Finders Keepers (9 page)

Ronnie and Dougie spent a few minutes ripping the piss out of him for being a mummy’s boy, but he just smiled and rolled his eyes and brushed the garage dirt off the seat of his jeans.

‘Thanks,’ he told Ronnie.

‘Come up any time you want to work on it. You know where the key is.’

‘Cheers.’

‘Get home safe now!’ Ronnie and Dougie had a final laugh at his expense and then went inside and whistled for the dog.

Steven waited until everyone was asleep. Just after midnight he dressed quietly, took the torch from under the kitchen sink where his mother kept it for when the electric went out, and walked back through the silent village to Ronnie Trewell’s house.

The garage key was where Ronnie had told him it would be; the up-and-over door opened with barely a squeak, and the trailer rolled easily out on to the driveway.

So far, so good, thought Steven, as he closed the door and put the key back in the hanging basket that contained a bouquet of dead weeds.

The trailer was made of aluminium and was well balanced on properly inflated tyres, so Steven made good time down into the village, towing it behind him. But he’d hardly gone fifty yards up the hill towards Em’s house before he started to sweat and his hands to hurt from gripping the awkward metal so hard. He swung the trailer sideways so that it wouldn’t roll back down the hill, and stopped.

He had never considered that he might not be able to tow the trailer all the way to where it belonged. Now, if he couldn’t, he had blown it. If he couldn’t get it up this hill, he would be unlikely to get it back up the similar hill to Ronnie’s house. He couldn’t just leave it on the street. Anyone might hitch it up and
tow
it away and then it really
would
be stolen, instead of just ‘borrowed’.

Stopping and thinking had allowed Steven to get his breath back, and so he tugged the trailer another twenty yards before halting again, his hands burning. He was fit but slim – not a bulky young farmer like the boys who inhabited the YFC discos he had been to once or twice. The hill was long and unrelentingly steep, and the road was broken up in places that he knew from dodging them on his skateboard by day, but which he couldn’t see by night, making the trailer bump and lurch now and then. But Steven Lamb was not a boy who gave up easily. He’d been through more in his seventeen years than most people had in a lifetime, and that was a well of experience he often drew from when faced with a difficult situation. Sometimes he thought that was all he really had – this determination. Other boys were great at soccer or cross-country running or chatting up girls. Steven was just plain
dogged
. He hated to give up. It wasn’t a spectacular talent, but it was better than nothing.

So he turned the trailer so that he could push rather than pull it, and found that was better – he could get his weight behind it. Even so, it was only another fifty yards before he had to stop again, wiping sweat from his forehead with his arm.

He hoped no cars came up or down the hill. The trailer had no lights and he was in jeans and his black school jumper. He wanted to return the trailer, but he didn’t want to get squashed doing it. Plus, if he were run over and killed right now, nobody would know he’d been returning the trailer. Everyone would think he’d been the one who’d stolen it in the first place. He’d die a thief, and that would be seriously unfair.

Spurred by that thought, Steven put his back into it once more.

The lane suddenly brightened, and he realized a security light on the eaves of Honeysuckle Cottage had picked up his movement.

Feeling horribly visible, Steven pushed on. He hadn’t been up here at night for a long time. Well over a year. The last time had been in the snow, with his newspaper bag on his hip. He didn’t want to remember that night – not now, while he needed to keep going on past Rose Cottage.

The memories crowded in anyway.

The night Mrs Holly had been murdered.

She’d made him tea; she’d given him money. She’d hugged him so fiercely that she’d squeezed tears from his eyes on to her blue shoulder.

And he’d given her nothing. For all the time they’d spent together – for all the interest she’d shown, and all the quiet little moments of kindness, he’d given nothing back. Not even when she needed him most.

A hundred times since that night, Steven had been burned by the shame of cowardice. It made him feel weak and unworthy of love.

Come with me
.

That’s what he could have said.
Should
have said. It would have been so simple.

But come with me
where
? He was just the paperboy and Lucy Holly was a real adult with a proper life, who was used to making grown-up decisions, despite her weak legs and her crutches. Something had told him that she would not consider that battling through a blizzard on the arm of a boy to his mum’s house in the middle of the night was a sensible decision. Even
he
had known it would have sounded a bit nuts. Asking her if she needed help would have meant acknowledging the danger she was in, and he’d had no idea how to speak to her about that.

So instead he’d left her there to die.

The thought sent a chill through Steven.

He had to stop thinking of this. He had to be strong and focused, or this bloody trailer was going to run him over on its way back down to the bottom of the hill. He had to be
dogged
.

Steven gritted his teeth and locked his aching arms and
shoved
as hard and as fast as he could. He felt sweat trickling between his shoulder blades and snaking down his back.

The security light went out and he breathed a sigh of relief.

He was almost past.

Beyond Rose Cottage’s box hedge, the coarse lane hedge took over again and matched its opposite all the way up to Springer Farm and Old Barn Farm beyond that.

But he had to stop, just for a moment – or his arms were going to drop off. He did, turning and leaning his backside against the back of the trailer to keep it from rolling, his legs braced against the road, trying to keep his panting as quiet as possible.

The security light came back on again.

‘Hello, Steven.’

His heart stopped.

Silhouetted in the bright white light was Jonas Holly.

Only the thought of the giant effort he’d already made kept Steven from just leaving the trailer and running.

Jonas looked even taller than he’d remembered him being. So tall and thin within the bright white light that Steven wondered whether he was imagining him.

‘You want a hand with that?’

It wasn’t what Steven had been expecting him to say. The last thing he wanted was to spend time in the company of Jonas Holly. Especially alone in the middle of the night.

The silence unfolded smoothly between them, with a low whisper all of its own. He almost declined, but thought how weird it would look to say ‘No, thanks,’ then turn and continue his snail-like progress under the invisible eye of the silhouette.

There was no option.

‘OK.’

The man walked towards Steven with the light splayed behind him, as if he were emerging from a Tinseltown version of a diamanté heaven. The light clicked off and for a horrible second Steven lost sight of him completely.

Then Mr Holly was beside him and bending to grip the edge
of
the trailer. Steven did the same and they started up the hill together.

So much faster.

Jonas didn’t speak to Steven at all. Once he muttered ‘Shit’ under his breath as they hit a pothole and they both hurt their wrists. Then they continued in silence broken only by bumping and panting and the occasional grunt of effort.

They went past Springer Farm, with its B&B sign barely visible through the bindweed, until they reached Old Barn Farm’s shiny black gates.

‘Here,’ said Steven, and they steered the trailer off the road and straightened up.

‘New gates,’ said Jonas.

‘New people,’ said Steven.

He went over to the intercom panel and shone his torch at it. Then he pressed in the code. 1204. Em’s birthday, she’d told him, so it was easy to remember.

The gates opened almost silently.

‘They gave me the code so I could take them their paper,’ said Steven – and then remembered that he didn’t take a paper to Mr Holly’s house any more and wished he had just shut up. What would he say if Mr Holly asked him about it? Silence was the only form of lying he was even halfway good at. But Mr Holly said nothing about his paper, and together they pushed the trailer inside the gates and left it there.

Steven closed the gates and they walked back down the hill in dark silence.

Steven felt the questions that waited to be asked just under the surface, like the big gold and white fish in the Austins’ pond. The fish followed him from one end of the dark water to the other when he delivered the
Bugle
, and then did the same on his return journey down the path – hoping to be fed. Thus the unasked questions followed him and Jonas Holly down the hill from Old Barn Farm all the way back to Rose Cottage, hungry for answers.

It was enough to make Steven shake with tension.

But nothing was asked and nothing was told. Nothing of the mystery trailer, and nothing of the night when Lucy Holly had been murdered.

Instead Jonas Holly murmured ‘Good night,’ and peeled off at Rose Cottage, while Steven muttered ‘Thanks,’ and jogged home in a world that had just got that little bit stranger.

JONAS WOKE TO
a dawn that promised everything.

It was a week since Jess Took had disappeared, and May had become almost fictional in its brilliance – the kind of balmy weather that only Enid Blyton really seemed to have believed possible.

During the night Jonas had thrown off the sheets, and now he looked down the landscape of his own naked body to the moors beyond the cottage window.

They were spectacular. Under a sky that was already pale Wedgwood, Exmoor had burst into life. Heather that had made the hills look scorched and black through the winter had magically revived and now mottled them green. Grass that had been muddy just a month before had become like straw, while the yellow sprays of gorse and broom hid countless birds, betrayed only by their summer songs. Foals tripped along behind sleek mares, and lambs that imagined themselves lost bleated plaintively – a sound that carried for miles on a still day. Buzzards and kestrels looked down on it all – poised to bring
sudden
death without disturbing the peace. Jonas’s parents, who had lived in the house before him, had never bothered with pictures or paintings. These windows on to Exmoor were all they’d ever wanted by way of decoration, and on a morning like this, Jonas understood them better than he ever had when they’d been alive. Van Goghs and Gauguins would be drab by comparison.

A starling darted up under the eaves outside the window and he heard the chicks clamouring like crickets, almost overhead. They were probably in the attic. When they’d flown he would go up there and block the holes and put up nesting boxes instead.

Maybe he would. He hadn’t been up there since …

Lucy died.

Jonas sighed and looked down at the narrow plank of flesh that his body had become. His genitals seemed ridiculously large, jutting uselessly between his sharp hips, and thrown into relief by the early sun his ribs looked like ripples on a flat sea. On the plain between the two, even the scars on his belly seemed worse than usual – red and ridged and twisted and puckered.

They’d told him they would fade to white with time.

Time.

He looked at his alarm clock – something he hadn’t done with any good reason in over a year. It was almost six thirty.

Jonas swung his legs to the creaking floor and headed to the shower. One bathroom window framed a picture of the edge of Shipcott and the towering moor behind it. The thought of going back to the village he’d let down so badly made his gut ache, but he almost welcomed the feeling. He deserved it.

The other window displayed the burned-out farmhouse on the closest hilltop, charred rafters piercing the sky. He stared at the remains of Springer Farm as if into a mirror, while he slid his soapy fingers over the slats of his own ribcage.

He sat silently on the bed until he was dry, then he put on his uniform.

*

Reynolds mustered his troops in the car park of the Red Lion. They were due to start the search at 8am. Reynolds was in the empty car park by seven fifteen and nervous by seven thirty. The only other people there were the press and TV crews.

Memories of his thirteenth birthday worried at the back of his mind. His primary-school classmates seemed to have taken the move to various secondary schools as an opportunity to abandon him as a friend. His mother told him it was because he was too clever for them and he was sure she was right. But he was also sure that many boys would still come to his party – if only for a magician called El Gran Supremo, complete with top hat, wand and rabbit.

But they hadn’t come.