Finders Keepers (30 page)

‘Oh,’ said Charlie. ‘Do you know “Ten Green Bottles”?’ He started to sing it without waiting for an answer.

‘Mr Holly?’ said Steven tentatively, but the man did not move. Steven frowned at his long flat body clad only in shorts. His abdomen was a shallow dish between his ribs and his hip bones, containing thick red scars that crawled and twisted across his pale skin like some strange delicacy that might require chopsticks.

The marks a killer had made.

‘I feel sick,’ Steven said again, and turned away.

*

When he wasn’t robbing banks, Davey had often fantasized about being a cop. As part of those fantasies he’d also imagined interrogating a suspect. In his fertile young mind – fed by television – chairs were scraped across concrete floors, fists were banged on Formica tables, and interviews were conducted in an atmosphere of such loud intensity that spittle landed on the used coffee cups between the adversaries.

So when Dr Evans asked if he felt up to speaking to the police, Davey – despite having passed a restless night at North Devon Hospital – was excited.

At first.

He’d imagined a cop who looked like Will Smith in
Men In Black
. Cool, wearing shades and a sharp suit, with a gun in his sock and a watch shaped like a Dairylea slice. The reality was more like being quizzed by his maths teacher, Mr Harris, who picked his nose when he thought no one was looking.

DI Reynolds asked the same boring questions over and over again, and wrote everything down in a little notebook. Then he flipped the pages of that notebook back and forth before he asked his next question. It made him seem like he’d lost his memory. Davey had told him
three times
that he hadn’t seen the face of the man who had snatched him, and yet he kept asking about him, but in another way – as if he could trap Davey into remembering who it was.

‘Did you see him coming?’

‘No. I told you that already. He came up behind me.’

‘Tell me about the car.’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘What colour was it?’

‘I
told
you.’

‘Can you tell me again?’

‘Dark. Blue or black. Or green maybe.’

‘Was the man wearing anything on his hands?’

‘I can’t
remember
.’

‘Did he tie your hands or mouth at any time?’

‘No.’

‘Not with rope?’

‘No.’

‘Or tape of any kind?’

‘
No!
’

‘But you did see Constable Holly?’

‘Yes, when they dragged me out from under the car.’

‘
They
dragged you?’

‘Someone dragged me. I was backwards.’

‘But Mr Holly and this
smooth
man were two different people?’

Davey rolled his eyes and didn’t bother answering.

Lettie gave him a look. ‘Don’t be rude, Davey,’

‘Yes,’ sang Davey. ‘They were two different people.’

‘What happened then?’

‘I dunno. I was all … whirly.’

‘And then you remember being in the boot—’

‘Yes.’

‘And that’s when you saw Steven.’

‘Yes.’

‘And what happened then?’

Davey hesitated. There were things he couldn’t remember. Lots of them. But there were other things he
could
remember that he’d rather not tell. Specially not with his mother and Dr Evans hovering anxiously at the foot of his bed, listening to everything. His mother clutched the metal rail with both hands, as if DI Reynolds might carry him
and
his bed off, just for a laugh.

He remembered being jostled and opening his eyes to see Steven’s face so close …

‘
Ssssssh!
’

‘
What? Go away
.’

‘
Davey, shush!
’

Hands under his shoulders and knees, lifting him out of the boot of the car; the sky and the treetops above him, and sweat rolling off a spiky fringe
.

His feet hitting the ground
.

‘
Go AWAY! I’ll tell my brother!
’

‘
Davey, shut up! It’s me. Ssssssh!
’

But he hadn’t shushed. He
could
remember
that
. With shame coating his innards like hot syrup, Davey remembered fighting instead – fighting
Steven
! Waving his fists blindly and shouting so loud that it echoed. He couldn’t remember what. He’d connected with one fist. Hard. And then he’d just run – all wobbly and tumbly and knee-scrapey through the stumps and the ferns.

He hadn’t even looked back …

‘Yes?’ said DI Reynolds.

‘And he helped me out and we ran away.’

‘And where was Mr Holly while you were running away?’

‘Dunno.’ Davey shrugged.

‘And where was the other man?’

‘Dunno.’

A tiny, elderly Pakistani woman pushed a filthy mop shaped like a V into the ward and past the end of his bed while nodding into a mobile phone, and Davey longed for a life like that, where he didn’t have to think, and nobody asked him difficult questions.

‘They just let you run away? Didn’t try to catch you?’

‘I ran
fast
,’ said Davey. Then, without prompting, he added hurriedly, ‘Steven was right behind me; he must have got lost or something.’

DI Reynolds said nothing but flipped back several pages, clicking his pen and making a small
tu-tu-tu
sound through his pursed lips, like a tiny train.

Why do I always get the retard?
thought Davey. This guy was such a loser. Plus, there was something weird about DI Reynolds’s hair, although Davey couldn’t say quite what.

‘We ran away
together
,’ he provided for free.

‘After he helped you out of the car, did your brother say anything to you?’

Ssssssh!

‘I can’t remember.’

Davey’s mother bit her lip and blinked out of the window.

DI Reynolds didn’t sigh, but Davey could tell he wanted to. Maybe the policeman was as disappointed with the interview as he was.

‘Try,’ said DI Reynolds.

‘OK,’ Davey said, and put on a trying face, but all the time his mind squirmed with the dawning awfulness of it all. Steven had come to help him, but he hadn’t helped Steven back. Instead he’d punched him; he’d shouted when Steven had told him to shush; he’d given them both away and then only saved himself. This was not the kind of cop or bank robber he’d ever imagined being. The kind who abandoned a friend to his fate. A
brother
.

‘What’s wrong, Davey?’ said DI Reynolds.

Davey shook his head. His mother gazed at him with eyes like a cartoon puppy in a rainstorm, and Davey could barely look at her straight.

‘He
did
say something!’

The sudden hope in his mother’s eyes triggered a tumble of words. ‘He said … Steven said … “Run, Davey! I’m right behind you! Run home to Mum.” And so I did.’

At the foot of the bed, Lettie clutched her mouth and nodded hard as tears rolled down her cheeks.

DI Reynolds clicked his pen, but did not write it down.

THERE WAS A
sharp hiss and the children got up as one and moved towards the gates of their kennels. The hiss came again, and again, a slow metallic scraping of the knife being sharpened.

They clung to the chain link, waiting expectantly. Finally there was the dull thump of something hitting metal, and the low rumble of an approach on wheels across the rutted concrete walkway.

A low flatbed trolley emerged from the back door of the big shed. The huntsman propelled it, his legs bowed but sturdy, his face smoothed and distorted by a stocking mask, like a bad fabric puppet.

Steven got a flash of the clearing in the woods, of Davey curled in the boot of the old blue saloon while the man with the smooth head held Jonas Holly’s legs; the slow stagger towards the trees; the grip on his arm; the kick to the backs of his knees. He remembered the hot chemical wool over his face and the way everything swam away from him like fish spiralling away through the tops of the trees …

Something heavy dropped into Pete’s kennel and Steven flinched.

The huntsman moved down the line.

It wasn’t until he got to Jess’s kennel that Steven could see clearly what he was throwing over the gates …

Bones.

As if they were dogs!

And Jess Took picked one up and started to chew on it as if no one had told her she
wasn’t
a dog.

‘All right, bay?’ the huntsman said to Steven without looking at him and not waiting for an answer.

‘Why am I here? What do you want?’

‘Good lad,’ said the huntsman, and leaned up to drop a couple of big bones over the fence. Steven looked down at the crude grey-pink chunks, with shiny white knobs protruding.

‘I’m not eating that,’ he said firmly.

The huntsman ignored him and moved on.

‘He doesn’t listen,’ said Jess sadly. ‘He only talks.’

The huntsman dropped bones into Jonas Holly’s kennel and then into Charlie’s.

Charlie picked up a rack of ribs and said, ‘Thank you.’

The huntsman turned his trolley and wheeled it back down the line. It made a different sound when it was empty.

As he passed her kennel, Jess Took bared her teeth at him and said, ‘Woof!’

*

Kate Gulliver also thought that it was ‘very interesting’ that Steven Lamb had implicated Jonas in the abductions – and then disappeared himself.

Reynolds was delighted. He’d rung Kate – who’d always encouraged him to call her that – and told her of Elizabeth Rice’s conversation with the boy.

Very interesting
, she’d said – and Reynolds wished he could
turn
back time and put her call on speakerphone just so he could give Rice a triumphant look.

‘That’s what
I
said,’ he told Kate in Rice’s hearing instead, but Rice gave no indication she had heard anything – triumphant or otherwise. She was rummaging in a bag from the Spar shop they were parked outside.

Kate continued, ‘The trauma of Steven’s experiences at a formative age could have damaged him in countless ways. He might have paranoid tendencies which make him focus his suspicions on an innocent party.’

She sounded quite enthusiastic about the idea. ‘I can even see a scenario where he might visit similar experiences on other children. Abuse begets abuse; it’s not unusual.’

‘Exactly,’ Reynolds nodded, hoping Rice was getting this: that he’d been
right
and that Kate Gulliver
said
so.

Increasingly he got the impression that Elizabeth Rice resented his superior intellect. It was a shame, because she was no slouch herself, but lately – since he’d been the boss – she hovered between two standpoints: questioning him or ignoring him. Both got under his skin. Today she’d been in a particularly bad mood because her digging into the background of the Piper Parents had turned up nothing and made everybody hate her. Reynolds had told her that it went with the territory and she’d replied, ‘Maybe
your
territory,’ in a tone he would have corrected if she’d been a man.

Reynolds had always felt he had a great kinship with women. Men were threatened by his brains and often responded with hostility. DCI Marvel had been a case in point. But women were generally far happier to let him do the thinking for them, while he encouraged them to shine in supporting roles.

‘There’s no
I
in
team
,’ he was fond of telling them. It went down terribly well.

Most of the time.

Lately Elizabeth Rice had greeted the homily with stony silence.

Pity. There’d been a time a few years back when he’d thought Rice might be girlfriend material. Even wife. But then they’d spent time together on cases and he’d seen all the things that were wrong with her. It wasn’t just the toast and the baked-bean juice. She often wore jeans, she laughed too loudly, and she sang in the shower. She didn’t have a bad voice but she had no taste in music – or consideration for those who did, and who might be trying to work just the other side of the Travelodge wall.

Slowly those faults had eroded any ideas he might once have harboured about a possible future together, and her burgeoning intellectual jealousy was very unattractive.

Kate said she would contact Steven Lamb’s old therapist.

‘Excellent,’ said Reynolds. ‘Keep me informed.’ He hung up and turned to Rice, who immediately held up two thin, white-bread sandwiches in plastic boxes – a barrier to his victory.

‘Chicken or ham?’ she said.

They both looked like the antithesis of nutrition. He thought of DCI Marvel and felt a single solitary pang of guilt. No, not guilt –
empathy
. It was tough at the top.