Finders Keepers (27 page)

‘The police!’ she panted.

‘No!’ Steven yelled.

‘Steven! Don’t be so
stupid
!’ Em ran up the little stone steps before he could stop her.

He heard her hammer on the door and shout.

He didn’t want Mr Holly there. Pretending to help. Pretending to care. Taking charge.

Leading them away from where Davey might be?

He would have run on alone, but he couldn’t leave Em here with
him
.

Torn between his brother and the girl he loved, Steven Lamb dithered on the narrow lane, to the sound of Shane’s doubled-over wheezing.

Em came down the steps with Mr Holly behind her, wearing jeans and a T-shirt and thick green gardening gloves.

Steven yanked the protesting Shane upright and started to push him onwards up the hill.

When they finally stopped beside the burned-out Mazda, the silent heat of the woods was oppressive.

‘I was in here,’ Shane panted. ‘He was over there.’

They followed him through the ferns and between the trees to the little silver birch and the yellow note.

Steven picked it off the forest floor.

‘
You don’t love him
.’ The relief left him wobbly.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘He’s just messing about! I’m gonna kill him! We had a fight and—’

‘No,’ said Jonas Holly harshly. ‘It’s not a joke.’

They were surprised into silence by his words. Now they all watched as he frowned at the trees to the north, as if trying to remember something – or to see something that nobody else could.

‘Wait here,’ he said calmly. ‘Stay together. If I’m not back in ten minutes, go for help.’

And with that he ran into the woods.

‘Shit!’ Steven felt his little brother disappearing from him as fast and as surely as if he was falling down a well. If Mr Holly
thought
he knew where he was, then Steven needed to know too. And if the policeman was somehow
involved
, then what the
hell
was he doing letting him get away?

Doing nothing was not an option.

Steven grabbed Em’s hands. ‘You two go for help
right now
,’ he said urgently. ‘I have to go after him.’

‘But Stevie, he said—’

‘I don’t care, Em! He murdered his wife. He might have killed those children too. Tell the police. I have to go
after
him. I have to find Davey!’

Em’s open mouth held a million questions, but Steven let go of her and ran after Jonas Holly.

‘Steven!’ she shouted, but he never looked back and was soon swallowed up by the trees.

*

Davey Lamb wasn’t a girl, he wasn’t nine years old, and he wasn’t special like Charlie Peach. Davey Lamb was fit and strong and tried to fight every bit as hard as he’d once boasted to Chantelle Cox that he would. Twice he’d even broken away and reeled into the woods – trying to outrun his attacker on rubbery legs that let him down and tripped him up. The trees spun around him and the floor of the forest was cool and rough against his cheek. And the arms that pulled him upwards once more were strong and relentless.

Davey tried to see a face, but it always eluded him, like something seen from the corner of his eye. Smooth and featureless and glimpsed only in snatches. His kidnapper seemed neither tall nor short, nor fat nor thin. He wore a big coat, but other than that, he was just a being with hands that gripped and legs that moved faster than Davey’s own could. A dark voice muttered threats beside his ear, and Davey’s T-shirt – a red one with a pointing finger over the words
HE MADE ME DO IT
– bunched up under his arms as he was propelled staggering through the trees.

Davey wondered whether Shane was still sitting in the Mazda, waiting to be captured by the same person who now held him hard by the arm and the scruff, and who occasionally helped him along with a knee under his buttocks.

Davey laughed at that idea, and immediately felt sick. He was drunk. He hadn’t been drinking, but this was definitely what being drunk felt like. Last winter he and Shane had finished a bottle of Advocaat they’d found in Shane’s mother’s kitchen cupboard. They’d downed it like cough mixture, then had laughed until they’d cried at the sight of Shane’s hamster, Anakin, quivering under his shavings.

This was like that, but without the fun. Sometimes Davey’s mind drifted off, even while his legs went on working. Then he would snap back and remember he was in great danger, and shout and flail and twist in the kidnapper’s grip.

It was pointless.

‘I’ll shoot you in the head,’ the voice said in his ear, and for a moment Davey believed him and sobered up and did his best to walk by himself. Then he forgot all about being shot in the head and stopped cooperating again.

He was pushed and pulled and bumped and dragged through the trees for several days. It felt like several days; it might have been seconds. At last they came to a picnic area and a car and Davey was leaned against the back door and told harshly to
stay
, so he didn’t, of course. As soon as the man walked away from him and opened the boot, he set off for the woods again.

The man caught him and Davey sat down and refused to move. The man grasped his wrists and dragged him across the clearing on his arse, back to the car. He was surprisingly strong.

The man dropped his arms and Davey simply rolled under the car, snatching his ankle away from the man’s hand just in the nick of time. The man swore loudly and got on his knees to reach for him. Davey giggled and moved, giggled and moved as the man probed and groped and grunted four-letter words.

‘Oh, fuck you too!’ Davey laughed, although each time he
avoided
the grasping fingers, some part of him felt like pissing his pants in terror.

The man stood up and moved away.

Now the fear had time to settle on Davey’s back like a stiff blanket left out in the frost, and his teeth started to chatter. He watched the man’s workboots walk to the back of the car; he could hear him moving things about in the boot.

Davey listened to the sound of his own breath pumping through his mouth; the sound of something being shifted and lifted. Not knowing
what
was the scariest thing of all.

The boots came back. This time, when the man’s silhouetted head dipped below the sill, it was not his hand that reached for Davey, but a white stick. And he did not attempt to pull Davey out – but started to jab and swipe at the boy, trying to drive him from his narrow hiding place.

The stick first hit Davey in the knee and he yelped and bumped his head on the exhaust. He put out his hands in self-defence and the stick rapped the fingers on his left hand as it arced past him. Then its point jabbed him hard in the ribs, and Davey thought he would pass out. He didn’t feel drunk any more. He felt sick and terrified. He couldn’t move. All he could do was lie there, drowning in tears, clutching his side and hoping that the pain would go away; that was what mattered. The pain and the helplessness.

He’d once seen Iestyn Lloyd, the terrier man, digging out a fox as his Jack Russells yipped and clawed and snapped at the earth around it. Now Davey knew how a fox must feel.

With his eyes tight shut and his ribs still burning, Davey felt the pull on the back of his shirt, the hand at the waistband of his jeans and the gravel sliding forwards under his hip as he was dragged from under the car.

He came out of the darkness and into the light, blinking through his tears. As he emerged, he was dimly aware that suddenly there were
two
shapes looming over him.

And one of them was Jonas Holly.

NOBODY BELIEVED EM
. Not at first, anyway. They eyed her with suspicion and asked her questions she had no hope of answering. Frankly, she was embarrassed to repeat Steven’s accusations; even though she loved him, she found them hard to believe herself, and she relayed them almost apologetically to Detective Inspector Reynolds. Em was quick to notice the glances he exchanged with his colleague as she spoke, and she got the feeling that if Shane had not been both beside her
and
beside himself, DI Reynolds might have told her to run along and stop wasting his time. It seemed they were far more impressed by a blubbering, panic-stricken eleven-year-old than they were by her careful re-telling of events.

When she’d finished, Reynolds and Rice drove all three of them back to the woods and followed them first to the burned-out car and then to the little birch where the yellow note still lay.

‘Did you write this?’ said the Detective Inspector so sharply to Em that she flinched.

‘Of course not!’ she snapped back. ‘Steven thought it was his
brother
having a joke, but then the policeman said it wasn’t. Then he told us to stay here and he ran into the trees.’

Reynolds stared in the direction her finger indicated.

But he didn’t move. Didn’t run into the trees. Why wasn’t he running into the trees?

Em was a girl who respected authority. Why shouldn’t she? Authority had always respected
her
. Until now. Now she saw only suspicion in DI Reynolds’s sharp eyes – a suspicion that was making everything proceed too slowly. The little jet of anger that shot through her took her by surprise.

‘You think I’m lying!’

‘I didn’t—’

‘You do. You think I’m lying. I’m not. You need to stop wasting time and go and find them!’

‘Now, now,’ said DI Reynolds. ‘We need to do this the right way.’

‘You need to do it the
fast
way!

‘Listen, Emma—’

‘
Emily
.’

Reynolds pursed his lips disapprovingly and glanced at Rice, but Rice pretended to be looking into the woods.

And then she really
was
looking into the woods.

‘Somebody’s there,’ she said softly.

They all turned to follow her gaze. In the straining silence that followed, they heard something moving quickly through the undergrowth. Getting louder.

‘It’s coming this way,’ whispered Rice, and her hushed words in the cathedral of trees made life suddenly seem like an evil fairy tale.

‘There!’ hissed Em, at a brief flash of red.

‘Davey!’ shouted Shane.

Reynolds felt a rush of relief.

‘See?’ he couldn’t resist saying to the girl, and had to make a conscious effort not to add ‘I told you so.’

Davey Lamb stumbled out of the trees at an angle to them, as if he had only arrived by accident.

‘Davey!’ Shane said again, but in a more faltering voice. Reynolds could see why. The boy moved as if drunk, his legs stiff and rubbery by turn, and his arms loose and flapping by his sides, the elbows jerking this way and that. He turned his head at the sound of Shane’s voice, but it was with the wobbly neck and the vacant eyes of an unstrung puppet.

Nobody moved; nobody ran to Davey and helped him. That alone made the scene even more disturbing. Instead the boy swung himself around in a doddering arc and came to them. Rice finally closed the few paces between them. ‘Are you OK, Davey?’ she said.

‘What?’ he said, screwing up his face in confusion. ‘What?’

Drugs. Reynolds had seen enough of them to know. These rural communities were rife with them. An edge of anger made him want to slap the boy for wasting their time. Except, as he got closer he could see that Davey Lamb was also streaked with what looked like coal or grease.

‘Where’s Steven?’ said Emily Carver urgently.

‘Back there,’ said Davey, waving a vague arm behind him. ‘They tried to kill me, but I got away.’

‘Who tried to kill you, Davey?’ Rice had bent down a little now to get on to the same level as the boy. She spoke in her soothe-the-victim voice.

Davey stared at her, then turned and stared at the woods behind him, frowning deeply. ‘I dunno,’ he said. Vomit followed the last word out of his mouth and fell down his shirt in a lumpy coconut stream.

‘Gross!’ said Shane.

Reynolds looked soberly at Rice.

Davey sat down heavily on the forest floor, cross-legged, and
with
long strings of snotty fluid hanging from his nose. He started to cry.

‘Davey, where’s
Steven
?’ the girl insisted, but Davey Lamb could only shake his head and sob.

PART TWO
LAST WINTER

THE HOCKS, THE
hoofs, the hide, the head
.

The hocks, the hoofs, the hide, the head …

Funny, I never do this without singing that old song. In my head, mostly, but sometimes out loud, as my knife slips easy through the skin. No accident, that. Old Murton taught me well about knives. Meat likes a fresh blade, old Murton used to say – no point in sharpening a knife and then not using it. I sharpen my knives right before I use them, see? Right before I take the legs off at the hock, like
so
. They come off so clean and I pick them up. This is a calf, so it’s easy to hold all four feet in one hand. Place them off to one side. Now a little slit here and
here
, a long slit
there
and all round the throat.