Darkside

They crossed the old hard standing with its ridged concrete, where the blacksmith used to shoe the ponies. Jonas could almost feel Taffy’s head, heavy in his arms as he dozed, while his neat little hoofs were shaved and shaped and scorched and hammered. That strangely comforting stink of burned hair, and the yard lurcher, Nelson, darting in to snatch the biggest bits of horn, which made his breath reek and gave him the runs …

Reynolds said something Jonas didn’t hear.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘Could be anywhere,’ said Reynolds again, shining his torch across the field behind the stables.

Jonas didn’t answer. From the corner of his eye he’d seen something regular at one edge of the concrete standing. Three or four darker patches in the snow which his memory could supply no immediate explanation for.

He dropped back from Reynolds and walked over to check it out.

Footprints.

Now that he had found what he was looking for, Jonas switched his torch back on and examined the depressions in the snow.

Although the snow was filling them fast – softening them and making identification impossible – they were definitely footprints. Jonas shone his torch into them. There was no tread visible at the bottom of each twelve-inch-deep impression, just a delicate frosting of new flakes glittering in the false light.

Jonas followed them with his torch.

The prints led down the hill – straight towards Rose Cottage.

‘Lucy!’ he shouted into the night, as if she might hear him.

Reynolds shone his torch in Jonas’s face and saw terror there.

‘What?’ he said.

‘My house!’ cried Jonas and pointed to where the bathroom light shone square and yellow two fields away. ‘He’s gone to my house! My wife! She’s alone. I left her alone!’

Then he started to run, bounding through the snow in long, awkward strides.

Reynolds ran after him for a few paces, then stopped. ‘Jonas! Wait!’

But Jonas ignored him.

‘Fuck!’ Reynolds turned and made his way back to the blackness behind the cottages. He needed reinforcements. If the killer was indeed at Jonas Holly’s house then he didn’t want to be the only back-up. Once back on the flat ground, he slipped and skidded around to the courtyard once more, almost surprised that things had been going on here without him. The house was still burning, Grey was still playing with the hosepipe, and Rice and Singh were still bent over Marvel and had started CPR again. Reynolds rushed straight to them.

‘How is he?’

‘Dead,’ said Singh between compressions.

‘Shit,’ said Reynolds. ‘Shit fuck shit!’

‘Yeah, I know,’ said Singh. ‘Should I stop?’

Reynolds thought of the months of work he’d put into the file he’d hoped would see Marvel kicked off the force in disgrace and without a pension.

Wasted.

Now Marvel had instead died trying to rescue a civilian from a burning building.

Die a hero, stay a hero.

Nothing was fair.

‘Yes,’ he told Singh. ‘Stop.’

Rice and Singh both stopped working on Marvel, and Grey stopped his own pointless task and came over and stood beside Rice. Singh remained kneeling in the sludge that the snow had become. He took off his jacket and laid it carefully over Marvel’s face. Then he noticed something sticking out of the inside pocket of Marvel’s coat and carefully removed a burned and crispy photograph.

Two charred and blistered boys, damaged beyond recognition.

‘Did he have children?’ he asked.

‘Don’t think so,’ said Grey.

‘Right,’ said Reynolds, before they could all get maudlin, ‘our man might be at Holly’s cottage down the hill. We all need to get there now!’

‘How?’ said Pollard, whose face was as black as a miner’s. ‘Even fire and ambulance can’t make it.’

‘Across the fields. You can see it from here. Everyone get a torch and a coat.’

They all looked at each other.

‘Come on!’ yelled Reynolds, and they all scurried into their respective cottages and out again in seconds, Singh in just a sweater.

‘Get your jacket,’ Reynolds told him roughly. ‘You need it more than him.’

Singh tentatively lifted his jacket off the body and pulled it on.

Then Reynolds led his new team out of the courtyard, leaving DCI John Marvel to another, colder shroud, which covered him slowly from a pitch-black sky.

* * *

When Lucy woke there was dust on her lips and carpet-print on her cheek.

She knew the sound of an empty house and this was it.

The telephone was downstairs. She didn’t know how long she had, and couldn’t afford the time the return journey would take.

She remembered her first line of defence and limped to the landing and tried to move the bookcase to the top of the stairs, but with her weakened hands and wrists it was a hopeless task which she was quickly forced to abandon.

She thought of banging on the wall to alert Mrs Paddon, then decided not to. What could an eighty-nine-year-old woman possibly do to help? Lucy would only be placing her in danger. Instead she went into the back bedroom, picked up the gaff, opened the trapdoor into the attic and – after several wavering attempts – managed to hook the eye on the sliding ladder and tug it to the ground.