Finders Keepers (38 page)

‘Charlie needs to be at home with his dad.’

The broom swung through a short arc and smashed into Jonas’s face. It knocked him sideways so fast that his head bounced off the fence with a rattle. Bob Coffin loomed over him.

‘He don’t love him!’ he spat. Then he clanged out of the run and stormed up the walkway.

Jonas sat up and touched his jaw cautiously. The side of his face was numb and blood dripped slowly over his lower lip.

Charlie looked scared, so Jonas said, ‘Don’t worry, Charlie,’ and held his hand again.

The other children had been stunned into silence by the outburst.

All except Steven.

He rattled the fence, his eyes wide with excitement.

‘He heard you!’ he hissed at Jonas. ‘He
heard
you!’

DAVEY STOPPED HANGING
out with Shane and now spent most of his days holding his PS2 console loosely in his hand, while pimps crashed their cars pointlessly into whores without any help from him. Uncle Jude tried to get him to help in the garden but he was already exhausted. He slept a lot, although not at night when he was supposed to;
then
he lay and stared into the darkness and thought of the way his mother would look at him when Steven came home. When she knew what a coward he was. What a liar.

Em called him downstairs for tea. She only came after school now and always cooked for them. It was spaghetti hoops on toast, his favourite, but his mum and his nan didn’t eat it, and that made everything taste crap.

‘I don’t like this,’ he told Em.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I thought you did.’

He dropped his fork with a clatter. ‘Why do you keep coming here?’

Everyone looked at Davey.

‘Well, why does she?’ he demanded. ‘Is she going to keep coming for ever?’

There was a short silence before Nan covered Em’s hand with hers. ‘She’s here because she loves Steven. Like we all do.’

‘I don’t!’ said Davey.

‘Of course you do,’ said Lettie. ‘Don’t be silly.’

Davey stood up sharply, with a loud scrape of his chair. ‘I don’t! I hate him! I hope he never comes home!’

Em bit her lip and Nan looked down at her toast.

Davey waited for his mother to get up and slap him hard. He didn’t care. Let her! She’d slap him and he’d cry and then s
he
’d feel bad instead of
him
.

Instead Lettie reached for his hand. He tried to pull it away from her but she held on to it.

‘Leave me!’

She didn’t. She tugged him gently towards her. With every grudging step he felt his shell of brittle anger crack and flake.

‘
Leave
me!’

Lettie didn’t again. Instead she turned him and eased him on to her lap, and started to rub his back in warm circles, as if he were a small child.

‘Just leave me
alone
!’ he shouted.

Then he put his face in her neck so no one could see him cry.

After tea, Lettie took Davey to the Red Lion to see DI Reynolds.

‘I lied,’ Davey muttered, examining his own trainers as if he’d never seen them before.

‘I know,’ said DI Reynolds.

Davey was confused. DI Reynolds didn’t seem angry – or even surprised. In fact, he then answered the question Davey hadn’t asked. ‘We do come across our fair share of liars, you know.’

‘He’s not a liar,’ said Lettie firmly. ‘He just lied about this because he felt so bad about leaving Steven.’

‘Of course,’ said DI Reynolds.

Davey bit his lip and – to his amazement – DI Reynolds winked at him. Or maybe he just twitched. Davey looked away, uncertain of how he should respond and hoping his mother hadn’t seen it.

They sat down in the lounge bar where children were allowed, and Detective Sergeant Rice agreed with DI Reynolds that she didn’t mind buying Davey a Coke and his mother a white wine. Davey guessed she was DI Reynolds’s secretary.

DI Reynolds got out the same notebook he’d used before and they went through everything again. This time Davey did his best, however annoying it was, and told him even those details he wasn’t sure were real – those dreamlike snatches that had seemed too small and uncertain to bother with. A paper sack with a torn picture of a dog’s back legs and tail on it; black boots; zig-zag tyres. DI Reynolds made careful notes of everything and asked him all the same questions over and over again and even made his little train noise, and suddenly – out of nowhere – Davey remembered that the car was navy blue!

DI Reynolds wrote it down and Davey grinned in delight.

‘And he wore gloves!’ he shocked himself by saying.

‘What kind of gloves?’

‘Green woolly ones. That’s what smelled like medicine.’

DI Reynolds hissed something that sounded like ‘Shit’ to Davey. He got up abruptly and walked to the fireplace and back, and then walked there again and stared up at the shiny dead eyes of the big stuffed stag. DS Rice watched him eagerly and when he turned round they exchanged meaningful nods.

‘Does that help?’ said Davey.

‘Tons,’ said DS Rice.

Lettie gently twisted the little hairs at the back of Davey’s neck, and he didn’t even mind that people were watching.

DI Reynolds came back and they went through things again, but Davey had nothing more to offer. Even so, when the officer
finally
snapped a strip of black elastic around his notebook, it was with a satisfied air.

‘Well done, Davey,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

Davey was sorry it was over. He was high on the joy of true things.

DI Reynolds shook his hand and then his mother’s. ‘Don’t you blame yourself about what happened with Steven either,’ he told Davey. ‘You were drugged. Not your fault.’

Davey nodded wholeheartedly, and thought DI Reynolds was a lot less disappointing this time round.

‘Mum?’ said Davey cautiously as they walked home. ‘Sometimes I
have
lied about other stuff.’

‘I know,’ said Lettie.

EVEN A DOG
learns how to get what it wants – a bone, a pat on the head, a place by the fire – by watching and learning and licking the hand that feeds it.

Steven had said nothing, but Jonas could tell by his restless pacing that the boy was excited and filled with new hope that the huntsman might be starting to crack. His mood was infectious, and the younger children played games and giggled, while Jess sang fragments of pop songs.

And the next day – when his jaw had almost stopped hurting – Jonas screwed up his courage and simply went on talking to the huntsman as if he’d never been interrupted.

‘You’re wrong about the children. People
do
love them.’

Coffin gave no indication of having heard him. His face was stretched and blank. He skirted Jonas like a dangerous whirlpool, spraying the cement with the brick-coloured hose.

‘They weren’t abandoned. Not like the dogs.’

He didn’t expect a response, but he got one, gruff and muffled.

‘Dogs die in hot cars. Seen it with my own eyes.’

Jonas flicked a look at Steven, who nodded encouragingly.

‘You only wanted to protect them. I understand that.’

Coffin dropped the hose into the water bucket, then picked up the broom. Jonas flinched, but Coffin just swept around him and said nothing more.

Jonas had to keep him engaged. If it was only dogs the huntsman would talk about, he’d start there. With a vague motion of his arm, he asked, ‘What happened to all the hounds?’

There was a long pause, then: ‘Had to go.’

‘Go where?’

The huntsman stopped sweeping and picked at the wooden handle of the broom. Jonas looked at Steven, who gave a little shrug.

Coffin bent to his task again, but now his strokes were short and jerky.

‘The Midmoor took a few. The others I had to get rid.’

Jonas said nothing, but pictures raced through his head like a flicker book. He had hunted as a boy, and he knew how hounds were ‘got rid’. He thought of the sixty or so animals that had made up the Blacklands pack. All his life he’d seen them milling about outside pubs, moving as one through the village by night and loping muddily across the moor. A joyous jigsaw of pied coats, silken ears and lolling tongues – vital and vibrant and singing for fun. The thought of spending years whelping them, raising them, training them – and then shooting them all in the head made him feel ill.

The strokes of the broom got louder and the huntsman spoke without any further prompting. ‘Had to be done, Mr Took said.’

He angrily thrust the broom at the wet cement, his voice rising rapidly. ‘Well, I say
bollocks
to him. Bollocks to him and them fox-loving incomers driving down from London for the weekend and tell us how to live our lives! Take our lives
away
from us! After a hundred years! Take
everything
away and then tell me I don’t fucking
love
them!’

He hurled the broom across the run. It bounced off the fence next to Jonas’s head and Charlie started to wail. The children watched the huntsman, their eyes wide with the fear of uncertainty.

Coffin’s open mouth stretched the stocking mask into a darker shadow that fluttered with vehemence.

‘Now I’ve took everything away from
them
,’ he said, low and vicious. ‘See how
they
like it.’ Then he slowly retrieved the broom and carried on sweeping as if nothing had happened.

Jonas felt everything falling into place in his head like a little Chinese puzzle box. He watched Coffin with unseeing eyes, and thought of the emptiness Lucy had left in Rose Cottage – that deep, sucking silence that tugged at his soul and lured him to follow as surely as a siren’s lament from a jagged rock. If he could have filled that void, he would have. If he had been able to forget for one single second the sheer
absence
signalled by the quiet clock, the folded rug and the empty vase, he would have done anything –
anything
– to make that happen.

Revenge may have sparked Coffin’s madness, but at some point, Jonas guessed, he had started to steal children simply to fill the runs left echoing bare by the loss of his hounds. What he had done was unpardonable, reprehensible and utterly insane – and Jonas understood it completely.

‘You did the right thing,’ he said quietly.

‘What the
hell
!’ said Steven.

Jonas didn’t even glance at him. He looked only at the huntsman, who had cocked his unformed face towards him in rare attention.

‘I know what you’re trying to do here, Bob. I can understand it now. I can see how much you love them, and how much you want to take care of them.’

‘Yes,’ said the huntsman.

‘You just want them to be safe.’

‘That’s right,’ said the huntsman.

‘And we’re very grateful,’ said Jonas gently.

The huntsman nodded. ‘Good.’

‘You’re nuts!’ shouted Steven. ‘Both of you!’

Jonas looked calmly at Steven and the boy closed his mouth.

Jonas felt confidence coursing through him. Starving, half naked and chained at the feet of a maniac, he felt suddenly buoyant and completely sure of himself. Coffin’s face was turned towards him. It was blank and stretched, but Jonas knew he had the man’s attention.

‘But
Charlie
doesn’t understand it,’ he said carefully. ‘He’s not clever like you. Look at him, Bob.’

To his surprise, Bob Coffin
did
look through the fence. Charlie sniffed miserably and said, ‘My tooth is sore.’

Everything was suddenly very quiet, as if the sky itself was holding its breath while the huntsman stood there, motionless in the sun, the broom held loosely in his hand.

Loose and close to Jonas.

Loose enough and close enough for him to grab? Coffin
never
got this close to him. The man was always wary around him, even though
he
was the one who was chained to a fence. Jonas shifted position slowly and slightly, testing his wasting muscles, wondering how fast he could still move.

He licked his dry lips and went on, ‘Look how sad he is. What’s the point of keeping him here when it’s not making him happy?’

Coffin raised his arm and Jonas’s whole body seized in readiness. But the man only touched the bottom of his stocking mask, as if he might lift it.

Jonas watched Coffin walk a tightrope strung between compassion and craziness. The wind thrummed the high wire, and the huntsman wobbled – and Jonas swayed a little closer to the broom. From the corner of his eye he could see Steven gripping the fence, tense with anticipation. Jonas’s hand twitched—

Coffin grunted. He dropped his hand from the stocking mask. He picked the hose out of the overflowing bucket, walked out, and locked the kennel gate behind him.

‘Shit,’ said Steven.