Darkside Read Free Page A

instead of the sensible amenities of self-service petrol stations, meaningful road-signs and his beloved Kings Arms.
    The Divisional Surgeon had already found cuts andbruising inside Margaret Priddy's mouth where her lips had been crushed against her teeth, and the pathologist might find even more. All it would take now was for the Scientific Investigations Department in Portishead to confirm that the saliva and mucus on the well-plumped pillow found lying next to Mrs Priddy belonged to the victim, and they would have their upgrade to murder and their murder weapon all in one neat forensic package.
    Marvel looked at the empty bed over which three white-paper-clad CSIs crouched like folk off to a costume party dressed as sperm.
    'I like the son for this,' Marvel told DS Reynolds. Marvel loved saying that he 'liked' someone for something. It made him feel as if he were in a Quentin Tarantino film. His south-London accent was a handicap but not a bar to such pronouncements.
    'Yes, sir,' said DS Reynolds carefully.
    'Sick of watching his inheritance pour down the home-nursing drain.'
    'Yes, sir.'
    'So what have we got?'
    'So far? Hairs, fibres, fluids--
    'Semen?'
    'Doesn't look like it, sir. Just what was on the pillow, and urine.'
    'I thought she was catheterized?'
    'I think the bag must've burst.'
    'So the perp could be covered in piss.'
    'Yes, sir.'
    'Lovely. Anything missing?'
    'Doesn't look like a burglary, sir. If something was taken then the killer knew exactly what he was looking for and where to find it.'
    Marvel glanced around the room with its old dark furniture. A lifetime of use was evidenced by the wear around the dull brass handles on the chest of drawers. Nothing looked disturbed; even the lace doily on the dresser was flat and un-mussed.
    'I want the names of all the nurses employed and hair samples from everyone at the scene.'
    'Yes, sir.'
    'Prints?'
    'Not so far.'
    It was a bitterly cold January and the killer could have worn gloves for that reason alone. But Marvel hoped he was not just some opportunist burglar who had overreacted to finding a woman watching him silently from the bed in what he'd thought was an empty room. Marvel hoped he'd planned ahead. Whether he'd planned burglary or murder ahead was open to question, but the fact that it looked unlikely that they would find prints made the whole case more interesting to Marvel. He hated to waste his talents on the low and the stupid, and - since coming to Somerset - he'd started to tire a little of the flailing drunks who'd turned from nuisances to killers because of the unfortunate coming together of heads and kerbs, and of the glazed teenagers whose generosity in sharing their gear had been repaid by their ingrate friends dying curled around pub toilets with shit in their pants and in their veins.
    No, the gloves made the killer a more worthwhile quarry in Marvel's eyes.
    Just how worthwhile remained to be seen.
    *

    Four hundred yards before the sign that read PLEASE DRIVESLOWLY THROUGH SHIPCOTT was the house Jonas had grown up in, and from where his parents had been carried to their graves. Not house really, more cottage - although cottage sounded nicer than it really was, as if it were the picture on a box of souvenir fudge. This cottage was squat and tiled rather than thatched, and attached to its only neighbour like a conjoined twin. The pair of them sat and glared across the narrow road at the high hedge beyond it, which cut off both light and the view from the downstairs windows. Both twins had identical silvered-oak nameplates on their garden gates: Rose Cottage and Honeysuckle Cottage. The John and Mary of adjoining country homes. Rose for Jonas and Lucy, Honeysuckle for old Mrs Paddon next door.
    Jonas parked the garish police Land Rover behind Lucy's Beetle in the track beside Rose Cottage and felt his heart quicken.
    He had to keep hold of himself.
    Had to step out on to the dry, freezing mud slowly and walk normally through the front door,