Finders Keepers (15 page)

Before he even thought about it, Jonas tried to open the door but it was locked.

Shit
.

Now his prints would be on the handle. Bollocks and shit.
Reynolds
would be justifiably furious with him – especially after the debacle during the last case, when his prints and hair had been found at more than one scene. Even though Jonas had been there in an official capacity, Marvel had made a song and dance about it and had been gunning for him from then on. He didn’t want to alienate Reynolds in the same way.

Instead he needed to glean as much information as possible that might help them to find Charlie Peach.

Jonas looked towards the minibus again; it was easily visible, maybe sixty yards away. Had the kidnapper broken this window and then had his eye caught by Charlie? Maybe his ear? Jonas bent at the knees a little to reduce his six-foot-four to more average proportions. Even from six inches lower he could see the minibus clearly.

Inside the car, the dog heaved itself to its feet and pressed its snout to the hole. A few blocks of safety glass tinkled free of the window.

Jonas heard the whoop of police sirens and walked back to the minibus to meet Reynolds.

Charlie Peach was not hiding or playing a joke. Charlie Peach had just plain vanished.

Reynolds blamed Jonas Holly. One hundred per cent. His only task had been to stop anyone leaving the show ground through the single exit with a child that was not his own – and he’d failed miserably.

The man was a jinx.

Reynolds looked again at the note stuck to the steering wheel. Even without touching it he could see a tiny fibre of greenish wool clinging to its gummed edge.

The man they were hunting had been right here, in the confines of a field that also contained a policeman who had been specifically assigned to look for him.

The more Reynolds thought about it, the worse it got.

Jonas appeared at his shoulder and Reynolds was suddenly
uncomfortably
aware that, at his height, Jonas probably had a bird’s eye view of his plugs. He hunched away from him angrily, then bitterly slapped the roof of the minibus where Charlie Peach used to be.

‘Welcome back, Holly,’ he said.

Reynolds’s words would sting Jonas later, but right now he ignored them and told the DI what he knew so far. Reynolds asked follow-up questions while Rice made notes. Reynolds handed Jonas a roll of police tape and told him to secure the scene, then he and Rice went to look at the other cars.

Someone fetched Jonas some metal stakes and helped him to hammer them into the firm ground around the minibus, then Jonas unwound the tape, watched by a wide-eyed audience of children in jodhpurs and ribbons.

When he’d done that, Jonas stood by the minibus and stared at the empty seats. In his mind’s eye he saw Charlie Peach, left there, maybe scared, maybe just interested, as the man approached. Had he followed him on a promise of sweets or an Xbox? Had he been dragged from his harness kicking and biting? Had he shouted for help? Would he even have understood what was going on? A mental age of four, the carers had said. Jonas felt a surge of anger at whoever had stolen such a child.

You have to save the boy, Jonas
.

Lucy’s voice was so clear in his head that his heart leaped, and he had to stop himself turning to find her.

She wasn’t there. Lucy was dead. She wasn’t there.

She never was.

After the initial shock, the echo of her voice calmed him – just as it always had.

Jonas stared sightlessly at the little yellow note. ‘I’ll save him,’ he whispered fiercely. ‘I promise.’

*

Steven and Em had been allowed out soon after the police arrived, and walked the two miles home in silence broken only by the pony’s metallic hoofs scraping the tarmac. Em was distracted and hadn’t offered to let him ride. He hoped she was thinking about the missing boy, but he feared she was bored – or irritated by his weirdness over Jonas Holly.

At the entrance to Old Barn Farm she said, ‘Bye then.’

She wasn’t even going to let him back through the gates. He was crushed.

‘Bye then,’ he said awkwardly, then added ‘Thanks,’ because he meant it.

‘See you at school.’

‘See you at school.’

He patted Skip’s warm neck and turned towards home, hearing the gates opening behind him.

‘Do you … want to go out again some time?’

He looked back in surprise.

Em looked uncharacteristically nervous. ‘Only if you want to.’

‘I want to.’

‘Good.’ She smiled. ‘Me too.’

She waved.

‘Bye,’ he said again, and held his hand up in return.

She pointed Skip down the driveway, and Steven walked home. At least, he assumed later that he
must
have walked home, but only because home was where he found himself when he finally stopped running in circles, laughing and shouting with joy, inside his own head.

*

There were 127 cars and horseboxes on the site, and by 6pm all but three had been searched as they left through the gate, past a yawning Graham Nash and an industrious Elizabeth Rice.

Only the minibus and the Focus and Megane that had suffered broken windows remained, with three men from the forensics lab at Portishead poring over them.

Their disgorged occupants, with assorted children and dogs, got more and more hungry, tired and fractious until finally Jonas offered to drive them all home himself, just for some peace and quiet. He took them in two shifts – first Alison Marks, the chatty owner of the Focus, along with her family, who lived in Exford. There was no conversation to be had with Barbara Moorcroft on their way to Loxhore. Her two hysterical Patterdales barked relentlessly and her three children sat in pained silence throughout the ride, apparently used to being yapped into submission.

On his way home, Jonas stopped at the highest point of the road that draped across Withypool Common. He cut the engine and listened to the silence swell around him like a balm.

He’d become so used to silence since Lucy had died that he’d forgotten how stressful noise could be. How stressful talking and people could be. The thought that he’d once talked to people every day seemed impossible to him now. And the idea that he would have to get used to it again was sobering.

He wasn’t sure he could.

Jonas expelled a long, shuddering breath that he felt he might have drawn in hours ago when Charlie Peach first went missing. Everything after that point was hazy to him – a fairground blur of panic and shouting and movement and guilt.

But now – here atop the moor, with the window down and the summer evening breeze soothing his mind – he could start to think again. He drank in the stillness, even as he started to recognize its separate components: a blackbird somewhere close by, the swish of the long grass and the dry rattle of gorse; the ebb and flow of the air itself against his ear – a coded whisper in breathy Morse.

Jonas sat and allowed the moor to clear his head.

He didn’t want to think about the day just gone, but the broken windows nagged him.

He was sure a couple of cars at Tarr Steps, where Pete Knox was taken, had also been vandalized. He would have to ask Reynolds about Dunkery Beacon. If windows had been broken there too, the connection with the kidnapper would be undeniable.

But it still begged the question:
why
?

The answer stayed in the shadows like a wolf skirting a campfire.

THREE CHILDREN GONE
in the space of a fortnight.

The
Sun
called him the Pied Piper, this man who was spiriting the children of Exmoor away, right under the noses of their guardians, and the other tabloids fell on the name with glee. Even the broadsheets picked up on it, although they sniffily referred to it as ‘the case some are calling the Pied Piper’, which meant they could
use
the name while somehow maintaining a dignified distance
from
it.

Either way, Reynolds found it unhelpful. The name conjured up a damning image of the police stupidly failing to spot an endless crocodile of children being danced away across the moor by a man in a jester’s outfit playing a tin whistle.

The tabloids also seemed to imply that the kidnapper of three children must be an awful lot easier to catch than the kidnapper of one, and with the national media spotlight turned so brightly on the case, he was now at risk of failing far more publicly.

Reynolds could only hope that his hair would stand the strain.

He was assigned three more officers and held a press
conference
where he announced – teeth slightly on edge – that the
Sun
had offered a £10,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of the missing children or the identification of their abductor. When he watched it on the news, he was relieved to see that his plugs looked pretty damned good, even under the harsh TV lights.

Everyone was talking about it.

Not his hair – the reward.

*

That evening, Kate Gulliver called DI Reynolds to ask how Jonas Holly was doing.

She got Elizabeth Rice instead.

‘Oh hi, this is DC Rice. DI Reynolds isn’t here right now.’

‘Can you ask him to call me?’

‘Sure,’ said Rice. ‘What’s it about?’

Kate prickled. She didn’t know Rice, but Rice must know she was a force-approved psychologist. For all she knew, Kate could be calling to speak to Reynolds about his own personal issues. It was rude of her to ask. Bloody rude.

But Rice
was
a woman, and Kate hated to be rude to any woman in a man’s world, from tea ladies up. There was always a sense that they were in this together, like sisters, and to be rude to a sister would only get one a reputation as a bitch.

So instead of telling Rice that it was confidential, she told her she was calling about Jonas Holly.

‘Just wondered how he was coping being back at work, that’s all.’

It wasn’t all, of course. If Kate Gulliver had been confident that Jonas was equipped to be doing just fine, she’d never have called.

‘OK, I think,’ said Rice, sounding a little surprised. ‘He seems OK.’

Kate said ‘Good,’ and cursed the sisterhood that meant that
now
she’d had an answer from Rice, she could no longer ask to speak to Reynolds. She trusted Reynolds’s judgement, whereas she didn’t know Rice from a bar of soap. But sisterly manners now dictated that she had to accept the opinion of some underling, thank her, and say goodbye.

Which she did.

Rice hung up and frowned into the middle distance of the Red Lion bar. She did not share Reynolds’s erudition, it was true. But she had more common sense in her little finger than any man she’d ever known, and something told her that Kate Gulliver was unusually concerned about Jonas Holly.

It wasn’t intuition, it was just logical.

Jonas had been through a horrendous, life-altering experience. Rice herself had suffered nightmares for months after their last trip to Shipcott. The memory of Jonas holding the still-warm body of his dead wife at the foot of the bloodied stairs would be with her for ever. Even now – here in the bonhomie of the Red Lion bar – Elizabeth Rice shivered as she remembered the slide of warm blood against her lips as she’d tried to keep Lucy Holly alive; the smell of iron and – somehow – burning rubber; Jonas’s eyes never leaving his wife’s face, but growing darker and darker as his own blood drained away through the deep wounds in his stomach.

Some time later that day, she’d showered and cried as the water turned pink around her ankles. She’d had to scrub the dried blood off her knees. Only her fear of being seen as a weak woman had kept her from going to see one of the force shrinks herself.

So Gulliver’s call might have been routine, but Rice’s logic said it was not.

For a start, it was after 6pm. That implied that Gulliver had wanted to have a proper chat with Reynolds, not just a quick check on a former patient as part of the working day. Then Rice had noticed the irritation in Gulliver’s voice when she’d
answered
Reynolds’s phone. Fleetingly, she considered that they might have a more-than-professional relationship, but quickly discounted that. Reynolds was not a man she could imagine having sex with anyone – not even himself. So Gulliver was irritated because her enquiry was more than casual; it was important; she really wanted to
know
how Jonas Holly was doing. And that must mean she was not 100 per cent sure he’d be doing OK – even though making sure was her job.

Reynolds approached with a half of Thatchers for her, and a white wine.

Rice quickly took the decision to tell him to call Gulliver and leave it at that. If there was something wrong with Jonas Holly, Reynolds would pick it up. He already seemed to dislike Holly for some reason Rice couldn’t quite fathom, but which she felt instinctively wasn’t quite fair. She had no desire to feed her boss’s irrational dislike of a man who was a victim and deserved only sympathy.