Darkside Read Free

without alerting his mother.
    Now the thirty-one-year-old Jonas swallowed that same bitter pill and unfocused his eyes so he could look straight over Marvel's greying hair.
    'I'm very sorry, sir.'
    Marvel regarded the tall young policeman with a little disappointment. He'd really have preferred the fool to have got defensive and angry. He loved a good fight. Instead PC Holly had rolled over like a puppy and shown the world his belly.
    Ah well.
    Marvel turned away before speaking.
    'You can go,' he said.
    In small defiance, Jonas bit back his 'Yes, sir' and left without another word. Halfway down the stairs he heard Marvel say something he didn't catch, and the laughter of the big-town cops.
    *

    Some investigation, thought DCI John Marvel, as he stared out at the leaden Somerset sky. A dead old woman with abroken nose. Big deal. But a suspicious death was a suspicious death and helped to justify the funding that kept his Task Force (as he used to like to call it over late suppers with Debbie) in existence. So if they could whip suspicious death up into murder, then all well and good.
    Marvel had spent twenty-five years as a homicide detective. Half his life. To Marvel there was no other crime worth investigating - nothing that came close to the sheer finality of death by the hand of another. It kicked assault's arse, rode roughshod over robbery and even trumped rape in his book. Of course, there were degrees - and not every case was a thrill. Some were one long slog from beginning to end, some went off like firecrackers and turned into damp squibs, while others started off quietly and then spiralled wildly out of control. There was no telling at the start how it was going to finish, but the thing that kicked each one off was what sustained Marvel after all these years. The body. The corpse. That stabbed, strangled, beaten, shot, dismembered, poisoned used-to-be-person hung over his head every day like a cat toy - endlessly fascinating, tantalizing, taunting, always reminding him of why he was here and the job he had to do.
    The burgled replaced their televisions, bruises healed on the beaten, and the raped kept living, kept going to work and buying groceries and sending postcards and singing in the choir.
    The murdered were dead and stayed dead.
    For ever.
    How could any true copper not love the murdered and the challenge they threw down from beyond the grave?
    AVENGE ME!
    Marvel could never hear that ghostly voice in his headwithout also imagining some kind of broad, dark cape billowing in righteous vengeance.
    It was stirring stuff.
    And Marvel was always stirred.
    Eventually.
    Even by a case like this in a place like this, he knew he would be stirred once death by violence was confirmed. He had to sort of grow into being stirred.
    But until then, he was just a bit cheesed off.
    Marvel sighed.
    Margaret Priddy's body had been removed to civilization - or what passed for it in this neck of the yokel woods. He hated to be out of town. He'd been born and brought up in London. Battersea, to be precise, where the stunted lime trees grown through lifting, cracking pavement were all the green he felt anyone should suffer. Once he'd carved his name in the bark and been repelled by the damp, greenish flesh his penknife had exposed. Sometimes as a kid he'd hung around a bus stop close to the park, but had rarely ventured in. Only on the occasional Saturday for a kickabout, and even then he'd never warmed to the muddy, olive-green grass. Playing behind the garages or under the railway arches was cleaner and faster. Grass was overrated, in Marvel's opinion, and it was his constant gripe that most of the Avon and Somerset force area where he'd ended up working was covered in it.
    Now here he was in this shit-hole village in the middle of a moor that didn't even have the niceties of fences or barns on it, with the miserable prospect of having to conduct a murder investigation surrounded by the vagaries of gorse, yokels and pony shit