Finders Keepers (36 page)

And small, dark places invaded your dreams.

Today Jonas Holly’s eyes were brown. That was all. Brown with a sheen that looked disturbingly like tears.

He doesn’t know what you’re talking about. He really did love her
.

Steven thought about someone hurting Em and found wild fury in his chest – there as if by dark magic – and knew that he would rather kill himself than watch her in pain. If Jonas Holly had loved his wife that same way, then he could
never
have killed her, whatever Steven thought he had seen.

With a horrible jag of remorse, Steven started to wonder whether he’d also imagined the danger he’d felt coming off Jonas Holly that night outside Rose Cottage.

The little vertical line between his eyes deepened.

That was impossible. He hadn’t imagined it.

Had he?

Had he?

What else might his brain have invented? The slap that had knocked Lucy Holly to her knees? The money falling from a black-and-white sky? The hedge at his back with nowhere to run.

Em?

She was too good for him, wasn’t she? Too good to be true. Her heart ticking under his hand, her Super-Sour sweetness. Had he imagined that? Had he imagined
her
?

Steven blinked and shuddered. How much was real? All of a sudden, he wasn’t sure any more. The heat and the stink of the kennels was his only truth now. How long had he been here? A month? A year? He no longer knew. Jess and Charlie and Maisie and Kylie and Pete were all real. He knew
that
. Jonas was just Jonas and his eyes were just brown, and his stomach bore the marks that a killer had made. Of those things he was sure. Anything else could be in his head alone. All the fears.

Steven felt as if he were teetering on the edge of a deep, dark precipice, rock crumbling below him and spinning into the abyss.

He’d been through a lot.

He’d been through a
lot
.

What if the last five years existed only in his head? What if
Arnold
Avery had won after all, that misty morning up at Blacklands …

Tears filled Steven like water in a jug, and poured out of his eyes in what felt like a never-ending stream.

‘I’m sorry,’ he sobbed. ‘I’m sorry.’

Through the blur, he saw Jonas’s stricken face become surprised, and then concerned. He moved as close as his tether would allow him and reached out to touch the wire between them.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Jonas.

‘I think I might be dead,’ said Steven, and kept on crying.

KATE GULLIVER CAME TO
Shipcott and had dinner with Reynolds and Rice. Rice had never met her before and was taken aback by how attractive she was – with a mane of dark hair, Spanish eyes, and legs that were needlessly lengthened by spike-heeled patent-leather boots.

Rice felt
dowdy
drop over her like a potato sack.

The Red Lion only had one vegetarian option and it was always an omelette. Kate made a townie face and ordered two salad starters instead.

In a defiant countermeasure, Rice ordered pizza and a dessert. She could run it off in the morning. Or not.

Kate had spoken at length with Rose Hammond, the psychologist who had helped Steven in the year following his ordeal. She made little quote marks in the air around ‘helped’, leaving them in no doubt what a crappy therapist Kate considered her to be.

In his turn, Reynolds had spoken to the officer who’d dealt with the aftermath of the Arnold Avery case – a taciturn chief
inspector
, who seemed to hold Steven Lamb personally responsible for depriving the Avon and Somerset force of the pleasure of bringing Arnold Avery down in a hail of officially sanctioned bullets. Apart from that, he’d grudgingly conceded that the experience of being attacked by a psychopath must have been traumatic for a twelve-year-old boy.

Kate thought it was a trauma that might not necessarily have been resolved by a twice-monthly session with a country psychologist. Especially one who came cheap enough to be paid for by some Irish gardener who claimed to be the boy’s uncle.

She put air-quotes around ‘uncle’, too, and Reynolds laughed as if she’d been witty.

Rice felt like a stupid spare part. She wished there was someone across the table for
her
. Someone she could cock a secret eyebrow at, and whose mouth would twitch in amused support. She imagined Eric, but he’d never got her humour. He’d preferred jokes – often ones that started with an Englishman, an Irishman and a Pakistani going into a massage parlour. She imagined Jonas Holly instead – a quiet counterbalance, unimpressed by Kate Gulliver with her air-quotes and her Spanish eyes. Watching his plate or watching her, with absolute focus.

Just thinking about it made her feel warm. Everywhere.

After a lot of psychobabble that Reynolds nodded at eagerly – and that Rice largely tuned out – Kate said, ‘The legal system failed Steven and allowed a killer to track him down and almost kill him. I think any finger-pointing at a symbol of that system should be treated with the utmost caution.’

‘I agree,’ said Reynolds.

Big shock
, thought Rice.

‘There’s another thing.’ Kate’s voice took on a sombre tone. She speared a cherry tomato before going on. ‘A child so traumatized, so
damaged
. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that Steven might be somehow culpable, and trying to deflect suspicion.’

‘Great minds!’ said Reynolds, smiling at Kate like a smug puppy.

Rice didn’t have the letters after her name to argue with them. But, although she was relieved that suspicion seemed to be falling further and further from Jonas, she hated the drama that Kate Gulliver had squeezed from the moment with her cherry-tomato pause. Triumph disguised as concern. Kate and Reynolds were peas in a bloody pod.

Unless she was very much mistaken, she was the only person at this table who’d ever actually
spoken
to Steven Lamb. And so, for what it was worth – which she realized wasn’t much – she told them that, to her, Steven hadn’t seemed the type to be a kidnapper, a killer – or even particularly resentful.

‘Interesting,’ said Kate. She put down her fork and clasped her elegant hands under her chin. ‘On what basis do you make that assessment?’

Reynolds snorted. ‘On the basis of a five-minute chat with a towel on your head, wasn’t it, Elizabeth?’

He and Kate showed each other their teeth.

Rice took her cheesecake upstairs. She ate it with her fingers, sitting in the bath.

THERE WAS A
reason why Davey Lamb got up before his alarm every morning and often slipped from the house before his mother had stirred. Davey’s instincts told him that if he didn’t get out of the house while his mother was all doped up and watching bad TV, she might never let him leave again.

Every now and then Lettie focused on him with clear eyes, and then reached out and held him in arms that were so tight and desperate it made him itch to throw her off and skip away across the room to freedom. But – in the first consciously selfless act of his young life – Davey stayed put and allowed her to crush him to her breast as if she might re-absorb him straight through her skin.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t afraid. He
was
afraid.

He and Shane didn’t go to Springer Farm any more, or to the woods. Both now seemed like places where bad things had happened – and still might. Sometimes they went to the playing field and he watched Shane skate. That was all. He stopped bothering with homework or the fallout. Sometimes he didn’t go
to
school at all, but sat on the swings and shared a fag with Chantelle Cox, or swung himself so high and so fast that the world seemed easy to leave behind.

Gravity always dragged him back.

The Piper Parents came round for a meeting and pawed him like zombies. They asked him how he was and made sympathetic faces, but he knew they really wanted to grab him and shake him to make him tell them something –
anything
– that might help them to find their missing children.

He couldn’t. He had seen the kidnapper, heard his voice, been in his car, and yet his recollection was so patchy as to be useless. The only things he remembered for sure were the plan he and Shane had thought was so clever, and the way he’d shouted instead of shushed …

He went into Steven’s room and touched all the stuff he’d never been allowed to. He took down the Batman action figures, but found the fantasy of crime had been made dull by the reality. He looked through Steven’s school bag and read a story he’d written called ‘A Day in the Life of a Tree’, which sounded shit but was actually quite good, considering the tree never went anywhere or did anything. He searched for porn under the bed, but found only Steven’s name carved into the wall, and the crumpled receipt for the umbrella they had given Nan for her birthday.

£13.99.

It made him so angry he felt like crying.

If Steven ever came back, he’d tell everyone how Davey had lied about them running away together. Then, instead of a hero, he would be a baddie, who’d hit his own brother and left him behind.

Davey wanted his brother back – of course he did.

But only if he shushed, not shouted.

*

Through the bright-blue gap in the roof, Jonas could see a
buzzard
circling over the moor. Now and then it cried out – a strangely puny sound for such a big bird. He waved away a fly. They were always there, because of the meat. This one landed on his face again, and Jonas left it; took the decision that unless it was on his mouth, he no longer had the energy.

The children came back from the meadow with hands full of grass and dandelions, and Jonas’s stomach squealed in pathetic anticipation. This time, Steven had picked some too, and when Jonas thanked him, he said: ‘’s OK,’ and went immediately to his post at the back of his kennel, eye pressed to the chink in the wall. He had barely spoken since he’d broken down – not even to Jess.

Charlie touched Jonas’s arm. ‘Hello, Jonas. How do you do?’

‘How do
you
do, Charlie?’

‘Do you have some peanut butter?’

Jonas’s stomach wrenched at the mere words. ‘Sorry, Charlie.’

The boy screwed up his face. ‘I’m hungry,’ he said forlornly.

‘Why don’t you eat your meat?’ asked Jonas, pointing at the bones behind Charlie.

‘Why don’t
you
eat
yours
?’

‘I don’t eat meat,’ Jonas told him patiently for the fiftieth time.

‘I don’t eat meat too,’ said the boy. He kicked out at one of the bones, yelping at the pain in his toes. The bone drubbed across the floor and rattled the bottom of the gate.

Charlie sat down on the edge of his bed and sniffled. ‘Hurt my toe,’ he said in a tiny voice.

Steven turned away from the wall and nodded at Charlie. ‘I think he’s scared of eating it,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘ ’Cos of the meat. You know?’

‘No.’

Steven sighed. ‘When the helicopter came over. He put us in the meat. Hanging up in the little room. You know?’

Jonas looked so confused that Steven asked, ‘Where were you, then?’

Jonas frowned. Where
was
he?

The helicopter, the cold splash, the banging on his legs, the sharp pricks on his chest and Lucy floating above him …

‘He held me underwater.’

Steven blinked. ‘Why?’

Jonas shrugged. He had no idea.

But now that he’d remembered the shock of the water, Jonas also remembered other things. Not all of it, just bits. Being so small, his head swimming with that smell, his arm hurting from the huntsman’s grip, concrete grazing his knees. He remembered the sudden bitter darkness, the loop of chain pulling him upwards, and the heavy things touching his face … heavy,
cold
things …

It was
obvious
.

‘Cold!’ he said. ‘The flesh room is cold and so is the water.’

Steven still looked blank.

‘Thermal-imaging cameras. On the chopper.’

Steven’s mouth opened in understanding. They’d all seen thermal imaging on
Police Camera Action!
Bright white shapes with arms and legs, trying to hide in bushes or run across fields away from the scene of the crime, their own body heat a beacon to the hunters overhead.

Jonas saw it clearly now. When the helicopter or the searchers had come, the children were drugged and gagged and forced into the icy flesh room and stuffed inside dead cows and horses until the coast was clear. The idea made his stomach recoil. No wonder poor Charlie had freaked out when he’d heard the sound of the blades.

How many times had they suffered so? He thought of the long-ago day of the search, the dry grass whispering against his legs, the smell of heather and sunblock and the helicopter droning overhead, coming and going. Bob Coffin had searched with the rest of them. That meant Pete and Jess had been inside
the
cold, cloying carcasses all day long, as rescue passed by so close – with the police helicopter triggering a fresh ordeal every time it launched.