Darkside Read Free Page B

and clean the bathroom and fill the washer-dryer, and make the tea - just the way Mark Dennis had told him he must.
    ' Lucy needs you. You can't fall apart on her, Jonas. Now more than ever .'
    He wouldn't fall apart. He would keep hold of himself. Even though every day for the past three weeks he had walked up the cracked and un-weeded stone pathway with his heart squeezed into his throat with fear, and his keys jingling like wind chimes in his trembling hands. The dread was almost overwhelming - the dread that he would push open the front door and it would once more wedge softly against the body of his wife. Or that he would call her echoing name and finally find her in a bath of tepid, pink water. Or that he would walk into the house enclosed in winterdarkness and feel her bare feet nudge his face as they dangled in the stairwell.
    Jonas shook himself on the doorstep, forcing his breathing back to normal so he wouldn't cry with relief when he saw her, and pushed open the door.
    'Yuk' had made it home before him.
    Lucy greeted him with the word and a single questioning eyebrow as he walked into the living room. If he'd had to hazard a guess he'd say that Mark Dennis had told his receptionist, who'd passed it on to Mr Jacoby or someone in Mr Jacoby's shop. From there it could have been anyone who finally brought it to the Holly household. Steven the paper boy, old Will Bishop the milkman, or one of the several visitors Lucy received sometimes on her couch, between the horror movies which Jonas ordered by mail for her in a never-ending supply, and which she watched with indecent joy from behind her favourite tasselled cushion.
    He gave a mock-sigh and shrugged expansively, making her laugh. It lit up her face. Lucy was always beautiful to Jonas, but when she smiled, that became a universal truth - even after the ravages of disease and the strain of recent weeks. Her boyish face with its upturned, freckled nose and widely spaced green eyes - together with her cap of cropped auburn hair - gave her an elfin look.
    He kissed the top of her head and she took his hand and became serious.
    'Poor Margaret.'
    Poor Margaret indeed. But it was a relief. A relief to speak of death like common gossips for whom it was merely a passing notion, instead of a time bomb in their pockets.
    'What have you heard?' It was a village in the middle of Exmoor; she could have heard anything.
    'That somebody killed her.'
    'Possibly. Taunton have it now.' He squeezed her hand, feeling with relief that it was warm and steady, then turned and sat down beside her on the edge of the couch. 'How are you feeling, Lu?'
    It was a question he'd been asking daily in one form or another for nearly three years. Sometimes it came out sounding strange to his ears, other times it was a studiedly casual 'All right, Lu?' He could reduce it to a mere questioning look from across the room, which she would answer with a smile or a shrug.
    Sometimes he didn't even have to ask.
    Those were the days when he came home to find her curled and gasping in the rib-crunching spasms of the MS 'hug', or jabbing at a broken plate and spilled food with the dustpan and brush, her spastic hands that had caused the mess in the first place unable to make it right. Sometimes when he found her like that he pulled the rug over them both on the couch and tickled her arms languorously until she relaxed and finally slept; other times he held her while she shook and cried and slapped at her own failing body with her angry, twisted hands. Jonas had never cried with her - never given in to the self-pity that that would imply.
    After she had been diagnosed, everything had changed - at home and at work. He had withdrawn an application for Anti-Terrorism and applied instead for this backwater posting where he was largely autonomous and could fit work around home rather than the other way round. They moved into Rose Cottage, which had been closed up after the death of his parents. Jonas had never wanted to