Finders Keepers (2 page)

Took ignored him and slid sullenly from Blue Boy’s back. The bay’s near fore was swollen at the knee.

Great. He’d have to ride Scotty on Monday, and Scotty was not half the horse Blue Boy was.

Took banged the tailgate shut on Blue Boy, removed his sweaty helmet and opened the door of the horsebox.

‘Not a bloody fox in sight,’ he told Jess.

Except Jess wasn’t there.

Instead there was a note on the steering wheel. A yellow square.

John Took’s mouth tightened. Bloody Jess and her teenage rebellion. She used to be such an easy kid before the divorce. Where’d she buggered off to now?

He reached up and peeled the note off the wheel. As he read it, his frown of annoyance became one of confusion. The note consisted of four words that were both simple and utterly mysterious.

You don’t love her
.

THERE WAS A
place between light and dark – between life and death – where Jonas Holly lived after his wife died.

He was split into the physical and the psychological – a keen division which saw him wake every day, get up, get dressed, move his arms and legs, blink, while all the time his mind just sat there as if on hold in the great switchboard of life. His mental processes stretched no further than the immediate and the practical. It got dark, he switched on a light; the milk arrived, he took it in; he had thirst, he drank water. On the rare occasions when he hungered, he ate. It took him almost two months to pick his way through what was left in the freezer, the larder, and Mrs Paddon’s doorstep donations. His already long frame became stretched; he ran out of notches on his belt. Finally, canned tomatoes over kidney beans marked the end of food and the start of starvation or shopping. It took Jonas three days before he walked into the village to choose the latter.

He was pared down to the primitive. Animalistic. He barely spoke. Every few days he would answer Mrs Paddon’s
neighbourly
inquiry with a mumbled ‘Fine, thanks’ and then immediately go indoors. For an hour once a week he was probed by the psychologist and managed to tell her virtually nothing. The only reason he went to Bristol for their sessions was because he had to be passed fit before he could go back to work, and the only reason he planned to go back to work was because he had absolutely no idea of what else he might do with the rest of his life. Or much interest in the subject.

Kate Gulliver, the psychologist, seemed OK but he didn’t trust her. Nothing personal – Jonas didn’t trust anyone any more, not even himself.

Especially not himself.

Occasionally Jonas would look hard into the bathroom mirror. He never saw anything but his own brown eyes staring back at him quizzically, doubting even his own memory of events. He remembered the knife. He remembered the blood. He remembered how one had led to the other. At least, he thought he did. His memory had always been shaky, and the lack of horror that accompanied these images made him wonder whether they had happened that way at all, or whether they were all his mind could cope with for now. Maybe the gaps would be filled in later, when he was better able to deal with another truth.

He hoped not.

It was already enough truth for Jonas that every time he went upstairs in their tiny cottage, he had to cross the flagstones behind the front door where Lucy had died – and where he had almost managed to follow her.

Sometimes he pissed in the garden and slept on the couch.

Truth was overrated.

Kate – who encouraged Jonas to call her that – talked about the stages of grief and wanted him to explore his feelings. Jonas thought that would be a bad idea. He knew his feelings were in there somewhere, on a high shelf in the wardrobe of his psyche, but he was wary of fetching the stool that might enable him to reach them.

He was worried about what else he might find there.

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Jonas knew the stages of grief by now. He knew them backwards. He could juggle them like plates. It didn’t mean he knew how they
felt
.

So instead he had done his best to demonstrate the appropriate emotions at what he guessed were appropriate intervals over the eight months they’d spent in each other’s sporadic company.

‘Do you ever feel guilty?’ Kate would ask.

‘Of course,’ he’d answer. ‘I should have got there sooner. In time. To stop it.’

She’d nod seriously and he’d look at his hands.

He’d spent three sessions in total silence, gazing dully at the cheap carpet in her stage-set office while she’d asked careful questions at long intervals. It had been calming and, he imagined, would be construed as depression.

Soon he would have to find the energy to have a go at anger. He kept putting it off.

In one way he hoped that affecting emotions might magically give rise to the real thing, but all he had felt since the death of his wife was a strange numbness that was a smoked-glass barrier to reality.

Only in his dreams did Jonas feel anything at all. In his dreams he often found Lucy. It was always somewhere unexpected. He would catch the Tiverton bus and find her sitting up front with shopping bags at her feet; he would steal a trinket in a foreign bazaar and then turn to find her at his shoulder. Once he saw her through the slats of Weston pier, and they kept flickering pace with one another – he above and she on the wet sand below – until they reached the beach, where they embraced.

Always they embraced.

Always they wept with joy.

I found you. I found you
. He repeated it without moving his
lips
– a song sung by his heart that made his flesh tremble with happiness.

Always it ended the same way. Lucy sobbing in his ear: ‘You shouldn’t have come looking for me, Jonas.’

And he would realize for the first time that her body was cold when it should be warm, and – even as that horror struck him – he would feel her turn into a slab of dead meat in his arms.

He would wake, still groping for her, his pillow soaked in sweat and tears, calling ‘I love you’ into the darkness or the dawn.

Jonas didn’t tell Kate Gulliver any of that.

He also didn’t tell her how time slipped away from him. How he would fall asleep on the couch and wake in the kitchen with a knife in his hand. How the impulse to put the glittering blade into his mouth and jab and stab at his tongue and palate and cheeks until the blood ran from him like a hose was almost overwhelming. Or how, more than once, he’d watched his own hands twist a pair of his uniform trousers into a noose. They were an old pair, and missing a button – no good to anyone who wasn’t handy, or who didn’t have a handy wife.

He lost whole days – disappeared inside his head just as surely as if he’d been abducted by aliens. He would be returned to find that nothing had changed but the clocks.

Sometimes the calendar.

These were all things that his new, animal self knew were better left unsaid. Better not explored.

And so Jonas Holly said nothing, felt nothing, and hovered between the light and the dark – between life and death – until such time as he might be allowed to return to work as an Exmoor village policeman.

STEVEN LAMB WASN’T SURE
exactly what he’d expected for his £300, but this definitely wasn’t it.

Ronnie had told him the bike was not a runner. ‘We’ll get it going though, no bother,’ Ronnie had assured him as they drove to Minehead. And Steven
was
assured. Ronnie Trewell could get
anything
going – countless Somerset drivers who’d had cars stolen despite locks, alarms and immobilizers could attest to that.

But what Ronnie
hadn’t
told him was that the 125cc Suzuki was in what looked like a thousand bits. Two wheels and the frame were identifiable, but everything else – engine parts, cables, lights, tank, levers, nuts and bolts – was jumbled into two giant plastic boxes.

‘It’s all there, mate,’ said the greasy-looking man with the shifty eyes whom Ronnie had introduced as ‘Gary’. ‘Top bloke,’ Ronnie had added – as if that was all the insurance Steven should need to trust someone he’d never met with all the money he had in the world in exchange for a collection of random mechanical parts.

‘There’s the exhaust,’ said his best friend, Lewis, peering into a box – as if that proved that the rest of the bike
must
be present.

Steven thought of all the mornings he’d got up in darkness to trudge through rain and snow with a bag of newspapers on his hip, to earn the money he had in his jeans pocket right now. Since he was thirteen. Four years’ worth of numb fingers, blue toes and shooting pains in his ears, which stuck out beyond the protection of his dark hair. He’d bought other things along the way – a skateboard with Bones Swiss bearings, a necklace for his mum’s birthday, a new shopping trolley for his nan, and even the occasional quid for Davey when his brother needed bribing. But a motorbike had been the goal for the past two years and Steven had been devoted to its acquisition. The thought of being able to leave Shipcott without relying on lifts from Ronnie or the Tithecott twins, or lurching country buses filled with blue-haired ladies and men who smelled of cows, was all the motivation he’d needed to keep walking, keep working, keep waiting.

‘Deal?’ said Gary, and stuck out his hand.

Steven looked at Lewis, who avoided his eyes – the bloody coward – and then at Ronnie, who gave him an encouraging nod.

‘OK then,’ said Steven miserably, and tried to shake the man’s outstretched hand, only to be embarrassed to realize that it was held out palm-up for the money, not to seal the deal like gentlemen. Gary laughed as he fumbled, and Steven felt like a boy among men.

Feeling slightly sick, he took out the envelope stuffed with notes and – like Jack handing over his mother’s cow for a handful of magic beans – gave it to Gary.

He wanted desperately to ask for a receipt, as his mother had insisted he must, but Gary had already stuffed the money into his back pocket and was picking up one of the boxes.

‘Give you a hand,’ he said, as if he wanted rid of the evidence as quickly as possible before anyone rumbled his scam.

Lewis took the frame, which was the lightest thing on offer,
Ronnie
picked up the other box despite his limp, and Steven took a wheel in each hand.

They loaded what Steven desperately hoped was a complete motorcycle into the trailer Ronnie had borrowed from somewhere, and got into the Fiesta. Lewis in the front, Steven squashed up behind with an old greyhound, which was obviously used to stretching out on the back seat – and which gave way only grudgingly, before flopping back down across his legs.

They drove back to Ronnie’s home in Shipcott too fast, and with the dog’s bony elbows sticking into Steven’s thighs round every precarious turn.

DETECTIVE INSPECTOR REYNOLDS
was worried about his fringe. He was worried about the girl as well, of course, but his fringe was a constant and the girl was just a case, like those that had come before and many that would follow. She had probably run away. Most of them had. If not – if she
had
been abducted – then she would be found or she would not; she would live or she would die – or she would live the rest of her life in a way that would make her wish she
could
die.

It sounded callous, but that was just the way things were with missing children. Naturally, Reynolds would do everything in his power to find her, but right now the girl’s fate was an open-ended question. His fringe, on the other hand, was here to stay.

He hoped.

He examined it in the mirror and pushed it first to one side and then the other. It was a chilly morning and so he’d chickened out and worn a woollen beanie in to work. But he couldn’t hide for ever. Somehow the plugs looked more obvious here under the cold fluorescents of the gents’ toilet at
Taunton
police station than they had in his bathroom at home.

He pushed the fringe back the other way. It made no difference. He sighed. Maybe he shouldn’t have let them cut it so short, but the spectre of Elton John’s moptop had made him uncharacteristically macho.

Fuck it.

He’d spent almost four thousand pounds of his hard-earned savings on the bloody things – he couldn’t hide in the bogs all day.

DI Reynolds took a deep breath and banged out of the toilets to take charge of the hunt for Jess Took.

*

You don’t love her
.

Reynolds had the note with him in an evidence bag for safekeeping. He’d ordered its presence at the possible crime scene not to be made public. If Jess Took had been abducted, then it was a detail that could be useful in trapping her kidnapper in a lie. Alternatively it could weed out the weirdos who might like to claim the crime as their own.

He’d looked at it a hundred times as they drove from Taunton to Exmoor. Jess Took had only been missing for thirty-six hours and the graphologist hadn’t wanted to commit himself without further investigation, but had told him that, due to the care taken with the lettering, the note was unlikely to have been written by a person who wrote every day. Very helpful. That really narrowed it down. Who the hell wrote every day – or
any
day – using a pen and paper? Reynolds himself couldn’t remember the last time he’d picked up a pen with any real purpose other than to jot a few notes or to click the end of it while he mused. It was all keyboards now. Words were created and disappeared into a box and then you switched them off and back on again and hoped that they were still there. Reynolds was all for the paperless office, but for some reason the Taunton Serious
Crime
office seemed more paper
ful
by the week. It was an enigma, he thought, wrapped in endless reams of A4.