus Christ! One man down and his grammar was all over the fucking place.

‘We’re just giving up on her, are we?’ said Jonas.

‘Yes,’ said Reynolds, thrilled by the horrible brutality of that truth. He looked Jonas square in the eye in case he was going to have trouble with him, but the young policeman just gave a tilt of his head that might have been assent, might have been a shrug. Either way, Reynolds strode away from the scene of the crime and fetched his torch and his back-up torch for Jonas, then led him across the courtyard.

They left the orange glow and the heat that was turning the snowy courtyard into a giant puddle, and moved into the darkness behind the stables. Once away from the action, it was shockingly serene. Jonas felt quite removed from the horror of it all. The farmhouse burning down sounded like a jolly bonfire; the tiles blasting off the roof like rockets and bangers. The smell of roasting meat filled the air and Jonas shivered, but got a pang of hunger that disgusted the vegetarian in him.

He felt strangely ambivalent about Joy Springer inside the burning house. He wondered if her cats had died too, and thought of the way their fur made him sneeze whenever he’d gone into the gloomy old kitchen with its towering dresser and Belfast sink.

Reynolds switched his torch on; Jonas followed suit and immediately went blind, but for the two bright shafts of speckled light which showed tunnels of falling snow. He turned it off again, without bothering to explain to Reynolds why it was easier to see without it.