Finders Keepers (14 page)

Charlie looked up towards the tents.

‘Mr King!’ he shouted. ‘Mr
King
!’

The man looked up and saw him. Charlie shrank back against his seat.

The man turned and walked quickly towards the minibus. As he came closer, Charlie saw his big green gloves and strangely flattened, featureless face. The man looked like the Guy they’d made at the school last Bonfire Night – but alive and walking.

Charlie had never been so scared in his life. Worse than lights out.

‘MR KING!’ he squealed into his own chest as he tried to stop the man unbuckling his safety harness. ‘MR KING!’

But the big voice was talking and then people were clapping too.

Charlie Peach continued to shout for someone to come and save him, but his terrified cries were quickly muffled by a strong woollen hand that smelled of hospitals.

Jonas was stopped half a dozen times on his way to the cars.

People meant well. He knew that. So he was polite and pleasant – and resisted the urge to tell them all to just go away and leave him alone.

A man in sunglasses and shirtsleeves shouted something he didn’t catch and started jogging towards him, and even before the man reached him, something told Jonas that this was bad news …

SHUT THE GATE
. Shut the gate shutthegate shutthegateshutthegate …

Jonas ran in time to the words in his head. Ran for the first time in over a year. Ran to the gate and swung it shut with a clang that reverberated like a giant bell. A BMW X5 turning in from the lane lurched to a halt to avoid being hit by all five bars.

‘What the
shit
!’ said the driver angrily, and then saw Jonas’s uniform and downgraded his protest to ‘What’s going on?’

‘We’ve got a missing child,’ panted Jonas, not even looking at him – already scanning the field for Charlie Peach. He raised his voice and said it again: ‘We’ve got a missing child!’

The words were like a fire alarm going off. People moved to him as if magnetized.

The gateman in a hi-vis vest was Graham Nash from the Red Lion.

‘Has anyone left?’ Jonas demanded.

‘A few.’

‘Who?’

Nash looked defensive. ‘I don’t know. I’m busy getting people in. People going out aren’t my job.’

‘You notice anyone in particular? Strangers?’

‘Shit, Jonas, I don’t bloody know. I can’t know everyone. The kid’s probably getting an ice cream.’

Jonas knew Charlie Peach – he lived in Shipcott – and he knew that was not the case. He put Graham Nash on the road to direct traffic away from the show.

‘But it’s not even lunchtime,’ Nash protested. ‘People are going to be very pissed off if they’ve paid their entries and I won’t let them in.’

‘This gate stays shut until we find the boy,’ said Jonas coldly, then he looked hopefully at his phone. Finding he was within range of a signal, he stood stock still so as not to lose it and called DI Reynolds.

Reynolds said he’d be right there and told him not to let anybody leave. Jonas didn’t waste time explaining that he’d already done that – just said ‘Yes’ and hung up.

He and Mike King jogged back to the judges’ caravan and commandeered the PA system. Through shards of feedback, Jonas asked all judges in all rings to halt their classes while they searched for Charlie Peach, then handed the microphone to the boy’s carer to give a description of him.

The moment the announcement was over, the mood of the show changed as if a switch had been thrown. The urgency and purpose were palpable. Horses were dismounted and hitched to horseboxes, people left their deckchairs and put down their cups of tea and swarmed through the tents and the cars, crawling underneath, opening boots, checking the Portaloos.

Horse people, thought Jonas. Good or bad, they really get things done.

Steven heard Jonas Holly’s voice on the PA system and flinched hard enough for Em to notice.

‘What’s up?’

‘Nothing. Just made me jump, that’s all.’

She smiled at him and he tried to smile back but it didn’t feel right on his face. He was suddenly tense.

They listened to the announcement, sitting on the grass with Skip dozing over their heads. Another voice boomed out, describing a boy with pale hair and a Dr Who T-shirt.

‘His name is Charlie,’ the voice said. ‘Charlie? If you can hear this, come on back to the minibus, all right, big man? I’ll wait for you there.’

Steven and Em looked around them.

‘He’s probably getting an ice cream,’ said Em.

‘Mm.’ Steven hoped she was right.

He sat for a minute more, inwardly twitching.

He couldn’t do nothing; he stood up. ‘I’m going to help look,’ he told her.

Em scrambled to her feet. ‘I’ll come too.’

She tied Skip to a piece of twine attached to a random horsebox and draped her jacket across the mudguard. ‘We won’t be long,’ she shrugged.

Steven watched the crowds looking in and under cars and around the tents and toilets. If the boy were there, someone else would find him. Instead, Steven led Em to the edge of the meadow, which was bounded by thick hawthorn hedges run through with old man’s beard, bindweed and the occasional wild clematis.

‘Do you know the kids who have gone missing?’ asked Em.

‘Nah.’ He shrugged. ‘The girl, Jess, went to our school but I didn’t know her.’

‘You must be the only one,’ said Em wryly.

Steven shrugged and added, ‘The boy wasn’t from round here.’

They walked clockwise around the meadow. In most places the hedge was so thick they couldn’t even see the field on the other side. Elsewhere it was thinner, but still made impassable by thorns. The field sloped away at the far end, and the show
disappeared
over the close horizon. The sound of it disappeared along with the sight. Deep in the second corner, close to a single oak tree, Em noticed a break in the hedge. They couldn’t get close to it because of waist-high nettles, but by walking on a little way and looking back, they could see the posts of a stile, disused and almost hidden by the surrounding foliage.

‘You think he could have got through there?’ said Em.

Steven examined the nettles, then shook his head. ‘They’d be broken if anyone had gone through them.’

They walked on. Even though they were only a hundred yards from where people were searching desperately for the missing boy, it was quiet here. The loudest sound was the chirrup of crickets in the long grass, and the occasional thump and rustle of rabbits as they warned each other and ran away. One baby, too young to understand danger, sat in the open as they approached. They were less than ten feet away before it gave a playful binky and hopped into the hedge, making them both laugh.

The ensuing silence was such that they could hear the rain-starved grass crackle underfoot.

‘Thanks for bringing back the trailer,’ said Em suddenly.

Steven’s stomach lurched. ‘I didn’t take it.’

‘It doesn’t matter who took it,’ said Em with a shrug.

Steven stopped her with a hand on her arm. He felt a little thrill at touching her skin and took his hand back hurriedly as she turned to him.

‘I promise,’ he said urgently. ‘I didn’t take it.’

Em nodded her understanding that the distinction was important to him. ‘But
you
brought it back,’ she said. ‘You remembered the code.’ She looked at him until he broke eye-contact.

When they walked on this time, she took his hand.

A tingle ran up Steven’s arm and spread across his chest, kick-starting his allergy again.

He stole a glance at her. She seemed unaffected. Their arms
formed
a V between them, his wiry and too long, hers bare and slim and perfect. At the point of the V, their hands tied a knot that swung easily – as if they’d been holding hands for years.

She said something and he didn’t hear her, so she said it again.

‘We should let that policeman know about the stile, just in case.’

Steven saw she was leading him back up the hill to the rows of cars. Even from this low angle, he could see Mr Holly towering above the roofs. Following him was one thing; initiating a conversation with him was another thing entirely.

‘No,’ he said, and stopped walking.

She stopped too and their hands slid apart.

‘Why?’

Steven floundered. ‘Just. No. Just because. He’s busy. And we shouldn’t walk over their … Over the … you know, crime scene and stuff.’

‘Crime scene? Kids go missing all the time at shows. They always find them and everything goes on the same.’ She spoke a little sharply – as if saying it would make it happen, and Steven took his uneasy cue from that.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘They’ll probably find him in a minute.’

But the genie was out of the bottle, and Em looked worried.

‘I’m going to tell him. You coming?’

She started walking. He didn’t follow her.

As Em spoke to Jonas Holly, the policeman looked across the roofs of the cars towards the corner of the field and made fleeting eye-contact with Steven.

Em returned to him. ‘He said he’d check it out.’

‘OK. Good.’

As they walked away, she looked at him quizzically. ‘Are you in trouble with the police?’

‘No. Of course not.’

‘Then why are you being so weird?’

What could he say? Explaining that he alone suspected that
the
village policeman had murdered his wife would make him sound crazy.

And now there was another suspicion as well. A new feeling just starting to take shape in Steven’s mind. Mr Holly had re-emerged, just as three children went missing. Steven didn’t have strong views on the validity of coincidence, but he had learned to trust his gut, and it rarely lied to him.

He could tell Em nothing of this, of course. Trying to justify odd behaviour by revealing insanity was unlikely to impress her. He knew this instinctively, too, and was relieved that that, at least, implied
some
sort of normality.

She was still looking at him, waiting for an answer.

‘Sorry,’ he said finally.

She stared at him for a long moment, then turned away.

He trailed behind her to where Skip was dozing in the sunshine.

*

You don’t love him
.

Jonas stared at the yellow note on the wheel and still hoped it was a hoax. A joke. Maybe Charlie was an attention-seeker – or another child had put him up to it. Charlie could be hiding in a Portaloo right now, giggling at the mayhem he’d caused, Jonas thought.

He hoped.

Because if it wasn’t a hoax, Jonas had an awful sinking feeling that Charlie Peach was already beyond their help.

All around the showground, people were searching. Maybe three hundred people in a single large field. If Charlie were still on the site, he’d have been found by now, surely?

If he weren’t, that meant that the gate had been shut too late.

At this time of day, the priority was to get people
into
the show, not to keep tabs on those few who were leaving after early
classes
or drop-offs. He couldn’t blame Graham Nash. The man on the gate was expected to do nothing more than make sure cars leaving didn’t crash into cars coming in. He was not there to check whether they were leaving with a stolen child stuffed in the boot or hog-tied on the back seat …

No, that was
his
job.

Jonas wandered up the hill a little so he would have a better view of the whole site. He looked across the rows of cars and horseboxes that covered the side of the sloping field like bright scales. His eye was caught by a dot of darkness on the window of a car a few rows in. He frowned and walked over to it. As he got closer he could see that the darkness was a neat hole in the rear passenger window of a silver Renault Megane. He cupped his hands and peered through the window into the dark interior, expecting to see something worth stealing on the back seat. There was a ripped map book, a scattering of wax crayons, a little girl’s cardigan. He noticed a similar hole in the opposite rear window and walked around the car to look at that too. It was not big enough to put even a child’s hand through and he noticed that the Megane’s doors were still locked. If someone had attempted to feed some kind of instrument through the window to pull open the locks, they’d been interrupted.

Interrupted in their quest to steal wax crayons.

Jonas looked over his shoulder and could see the minibus. He stepped away from the Megane and started to make his way back to it. As he passed a Ford Focus he saw that it, too, had a broken window – a small, neat hole surrounded by a mosaic of cracked safety glass. He peered through the two-inch hole and saw a large, tubby chocolate Labrador draped awkwardly across the rear seat. It raised its head and gave a token bark, but looked too hot to do any more.