Finders Keepers (23 page)

So when Steven came home from school and found his skateboard was missing, there was no doubt in his mind who had taken it.

‘DAVEY!’

He banged through his brother’s bedroom door. Davey wasn’t there, so Steven searched the room. It was in its usual chaotic state, and looked no worse after he’d spent fifteen minutes turning it upside down and inside out, but at least he was sure his skateboard was not there.

He searched the back garden, making threats inside his head to kill Davey if he had left it out to be warped by dew or rain. Inside the coal bunker, behind the bins, under the wigwams of beans that he and Uncle Jude planted each spring. He even took a careful garden fork to the compost heap, just in case Davey had buried it there among the dirt and weeds and potato peelings. He’d kill him if he had. The skateboard had Bones Swiss bearings and had cost him £95 – and he only earned twelve quid a week.

Nothing.

‘Little
shit
!’ he shouted, and didn’t even say sorry to Mr Randall when his head popped up over the garden fence.

Steven ran back through the house, yelling for his brother.

‘What’s wrong?’ shouted his mother from upstairs. ‘He’s at Shane’s house!’

Steven knew
that
wasn’t true.

He slammed the front door behind him.

Davey saw Steven coming at the exact same moment that Shane managed to perform his first turn at the lip of the ramp without falling.

‘Yes!’ shouted Shane, with his fists in the air, and promptly fell off.

‘Shit!’ said Davey and jumped off the swing before it had stopped, giving himself a running start across the football field.

Just as he’d suspected, Steven was faster. And worse than that, Steven was
angry
. Angrier than Davey had ever seen him. Shane shouted something from behind him, but he didn’t know what. Davey had never been scared of Steven, but all that changed in an instant. For the first time in his short life, Davey experienced complete and utter regret. He’d thought he was being so clever. He’d thought he was getting Steven back
but good
. Now he realized that all he had been doing was signing his own death warrant, and fear speeded him so much that for a brief moment he actually thought he might outrun his brother.

He raced away from the village and towards the stile at the far edge of the field, arms pumping, knees flashing, but twenty yards off, he knew he’d never make it. He threw a desperate look over his shoulder and yelped at how close Steven was.

He stopped and turned – hands out defensively.

‘I’m sorry!’ he yelled. ‘Don’t hit me!’

Steven ran right through him, knocking him backwards straight off his feet, and landing on top of him with a force that made Davey howl.

‘
Where is it?! Where is it, you little shit?
’ He drew back his clenched fist.

Davey covered his face with raised arms. ‘Don’t hurt me, Stevie! I’m sorry! Please don’t hurt me!’

Steven hesitated, straddling his brother’s chest.

‘Where
is
it?’ he yelled again.

‘In the river!’ shouted a panicky Shane from beside them. ‘It’s in the river!’

‘Fuck!’ Steven got to his feet, dragging Davey up with him by the front of his T-shirt and one skinny arm. ‘Show me,’ he said, and started to haul his brother towards the stream at the edge of the field.

‘I don’t know, Stevie …’

Steven half pushed, half dragged Davey to the top of the steep, bramble-strewn bank. ‘Show me!’ he demanded again.

They followed the stream – Davey stumbling and twisting in Steven’s grip, trying not to cry.

‘There,’ he pointed.

Through the shallow water, Steven saw the tail of his skateboard sticking out of the mud and was seized with new fury.

‘Go get it!’ he told Davey, and shoved him hard down the bank. Davey tumbled through the thorns and the prickles and skidded into the water with a solid splash.

‘Shit,’ said Shane.

Davey scrambled to his feet, crying now, spluttering and choking as his sobs sucked water close to his lungs. ‘Bastard!’

‘Just get it,’ Steven demanded coldly.

Davey felt about with his hands and feet in the mud. Hitching with sobs and choked by tears, he staggered about and fell over half a dozen times, and finally stood up with the skateboard in his hands. He held it up to Steven like a sacrificial baby. ‘Here!’ he shouted. ‘I
hate
you!’

‘I hate you too, you spoiled little shit!’

Steven spat at Davey’s upturned face. The gob missed, but even as he did it, Steven felt ashamed. He wiped his mouth and walked away.

Davey hurled the ruined deck at his back. It nearly hit Shane. ‘I wish you were
dead
! I wish you’d
died
. I hate you, you big fucking
pig
!’

Steven said nothing and didn’t look back.

I’M JUST PISSING
people off
, thought Rice. Not just any old people either – she was pissing off the Piper Parents. It was embarrassing.

As agreed with Reynolds, she’d probed John Took and his ex-wife for information about their relationship with their daughter, while she sipped tea on the sofa. Took had suddenly realized what Rice was getting at and blown a fuse.

‘It’s just routine, Mr Took,’ she soothed. ‘We’re asking everybody the same questions.’

‘Why start with me?’

‘I’m going in order,’ she lied swiftly.

‘Fine,’ he said, pulling his phone from his pocket. ‘Let me tell the others they can expect you.’

He dialled a number, while Barbara Took watched them in concern.

‘Look, Mr Took,’ said Rice, trying to sound professional instead of simply annoyed with him, ‘this is an official line of inquiry. I would hope you’d be happy to help if it meant
shedding
any light on what might have happened to Jess.’

‘No
bloody
signal,’ muttered Took, and started walking around the room with his phone above his head.

‘Miss Rice,’ said Barbara Took. ‘I absolutely understand why you’re asking these questions, but I can also understand why my h— Why John is so upset by it. Can’t
you
? I mean, you’re treating us like suspects, when he knows and I know that we both love Jess very much and would never harm her. It’s insulting.’

‘It
is
,’ shouted Took from the fireplace. ‘
Bloody
insulting.’

‘I’m not saying either of you harmed her, Mrs Took, I’m just saying that if somebody else
thought
she was being harmed or neglected, then that might be a motive. And a motive would really help us at this stage.’

‘John, do stop waving that phone around and sit down.’

To Rice’s surprise, John Took did just that. Barbara topped up his tea and offered her a refill too. She’d been trained to accept tea whenever possible in this kind of situation – it established a rapport.

Once they were all sipping from the delicate china, everything seemed better. More civilized. The windows were open, and from somewhere, Rice could hear Rachel say ‘Oh hell!’ and a young man’s voice answer, ‘That’s what happens if you don’t keep your leg on!’

Took made a noise of extreme irritation and muttered, ‘Fucking leg on. I’m paying eighty quid an hour for that pony-club shit.’

Barbara sighed and put down her cup. ‘John, I think we’re agreed that this line of questioning is pointless.’

‘Too bloody right.’

‘But it’s just as clear that Miss Rice needs to ask these questions as part of the investigation.’

Took was grumpily silent.

‘So let her ask them and we’ll answer them, and then Miss Rice can go off and ask them of somebody else. Really, John, as the leader of the FEC, I think it’s up to you to set an
example
to the other parents. They look to you for things like that.’

Took put his cup down noisily on the coffee table and glared at the carpet. Then finally grunted, ‘Fine.’

‘Good,’ said Barbara. ‘
We
both know that you and I have never abused or neglected Jess, and I dare say Miss Rice knows that’s true, too?’

Rice nodded eagerly, because it wouldn’t make any difference to the questions she would ask.

‘So let’s not waste her time.’

Barbara patted Took’s knee and, briefly, he put a hand over hers.

Ten minutes later, Rice left with all her questions answered exactly the way she thought they would be, and with the feeling that what had seemed like a good idea at the time was actually going to be a time-consuming, alienating dead end.

THE SUZUKI HAD
really taken shape.

Now, whenever Steven opened the garage door, he got a little thrill to see his bike upright and with the wheels on. The contents of the boxes had lessened to the point where every time he worked on the bike, there was a tiny feeling that
this
might be the time he’d finish. But the final bits in the box were like the blue sky on a jigsaw – frustratingly slow, and keeping him from completing the whole.

Still, the experience was an end in itself. Sitting under the cold fluorescent strip lights with Em, their voices echoing just a little, the sound of metal tools on the cement floor, the warm silk of the visiting greyhound, and the puckering tang of the Super-Sours that Em bought in quarters from Mr Jacoby’s shop.

Best of all, Em seemed to have supreme confidence that he knew what he was doing, and it actually made Steven attempt things he might otherwise have left to Ronnie.

Dismantling and cleaning the carburettor was one of those things. He’d been putting it off for a while, afraid of messing it
up
. But because of Em’s faith in him, Steven finally announced that it had to be done, and on Thursday night they took their usual places – he on an upturned bucket and she on a plastic milk crate.

Steven soon found that the carburettor was like so much in life: looked difficult; was easy.

With the Haynes manual open on the floor at his feet, and Em passing him bits and making helpful comments (‘I’ll find it … I also thought it was upside-down … That looks brilliant …’), he cleaned the jets, inserted the needle and dropped the float and filter into place, then methodically screwed it all back together with a happy flourish, and grinned at Em.

‘Finished!’

‘Woo-hoo!’ she laughed, and threw her arms around him. ‘Well done, Stevie,’ she said into his shoulder.

Steven entirely lost his breath. He sat on his bucket, twisted sideways, with his arms held out away from her like stiff wings.

‘Don’t,’ he said shakily. ‘I’m all oily.’

‘Don’t care,’ she mumbled into his neck, and he shivered.

So he put his arms around her, which was
so different
from holding her hand. Under her cotton T-shirt he could feel the warm skin sliding across the bones of her spine and ribcage, and the thin straps of her bra.

His first.

‘You’re shaking,’ she said, looking up into his face. ‘Are you cold?’

‘Yes,’ he croaked, although he thought he might burst into flames.

He looked at her lips, and she kissed him.

Just like that.

It was perfect. Every single little thing about it was perfect. She tasted of Super-Sours and smelled like fresh hay and Persil and motor oil. Or maybe that was him. He didn’t care. He
didn’t care
. It was all too perfect to care about anything else.

Looked difficult; was easy.

They parted, then sat up on the bucket and the crate and just looked at each other and smiled.

‘I love you.’ The words burst out of him like champagne.

‘I love you too.’ She didn’t even hesitate, and Steven felt a surge through his veins that made his whole body tingle.

By silent agreement, they got up and packed away. They barely spoke, apart from the mundane ‘Where does this go?’ and ‘Should we leave this out for Ronnie?’ But the air in the garage had changed. It was warmer, and charged with some kind of magnetism that meant that whenever he looked at her, she was looking at him too, and a strange sort of physics that dictated that when their eyes met, their lips smiled – as if they held an independent memory of the contact they had shared.

In the fading light, they walked up the hill, hands intertwined with new frisson. They didn’t talk about the kiss, but only because they didn’t have to; they didn’t talk about anything else, because only the kiss was important.

Steven didn’t even notice Rose Cottage pass them.

At the black iron gates they kissed again. This time he started it, and by the time she finished it, it was dark.

‘I’d better go,’ she said.

‘OK,’ he said, and kissed her again.

‘I’d better go,’ she said.

‘Me too,’ he said.

She kissed him.

‘It’s late,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go.’