Finders Keepers (16 page)

But if Jonas’s own psychologist – the person who’d signed him off to return to work – was worried about Jonas, then Rice decided there and then that
she
’d better be worried about him too.

IT WAS ALMOST
strange – how Exmoor could remain as hot and sunny as it did, with such a black cloud hanging over it. An uneasy feeling hung there with it, and the children suffered most. Those who had considered the moor their personal playground were suddenly confined to tiny back gardens. Despite the brilliant summer, parents did an unprecedented one-eighty and actively encouraged the playing of video games in darkened rooms.

There was an upturn in sightings of toddlers on old-fashioned reins, and people whose offspring were too old to fit into reins eyed the contraptions wistfully. Tourists who couldn’t cancel their bookings without losing their deposits stocked up on jigsaws and Swingballs, and when they were forced by the superb weather into hiking, were seen in lay-bys and car parks across the moor giving stern briefings to unimpressed-looking youngsters about the dangers of wandering off alone.

When they did get into their cars and venture out across the hills or towards the beaches, they were likely to be stopped and
questioned
at police roadblocks, and asked to open their boots, so that their deckchairs and windbreaks and kites and spare toilet rolls could spill on to the road – all without revealing a single missing child.

Shops suffered too. Exmoor survived its winters and thrived on its summers, when the population swelled fifty-fold. Within a fortnight of Jess Took being taken, it felt the difference. Summer stock aimed at tourists and outdoor pursuits hardly sold, but disappeared reasonably fast anyway, as sulky kids required to trail into shops behind their mothers instead of waiting in cars retaliated with an outrageous spree of petty theft. In Dulverton twelve-year-old James Meldrum enjoyed brief popularity by brazenly walking out of Field & Stream with a brand-new fishing rod for every boy in his class, before going back the next day and stupidly getting caught stuffing an 80p bag of No.1 hooks into his pocket.

But such light relief was the exception.

Shopkeepers were grim-faced, and B&B owners sat and waited for the phone to ring. Publicans’ eyes rarely left the door, even as they served halves and the occasional ploughman’s lunch to locals. Prices were slashed; sales brought forward. Old Bob Moat drove his tractor all the way from Exford to Lynton and didn’t have to pull over for a single caravan. It was an anecdote worth repeating – as rare as heather flowers in April.

Basically, tourists stayed away from Exmoor in droves, and chose other areas of outstanding natural beauty in which to leave their children in cars.

*

Davey and Shane still hadn’t spent the money.

It was simply too much. If they’d found a fiver, they’d have blown it in a single trip to Mr Jacoby’s shop. If they’d found a tenner, they’d have asked Dougie Trewell to get them some cans so they could see what getting drunk was all about.

But a hundred pounds was serious money, and although there were many false starts, it stuck to their fingers like glue.

The simple solution, of course, would have been to split the cash, but having grown accustomed to thinking of the possession of an entire hundred pounds, it was too much of a comedown now to consider spending a mere fifty.

Davey volunteered to take care of the money, but Shane was immediately suspicious. Davey was offended by his suspicion, but then baulked at allowing Shane to keep it at
his
house. They came to an arrangement: one of them would take the cash home one night, then hand it over in a corner of the school playground the next day, so that the other could take his turn at keeping it safe.

It was during one of these increasingly casual playground handovers that Mark Trumbull solved the problem for them by relieving them of the lot in a single transaction.

‘Gimme your money,’ he said simply, and held out his hand.

‘Piss off,’ said Davey, even though Mark Trumbull was a foot taller, thirty pounds heavier and had previous form as a bully. The money in his pocket made Davey feisty.

‘Yeah, piss off,’ said Shane, taking a step backwards.

Mark Trumbull didn’t bother with any gangster threats or clever conversation. He simply punched Davey so hard in the chest that he knocked him flat and left him gasping, then rummaged in his pocket for the notes, while Shane shouted at him from a safe distance. Then he walked away.

‘I’ll tell Mr Peach on you!’ yelled Shane, and then remembered that Mr Peach was on leave ’cos of Charlie being kidnapped, and realized that the threat was therefore even emptier than it had sounded.

Shit.

STEVEN HAD NEVER
had a girlfriend before, and now that he did, he wasn’t quite sure what to do with her.

‘Shag her, of course,’ Lewis advised, when Steven revealed his dilemma. ‘Absolute minimum, she owes you a blowjob.’

Steven rolled his eyes.

They were babysitting, which was what they often did on Friday nights when Chantelle Cox went to Cheeky’s in Minehead with her mother and her cousin.

Lewis had started the babysitting thing and roped Steven in with promises of a well-stocked fridge and porn on the TV. In fact, the Coxes’ fridge was as dull as his mother’s and the porn channel was a myth, even though Lewis insisted that he’d watched it ‘loads’ – and tried to maintain the lie by spending at least ten minutes of their regular Friday nights prodding the remote control and complaining about signals.

Plus, they didn’t even get paid. Steven had assumed that he’d get a cut of whatever Lewis earned – or at least benefit in trickledown. But when he’d finally raised the issue during a
tantrum
by the baby that had lasted right through
Top Gear
, Lewis had laughed and told him, ‘I don’t get
paid
, idiot!’

Only then had Steven realized that the baby they were sitting for was actually half Lewis’s. Once
that
penny dropped, Steven looked at little Jake with new – more wary – eyes. Steven had never had sex, and had never seen any upside to that situation until now. But the ghastly light-of-day connection between sex and babies was suddenly very real and immensely sobering. Especially as the half of the baby that belonged to Lewis always seemed to be the bottom half – and watching him gag while unwrapping a shit-filled nappy was better contraception than Durex.

So he didn’t shag Em.

Instead they just hung out together. Sometimes at the bus stop with the other kids, sometimes in the woods or up on the moor, where they once saw a kite take off with a snake in its grasp, knotting itself into a frenzy.

Sometimes he helped her groom Skip, and other times she watched him rebuild his motorbike. At the stable, he handed her brushes and filled buckets. He was quite sure that Em could groom Skip a lot faster without him, but she never said so. And having her with him at Ronnie Trewell’s garage was great. She never got fed up and talked about shopping; she watched him and made encouraging noises. It made him feel that he knew what he was doing, and he was surprised to find that his bike actually started to seem less like junk and more like a bike while she was around. Once she spent a whole afternoon rubbing Autosol into the pitted chrome front mudguard, until they could see themselves grinning in it.

Steven and Em held hands when they were alone, and often he thought about kissing her, although he always chickened out at the last moment – even when it looked as if she was expecting it. The idea of getting it wrong was awful. Of leaning in and missing her mouth, or hitting her mouth just as she started to say something, or of his lips being too dry or too wet. It was just too
important
to ruin. Every time they said goodbye, he lingered – then kicked himself for not being man enough to kiss his own girlfriend.

He thought about other things too, of course. It was only natural. But even his sexual fantasies were short-lived things because he needed so little of her to fuel them. A kiss, a touch – sometimes just an imaginary whisper was enough.

Every time he saw Em, Steven’s heart skipped a beat. He knew now that he was not allergic to horses or to anything else. He knew it was love, even though he’d never felt it before. He told no one, and barely allowed himself to think it. The idea of loving her was so huge that his brain skirted the edges of it and never faced it head-on. If he confessed it – even to himself – he was afraid it might lose its magic.

Because the journey took her past Rose Cottage, Steven always walked Em home. He was disturbed by the idea of Jonas Holly watching her walk past his house, but he didn’t tell her that – just that he wanted her to be safe.

‘I’ll be fine,’ Em told him. ‘I’m fit. I can run fast.’

‘Still,’ he shrugged, ‘things happen.’

‘Only to other people,’ she laughed.

He hesitated, and then told her, ‘Then you’ll be there if someone tries to kidnap
me
.’

Her parents knew his name. Her mother offered him tea and cake. Not Spar-shop cakes, but real cake she’d made herself and which he was expected to eat off a plate with a fork. Em’s father was polite but wary. He’d shake Steven’s hand and ask him how he was, but when he was at home he always seemed to be lurking nearby, frowning and watchful.

Steven was slightly insulted, but couldn’t blame him.

They went to Steven’s house only once, for tea. His mother kept apologizing for serving white bread and Nan showed Em photos of Steven as a small boy.

In one of them he was naked.

So mostly they went to hers.

They studied together at the kitchen table, or listened to music in her room, or watched TV in her lounge, which was bigger than his whole downstairs. They patted foals on the moor; they caught the bus to Barnstaple and he helped her choose CDs or strappy tops that made his head swim.

His friends took the piss, of course.

‘She’s new,’ said Lalo Bryant. ‘She’ll learn.’ And they all laughed.

‘If you’re not having sex with her, she’s not really your girlfriend,’ said Dougie Trewell with absolute authority. Steven hadn’t
said
they weren’t having sex, but they’d all assumed as much, given he wasn’t boasting about it.
They
were always boasting about having sex. Everyone was doing it, apparently. All the boys, anyway. It made him nervous that if they didn’t have sex soon, Em would think he was an idiot and move on to someone who knew what he was doing.

But the killer blow came from Lewis, who sighed heavily and patted Steven’s back. ‘She’s too good for you, mate. No offence.’

Steven wanted to punch him.

Because he knew it was true.

Em was special. His friends all knew it and even the other girls in their school could see it. Some of them were already wearing velvet ribbons instead of letting their loose hair blow into their mouths.

Steven wasn’t special.

It had never bothered him before, but suddenly it was critical. It raised painful questions: Why was Em going out with him? What did she see in him? Was it a joke? Was she secretly laughing behind his back, just as his friends were laughing to his face? His chest hurt at the thought.

At night he spent ages staring at himself in the bathroom mirror, worrying at spots and wishing his ears didn’t stick out.

‘Mu-um! Stevie won’t get out the bathroom!’

‘Shut up.’

‘
You
shut up.’

‘
Both
of you shut up! Steven, get out of the bathroom!’

He stopped saving for a bike jacket, and bought Clearasil and a Gillette Mach 3, which he scraped across his chin and cheeks every morning to encourage stubble.

Nan came back from a trip to Barnstaple with a can of Lynx.

‘How’s your girlfriend?’ she said bluntly. The deodorant had given her asking rights.

Dougie’s pronouncement rang in Steven’s ears, and he hedged, ‘She’s not my
girl
friend. Just a friend.’

Nan snorted and stared at him until he blushed.

‘I thought so!’ she said triumphantly, and marched downstairs.

He was half-happy to think his nan knew that he was now a boy who had a girlfriend, but the fact that it had been acknowledged made him fearful too; the more people who knew, the greater would be the humiliation if – when – Em fulfilled his friends’ cheerful predictions and dumped him.

While he waited for that to happen, he smelled of Lynx Instinct.

JONAS WAS BACK
on his beat.

He was out by 8am every day and by 6.30pm, when he drove back to Shipcott, he was exhausted. He was no longer used to the physical exertion of a working day, and had eaten too little for too long to have any reserves of energy.

Now he parked outside the Red Lion and looked across at the Sunset Lodge retirement home.

He should go in; he always used to.

It used to be a regular part of his beat – sitting in that sauna of a garden room with a cup of tea balanced on one knee and a custard cream going soggy in his saucer.