Finders Keepers (40 page)

‘Bye, Charlie.’

‘Bye, Jonas,’ said Charlie. ‘
Dog! Spot!
’

Jonas pressed his thumb firmly on to the brass nameplate on the boy’s collar. It was all he could think of.

Charlie was led from the yard to a chorus of tearful farewells.

Jonas watched him waving until he disappeared, then gouged another strip of flesh out of his hand as he pulled it back through the wire.

‘Brilliant!’ said Steven. ‘That was fucking brilliant!’

AFTER THE DEEPWATER
show, Grant Farmer – who actually
was
a farmer – let the grass in the field grow for haylage.

The summer was hot and dry and by the end of July the field was packed with long well-mixed grass. Farmer usually took it off in the middle of August, but it was starting to look a little brittle and his wife, Jackie, who often knew best, suggested they cut it early and try to get another crop from the field before the weather turned. Jackie had to convince her husband. He didn’t like change or the unexpected, and he was still unsettled by the incident a week ago when someone had tried to steal one of the cows. Number 23 had come in at milking with a dirty rope halter on her head. Jack Biggins at Uphill Farm had lost one a few weeks before. Just disappeared. Grant didn’t like it.

His wife didn’t like it either, but two crops of good haylage from a twelve-acre field would keep their small herd of Friesians in feed all winter, maybe with extra to sell.

Money never comes amiss to a farmer.
Or
a Farmer.

So on 23 July, Grant unhitched the muck-spreader, hitched
the
rotary mower to his tractor instead and drove the eight-hundred yards up the road to the show field, leaving a broad swathe of mud and dung along the entire length, to test the mettle of unwary motorcyclists.

He turned left inside the gate that Jonas Holly had once banged shut so hard, and lowered the blades. Like many farmers, he liked to cut his hay in concentric squares, rather than in stripes. It was how his father had always done it. So he rolled a cigarette, then trundled along the edge of the field in his old John Deere, high above the broad hedges and far away from responsibilities.

He turned right in the first corner. Three-quarters of the way along this side, the field sloped away to the corner where the stile and the oak tree were. This slope stopped the field being great. One corner dropping away like that was never good. The ground there got boggy in winter, and care had to be taken that the farmhand – a twenty-year-old fool named Stuart Clegg – did not roll the tractor down the camber and kill himself, leading to increased paperwork.

At least the slope hid the stile. And Grant Farmer always let the nettles grow around it to further discourage ramblers. He’d never actually
seen
a rambler in this particular field, but he always came over the brow of the hill half expecting there’d be a gaggle of them there, tramping across his livelihood.

He set his face to ‘hostile’ and the tractor nosed downwards.

There was someone under the oak tree. As he came over the brow, he caught a glimpse of summer clothing, which disappeared below the level of the grass as the tractor descended.

Picnickers. Even worse than ramblers. Vandals and litterbugs.

Grant resisted the urge to steer straight over there and ruin the line of his mowing. He drove to where the nettles started and then turned sharp right towards the oak.

As he got closer he could see the clothes again. White shorts and a blue T-shirt. Just one person, in fact. And by the time he
was
twenty yards away, he could see it was a youngster with yellow-blond hair, lying on his side.

Grant stopped the big green tractor and walked the last several yards through the long grass to where the boy lay curled on a flattened patch of hay, with his thumb in his mouth.

He was quite, quite dead.

Grant Farmer was used to death. Death was sad but that was just life.

This was different, though – and even he had to sit down for a moment and stare at the boy, who was tethered to the oak tree by a slim rope attached to a collar around his neck. Like a dog.

Grant pulled out his phone and dialled 999. There was no signal, so he put the phone away again. He’d have to drive back up the hill to find a signal. He walked to the tractor and climbed in. From here the body was at a slightly different angle. He started the engine, but let it idle.

He’d call the police. The police would come.
Lots
of police would come. Grant Farmer could see them now, driving across his hay in their four-by-fours, putting tape across the gate, and maybe a man there to bar access – maybe even to him. A long slow line of officers searching for clues, flattening the grass underfoot as they moved across the field like a human mangle. Grant was not the most imaginative man alive, but even he could see all this so clearly in his mind that it looked like a series of photographs in a book about crime.

He could certainly imagine what it would cost to feed his forty-two Friesians all winter.

Grant Farmer rolled another cigarette, then looked at his watch.

The boy wasn’t getting any deader.

It took him two hours to finish cutting the hay, and then he called the police.

*

Charlie liked things just the way they were. So when the bone man had told him to wait under the tree, that’s what he had done. He hadn’t even tried to undo the knots that kept him there. It was just like waiting in the minibus. Jonas had promised him he’d be OK and told him to do what the man said. So he’d sat down, waved goodbye, and waited for his daddy to come and take him home.

He’d sung his songs to keep himself amused.

One man went to MOW

Went to mow a MEDAL
.

He’d shouted ‘Hello!’ and ‘Daddy!’ a few times, but the little slope kept the sound close at hand.

He’d eaten grass when he’d got hungry. The heavy dew ensured he’d had water. But it also ensured he’d got wet and cold.

On the third night Charlie Peach had died of exposure.

He’d never made a fuss.

Elizabeth Rice didn’t know all this as she stared down at Charlie’s body.

She would know it later, once the pathologist had examined the knots and fingernails; once he’d opened Charlie’s taut little stomach and found old meat and new grass inside it. Later she’d also know that Charlie hadn’t been sexually abused, and that would be a small comfort.

All she knew right
now
, though, was that her throat ached from trying not to cry, here in the open, with Reynolds beside her and the forensic and medical teams unloading their vans and trucks and ambulances behind them.

It was the thumb in the mouth that had undone her – that little-boy gesture that betrayed the teenager for what he really was, and what he always would have been, if he weren’t lying dead at her feet.

‘We’ll have to inform Mr Peach,’ said Reynolds tentatively. ‘Would you mind, Elizabeth?’

‘Yes, I fucking
would
,’ said Rice, and burst into loud sobs. She knelt down next to Charlie. There was a fly at the corner of his mouth and she flapped it away. It came straight back and danced on his lip.

‘Don’t touch him,’ said Reynolds, but she put a hand on Charlie’s head anyway, and stroked his fine yellow hair the way a mother would.

If she found the man who’d done this, she’d kill him the way a mother would too.

The doctor came over in white paper overalls. He set his bag down at Charlie’s feet and cleared his throat.

Reynolds was at her back. Rice thought that if he tried to drag her away from Charlie she’d have to gouge his eyes out, and then her career would be over. Instead, he touched her shoulder and said gently, ‘Come on, Elizabeth. We should leave him to the doctor now.’

The doctor who was going to saw the top of Charlie’s soft blond head off. For a nanosecond Elizabeth Rice wanted to kill him too. Then all the anger left her and she felt limp without it to hold her up.

It was over. They were too late. For Charlie Peach the Pied Piper case had ended badly.

Rice nodded and wiped her eyes and thanked God for waterproof mascara. Reynolds helped her to her feet with a hand on her elbow.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said.

REYNOLDS KNOCKED AND
then waited on the pavement outside David Peach’s front door.

A dozen times in his head he’d run through a rota of other officers he could have sent, but had finally accepted that this was something he had to do himself. He’d done it a couple of times as a rookie and been appalled that he’d been allowed to inflict himself on the bereaved. But children were different. Reynolds recognized that, even though he’d never had one. Anyone who had lost a child deserved the most senior officer available to break the news, and that buck stopped with him.
All
the bucks seemed to stop with him now. It didn’t make him feel any better. He kept clearing his throat, and was suddenly very aware of every single finger and what each was doing. He stilled them all by clasping his hands together like Prince Charles, and felt even more nervous.

How to say it? How to start? There was a right way and a wrong way – he remembered that much. Reynolds ran through it over and over in his head, like an Oscar speech.

Hello, Mr Peach. Can I come in?
Get him away from the prying eyes of the neighbours and lingering press.

Can we sit down?
Get him off his feet in case he faints and hits his head on the coffee table.

I’m here with bad news, I’m afraid
. Too fast. But anything
less
fast only seemed like toying with the man when he needed to get to the point.

Charlie’s dead
. That was the point. There was no sugar-coating it. DCI Marvel would have just said it and moved on. But DCI Marvel was no role model.

Reynolds looked up at the wall of the house, which was painted pale blue like the sky beyond it. In the top window was a piece of paper taped to the glass. It was covered with stickers and glitter and the carefully coloured-in words
CHARLIE LIVES HERE
.

Tears sprang unexpectedly to his eyes.
Shit, shit, shit
. He wiped them away roughly but more leaked out. He thought of Charlie in the hay with his thumb in his mouth, of Elizabeth Rice stroking his hair as though he were sleeping, and he couldn’t believe he’d asked her not to do that – or to do
this
.

Shameful.

He hoped David Peach wasn’t home.
Please God, don’t let him be home
.

Reynolds didn’t believe in God and apparently God didn’t believe in him either, because almost immediately he heard the sound of someone coming down the stairs, and then David Peach opened the door, took one look at his face, and said, ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

*

Bob Coffin opened the gate to Jonas’s run with hands that shook with fury.

He wasn’t wearing his mask. It was that that made Jonas’s stomach clench with fear. The man was so angry he’d forgotten it.

Instead he had a white hunting whip.

Jonas didn’t know what was happening, or why, but he scrambled to his feet. He was still tethered, but the animal in him wanted to be as upright as possible in the face of attack, and as Coffin came at him, he stuck out his hands in self-defence.

It made no difference. This was full-force, no-holds-barred fury, fuelled by madness. The blows landed everywhere – his hands, his head, his face, his back and ribs. Sometimes with the heavy stock of the whip, sometimes the stinging hide lash, sometimes with the huntsman’s boots. The noise was overwhelming – the sound of the assault on his flesh, the rattle of the fence, grunts of pain and of effort, and the shouting and crying of the children.

Bob Coffin hit Jonas so hard and for so long that Jonas knew the man was going to kill him.

Why?

He didn’t know if he had asked, or how, but the huntsman told him anyway – in short exhalations as his arm rose and fell.

‘He’s
dead
. He
died
. You said to let him go and now he’s DEAD!’

The words went through Jonas’s numbed mind like a railway spike.

Charlie was dead?

The huntsman kicked him in the stomach and he curled around the pain.

Charlie was dead? That couldn’t be possible.

Fingers in his hair. Not Charlie’s careful hands, but a gnarled fist, dragging him off the cement and to his knees. Something hard and cold dug so brutally into his temple that it pushed his head round to look at Steven. The boy was screaming and beating the fence, like a crazed zoo-ape. Jonas couldn’t make out the words, just the shape of his mouth and the fear in his eyes. He couldn’t hear anything. Couldn’t feel anything. He watched Steven shouting and thought about Lucy in the water.

I promise
.