Finders Keepers (7 page)

But it still didn’t mean he could bring himself to deliver the
Bugle
to the home of a killer.

Steven watched the cottages approach. Rose and Honeysuckle cottages – their names on their respective wooden gates – almost hidden behind the high hedgerows that bordered the lane. It was only their top windows and roofs that were really visible from the road, but as he passed their gates he could look in and see that the little front garden of Rose Cottage, which had once been so well tended, was struggling to survive the weeds. Mrs Holly used to do the garden, even though she was sick. The summer before she’d died, Steven had arrived with the paper just in time to help her barrow a pile of greenery through to the compost heap at the back of the house. She knew all the plant names, and he’d told her about the vegetable patch
he’d
grown with Uncle Jude. His carrots and beans – and how even Davey would eat salad, now that it was made up of their own lettuce and tomatoes and little new potatoes which tasted more like nutty cream than like plain old spuds.

Mr Holly never came out any more. If he did, Steven hadn’t seen him, and for that he was grateful. It meant he didn’t have to think about him too much. Delivering the
Bugle
to Mrs Paddon once a week was as close as Steven ever wanted to get to Mr Holly again.

His glimpse of the gardens was over and he walked on, head down, until he figured he was at a safe enough distance to drop his deck once more and push himself up the hill.

Old Barn Farm was just about a hundred yards past the entrance to Springer Farm – or what was left of it. Steven’s mother had forbidden him and Davey to go there since it burned down. She said walls would fall on them, rafters might plummet at any second, charred floorboards could give way under their feet. Steven had never been to Springer Farm anyway, but suspected that Davey often went to play there, now that his mother had made it seem like such an exciting place to be.

Old Barn Farm had new gates to go with the new residents. Big black iron ones that wouldn’t open when Steven pushed them. He stood for a moment, undecided. The gates were so new that the mortar used in their brick posts was still dusted across nearby brambles. He wondered how far down the driveway the farmhouse was – whether it was going to be worth his while getting this order if he had to mess with the gates and then walk a mile after that every week. Or every day, if he could get them to take the
Western Morning News
from him.

‘Hello.’

Steven looked around at the voice and noticed a shiny steel intercom built into the gatepost. An intercom! In Shipcott! There was a button marked ‘Talk’, so he pressed it, feeling like 007.

‘Hello. Umm. I want to know … I wanted to know if maybe you want a newspaper delivered.’ He released the button and then fumbled it back down and added ‘please’ – then pressed it again and said ‘thank you’.

Double-O Dickhead.

There was a short silence, and then a spurt of laughter.

‘I’m
here
, dopey!’

Emily Carver was on the grass verge behind him on a horse.

It took only a split second of mental panic for Steven to realize that nothing he could say right now would save him from looking like a complete idiot, so instead he just waved his arms in a gesture of vague resignation, and hoped his face wasn’t as red as it felt.

She wasn’t wearing the green ribbon. Her brown hair was plaited over one shoulder and held in place by a plain black band.

‘I’m in your class,’ said Emily, as her horse – a smallish, golden-coloured animal – put its head down and started to crop the grass of the verge.

‘I know,’ he agreed. ‘Emily.’

‘I don’t like Emily. My friends call me Em.’

‘OK then.’ Steven nodded, but wasn’t sure whether she meant that
he
should call her Em.

‘What’s
your
name?’

‘Steven.’

She gave him a sly look. ‘And your friend with the red hair?’

Steven’s face fired up again, just as it had been cooling off. ‘Lewis,’ he said. ‘Sorry about that.’

She gave a pretty little shrug and a wave, which Steven interpreted as his having been absolved of responsibility for his best friend’s manners.

‘Do you want to come in and talk to my dad?’

‘What about?’

‘The newspaper thing?’

Of course. That was why he was here.

‘Oh, OK. Yes. Please.’

Em pointed a small remote control at the gates, which swung open silently, and tugged the horse’s head out of the grass.

They passed through the gateway together and started down the stony driveway to the unseen house in silence. Steven was grateful Em was being so nice to him, but he also couldn’t think of a single thing to say to her that didn’t sound strained and fawning to his inner ear.

I like your horse
.

Where did you live before coming here?

Where’s your green ribbon today?

All rubbish. He wondered how anyone
ever
started a conversation with a girl. Not a girl you had to talk to because she was your home-ec. partner, or a girl who looked at you and giggled and said stuff to her friends that made them giggle too. But a
proper
girl, and a normal conversation. In that regard, Steven was at a complete loss.

Behind them the gates clicked quietly shut and he glanced back over his shoulder. ‘Why do you have such fancy gates?’

‘Oh,’ said Em dismissively, ‘somebody stole our trailer.’

JOS REEVES AT THE
lab in Portishead called to confirm that green wool fibres that had been found stuck to the gummed note at the Pete Knox scene nearly matched fibres found clinging to the door handle of John Took’s horsebox.

‘Nearly?’ Reynolds asked. He’d been about to get in the shower – or try to. He was not a stocky man, but he’d examined the cubicle with a mathematical eye and was dubious about every single dimension.

‘Well, the fibre itself is the same,’ said Reeves, ‘but the ones at the second scene have traces of butane on them.’

‘You mean lighter fuel?’

‘That’s the stuff.’

Reynolds thought of the old Zippo his father had used. Reynolds’s parents had been married for fifty-two years – a whole three of them harmonious – but his mother still had no idea her husband smoked. The smell of a Zippo always made Reynolds think of huddling behind a barrier of cobwebbed
terracotta
pots in the garden shed while his father lit up, and inevitably brought with it the medical tang of the Fisherman’s Friends he would then chew like Smarties to disguise the smell.

‘So he’s a smoker,’ said Reynolds.

‘Maybe,’ said Reeves. ‘Or a camper. Or just a man making bonfires.’

‘Hoodies use it to get high, right?’

Reeves laughed a bit too hard for Reynolds’s liking. ‘I don’t think it’s for the exclusive use of hoodies, but yeah – it’s a cheap high. For kids.’

‘Could it have been used to disable a victim?’

‘Sure. Wouldn’t knock them out, but it would make someone woozy, disorientated, you know?’

‘But it wasn’t at the first scene,’ Reynolds reiterated.

‘Nope.’

Reynolds sighed. That meant the butane could be significant or simply a red herring. It could mean the wool was deliberately impregnated with butane, or it had been accidentally spilt. But if it was deliberate, then why wasn’t it present at the first scene?

‘And you have no idea what the wool fibres might have come from?’

‘Not so far, but we’re still working on them, obviously.’

Reynolds thanked Reeves and hung up, more frustrated than before. The Jess Took scene had been a mess of tyre tracks and footprints, while the Tarr Steps car park was tarmac, and had therefore yielded few samples for comparison. What little trace evidence they did have was more tantalizing than helpful.

Only the notes made the connection certain.

You don’t love her
.

You don’t love him
.

He thought of Pete Knox’s mother wailing in the car park and understood the depth of her despairing cry:
What does it mean?

*

Jonas pointed at the wall behind Kate Gulliver and asked, ‘Is that new?’

Kate Gulliver was surprised. Until now, this session had been like all their others – difficult and mostly silent. Most clients were tough at first, but slowly opened up until they gained some level of comfort in this strange new context. After a few sessions, she was used to those clients coming in, sitting down and picking up exactly where they’d left off the week before – shedding their reserve as they warmed to their examination of self. After a while, many of them enjoyed it. They found themselves fascinating.

Not so Jonas Holly. He seemed to be as interested in himself as he was in everything else – which was not at all.

Usually.

Now she turned to follow his finger and pushed her dark hair behind one ear. It was a habit she’d once cultivated to appear girlish but couldn’t break now, even though she was closer to forty than thirty.

Jonas was pointing at the small cross-stitched sampler over her desk.
SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME
.

‘No, it’s been there for years,’ she said.

He dropped his hand back on to the armrest where it usually waited, ready to propel himself off the chair at the end of the hour.

Kate wondered why he’d brought it up. ‘What do you think of it?’ she said.

‘Nothing,’ said Jonas, too fast for it to be true.

‘Have you only just noticed it?’

He shrugged.

‘Interesting,’ she mused.

He said nothing, so she went on, ‘That you’ve never noticed it before, but suddenly not only do you notice it, but you feel strongly enough to ask me about it.’

He shrugged again.

Kate Gulliver had seen more of Jonas Holly’s silent shrugs than she cared to count.

Although it was her job to work him out, she
couldn’t
work him out. Struggling through the aftermath of his wife’s death with Jonas had been one of the toughest things she’d ever done as a psychologist. Sometimes she got the feeling that he hadn’t progressed one iota from their very first session. The memory of that session was still branded on her consciousness – the way the sadness rippling around him was almost tangible, while he sat numb at its centre, like a black hole. She had treated many police and services personnel in her time – men and women who had seen terrible things,
done
terrible things – but she remembered that first session with Jonas Holly vividly – that feeling that reaching out to help
him
might instead suck
her
inexorably into his compressed misery. The whole experience had left her off-kilter and depressed. Afterwards she’d sought out her own therapist and had agreed that it would be best to keep a more-than-professional distance from the tall young policeman with the bottomless eyes.

So she’d gone through the motions with Jonas. No, no! That wasn’t true … She knew her stuff. She did her best. But she wanted nothing more than to be able to tick the box marked ‘Fit to return to duty’ and never see him again. The fact that she occasionally suspected that he might be going through the motions with her in return was something she didn’t want to examine too closely.

And yet here he was – eight months into their work – clearly disturbed by the sampler her grandmother had stitched as a girl.

‘What is it that bothers you about it?’

Instead of shrugging, Jonas shifted in his seat. Another first – usually he was as still as a summer pond.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, when he clearly did.

That was good though. It was an admission that it
did
bother him, which – in Jonas Holly terms – was hugely confessional.

‘Did you ever want children, Jonas?’ She hardly thought about the question. She asked it more to keep the conversation going than because she expected a response. Indeed, it was not
an
unusual question, but Jonas struggled to answer it. For a long time she thought he wasn’t going to, but finally he said ‘No.’

‘Did Lucy?’ she asked more carefully.

He got up, making her jump a little.

He walked across to the sampler, his hands dug into the pockets of his jeans. ‘Did you do it?’ he asked.

She watched his eyes run over the cross-stitch as if seeking answers. He’d already answered
her
question by ignoring it.

‘My grandmother did. When she was thirteen. I think it’s lovely.’ She wasn’t supposed to express personal opinions to clients, but whatever – this was
family
.

He stared at the sampler so long it became uncomfortable.

‘There was a girl kidnapped near me.’

There was a long silence while Kate adjusted to the sudden change of subject.

‘That’s terrible. Do you know her?’