Darkside

And then DCI John Marvel got another, even bigger tingle as he put two and two together and made what looked very much like four to him …

Wasn’t Lucy Holly a burden to her husband?

He put his so-called beer down on the table so fast that it slopped over the rim, and stood up.

He had to get back to his room. He had to be really alone so he could think about this clearly. He needed to write things down and draw little boxes and connect them with biro lines of reasoning. He needed to be absolutely sure before he exposed his theory to Reynolds, to give that bastard the smallest possible chance of poking holes in it.

And, more than anything, he needed a real drink to help him.

* * *

Jonas was pulling a ewe’s head out of a tree.

He’d spent several minutes trying to get a good grip on the struggling, ice-covered sheep without luck, and made a new effort to focus before his hands got too cold to function.

The snow was falling again in a silent blizzard that threatened to obscure his view of Shipcott below. Jonas had done his best to get over to Edgcott to do his rounds but he’d had to turn back at the top of the hill when he lost the road completely. He’d spotted the sheep twenty yards away and decided to do his good deed for the day.

He spoke soothingly to the ewe but she didn’t believe him for a second, and bleated in terror, while now and then raising her tail to vent hard marble-sized droppings in machine-gun bursts, as if paying out a shit jackpot.

Jonas Holly cursed under his breath but he understood the ewe’s fear. He had learned to live with fear.

It didn’t mean he wasn’t scared.

All the time.

All the fucking time! He could hear Danny saying those words again.

Jonas felt that if he could only keep all his fear separate and compartmentalized, then he would be able to manage it, like a lion tamer performing tricks with just one lion at a time – carefully twisting his head into the sharp, fetid maw, feeling the prick of teeth on his cheek, and then herding the beast back to its cage, before bringing out the next lion, whose job was to jump through hoops.

At times, though, Jonas got the feeling that the catches on the cages were loose, that the lions were plotting behind his back – and that there was imminent danger of a great escape, during which he would be torn to pieces in his top hat and red tails.

Which was probably what this poor ewe thought was about to happen to her.

Don’t be scared. I’ll protect you. That’s my job.

The words rushed at him from nowhere and for the first time in decades he remembered the face of the policeman who had told him that. The man had looked like a father. Not like his father, but like the kind of father Jonas had seen on TV – middle-aged, greying at the temples, slightly overweight. Jonas could even remember the shiny buttons on the policeman’s tunic and being overwhelmed that this exciting uniform was actually in his mother’s cramped little kitchen.

The policeman had asked his parents to stay in the front room. Jonas had panicked then, and imagined the policeman taking him out of the back door to prison while his parents waited trustingly in front of the TV that was showing Grange Hill. Or he might hurt him to find out what he wanted to know. Jonas didn’t want to be hurt any more. But he also didn’t want to tell. If he told on Danny about the stables, it would all come out. All the horror and the shame would come out and everybody would know about it, even his parents. And nobody must ever know that Jonas even knew that pathetic child – let alone used to be him. Even he, Jonas, had learned to leave that weak little boy to his fate and go somewhere else while unspeakable things were happening.

The big policeman had bent his head and asked quiet questions about the fire. Jonas had told him the truth – that he knew nothing. But he didn’t tell him the truth of what he suspected.

Somehow the policeman had known that he was hiding something. Like magic, he knew. How? He had probed and prodded and gently persuaded until finally Jonas had burst into tears.

‘Are you scared, Jonas?’ he’d asked with great kindness.

Jonas had nodded with his fists in his eyes. The policeman had taken one of those hot, wet fists and engulfed it in his own.

‘Don’t be scared,’ he’d said. ‘I’ll protect you. That’s my job.’

It was tempting. So tempting. To blurt it all out and be done with it and let grown-ups take charge. But Jonas never told because he knew that there was only one way now to protect himself, and that was by protecting the other boy – even from the nice policeman …

Here and now, Jonas’s face was as flushed and hot as his hands were cold. He wished he could run away and never come back. He had failed the village and – now that he had cried – he had failed Lucy too. She had seen his weakness and could no longer call on him for strength.

He was falling apart on her.