Finders Keepers (37 page)

It astonished Jonas that those same children could be right here in front of him, playing ‘I Spy’, making daisy chains, singing, gathering leaves for him to eat, being kind to each other in the midst of a waking nightmare. How did they do it?

Only Charlie was coming apart at the seams. He didn’t have the language or the understanding to cope with what was happening to him. Either he was bouncy, or in tears. Increasingly it was the latter. Right now he was grizzling the way a two-year-old does when it’s missed a feed or a nap.

‘Hey, Charlie,’ called Pete. ‘You want to sing?’

‘No.’

‘OK.
One man went to mow, went to mow a meadow. One man and his dog
…’

Kylie joined in, and then the others, but Charlie slumped listlessly against the shade of the back wall.

Jonas peered through the fence. ‘Hey, Charlie. Do you want to try my meat? It’s much better than yours.’

Charlie looked from Jonas to the untouched bones in Jonas’s kennel and back again, lips pursed. ‘You don’t eat meat.’

‘No, but if I
did
eat meat, this is the meat I’d eat.’

Behind him Jess said, ‘OK, Dr Seuss!’ and Steven laughed, which made Charlie laugh too.

‘You want to try it?’ Jonas asked.

Fresh from laughing, Charlie looked more malleable. He screwed up his face and twisted his hands in front of him while he decided. Finally he gave a huge melodramatic sigh and a shrug and said, ‘No.’

They all laughed then, even Jonas. It was crazy – laughing at a starving boy refusing food while they were all being held hostage by a lunatic – but it still felt good.

Jonas got to the end of his chain and reached out for the closest bone. It was too far to touch with his hand. Aware of
Charlie
watching his every move, he turned and stretched out one long leg. His toes felt the meat. He rocked it and it tumbled towards him. He pulled it the rest of the way until he could pick it up in his hands. Just the touch of it made his skin crawl. The double-fist-sized hunk of greying flesh, marbled with clots of yellow fat. All wrapped around the smooth protrusion of bone …

He closed his eyes and brought the chunk of meat to his lips. The smell! He swallowed sick. He couldn’t do this. He grimaced and opened his eyes. Charlie was watching him with interest. Without thinking about it again, Jonas sank his teeth into the meat.

It was like trying to bite the nose off a face. That horrible, that hard. And it wouldn’t come off. He had to start chewing while it was still attached.

Like an animal.

He retched but kept going, tears streaming from his eyes, until at last he was able to tear a small gristly chunk away and swallow it whole. He panted with tension and disgust, saliva running over his lower lip and his stomach cramping, as his traitorous system suddenly readied itself on a promise of nourishment.

He wiped his mouth and composed his features into something he hoped resembled appreciation, before looking at Charlie. ‘This is good,’ he said. ‘I feel a lot better now.’

Charlie seemed interested.

‘You want some?’

Charlie looked from his own untouched bones to the one in Jonas’s hands.

‘OK then,’ he said, and got up. Jonas once more stretched to the end of his chain and just managed to tip the joint of meat through the gap where the roof stopped.

Charlie looked doubtfully at it for a moment, then dug his teeth in close to the place where Jonas had.

‘Yours is nicer,’ he confirmed.

‘I told you so,’ said Jonas.

‘You can have mine,’ Charlie said magnanimously, and threw them over the fence. They tumbled wetly across the cement.

Steven gave a short humourless laugh.

Jonas looked at the gross chunks of old animal. His stomach clenched like a fist in desperation.

You have to save the boy, Jonas
.

I will. I promise
.

How could he save anyone if he were dead?

The nearest chunk had a tube of thick, pink vein sticking from it. Jonas shuffled forward on his arse until he could grip the vein under his curled toes, then drew the slab of dead horse towards him.

IT WAS SIX
weeks since Jess had been taken, and John Took couldn’t sleep.

Part of him – the ever-decreasing part that was in denial – was still hoping that Jess’s disappearance was a petulant teenaged prank. Even the thought of Jess running off with a much older boyfriend was preferable to the idea that she’d been abducted.

Since she’d started to get breasts a year earlier, John Took had lain awake on many a night worrying about the kind of boys who might lust after his daughter. Boys who were too old, boys with tattoos and nose-rings, boys without jobs, boys who were only after one thing.

Now, awake through the night again, he was astonished to find that he actually
hoped
she was off in some grubby B&B being ravished by an old lech or a pierced punk – if only it meant she wasn’t being raped and murdered. Or was already lying dead in a field somewhere, waiting to be found by some random dog-walker.

Everything was relative.

Rachel stirred beside him and pulled even more of the covers on to her side.

She was going through the motions of support and sympathy and offering him tea at ridiculously short intervals, but he could tell her heart wasn’t in it. Why should it be? Jess wasn’t her daughter. Rachel was suitably sympathetic in his company, but she continued to have two dressage lessons a week with that young buck he’d got out of
Horse & Hound
, and he could hear them laughing from the house.

No, it was the helpless terror he saw reflected in his ex-wife’s eyes that let him know he was not alone.

Like Jess was.

Took threw off the covers and sat on the side of the bed. This circularity of thought was nothing new. It was the same when he spoke to DC Berry, who was the ridiculous toddler of a family liaison officer assigned to the case. It was the same at those tortuous Piper Parents meetings. Everything went in circles. The same questions again and again:
Where? How? Who? Why?

It was that last question that really plagued him. With every abduction after Jess, the idea that this was personal became less and less likely. He knew that. But still it tormented him. The notion that somebody had chosen her – or had chosen her
first
– because of him. Because of something he’d done. DC Berry and DS Rice reassured him that it was now far from likely but, for the first time, John Took had started to reflect.

At first it was hard. He’d led a life as reflective as a black hole. It took practice. At the beginning it was like learning to meditate at that dumb class Rachel had wanted to do in the village hall. Bored wives and benefit scroungers
Om
-ing on the badminton court, while he watched the second hand linger on the wire-clad clock.

At first he hadn’t been able to think of any more enemies than the people on the list he’d given DI Reynolds. But because it was for Jess, John Took had made a giant effort to rummage around inside his own head for anyone he’d offended. It took
him
literally days to come up with Will Bishop, the milkman, who had left him a rude note demanding payment one too many times. Bishop had been threatening the residents of central Exmoor for years and one morning John Took had felt enough was enough. It was the same morning Scotty had thrown the shoe off his near fore for the third time in a week, and Rachel had told him that the trainer had told
her
that the £1,300 Stubben saddle he’d bought her didn’t fit. So he’d called the dairy and shouted very loudly until someone said something would be done. The notes had stopped and the milk had not, and Will Bishop had retired shortly afterwards, after more than fifty years on the job, so he’d considered the problem solved.

Maybe he could have handled that better.

After he’d thought of Will Bishop, the floodgates had opened.

Over the next few days, John Took was first surprised, then shocked, then ashamed by the sheer number of people he’d wronged, offended or simply hurt. The clues were in the looks, the mutterings, the silences when he approached a group of people in the pub or at a show. All those things he’d declined to notice, or had interpreted as respect, suddenly sprang up in his mind like tin ducks he’d missed on a fairground rifle range.

Charles Stourbridge – for telling him his new horse wasn’t worth a quarter of what he’d paid, when it plainly was; Mr Jacoby – for pointing out his man-boobs to Rachel; Linda Cobb – for telling her to keep her
fucking
dog under control when Blue Boy had just stepped on its paw during an ill-advised gallop across the playing field …

If DI Reynolds asked him for another list now, he’d be forced to create a database. Or get Rachel to, because he could never be bothered with the computer and she typed with more than one finger …

Did he have to add
her
to the list for that?

Or did she already hate him for something he had yet to remember?

How many others hated him?
That
was the question he always came back to.

Now Took sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the stars. He wondered whether Jess could see them from wherever she was now.

Wherever she was … was it because of him?

*

Steven watched the huntsman through the crack in the wall. It had become an obsession. It was a strange comfort to know that he was still there – that he had not drifted away from this madness and into a new one which would see him forget all about them and leave them to die of thirst in their kennels. They hated him, but he was all they had – and they feared his absence even more than they feared his crazy presence.

Even so, staying alive was becoming increasingly difficult. Although the days were still hot and dry, the nights had turned suddenly from chilly to cold. Steven woke every morning aching and stiff as an old man, despite the straw on his bed. He felt sorry for Jonas – out there on the bare cement – and wondered how long someone could survive with only his own chemistry to keep him warm.

The meat that the huntsman tossed into their cages every day was no good. The pieces were smaller and some bones had barely any meat on them at all – just fat or gristle, and some of it tasted as if it was already going bad.

All the children now started to eat flowers and leaves when they went out for exercise, and always brought some back for Jonas. But it was not enough to sustain them, and they had to eat what they could off the bones.

Charlie got sick. He spent forty-eight hours writhing and moaning over the drain in the floor of his kennel, while the bad meat rushed to evacuate his shaking body.

After every violent expulsion he crawled across the cement
and
– instead of making for his straw bed – lay curled up against the fence beside Jonas, who stroked his hair and held the hand that Charlie wormed through the chain link to reach him. Jonas murmured soothing sounds and sang ‘One Man Went to Mow’ in a low, hypnotic loop.

Dog. Spot. Bottle of pop …

Bob Coffin came often – to clean up the mess and to try to feed Charlie chicken and rice, although the boy turned away from him and shook his cold, sweaty head.

‘He’s not a dog,’ said Jonas. ‘You know that, right? He needs a doctor, not chicken and rice.’

The huntsman ignored him. Of course.

He came back later with a bucket and a bundle under his arm, and pulled Charlie’s stained underwear down and off his legs.

‘What are you doing?’ Jonas’s voice was so tight with tension that he could hardly hear it himself. He squeezed Charlie’s hand so hard that the boy squeaked.

Coffin said nothing. Using a sponge and a bottle of Hibiscrub, he washed Charlie down with the efficiency of a mortician, then opened a new pack of briefs and tugged a pair on to the sick boy. He flapped open an old blanket flecked with straw and tucked it around him.

Jonas watched his every movement like a hawk.

‘Can
I
have a blanket?’ asked Jess, but Coffin ignored her.

‘Good bay, Charlie,’ Coffin said, and Jonas felt tearful with relief as the huntsman patted the boy’s bony shoulder and locked the gate behind him.

Coffin started to clean Jonas’s kennel next; the now familiar sounds filled Jonas’s ears of the shovel scraping the floor, the slosh of the disinfectant, the hose in the water bucket.

‘You should let Charlie go,’ he said quietly.

Bob Coffin gave no indication of having heard him, but he picked up the broom that had pressed stippled bruises into Jonas’s chest and made an angry swishing noise with it on the wet cement beside him.

‘He shouldn’t be here.’

Jonas moved his legs but the broom banged his knee anyway. And again. It was rare for Bob Coffin to get close enough to touch him.

‘He won’t tell, if that’s what you’re worried about. He doesn’t even know where he is.’

Swissh! SWISSH!

Jonas hoped the silence meant the huntsman
must
be hearing him, taking it in, digesting his words. Maybe his conscience was finally being pricked.