Part 33 (2/2)

's.h.i.+t,' said Grey. 'You think he's got brain damage?'

'Where's the f.u.c.king the f.u.c.king ambulance?' cried Singh. ambulance?' cried Singh.

'Call control and tell them we need an air ambulance,' said Reynolds. 'Tell them officer down.'

Pollard opened his phone and scurried about the courtyard, seeking a signal.

Jonas started to heap snow on to Marvel's burned legs and Singh and Rice quickly did the same.

'He'll be fine,' said Reynolds with more confidence than he felt. He leaned over Marvel and said, 'Sir? John? Can you hear me, sir?'

Marvel's eyes flickered and rolled back in his head, then steadied and came to something like focus on his Task Force and Jonas Holly looking down at him.

'Murder,' he whispered hoa.r.s.ely.

'What, sir?' Reynolds put his ear close to Marvel's lips.

'Murder,' he mouthed again weakly.

This time Reynolds got it.

'He said murder.'

The others looked at him, confused.

Reynolds shrugged and - with a wholly inappropriate sense of dawning happiness - realized he was now in charge, due to the unforeseen incapacity of the Senior Investigating Officer. The fire was obviously beyond their control, even though Grey had finally arrived with a coil of heavy-duty yellow hosepipe over his shoulder. Now he needed to stop responding like a panicky man in pyjamas, and start responding like an SIO at a crime scene. He swelled visibly as he straightened up over Marvel's p.r.o.ne figure half buried in snow.

'Charlie, get that pipe hooked up and you and Dave do your best,' he told Grey and Pollard, then pointed at Marvel. 'Armand and Elizabeth, keep helping him him. The whole area is a potential crime scene. Me and Jonas will take a look round, just in case.' Jonas and I I. Jonas and I I. Jesus Christ! One man down and his grammar was all over the f.u.c.king place.

'We're just giving up on her, are we?' said Jonas.

'Yes,' said Reynolds, thrilled by the horrible brutality of that truth. He looked Jonas square in the eye in case he was going to have trouble with him, but the young policeman just gave a tilt of his head that might have been a.s.sent, might have been a shrug. Either way, Reynolds strode away from the scene of the crime and fetched his torch and his back-up torch for Jonas, then led him across the courtyard.

They left the orange glow and the heat that was turning the snowy courtyard into a giant puddle, and moved into the darkness behind the stables. Once away from the action, it was shockingly serene. Jonas felt quite removed from the horror of it all. The farmhouse burning down sounded like a jolly bonfire; the tiles blasting off the roof like rockets and bangers. The smell of roasting meat filled the air and Jonas s.h.i.+vered, but got a pang of hunger that disgusted the vegetarian in him.

He felt strangely ambivalent about Joy Springer inside the burning house. He wondered if her cats had died too, and thought of the way their fur made him sneeze whenever he'd gone into the gloomy old kitchen with its towering dresser and Belfast sink.

Reynolds switched his torch on; Jonas followed suit and immediately went blind, but for the two bright shafts of speckled light which showed tunnels of falling snow. He turned it off again, without bothering to explain to Reynolds why it was easier to see without it.

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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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, s.h.i.+ning 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 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.

'f.u.c.k!' 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.

's.h.i.+t,' said Reynolds. 's.h.i.+t f.u.c.k s.h.i.+t!'

'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.

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