Finders Keepers

35

JONAS WOKE ON a cold cement floor with the smell of dogs and disinfectant strong in his nose, and icy hands on his chest. It was dark, even though he wasn’t blindfolded, and he was dimly aware of a man bending over him, tugging his clothes off. Jonas flailed weakly, hoping to connect, but found he couldn’t feel his own arms – didn’t know where they were or what they were doing.

The hands were firm but not hurtful. They quickly stripped him, and Jonas became sick and panicky at the thought that he couldn’t stop what was happening to him, however bad it got… He felt his adult self dissolving around him like sugar in water. The terror in his chest was the terror of a small boy. The strength of a man drained from him and he knew once more the weakness of the very young and vulnerable.

Then the dark figure bent forward and looped something around Jonas’s throat. Something to hold him. Something to hold him down…

He tried to cry out, tried to jerk away, tried to fight back, but he was a fish flopping about on dry land.

‘Ssshh now,’ said the man. ‘Ssssshh. There’s a good bay.’

Jonas was a child again, and he was helpless.

And then – right under his chin – he felt the click that locked the collar around his neck.

New roadblocks were set up. More officers were drafted in from other force areas and even from the neighbouring Devon & Cornwall Police, whose patch bled into Exmoor to the northwest. As they arrived, Reynolds sent them straight to the woods to join the hunt… for what and for whom he was not completely sure.

Davey Lamb was returned to the bosom of his family. His brother was not. Rice hoped she never again had to watch two human beings disintegrate in front of her eyes the way that Lettie Lamb and her mother did when they realized Steven was still missing.

Jonas Holly’s home was searched. First to check on Em’s claim that he had indeed disappeared along with Steven Lamb – a fact supported by the open back door and the abandoned wheelbarrow half-full of weeds and hedge-trimmings. Then a more careful search was made as a matter of procedure, because allegations had been made and should therefore be investigated. Emily Carver seemed like a sensible girl, but her secondhand accusations smacked more of grudge than fact. Rice reminded Reynolds that she had personally demanded proof from Steven Lamb of any wrongdoing by Jonas and he’d been unable to provide it.

‘I know,’ said Reynolds. ‘But it does seem unlikely that someone has managed to snatch a teenaged boy and a good-sized police officer at the same time. I’m duty bound to take it somewhat seriously.’

‘You don’t really think Jonas killed his wife and kidnapped all these children, do you?’ Rice asked him bluntly.

‘No, but life has taught me to consider all possibilities,’ said Reynolds.

But he was also a cautious man, and Rice was relieved when Reynolds told the search team that they were searching the home of a fellow officer who was more likely to have been a victim of a crime than the culprit. In that spirit they moved through Rose Cottage with a rare degree of consideration.

Even so, the search felt intrusive, and Rice was not inclined to turn the place upside down. As she went through the house she was struck by the curious mix of chaos and Spartan neatness – as if Jonas Holly never entered certain rooms any more, but lived in the others without thought of his surroundings. Rice didn’t do a meticulous search; she didn’t feel it was called for, or that Reynolds had meant her to. She went through the rooms upstairs with a careful hand and an experienced eye.

But she didn’t need an experienced eye to see Lucy Holly everywhere. Her make-up bag was still on the bedroom dresser; her clothes were still in the wardrobe. A woman’s bathrobe hung on the back of the door, her trainers were under the bed – a scruffy pair of pink Converse All Stars.

It was as if Lucy Holly had popped out to the shops and would be back any second, bearing pasta for dinner and maybe a bottle of red like the one Jonas had opened for her.

It was a little unsettling, but maybe that was how Jonas liked it. Maybe he liked to imagine that his wife was so close he could almost touch her. That she might walk into the bedroom one night and turn down the covers and climb in beside him as if she’d never been away.

Maybe that was how it was when you lost somebody you loved.

Rice didn’t know. She’d never loved someone like that. She realized that now for the first time, standing at the foot of the Hollys’ marital bed, and felt the lingering regret of breaking up with Eric leave her like a soft burp.

Staring at the old mascara gone dry on the dressing table, Rice was engulfed by a wave of sadness for Jonas, and another for herself.

Downstairs, the kitchen table was piled high with laundry and mail – most of it junk – while the sink was clean and bare and the draining board held only a single mug, bowl and spoon. A half-bottle of Spanish wine was going bad without a cork.

Reynolds opened the cupboards, which contained ingredients but barely a thing to eat. Herbs, condiments, flour, rice, dried lentils, noodles and split peas, old sauces with sticky lids, and cans of tomatoes.

The front room was dim and everything was covered in a film of grey dust, as if it was all made of television. A red tartan rug folded over the arm of the leather couch was the only touch of warmth.

Reynolds ran his eyes over the eclectic mix on the bookshelf: Stephen King, Philip K. Dick, sports biographies and psychology textbooks. He recognized university leftovers and wondered who had studied the subject. He tilted a copy of Civilization and its Discontents off the shelf but found no clue inside. On the mantelpiece was a clock stopped at 7.39, a blue vase without flowers in it, and a photo of Lucy Holly in a silver frame. She was kneeling beside a fresh flowerbed, smiling up into the sunlight with a trowel in one gloved hand.

Not lying at the foot of the stairs with blood bubbling out of her neck.

Reynolds met his own eyes through the mist of the over-mantel mirror. Hazy, and with the light from the window behind him, his hair looked great.

He sighed deeply. If it had only been Steven Lamb who had disappeared, he might have delayed the roadblocks and the immediate request for extra manpower. In the middle of a crisis there was always the chance that children – OK, boys – there was always a chance that boys would invent their own slice of the action. Pretend to fall down a well, pretend to be lost at sea, pretend to be kidnapped…

But with Jonas Holly apparently missing too, everything became even more serious. Either both of them had been abducted, which seemed bizarre, or Jonas had taken the boy and, by logical conclusion, the other children as well.

Which seemed bizarre.

Reynolds sighed again and stared gloomily into the mirror. Overhead the floorboards creaked as Rice searched Jonas’s bedroom.

The answerphone flashed and Reynolds hit Play on a robot message telling Jonas he had won a holiday in Florida and needed only to call this number to claim his prize.

He moved away, then back again – and played the outgoing message:

Hi, you’ve reached Jonas and Lucy…

Shit.

He’d forgotten what a bloody weirdo Jonas Holly was. For the first time, the idea that he might have murdered his wife and stolen a slew of local children didn’t even seem that far-fetched.

He ordered his team to go through the house and garden again. This time with far more rigour.

36

JESS TOOK WATCHED THE skin peel off a small brown pony like a flesh banana, and remembered the fruit bowl in her mother’s kitchen. The way her mother polished each apple before it was allowed to take its place among the peaches and grapes; the way Jess was only allowed to take a piece of fruit if she rearranged the display so it didn’t look unbalanced.

Nothing worse than lopsided fruit, her mother used to say.

Jess smiled wryly against the cold block wall. She wished her mother could see her now. See the straw she slept on, the cement she shat on and the filth she ate. See if her mother still thought there was nothing worse than a wonky apple.

Jess’s mouth filled suddenly with tangy saliva as her body remembered the fresh, sweet, juicy crunch of a Braeburn.

Her eyes overflowed.

In the past six weeks, her mouth had almost forgotten what freshness was. Her tongue tasted fetid and her teeth were jagged traps for tiny shards of bone and frayed strands of flesh that resisted her constant probing. She tried never to close her mouth now; tried to keep the air circulating. Sometimes she drooled because of it, but it was better than closing her lips on that dank cavern.

The ssssssssss sound rose like sticky tape coming off a roll; the pony’s carcass jerked as the last of its skin left it and skidded across the floor attached to the winch. The huntsman filled his arms with the hide and hoofs and head, and walked from the big shed to the incinerator to create more stench of burning hair.

He sang as he went, like a madman.

Of course he did. He was a madman.

Jess sighed and turned away.

In the kennel next to hers was the new boy. She didn’t know his name but she had seen him at school. He was in the sixth form. He wasn’t one of the cool kids; he was just an average kid.

Now he was just an average dog.

Hound. Her father always hated it when she called the foxhounds dogs.

The older boy stirred and Jess turned away from the breeze-block wall and hung her fingers through the chain link on the other side instead.

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Hey, you with the ears.’

He blinked and frowned and then opened his eyes and looked at the corrugated plastic sheeting over his head.

‘Hey, what’s your name?’

He turned towards her.

‘I’m Jess.’

He closed his eyes again and ignored her. Jess let him. She’d done that plenty when she’d first woken up here: closed her eyes and tried to go back to sleep so she could wake from this lunatic dream in her own bed.

After a few moments, he opened his eyes and looked at her again. She laughed – a short humourless sound.

‘Yeah, it’s real,’ she said. ‘Crap, right?’

He propped himself on his elbows. ‘Jess Took?’

‘Yep.’

‘You’re alive.’

‘You’re a genius.’

He got slowly to his feet and stared stupidly down at his dark-blue briefs. ‘Where are my clothes?’

‘He took them. Don’t worry about it. He takes all our clothes.’

‘Who does?’

‘The huntsman. I can’t remember his name. But I know he’s the huntsman. Don’t worry, he’s not a perv. Not yet, anyway.’

Steven looked at her as if for the first time, taking in her grubby bra and matching knickers. It was only the second time he’d ever seen a girl in a bra, but this was nothing like the first.

‘I feel sick,’ he said.

‘It’s just the drugs,’ Jess told him. ‘Everyone feels sick when they first get here.’

Everyone.

Steven peered through the chain link beyond Jess Took and saw a little blonde girl, staring at him with solemn eyes; beyond her was a brown-haired child of about the same size. Kylie someone, and the other girl whose name he couldn’t remember – they’d been taken from the bus. In the furthest kennel of all was a thin, freckled boy with red hair. All the wire between them made the child he guessed must be Pete Knox indistinct and hazy in a block pattern, like a bad digital signal.

‘Hi,’ Pete said, and waved sombrely. Steven raised a slow hand.

‘What’s your name?’ said the blonde girl.

‘Steven,’ he said.

‘She’s Kylie,’ said Jess. ‘And that’s Maisie and Pete.’ She flicked her filthy hair and Steven noticed her collar for the first time. Almost simultaneously he put his hand to his own throat and felt the thick, soft leather collar there. His fingers worked at the buckle.

‘You can’t take it off. It’s locked on.’

His fingers found the little padlock. ‘Why?’

She shrugged. ‘’Cos he’s a loony, that’s why.’

A loony. The childish tag was not enough to describe anyone who would do this.

‘Hey!’ The shout and a metallic rattle behind him made Steven spin round, heart in his mouth. Two kennels down a youngster with bright-yellow hair slapped the chain link with the flats of both palms, and grinned happily.

‘Hey! Hello!’

‘Hi,’ said Steven cautiously.

‘Are we going home? Are we going home for tea? Can I have biscuits when we get home?’

Charlie Peach.

Steven had seen him occasionally, trailing behind his father into Mr Jacoby’s shop; once waiting for Mr Peach inside the secretary’s office after school. But mostly Charlie lived in a separate world, away from the normality of Shipcott. An indoors world where it was safe, or at the special school he went to. Steven had seen a Sunshine coach parked outside Mr Peach’s house on more than one occasion, waiting to take Charlie out for the day with the other vacant, smiling children packed inside.

Although once he’d met the eyes of a boy in that coach.

Above the boy’s crooked hands and shiny, wagging chin, he’d met a pair of eyes that had glared at him as if it was all his fault. Steven had looked away and never looked into the coach again. It was a different world in that coach.

Now he and Charlie Peach were in the same world. That made his already uneasy stomach feel still more sour.

‘Who’s he?’ demanded Charlie, waggling a finger through the diamonds.

Steven looked down and sucked in his breath.

In the cage between them lay Jonas Holly – a bruise painting one eye as black as a pirate’s patch, and a three-foot chain leading from the metal hoop on his collar to a small brass padlock fed through the fence that separated him from Charlie.

Jonas Holly was a victim – just like him.

All the rules Steven had lived by for eighteen long months changed in an instant and he felt dizzy with the adjustment. What did it mean? If Jonas hadn’t kidnapped the children, then had he still killed his wife? Steven felt the two notions warring within him. He’d been almost sure of both those things, and now his own eyes were telling him that at least one of them was not true.

He thought of the woods. The memories came in disjointed flashes – the smooth-faced man trying to heave a limp body on to the back seat of the old Ford; Davey’s red shoulder just visible in the open boot; the fear of moving towards danger instead of away from it, the way his gut churned at him not to…

His brother in his arms – warm, and waking too loudly.

Ssssssh!

Davey hadn’t shushed. Instead he’d shouted and lashed out and caught Steven a stunning blow on the nose. Steven sighed. It wasn’t Davey’s fault; he hadn’t known what he was doing.

‘Where’s Davey?’ he said to no one.

‘Who’s Davey?’ said Jess.

Steven looked both ways through the wire and did not see his brother. He had made it! He smiled inside – then thought of Davey falling into his mother’s arms instead of him, and his face tingled with imminent tears.

‘Who’s he?’ Charlie asked again, more forcefully, still wiggling a finger at Jonas Holly.

‘He’s a policeman,’ said Steven.

‘Oh,’ said Charlie. ‘Do you know “Ten Green Bottles”?’ He started to sing it without waiting for an answer.

‘Mr Holly?’ said Steven tentatively, but the man did not move. Steven frowned at his long flat body clad only in shorts. His abdomen was a shallow dish between his ribs and his hip bones, containing thick red scars that crawled and twisted across his pale skin like some strange delicacy that might require chopsticks.

The marks a killer had made.

‘I feel sick,’ Steven said again, and turned away.

When he wasn’t robbing banks, Davey had often fantasized about being a cop. As part of those fantasies he’d also imagined interrogating a suspect. In his fertile young mind – fed by television – chairs were scraped across concrete floors, fists were banged on Formica tables, and interviews were conducted in an atmosphere of such loud intensity that spittle landed on the used coffee cups between the adversaries.

So when Dr Evans asked if he felt up to speaking to the police, Davey – despite having passed a restless night at North Devon Hospital – was excited.

At first.

He’d imagined a cop who looked like Will Smith in Men In Black. Cool, wearing shades and a sharp suit, with a gun in his sock and a watch shaped like a Dairylea slice. The reality was more like being quizzed by his maths teacher, Mr Harris, who picked his nose when he thought no one was looking.

DI Reynolds asked the same boring questions over and over again, and wrote everything down in a little notebook. Then he flipped the pages of that notebook back and forth before he asked his next question. It made him seem like he’d lost his memory. Davey had told him three times that he hadn’t seen the face of the man who had snatched him, and yet he kept asking about him, but in another way – as if he could trap Davey into remembering who it was.

‘Did you see him coming?’

‘No. I told you that already. He came up behind me.’

‘Tell me about the car.’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘What colour was it?’

‘I told you.’

‘Can you tell me again?’

‘Dark. Blue or black. Or green maybe.’

‘Was the man wearing anything on his hands?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘Did he tie your hands or mouth at any time?’

‘No.’

‘Not with rope?’

‘No.’

‘Or tape of any kind?’

‘No!’

‘But you did see Constable Holly?’

‘Yes, when they dragged me out from under the car.’

‘They dragged you?’

‘Someone dragged me. I was backwards.’

‘But Mr Holly and this smooth man were two different people?’

Davey rolled his eyes and didn’t bother answering.

Lettie gave him a look. ‘Don’t be rude, Davey,’

‘Yes,’ sang Davey. ‘They were two different people.’

‘What happened then?’

‘I dunno. I was all… whirly.’

‘And then you remember being in the boot—’

‘Yes.’

‘And that’s when you saw Steven.’

‘Yes.’

‘And what happened then?’

Davey hesitated. There were things he couldn’t remember. Lots of them. But there were other things he could remember that he’d rather not tell. Specially not with his mother and Dr Evans hovering anxiously at the foot of his bed, listening to everything. His mother clutched the metal rail with both hands, as if DI Reynolds might carry him and his bed off, just for a laugh.

He remembered being jostled and opening his eyes to see Steven’s face so close…

‘Ssssssh!’

‘What? Go away.’

‘Davey, shush!’

Hands under his shoulders and knees, lifting him out of the boot of the car; the sky and the treetops above him, and sweat rolling off a spiky fringe.

His feet hitting the ground.

‘Go AWAY! I’ll tell my brother!’

‘Davey, shut up! It’s me. Ssssssh!’

But he hadn’t shushed. He could remember that. With shame coating his innards like hot syrup, Davey remembered fighting instead – fighting Steven! Waving his fists blindly and shouting so loud that it echoed. He couldn’t remember what. He’d connected with one fist. Hard. And then he’d just run – all wobbly and tumbly and knee-scrapey through the stumps and the ferns.

He hadn’t even looked back…

‘Yes?’ said DI Reynolds.

‘And he helped me out and we ran away.’

‘And where was Mr Holly while you were running away?’

‘Dunno.’ Davey shrugged.

‘And where was the other man?’

‘Dunno.’

A tiny, elderly Pakistani woman pushed a filthy mop shaped like a V into the ward and past the end of his bed while nodding into a mobile phone, and Davey longed for a life like that, where he didn’t have to think, and nobody asked him difficult questions.

‘They just let you run away? Didn’t try to catch you?’

‘I ran fast,’ said Davey. Then, without prompting, he added hurriedly, ‘Steven was right behind me; he must have got lost or something.’

DI Reynolds said nothing but flipped back several pages, clicking his pen and making a small tu-tu-tu sound through his pursed lips, like a tiny train.

Why do I always get the retard? thought Davey. This guy was such a loser. Plus, there was something weird about DI Reynolds’s hair, although Davey couldn’t say quite what.

‘We ran away together,’ he provided for free.

‘After he helped you out of the car, did your brother say anything to you?’

Ssssssh!

‘I can’t remember.’

Davey’s mother bit her lip and blinked out of the window.

DI Reynolds didn’t sigh, but Davey could tell he wanted to. Maybe the policeman was as disappointed with the interview as he was.

‘Try,’ said DI Reynolds.

‘OK,’ Davey said, and put on a trying face, but all the time his mind squirmed with the dawning awfulness of it all. Steven had come to help him, but he hadn’t helped Steven back. Instead he’d punched him; he’d shouted when Steven had told him to shush; he’d given them both away and then only saved himself. This was not the kind of cop or bank robber he’d ever imagined being. The kind who abandoned a friend to his fate. A brother.

‘What’s wrong, Davey?’ said DI Reynolds.

Davey shook his head. His mother gazed at him with eyes like a cartoon puppy in a rainstorm, and Davey could barely look at her straight.

‘He did say something!’

The sudden hope in his mother’s eyes triggered a tumble of words. ‘He said… Steven said… “Run, Davey! I’m right behind you! Run home to Mum.” And so I did.’

At the foot of the bed, Lettie clutched her mouth and nodded hard as tears rolled down her cheeks.

DI Reynolds clicked his pen, but did not write it down.

37

THERE WAS A sharp hiss and the children got up as one and moved towards the gates of their kennels. The hiss came again, and again, a slow metallic scraping of the knife being sharpened.

They clung to the chain link, waiting expectantly. Finally there was the dull thump of something hitting metal, and the low rumble of an approach on wheels across the rutted concrete walkway.

A low flatbed trolley emerged from the back door of the big shed. The huntsman propelled it, his legs bowed but sturdy, his face smoothed and distorted by a stocking mask, like a bad fabric puppet.

Steven got a flash of the clearing in the woods, of Davey curled in the boot of the old blue saloon while the man with the smooth head held Jonas Holly’s legs; the slow stagger towards the trees; the grip on his arm; the kick to the backs of his knees. He remembered the hot chemical wool over his face and the way everything swam away from him like fish spiralling away through the tops of the trees…

Something heavy dropped into Pete’s kennel and Steven flinched.

The huntsman moved down the line.

It wasn’t until he got to Jess’s kennel that Steven could see clearly what he was throwing over the gates…

Bones.

As if they were dogs!

And Jess Took picked one up and started to chew on it as if no one had told her she wasn’t a dog.

‘All right, bay?’ the huntsman said to Steven without looking at him and not waiting for an answer.

‘Why am I here? What do you want?’

‘Good lad,’ said the huntsman, and leaned up to drop a couple of big bones over the fence. Steven looked down at the crude grey-pink chunks, with shiny white knobs protruding.

‘I’m not eating that,’ he said firmly.

The huntsman ignored him and moved on.

‘He doesn’t listen,’ said Jess sadly. ‘He only talks.’

The huntsman dropped bones into Jonas Holly’s kennel and then into Charlie’s.

Charlie picked up a rack of ribs and said, ‘Thank you.’

The huntsman turned his trolley and wheeled it back down the line. It made a different sound when it was empty.

As he passed her kennel, Jess Took bared her teeth at him and said, ‘Woof!’

Kate Gulliver also thought that it was ‘very interesting’ that Steven Lamb had implicated Jonas in the abductions – and then disappeared himself.

Reynolds was delighted. He’d rung Kate – who’d always encouraged him to call her that – and told her of Elizabeth Rice’s conversation with the boy.

Very interesting, she’d said – and Reynolds wished he could turn back time and put her call on speakerphone just so he could give Rice a triumphant look.

‘That’s what I said,’ he told Kate in Rice’s hearing instead, but Rice gave no indication she had heard anything – triumphant or otherwise. She was rummaging in a bag from the Spar shop they were parked outside.

Kate continued, ‘The trauma of Steven’s experiences at a formative age could have damaged him in countless ways. He might have paranoid tendencies which make him focus his suspicions on an innocent party.’

She sounded quite enthusiastic about the idea. ‘I can even see a scenario where he might visit similar experiences on other children. Abuse begets abuse; it’s not unusual.’

‘Exactly,’ Reynolds nodded, hoping Rice was getting this: that he’d been right and that Kate Gulliver said so.

Increasingly he got the impression that Elizabeth Rice resented his superior intellect. It was a shame, because she was no slouch herself, but lately – since he’d been the boss – she hovered between two standpoints: questioning him or ignoring him. Both got under his skin. Today she’d been in a particularly bad mood because her digging into the background of the Piper Parents had turned up nothing and made everybody hate her. Reynolds had told her that it went with the territory and she’d replied, ‘Maybe your territory,’ in a tone he would have corrected if she’d been a man.

Reynolds had always felt he had a great kinship with women. Men were threatened by his brains and often responded with hostility. DCI Marvel had been a case in point. But women were generally far happier to let him do the thinking for them, while he encouraged them to shine in supporting roles.

‘There’s no I in team,’ he was fond of telling them. It went down terribly well.

Most of the time.

Lately Elizabeth Rice had greeted the homily with stony silence.

Pity. There’d been a time a few years back when he’d thought Rice might be girlfriend material. Even wife. But then they’d spent time together on cases and he’d seen all the things that were wrong with her. It wasn’t just the toast and the baked-bean juice. She often wore jeans, she laughed too loudly, and she sang in the shower. She didn’t have a bad voice but she had no taste in music – or consideration for those who did, and who might be trying to work just the other side of the Travelodge wall.

Slowly those faults had eroded any ideas he might once have harboured about a possible future together, and her burgeoning intellectual jealousy was very unattractive.

Kate said she would contact Steven Lamb’s old therapist.

‘Excellent,’ said Reynolds. ‘Keep me informed.’ He hung up and turned to Rice, who immediately held up two thin, white-bread sandwiches in plastic boxes – a barrier to his victory.

‘Chicken or ham?’ she said.

They both looked like the antithesis of nutrition. He thought of DCI Marvel and felt a single solitary pang of guilt. No, not guilt – empathy. It was tough at the top.

‘Chicken.’

They ate in the hot car. He was halfway through his sandwich before he realized it was, in fact, ham. He grimaced and sighed loudly but Rice didn’t ask him what was wrong.

Reynolds hoped his new hair made her realize just how badly she’d blown it.

The big one’s not eating, but the youngster’s settling in. Didn’t want either of ’em, but what’s to be done? The big one come sneaking up on me just as I’m winkling the first bay out from under the car. Grabs me hard and so I hit him with the stick. I know him too – and he knows me – so I had to bring him with. And right when I’m getting him in the car, here come another one trying to steal the first! It were Piccadilly Circus in the middle of Landacre Wood. Lucky they’re both scrawny.

But it fills up the yard again. That’s the main thing. Bin empty too long; made me itch with the emptiness. Every one I filled made the others look even emptier. Now I look at the runs, all full of life, and it’s like a sigh of relief in my head.

They’re still searching, but I’m not bothered. Let ’em come. I got my hiding places. Serves all them folk right. Teach ’em to value what they got, be it children or traditions. You can’t get ’em back. Once they’re gone they’re gone for good.

Still, I don’t like the big one. Something not right with that one, I always thought. Reminds me of a hound I had once off the Beaufort – Bosun. Huge brute, he were. A demon in the field, Jim Wetherall said when he offloaded him, but the wily old bastard never mentioned him were mazed in the yard. Bit a horse once. Imagine that – a bloody foxhound biting a horse! Not a nip either – a right proper chunk out the belly and I had to whip him raw before him let go.

Only dog I were ever wary of, Bosun, and the only one I ever shot and was happy to do it. Mostly him was as waggy as the rest, and that’s what made him so dangerous, see – the way he’d turn, sudden like.

The big one’s like that, I reckon – pretending to be weak, not eating, not moving. But I never had a hound fool me twice and I won’t be starting now.

So the big one’s chained up. Because of Bosun.

The others are free in the runs, like the old ones. They get hungry when they hear the knife like the old ones too! Already come running to the gates, slavering – specially the smallest bay – he’s a hungry one! The maids are little charmers, too. Make daisy chains in the meadow! Like a storybook.

They’re not as noisy as the old ones, but maybe that’ll come with time. They can make all the noise they like up here and no one to hear ’em for miles.

I miss the noise. That quiet made me mazed.

Maybe I can walk ’em too, some time. At night maybe, and coupled up like pups to keep ’em from darting off all over. It would be good for ’em, and good for me. Watching ’em get fit and strong and biddable.

Don’t know if I were happy before. Never rightly thought of it. But this makes me feel something like happy again.

It’s good to get back in the old routine.

Good to have something to love.

38

THE INCINERATOR IGNITED with a soft whump and made Steven’s mouth fill with saliva. It angered him, and he resisted the urge to rise and move to the front of the kennel to await feeding like the other children did. It made him think of the polar bears he’d once seen at Bristol Zoo – pacing tirelessly, staring up at the crowds, waiting for feeding time.

Instead he lay on the straw that was his bed and looked up through the yellowing corrugated plastic. Strips of dead flies and bird shit and little bits of grit. That had been his sky for six days now. His new horizons were close and diamond-meshed.

Steven wiped the drool off his lips and got to his knees.

The crumbling grey block wall at the back of the kennel had chinks that allowed him to see straight across the yard to the row of empty stables. If he leaned to one side, a chink showed him the ramp and partly inside the big shed – and the huntsman going about his work.

Today his work was a cow.

Steven watched the black-and-white beast walk cautiously off the trailer. It stopped at the bottom and gazed around with empty eyes. Steven had been to the new supermarket in Barnstaple once and seen old people doing the same thing, standing in the cheese aisle, looking for the tea.

‘Hup! Hup!’

The huntsman touched her hip and the cow moved down the rutted ramp into the big shed, skidding a little and leaning back to maintain her balance, her giant udders swinging.

The huntsman followed her down in his green overalls, boots and flat cap. He didn’t wear his stocking mask in the big shed and Steven could see the years of wrinkles and creases, the small blue eyes, the lipless mouth and the yellowing teeth.

‘He doesn’t know we can see him,’ whispered Jess beside him, and he nodded. It was a small thing, but it was worth noting. Maybe they could use it one day. He didn’t know how, but most things were useful, he’d always found.

The gunshot cracked loudly in the shed, and Steven jumped. Two cages away, Charlie sucked in a shocked breath and then started to howl like a child who’s fallen off a bicycle – with a wide mouth and uninhibited lungs.

Jess turned away and sat down on her raised straw bed. ‘It’s hot,’ she said dully.

Steven didn’t answer. They all knew it was hot. It hadn’t rained for ever.

He felt the collar around his neck. It was not uncomfortable, but it was annoying and confusing. The little padlock that held it shut lay in the hollow at the base of his throat like a cold pendant, but if he lay too long in the sun it grew hot enough to hurt. The collar itself was old leather, soft and tactile. There was a flat metal strip on it, perhaps two inches long; Steven imagined that it was where a dog’s name might be engraved. He ran his fingernail over it carefully but could feel nothing that might indicate that his own name – or another’s – had been marked there. He took some comfort in that; the collar had not been waiting for him. He was not chosen for this. Not special.

He thought of Em, who was.

Too special for him.

She probably would have realized it soon anyway, but now that he was gone, what was there to keep her true?

Was she already with someone else? Maybe even one of his friends? Lewis or Lalo Bryant. Lewis was definitely capable of turning comfort into copping a feel. The thought made Steven’s lips thin, and he thumped the wall with the side of his fist.

‘What’s up?’ said Jess Took.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Shut up.’

She stuck her tongue out at him but not with any great feeling.

Steven put his eye back to the best chink in the wall. He watched the huntsman sharpen his knife in a series of sibilant swipes, and swallowed the resulting saliva. His stomach rumbled. He turned away before the cuts were made but soon there was the clink of chains as the winch was attached, and then the rising ssssssssss that was the hide separating from the flesh it had protected since birth.

‘Sorry, Jess,’ said Steven.

She stuck her tongue out at him again – but this time she smiled.

Down the row, Maisie and Kylie and Pete were playing I Spy. The game had limited scope – I spy a fence; I spy a gate; I spy concrete – but the three youngest children often played it anyway. Sometimes they played ‘Shout for Help’, in which one of them counted down from three and they all screamed ‘Help.’ Charlie usually joined in, but Jess never did; when Steven asked why, she just shrugged and said, ‘They build kennels where people won’t be bothered by the dogs howling. Nobody’s going to hear us.’

‘Somebody might,’ said Steven, and shouted with the rest of them. But the huntsman never seemed perturbed by the game, so Steven guessed Jess was probably right.

Steven squinted through the wall again. The cow’s carcass was being winched through a dark doorway within the big shed now, giant, pink and stripped of skin. The hide lay in a black-and-white pile along with the feet and the tail and the head, with eyes gone milky and its rude blue tongue lapping at a little ooze of blood on the floor.

Soon the air would stink of hair and horn. Something in the incinerator always popped loudly; Steven didn’t know what it was, but imagined the eyes, and was relieved every time it was over.

‘What do you think he wants?’ he said.

Jess shrugged. ‘Money, I suppose.’

‘My mum doesn’t have any money,’ said Steven.

‘Nor does my dad,’ said Jess. ‘The horses take it all.’

39

DAVEY SAW THE story in the paper on the rack outside Mr Jacoby’s shop as he walked to Shane’s house.

THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY

Davey stopped dead. He almost didn’t recognize the blurred photo of his own mother, one hand over her mouth, the other clutching the end of his hospital bed. There he was, propped against pillows and looking disappointingly eleven, and there was DI Reynolds, leaning back in his chair and frowning.

Davey picked up the Sunday Mirror. The story was labelled ‘Exclusive’ and had been written by someone called Marcie Meyrick. As he read it, Davey felt his whole body go hot and cold and squirmy.

‘Little Davey Lamb’? Davey’s heart plummeted. Shit, they were going to have him for breakfast at school.

Sobbing?! He hadn’t sobbed! Shit! Davey wanted to punch someone. Who the hell was Marcie Meyrick? What a fucking liar! He read on:

Davey threw the paper down furiously.

‘Steady now,’ said Mr Jacoby, who’d appeared in the doorway.

‘They’re writing lies!’ shouted Davey.

‘That’s what newspapers do.’

‘It shouldn’t be allowed!’

‘It’s not,’ said Mr Jacoby. ‘If they’ve lied and you can prove it, you can sue them.’

‘I’m going to! It said I cried and I didn’t cry! Shit!’

‘How’s your mum doing, Davey?’ asked Mr Jacoby soothingly.

Davey looked confused, then shrugged. ‘Fine.’

Mr Jacoby sighed and withdrew, then reappeared a moment later and handed Davey a Mr Kipling Dundee cake and a Mars bar.

‘Here you are. For teatime. I hope they find your brother soon. You give my best to your mother and gran, all right?’

Davey had pilfered industriously from Mr Jacoby’s shop for years and now felt a bit embarrassed as he took the offerings and mumbled his thanks.

Life had been so simple and suddenly everything was just so wrong. How had it happened? Davey had no idea, but as he walked away with the Mars bar melting in his jeans pocket, images kept crowding into his head. Images of the money he and Shane had failed to spend, of the piece-of-shit cardboard bird he’d made for Nan – and of Steven’s skateboard nose-diving gently into the silt.

He never had any luck, however hard he tried.

He carried on to Shane’s, where they ate the Dundee cake with their fingers in the back garden and threw what was left into Shane’s neighbour’s pond.

40

‘HOW DO YOU do?’ Charlie asked Jonas through the chain link. ‘How old are you? I’ve got a mouse in my house. He’s white. His name is Mickey. You can play with him if you want. Have you got any biscuits? I’m hungry.’

Charlie wiggled his fingers through the fence and touched Jonas, resting his pinkie on his shoulder, or stroking his hair like a child with a loved toy.

Jonas ignored him, just as he ignored Steven and the bones that thudded over the gate. It was food and he was hungry. But the thought of eating meat made him feel sick. He thought about Sunday lunchtimes, staring at the bloodied flesh on his plate while his mother cleared the table around him and his father became increasingly red-faced at the waste.

You liked meat a month ago.

But he didn’t like it now.

There are children starving in Africa.

Jonas didn’t care. Africa was welcome to his meat.

Every day the faceless man came into the kennel to clean it, and Jonas squeezed his eyes shut and curled up small so the man wouldn’t notice him.

It worked.

Since that first night of those cold hands, the huntsman hadn’t even come close to him. He carried a single key in his pocket that opened every padlock. He let himself into the kennel each day, scraped up shit with a short-handled shovel and sluiced the cement with milky disinfectant. Then he unwound a thick brick-coloured hose and sprayed any remaining mess into the little drain hole, refilled the water bucket and moved on.

Once he’d finished, Jonas could breathe again. Feel his ribs press down on to the ground again like long chill fingers cupping his torso, reminding him that he was still alive.

He was not let out into the meadow with the children. He could not even stand upright because he was never let off the short chain. He didn’t know why, but he also didn’t care about the lack of movement. Moving would only draw attention to himself, when he wanted to be invisible.

Only his stomach seemed aware of the time that had passed.

‘I heard your tummy!’ Charlie said beside him. ‘Grrrrrrr. Grrrrrrr. Like that.’ His smile faded and he added a plaintive, ‘I’m hungry.’

‘Give him your meat if you’re not going to eat it,’ said Steven Lamb.

Jonas didn’t look at Steven and tried not to look at anything else either.

Cages filled with children, with no one to protect them.

This problem was too big and he was too small to do anything about it.

People hurt children. He’d had no answer when he was a child up at Springer Farm and he had no answer now that he was a child again.

All he could do was to close his eyes curl up tight, and hope it was all over quickly.

‘Hey,’ said Steven. ‘Mr Holly?’

No answer. The man had barely moved since they arrived. He hadn’t eaten at all. A few times Steven had seen him drink from the steel bucket, and he had pissed into the drain at the front of the cage. Once he’d cried in the night, like a baby.

It was embarrassing and it was bloody annoying.

Mr Holly was an adult. And a policeman. And he was doing nothing to help them – or even himself.

Unless he was playing some sick game. Trying to pretend to be one of them, when really he was in on it with the huntsman… Steven knew it was unlikely but he was still loathe to give the man the benefit of any doubt.

‘Hey!’ he said more sharply. ‘Charlie’s talking to you.’

Jonas Holly slowly closed his eyes.

Steven kicked the fence. ‘Hey!’

Nothing.

Behind him, Jess started to sing quietly. ‘Waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda…’

Charlie twisted his fist back through the fence.

‘C’mon, Charlie!’ said Kylie, and she and Maisie started to sing along. ‘You’ll come a waltzing Matilda with me…’

Charlie clapped and joined in. ‘We all sing Matilda, we all sing Matilda…’

Steven got up and ran his eyes and his fingers around his tiny prison, seeking escape.

Not for the first time.

The ends of the wire that folded over the steel struts were too stiff to unwind by hand; he could climb up and poke his head through the twelve-inch gap between the plastic roof and the top of the gate, but it was too narrow to do more. And although the grey block wall at the back of the kennel was crumbling around the edges, it was solid in all the important places. He had sat and kicked it repeatedly with his heel – and achieved nothing but a blister.

‘You can’t get out,’ Jess Took had told him the first time he’d made this circuit, but he was still reluctant to concede the point.

He’d had to concede every other point. He’d had to sleep on the straw bed, drink from the steel bucket, pee down the drain, and – after three agonizing days desperate for rescue – he had finally shat on the cold cement floor. The full house of humiliation.

They were exercised every morning and every afternoon. Everyone but Jonas Holly was led out of their cages and clipped to each other by short coupling chains that meant they could walk but not run or climb – although ballroom dancing would probably have been an option, as long as it was a slow tune. The huntsman led them to a small fenced meadow in pairs roughly according to height, which meant that Steven was always with Charlie, who often forgot that he was restrained and would wander off to pick up grit or stop suddenly to watch a cloud – each time jerking on Steven’s neck.

While the other children walked or sat together, Steven ran a hand along the perimeter. The fence was high – maybe twelve feet – and its base was sunk in a kerb of concrete, so there was no burrowing under it. The gate was secured with a large, rusted padlock. Beyond the meadow was a small cottage. Once it had been whitewashed, but now it was grey-green with age. While they were locked in the meadow, the huntsman went to the cottage. Sometimes – like now – Steven could see him standing a little way back from the window with a mug of tea, watching them.

Always watching them.

Steven was a resourceful boy but, dogged though he was, he could see no way of escape – especially with Charlie hanging off his neck.

He stood for a moment and watched the huntsman, who shuffled backwards into the darkness where Steven could no longer see him.

He was a rubbish kidnapper.

But a good enough guard.

‘Butterfly!’ shouted Charlie, and yanked Steven sideways.

41

EM COULDN’T BELIEVE what was happening.

Steven had disappeared before her eyes and yet for a week her mother insisted that she get up every day and continue to go to school.

As if the sky hadn’t fallen.

At first she refused. At first she wanted to saddle up Skip and spend the rest of the summer – the rest of her life – searching for Steven. Instead she was expected to put on her uniform, pick up her sandwiches and get in the car to be driven to school like a five-year-old.

‘But I love him!’ she’d told her mother, who’d looked at her father, who’d raised his eyebrows the same way he had when she’d said she wanted to do Chemistry instead of History. As if he didn’t believe she was capable of such a thing.

She’d got an A in Chemistry though – and it was the thought of that which made her get out of the Range Rover at the school gates every day, wave her mother goodbye, then – once she’d been to registration – walk back down Barnstaple Road to Steven’s house.

His nan was in a terrible state. Who could blame her? The doctor came often and gave her pills to add to the pills she already had for angina. He was a young, modern doctor who wore chinos, deck shoes and a pale-pink Ralph Lauren polo shirt, and his tanned presence made the Lambs’ little front room seem even dingier than it was. It took a good half-hour after he’d gone for it all to seem quite cosy again.

Steven’s mother, Lettie, took pills too. She sat on the sofa next to Nan, crying at Homes under the Hammer, with an old Spiderman pyjama top crumpled in her hands. Once – when Lettie left it on the sofa while she went to the bathroom – Em picked it up and pressed it to her nose. To her it smelled only of sleep, but then she was not Steven’s mother.

Ten times a day, Nan would cover Lettie’s hand with hers and say, ‘God will take care of him.’ And Lettie would swear and make a cup of tea, or nod and burst into fresh tears.

Steven’s Uncle Jude came often. He weeded the garden and brought in shopping and left with the unopened bills. He sat on the sofa with his arm around Lettie, and kissed Nan’s cheek when he arrived and when he left. Em gathered he was the kind of uncle who slept with your mother – not the kind you were related to by blood.

Davey got himself up and he made himself toast. He did his homework and made his own sandwiches and left the house quietly – sometimes before Lettie and Nan were even out of bed. Em usually passed him on his way to school, but when she tried to ask whether he was OK, Davey avoided her eyes and sidled around her. When Shane came round now, they made little noise, and Davey quickly tired of the PlayStation. At the ramp, Em had seen Davey frowning while Shane skated. It was as though Davey had become an older person swapped into a boy’s body, and Em imagined that somewhere in this universe or the next, there might be a middle-aged woman wondering why her husband had suddenly become obsessed with Grand Theft Auto and laughed at his own farts.

Em cooked and washed up, she cleaned the bathroom. She answered the door to the doctor or reporters or police or neighbours with flowers and cakes, and she made sure there was always change for the electricity meter. The Piper Parents came round and Em made tea for everyone while they broke down in relays.

While her own family wouldn’t acknowledge her loss, nobody here questioned it. It was assumed.

She learned to ignore the photographers calling her name as she arrived each day, and to say ‘No comment, thanks’ to reporters who asked outrageous questions to try to provoke her. ‘Are you and Steven lovers?’, ‘Are you pregnant?’, ‘Do you pray for Steven?’, ‘Do you think he’s dead?’.

School was a forgotten past and her own home was a mere interruption to her industrious vigil. Sometimes she went upstairs and lay on Steven’s bed and thought about being there together. How scared she’d been; how excited. It was hard to remember, when being there now was just so sad. Sometimes she went through his things. She pulled on the Liverpool shirt with his name on the back; she didn’t know why he kept it, it was way too small for him. She went through his school bag and read his essays – neatly written and neatly constructed. She browsed his odd collection of books – Five Have Plenty of Fun, The Cucumber Pony and The Methodology of Serial Killing. Talking animals and psychopaths nestling side by side on the shelf.

Sometimes Lettie and Nan mentioned Uncle Billy – the boy whose picture was in Steven’s room.

He hadn’t been hit by a car; he had been murdered.

At first Em was angry that Steven had lied to her. But by asking nothing and listening to everything, she learned the family’s story. A story of loss, terror and survival. A story where Steven had very nearly been a victim, but was instead the hero, and which made sense of his bookshelf. It made her own family’s stories – a great-grandfather’s medal on the beaches, an aunt who’d met the Queen – seem hopelessly humdrum.

For no reason she could have verbalized, Em had always believed Steven was special.

In his absence she learned how right she was.

Steven came out of sleep through a rushing tunnel of noise and fear. He awoke sitting bolt upright, with one hand clutching his chest like an old man having an attack.

The screaming was coming from Charlie Peach. Usually so calm and easygoing, Charlie was hurling himself around his cage in a blind panic.

Even Jonas Holly was watching Charlie – his eyes wide and wary.

Charlie knew he was making a fuss and that making a fuss was a bad thing to do, but for once he didn’t care. He covered his ears, squeezed shut his eyes and tried to run away from the sound, hurling himself blindly against the mesh of his cage, staggering back to his feet and running headlong into the wire once more. Again and again, his mouth wide, hardly drawing breath between raw, high-pitched howls.

‘No meat! No meat!’

Steven pointed at the bones in Charlie’s cage and tried to draw his attention. ‘There’s your meat, Charlie. It’s OK. It’s right there.’

Charlie was too upset to hear him.

The huntsman ran down the walkway with the flatbed trolley rumbling and clunking before him, and fumbled for the key – his green woollen gloves making it harder than usual. Pressed by the stocking, his face was as blank as always, but his body gave away his urgency.

He strode into the kennel and Charlie shrank back on his bed. The huntsman grabbed him, and Charlie kicked and flailed.

‘Leave him alone!’ Steven hammered his fist against the chain link. ‘Bastard!’

Jonas scrambled to his feet, although the short chain jerked him back to his knees at once. He hooked his fingers through the fence and watched.

Everything went quiet very fast. One moment Charlie was screaming and struggling, the next the huntsman was hauling his limp body from the kennel with his green hand over the boy’s mouth and nose.

‘Where are you taking him?’ Steven yelled. ‘Leave him alone!’

The huntsman ignored him. In a series of jerks – and with a strength that belied his stature – he dumped Charlie on to the trolley, then hurried him up the walkway and around the corner.

Steven turned to Jess. ‘What happened? Did you see what happened?’

She stared at him, her lower lip trembling.

‘What?’ he said. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Helicopter,’ said Jess.

It was only then that Steven heard the noise. It was distant but it was unmistakable. He rushed to the front of his cage to peer up through the gap in the roof.

‘They’re looking for us!’ said Steven excitedly.

The other children didn’t move.

‘Yes,’ said Jess Took dully. In the cage at the end, Pete Knox started to cry, which set Maisie off.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Steven, but before anyone could answer, the huntsman came back.

He took Jess next. She shrieked and tried to cover her face but he easily pushed her hands aside and clapped his glove over her nose and mouth. She went limp.

Then the others, one by one.

Pete kicked and howled and then succumbed like a kitten in a bucket of water. Steven shouted his name even after he disappeared from view – one arm dangling off the trolley. He fought panic.

The helicopter was closer now. The sound of the blades came to him in waves. It was criss-crossing the moor. Searching. For them.

‘One, two, three – Help!’ he shouted. ‘One, two, three!’ Maisie and Kylie just looked at him.

He had to give the helicopter a sign. He looked about his cage desperately. There was nothing to use. Steven gripped the top of the gate and hauled himself up. He pushed his head through the gap where the huntsman dropped the meat, swearing as his right ear tore. He tried to get his arm through as well, but couldn’t. His shoulder was too lumpy. He pulled his head back down, scraping his bloody ear again, then waved his right hand in the air until the fingers of his left gave way and he fell back to the floor.

‘Don’t! You’ll make him angry.’

Steven turned on Jonas Holly. The policeman hugged his knees to his chest, visibly trembling, his eyes huge and full of tears. Steven slapped the fence between them, making Jonas flinch.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ yelled Steven. ‘Get up and fight, you baby!’

Jonas closed his eyes and put his hands over his ears.

Steven kicked the fence once more, then turned around. The huntsman was right there – his green hand already reaching for him. Steven threw an arm up but he was too late.

There was barely a struggle. The fumes filled his head and he staggered and scraped his knees. He tried to get up and the huntsman helped him.

Helped him to his traitor’s feet.

Helped him on to the trolley and rolled him up the walkway and through the big shed to the flesh room.

Reynolds had asked to go with the chopper crew. They’d had several flights across the moor already, but he felt sure that his being there would make all the difference to the success of the operation.

Now they’d get things done.

The helmet they gave him smelled of sweat, and he grimaced as he tugged it down over his well-shampooed hair.

The co-pilot, whose name was Lee, shouted instructions at his face as though the blades were already whirring. They weren’t.

Reynolds made the mistake of asking about parachutes and everybody laughed so hard that he had to pretend it had been a joke.

He was no expert in aerodynamics, but as he approached the chopper he thought it looked too big for its rotor, and highly unlikely to take off. The closer he got, the more unsettled he felt. The paintwork was scratched all around the door as if it had been bumped in a car park; the vinyl seats were cracked and torn in places. The floor was grimy and utilitarian, with strips of wood screwed to it for grip – like the wooden slats in the changing rooms at the old public pool he’d been taken to as a child. Verruca city. He couldn’t help thinking he’d have more confidence in the whole aircraft if it had only been carpeted, the way an airliner was. Reynolds didn’t like to see the inner workings of things. It made him too conscious of how much there was to go wrong.

His seatbelt was frayed.

He should have sent Rice. Too late.

Leaving the ground was like climbing a rope ladder – a dizzy, lurching ascent. Lee and the pilot, whose name he hadn’t caught, were up front. He was behind them with a jolly, overweight air-support officer who had been introduced as Tuckshop. Reynolds couldn’t bring himself to use the name, but tried to sit as close to his own door as possible to stop the chopper yawing to one side.

They had barely left the big H before they were over Exmoor – the neat fields and Toytown cows giving way to brown patches and yellow and purple swathes of gorse and heather.

They passed over ponies, which did not look up, and deer that scattered. Reynolds peered between the seats at the thermal-imaging screen and watched a small group of them explode in a fountain of bright dots, like Pong gone mad.

The other three men shouted at each other and laughed, but Reynolds couldn’t make out a thing they were saying. If they were looking at him when they laughed, he just smiled and nodded and hoped they weren’t calling him a wanker. He seemed to be the only one who was taking this seriously. No wonder they hadn’t found anyone on their previous sorties.

The children could have been taken a long way off, of course. They could be dead. But if they weren’t on Exmoor, then there were no clues as to where they were. Exmoor was their only lead and it made a dull kind of sense to keep searching it.

Now, up ahead, on the top of a hill, Reynolds could see a small grey collection of utilitarian buildings. He consulted his map but couldn’t tell what he was looking at until Tuckshop’s nailbitten finger jabbed the paper and he shouted, ‘Hunt kennels!’ at full volume.

Reynolds nodded. It made him think of Jonas Holly and his dog theory.

The huntsman came back.

Jonas let it happen. He was so small, what else could he do? He kept his eyes closed and smelled that smell, and felt himself getting sick and wobbly.

‘Get up.’ The voice was in charge and Jonas tried to obey, but the chain pulled him back and he sagged against the fence with his long legs folded under him like a faun’s.

‘Get up.’

He tried again. The sound of the helicopter was louder now.

‘Get up!’ The huntsman gripped the tether chain and pulled.

Jonas staggered out of the safety of the kennel.

The ride on the trolley was brief. Then the sun on his back winked out and the cold was so sudden that he opened his eyes on blackness.

‘Stay.’

He stayed. There was the sound of chains and metal and the grunt of the huntsman moving something heavy. A squeal of something not oiled. Jonas wasn’t sure whether his eyes were open or shut, but then started to make out shapes in the dark. Long, pale shapes, swaying gently.

He was tugged off the trolley and fell to his knees. Strong fingers bound his wrists before him, and a cloth that tasted of dirt was wound around his mouth, pulling his lips painfully against his teeth. He flinched as cold chain was looped around his chest and suddenly there was a mechanical whine and he was being raised from the floor. He half staggered into a standing position just as the chain went slack, and he fell on to his side on a stone floor that was wet with cold.

‘Shit,’ said the huntsman. ‘You’re too big.’

Jonas tried to stand but something heavy and cold bumped his face and he nearly fell again. The huntsman steadied him by the collar.

Jonas was dragged and jerked – feeling smaller all the time – back out into the warmth, but on his feet now. He closed his eyes against the brightness.

The helicopter was close. Close and low. It brought no hope to Jonas. Nothing could save him, not even the police. Even as a child he’d known that.

The huntsman pulled harder and Jonas stumbled across the concrete in his bare feet, until his knees hit something metal.

‘Get in,’ said the huntsman.

Jonas looked down at the horse trough, its deep green water as smooth as marble. Getting in seemed a foolish thing to do.

The helicopter beat so close that Jonas raised his head, but he couldn’t see it. The very act made him dizzy.

‘In!’ said the huntsman, and pushed him roughly. The metal edge of the trough caught the side of his knee and he twisted awkwardly.

Off balance.

The huntsman shoved again and this time Jonas felt himself falling.

It took for ever. Falling and trying not to.

He splashed into the trough on his back – one leg still over the sharp metal side. He flopped back in the water and he saw the sky was cool green then cold olive then freezing brown, before the back of his head finally clunked on contact with metal.

He kicked and flailed for the edge of the trough. The water was up his nose and he needed to breathe. He pulled himself up from the brown through the green, towards the clattering roar…

Something pressed into his chest and pushed him back down where it was coldest. His groping hands felt the wiry bristles of a yard broom, pricking and pressing his naked skin. He was desperate to breathe. His chest hurt inside and out. His head might explode. He looked up at the dim sky pulsating in time to the whirring arms of the rotor blades.

Lucy looked down on him.

Lucy!

He’d found her at last, here in the water.

Or she had found him.

Her hair swayed on the surface like kelp, her lips moved – trying to tell him something he couldn’t hear because the helicopter and his heart were pounding so hard and his lungs hurt so badly.

With the last of his strength, Jonas reached out to hold her, just like in his dreams.

But before he could touch her, everything went black.

Steven opened his eyes but it was still dark.

The sound of the helicopter was disorientating.

He was freezing.

At first he thought he was underwater, but when he tried to swim he found he was compressed by something tight and cold.

Had he been rescued? Was this what it was like to be strapped into a cradle and airlifted across the moor? Cold, cold air and the blades clattering overhead?

But something that was not fresh air stank so badly that his stomach rolled and his mouth filled with thin saliva. He tried to spit and found that he was gagged. He panicked for a moment, and struggled as he worked to swallow without choking. Some of whatever was wrapped tightly around him yielded, some was hard and sharp. His knees were drawn up; he couldn’t feel his left leg at all. When he turned his face half an inch one way or the other he felt something slimy press against his cheek. He thought his left leg must be trapped under him and he guessed he was upright, although whatever his right foot was pressing against was far from solid.

Steven had a sudden mental image of a chrysalis hanging from a twig and felt his bowels contract sharply. He’d been captured by a giant insect, bound in sticky thread, and could only wait helplessly to be liquefied and sucked out through a sharp proboscis—

Proboscis was a good word.

That thought calmed him. Brought him back from the edge of panic. Allowed him to become aware of his own breathing again and to work on bringing it under control.

Yes, he was hanging up inside something disgusting, but a giant insect was major bollocks. He wasn’t a child; he mustn’t let childish fears stop him thinking straight. As his breathing slowed, he became aware once more of the stink that surrounded him. It was the same stink that came from the bones Jonas Holly never ate. That were left to lie in the sun for the flies to shit on…

He was inside meat.

Instantly he knew he was right. This was why Charlie had screamed about meat. This was what had scared him so. Steven had seen the huntsman skin the animals – the shaggy Exmoor pony, the cow with the empty eyes. He’d seen him drag the pink-and-grey carcasses through the dark door at the back of the big shed. He’d heard the clank of chains and the brief sounds of an electric winch.

Meat.

That was what he’d become.

What they’d all become.

The kennels were empty. Reynolds saw that with his own eyes, and the little grey screen was proof. There were only two bright blobs of warmth below them, and one was in the shape of the man standing over a water trough in the yard, leaning on a pole and squinting up into the sunshine. The other was an intensely white star in a small building near by.

Unwilling to shout loudly enough to make himself heard, Reynolds leaned between the seats and jabbed a finger at the white point on the screen.

‘Incinerator!’ Lee hollered into his ear.

Reynolds nodded and sat back.

Slowly the man below them raised a hand in greeting, and Tuckshop returned a half-wave, half-salute, like a fighter pilot in a black-and-white war film.

As the helicopter tilted away from the Blacklands hunt kennels, Reynolds did the same – and felt like the guardian of the entire world.

42

IT’S TRUE, THOUGHT Lettie Lamb. We’re all cursed.

She had never believed in curses; curses were for old folk and stupid people. But here, lying in a fast-cooling bath, watching condensation drip off the peeling ceiling, she could find no more logical reason for the miseries visited on her family than that which the Sunday Mirror had proposed.

Steven was gone.

Lettie’s mouth distorted with sudden emotion and she squeezed her eyes shut to stop herself crying. Crying helped nobody. She’d learned that a long, long time ago.

She waited until her breathing was normal again, concentrating on her breasts, which sat like little islands on the water – the warm meniscus of the tide rising and falling on the beaches of pale skin, where faint blue rivers ran from the puckered peaks.

He’d been gone for a week and just today her mother had put down her knitting and walked to the front window. She’d stood in her old place – the one she’d worn bare over the twenty years when she’d waited for Billy to come home. Jude had replaced the carpet. Not all of it, but that piece in the window. It wasn’t a perfect match with the rest of the room but it was close enough. Now the thought of her mother wearing a new path to the window to wait for Steven made Lettie shiver. Would she follow in time, however hard she tried to resist? Would the pair of them wear out the carpet together, lumbering back and forth like buffalo at a watering hole? Would Davey suffer the way she had suffered when Billy had gone?

Was Steven suffering now? Or was he already dead?

This time her mouth would not obey her when she tried to pull it back into shape. This time her tears reheated the water around her temples.

She thought of all the times she’d snapped at him; all the times she’d been unfair; all the times she’d taken Davey’s side for no reason other than that Davey was adorable and ‘You’re the oldest. You should know better.’

She thought of the time she’d slapped his face.

I can’t, thought Lettie. I can’t do this. It hurts too much.

She had to stop thinking. Thinking of Steven was like having a head full of thorns.

I’m cursed.

And suddenly – the revelation: all of the bad things had happened on her watch. Maybe all that was needed was to take herself out of the equation. The ultimate horror required the ultimate sacrifice. If it didn’t actually help Steven, at least she wouldn’t be around to know about it. Stopping everything meant stopping the agony of thinking about him every second of the day. It all made sense. A kind of sense. Sense enough for now.

Lettie opened her eyes. Without turning her head, she thought about what was in the bathroom that she might use.

Not much.

The water itself was tempting – just a tilt of the head would cover her face – but she guessed it would be almost impossible without something to keep her under while she drowned. There was the razor she used to shave her legs when Jude stayed over. It was a white Bic safety razor, and the blades were firmly encased in plastic that defied removal. Jude used an electric one that pushed his skin about his face in stubbled wavelets.

Lettie had a sudden bright memory of the razor her father had used. A steel-headed Gillette that held a proper blade in a canopy so smooth and shiny that it tempted tiny hands to pick it up and gaze into it like a mirror. He’d had a brush too, with coarse bristles that were black at the bottom and white at the tips. She and Billy used to squabble for the right to stir the solid shaving soap into a thick cream of suds and paint it on their father’s face with ‘the badger’. That’s what they’d called it, she remembered now with a pang. Then they’d watch in awed silence as the Gillette left broad, smooth trails through the snowy lather on her father’s tanned face.

She could smell her father now – that clean soapy smell of his cheek and his chin, and the Old Spice she’d bought him relentlessly for every birthday and every Christmas until he’d died when she was ten.

Cursed.

Someone pounded on the door and Lettie jolted upright with a splash, gripping the side of the bath with both hands, ready to leap out of it, scared of why.

Was he found?

Was he dead?

Was this the moment when her life shattered into a million pieces or started slowly to mend? She could feel her heart beating against the cold plastic of the tub in excitement and terror.

‘What is it?’ she croaked.

‘Where are my socks?’ yelled Davey.

Lettie sat there, frozen, for a few seconds that stretched to fill her entire future. Then she hauled herself from the water and went on living for a bit longer so she could find her son’s socks.

43

JONAS KNEW THE huntsman’s name.

He wasn’t sure when he’d remembered it, just as he wasn’t sure where he’d got the bruises. Bruises down his arms, sharp black welts across his calves, ridges on his ribs that hurt to touch, and an odd raw abrasion on his chest.

He remembered Lucy in water – that was all.

Then he’d woken up just now, when a chunk of bone came over the gate with a soft thud.

Bob Coffin. That was his name.

He’d been the huntsman for years – even when Jonas was a boy, working for rides up at Springer Farm and galloping about the moors with his friends on a pony called Taffy. They’d seen him, walking the hounds or resplendent in scarlet. The huntsman had touched his cap at Jonas and led him to the Red Lion car park the day they’d all searched for Pete and Jess.

Jonas looked through the wire. There was Jess Took. Beyond her were Kylie Martin and Maisie Cook and – at the end of the row – Pete Knox. He’d seen their pictures in the Bugle.

Bob Coffin. Jonas’s skimpy memory was of a much younger man, treating hounds, horses and children with the same efficient confidence that he would be obeyed.

And these were the Blacklands hunt kennels – although the hunt was no more. Jonas hadn’t sought its demise, but some locals had – and even more incomers. Incomers resented the red coats; they admired the foxes; they could afford the chickens.

The kennels had been searched at least once – Jonas was sure of it.

How did we miss them?

‘I don’t eat meat,’ he said as a second slab slapped on to the concrete, but the man ignored him, as if the stocking mask he wore made him deaf as well as smooth.

‘He doesn’t listen,’ said Steven Lamb to himself. ‘He only talks.’

Jonas stood up, then winced as something tugged him back down. He put a hand to his throat and felt the collar.

Steven watched the way Jonas Holly touched the collar and chain; the bemused look on his face; the way he’d stood up as though he thought he could.

It was as if he’d only just arrived. Didn’t know the ropes.

‘Hey,’ Steven said. ‘How long have we been here?’

Jonas opened his mouth to answer, but then frowned.

‘Five six nine eleventy years!’ said Charlie behind him.

‘Ten days,’ said Steven, and Jonas Holly stared at him in blank confusion.

44

FOR A WEEK, no child was taken. Then a week and a day. A week and two days.

A week and a half.

Exmoor held its breath.

Even the flash bulbs seemed more subdued, and the reporters more inclined to drift away from their vigils outside the homes of the Piper Parents to revisit the scenes of the abductions, to survey the local pubs, or to vox-pop market-day farmers about the curse of Exmoor. Several were even recalled and reassigned to stories that had a more tangible conclusion.

It was dull stuff. No new abductions meant no new news.

Marcie Meyrick took a view and stayed put, along with four die-hard freelance photographers who had stationed themselves outside the school in Shipcott which hosted children from several villages around. She was her own boss and had a feeling in her water that the Pied Piper story may yet pay for her to have that cruise to the fjords that she’d dreamed of for years.

So every morning she parked her only indulgence – a four-year-old Subaru Impreza – close to the school, and kept true to her vigil.

Three times a day she popped quickly into the Spar shop for a Cornish pasty or a bottle of water, or a pee. She’d flattered and cajoled Mr Jacoby into letting her use his toilet, and made sure he always saw her put a pound in the Guide Dogs box by way of thanks. So far she was right up there at the head of the hack pack with her single exclusive. She wasn’t about to languish over lunch in the Red Lion and let some pampered expense-accounted bimbo catch up while she was gone. It could happen in an instant and suddenly she’d have to start all over again. It had happened before and she’d started all over before. Not once but many times; and each time it got harder.

For the first time in her life, Marcie Meyrick wondered when it was going to end. Not the story, the job. There was always another tragedy, another paedophile, another house fire, another pit bull, another car crash. And she was always clawing and fighting to be first in line. Just once, just once, thought Marcie, it would be so good to be ahead of the game. To know exactly how things were going to go, and to be confident of being there when they went.

Suddenly, while watching children spill out of the school gates, Marcie Meyrick had a brainwave. She told the photographers her plan.

‘If we get pics of every single kid now, then when one of them’s snatched we’ve got a head start! Got their pic, their name, age, address – everything! Screw running round kissing the cops’ arses just to squeeze a bit of info out of them and a crappy old snap from the kid’s third birthday party!’

The men looked at each other – interested but nervous.

‘Is that legal?’ said one.

‘As long as we don’t approach them on school property, where’s the harm?’ Marcie said. ‘They have the right to say no.’

‘What’s the catch?’ asked Rob Clarke for all of them.

‘No catch,’ shrugged Marcie. ‘You’re all freelance. The more kids you get, the better chance you have of hitting the jackpot. You just gotta promise to use my words, that’s all. It’s a package deal.’

Within minutes they were all approaching children, taking their pictures, and logging their names, ages and addresses. Most children were excited about having their picture in the paper, and those who declined were generally girls who declared their hair looked a mess and to ask again tomorrow.

Marcie and Rob jogged after two boys who were already heading up the street.

When they turned around, Marcie realized one of them was Davey Lamb.

Shane smiled for a photo and gave his name to Rob, but Davey was more wary.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘My name’s Marcie. You’re Davey Lamb, right?’

He said nothing.

‘How’s your mum doing, Davey?’

The boy looked up the street towards home and kept his mouth shut.

‘I really am praying for Steven to come home. We all are. You know that, right?’

He fixed her with a steady gaze that would have wilted anyone less Australian.

‘Can we take your photo quickly, Davey?’ She smiled. ‘Maybe one of you and Shane together?’

‘You already have my photo,’ he said, and walked away.

Reynolds let the water pummel his head into submission.

He should have been happy, but he wasn’t. Nobody else had been kidnapped. It should have been a cause for relief, if not celebration, but all Reynolds could think was: Why has he stopped?

He always did his best worrying in the shower – even one as small as this. The worry used to be inextricably linked with watching his hair swirl down the drain between his feet, and had become a Pavlovian response, even though his hair was now silkily anchored. The second the water burst from the shower-head, Reynolds started to doubt himself and those around him; began to wonder why he’d become a police officer in the first place, to debate whether he should call his mother more, and to question what the future could possibly hold for him if he were unable to solve the case/get a girlfriend/finish that day’s Times crossword.

Like a metaphysical plumber, no job was too small for Reynolds to worry about once he’d stepped under the flow.

He had called Kate Gulliver and they’d had an interesting chat, but even she’d had no answers for him for this one – at least none he hadn’t already postulated in his own mind with an increasing sense of helplessness.

The Pied Piper (God, even he was calling him that now!) must have stopped for a reason. He might be dead. The children might be dead. He might have moved house along with his adoring wife and tow-headed babies. He might simply have run out of storage or his car could have broken down; or perhaps he’d become a born-again Christian and was even now preparing to release his captives, citing divine intervention. The possibilities were endless.

All Reynolds knew was that something had changed.

Not knowing what was just another bitter pill to swallow. Something in DI Reynolds almost hoped for another abduction – anything that might add to his pool of knowledge and give them a fighting chance of catching the culprit.

Because if the Piper had stopped for good, they’d never catch him.

45

HUNGER WAS A funny thing. Sometimes it hurt like a blade in Jonas’s gut – and he should know. Other times it was almost wonderful.

When it hurt, the pain came in long spasms that rippled up his body like a tsunami, tearing and squeezing the beaches of his organs and leaving him breathless and flattened. When it was wonderful, it freed him from the confines of his wire-mesh prison and speeded up the tortuous process that turned each day into the next.

His mouth was dry or drooling by turn, his thoughts either repulsed by the idea of sustenance or filled with fruit and potatoes and – bizarrely – cupcakes. Cupcakes he’d seen on TV, with thick, soft, fairytale icing, sprinkled with chocolate and little silver balls.

Instead of sweet cakes, he was served stinking slabs of dead flesh. He told the huntsman every day that he couldn’t eat meat, and every day he was ignored, so the children had taken it upon themselves to keep him alive. Maisie and Kylie had started it and the others had quickly joined in. They returned from the meadow twice a day with handfuls of grass, dandelions and clover. They carefully pushed the increasingly mushy handfuls through the fences down the line to Steven, who dropped them into Jonas’s kennel.

At first the idea of eating such offerings seemed ridiculously over-dramatic to Jonas. Then he reminded himself that he was being held in a dog kennel by a crazy man – and eating grass didn’t seem like such an outlandish response after all.

The grass was bitter and hard to swallow. The dandelions were strangely creamy and tickled his throat like yellow feathers, while the clover was stiff and tasted only of green. Once Kylie found some wild strawberries – each the size of a pea, and so sweet it made everything else taste foul again, just as he’d been getting used to it. He noticed little improvement in his hunger pangs, but chewing was good and he imagined that the children’s offerings must contain some worthwhile calories, so he was grateful.

He noticed that Steven Lamb never brought anything back from the meadow for him. He collected the assembled green stuff from Jess and dutifully pushed it through the wire, but, while Jonas thanked him, Steven never said a word.

Jonas was confused. Steven used to be a friendly kid. Used to keep an eye on Lucy for him as her disease progressed. Jonas had tipped him a fiver a month, but he knew Steven would have done it for nothing, and he’d given far more than a fiver’s worth of time and effort to the task. And Lucy had adored Steven. She’d never had a bad thing to say about him. Jonas had always got on with him just fine. But that night when Jonas had tried to talk to him about the money, he’d acted like a boy who had something to hide – or something to fear.

He frowned at Steven through the mesh, and tried to work out what he could have done to upset him.

Now that he’d stopped being a mental patient, the Jonas Holly that Steven feared and hated was back.

Except he wasn’t. Not quite, anyway.

Seeing the scars that patterned Jonas’s stomach had shaken Steven. The scars could not lie, however much he wished they could. He was a fair-minded boy, and now had to consider that he might have been wrong about Jonas Holly killing his wife, just as he’d been wrong about him stealing the children.

But although his suspicions had been reduced, Steven was reluctant to let them go entirely. He was curious about that other person. That cringing ball of child-like fear with the trembling lip and night-time tears, who seemed to have vacated the kennel next to his as suddenly and completely as a dog retrieved at the end of a family holiday. The Jonas he saw now bore no resemblance to that pathetic other, and seemed to have no recollection of his time in captivity so far. He asked stupid questions; he expected to be taken out for exercise. He asked about a bloody vegetarian option! It was as if he’d only just arrived.

It was all too weird, and so Steven determined to keep hold of his caution, even if his hatred was deserting him.

46

THERE WAS A fracas at the school. Nobody ever agreed on precisely who had called the parents, but whoever did had managed to pick the biggest, strongest and most belligerent. They descended on Marcie Meyrick and the photographers just as they were lining up the first of several immaculately made-up, blow-dried teenaged girls to have their photos taken.

By the time Reynolds and Rice got there, all the witnesses seemed to have gone to work, and the only people left at the scene had all apparently arrived too late to see anything but five journalists disappearing up Barnstaple Road.

‘Running like hell,’ laughed Ronnie Trewell, who was there in loco parentis for his brother, Dougie.

‘Jogging,’ corrected Mike Haddon, the blacksmith. ‘I think they’re from London.’

It seemed they had also dropped their cameras, which were smashed to pieces on the pavement. And at some point during what Reynolds gathered must have been a very confusing mêlée, someone had had the time to key the word LIER down both sides of a black Subaru Impreza with gold alloys which had been parked on the school-crossing zigzags.

Rice ran a quick check and found it was registered to Marcie Meyrick.

Reynolds walked twice around the car inspecting the damage. He shook his head in despair.

‘Outrageous,’ he said. ‘Can’t spell or park.’ Then he told Rice to issue a ticket.

Because she’d been delayed by the fuss at the school gates, Emily Carver’s mother was late driving back home along Barnstaple Road. But she was just in time to see her daughter – whom she had dropped off at school less than fifteen minutes before – knocking on the door of number 111.

She pulled over, demanded an explanation and called the school when Em’s story didn’t ring true. Then she hit the roof. Right there on the pavement outside the Lambs’ house, complete with waving arms and crazy hair. At one point Em glanced over her mother’s shoulder to see Lettie and Nan watching round-eyed from the front window, and gave a nervous giggle.

‘It’s not funny!’ shouted Mrs Carver, and slapped Em’s face. ‘I want you to be safe. You could be lying dead in a ditch!’

Em held her cheek and fought back tears.

The drive back to Old Barn Farm was stuffed to the brim with cold silence, but the noise started again back at home, while Em started to feel detached from the people who’d made her and loved her, yet couldn’t understand her.

‘This is ridiculous,’ her father snapped at her. ‘You’re ruining your life for a boy you hardly know!’

‘I do know him. And I love him.’

Her mother shouted, ‘You don’t even know what love is.’

‘Don’t tell me how I feel,’ said Em, tilting further and further towards calm on this see-saw of hysteria.

‘I’m selling Skip!’ her father yelled. ‘If you’re going to start running off after boys!’

‘OK.’ Em nodded sadly.

And that’s when they finally shut up and stopped treating her like a baby.

47

AS STEVEN WATCHED Jonas Holly reach out for the dandelions like some kind of starved but gentle ape, he had to keep reminding himself that Jonas had murdered his wife.

He thought of Em, and wondered whether Jonas and Lucy Holly had ever been that happy, that in love. Did Jonas Holly remember the feel of his wife’s back under his hands, or the first time he’d seen her breasts inside her bra?

Jonas’s stomach squealed and he put his hand under his ribs and grimaced. It was a big hand but it didn’t hide the scars completely. They still squirmed out from underneath like dark maggots escaping his fist. Steven had a scar in the middle of his back that matched the tear in his Liverpool shirt; it was where Arnold Avery had hit him with a spade. He could no longer remember the pain with his body, but he did remember that it had hurt and then itched and then become a fading ache that had lasted months. He had twisted to look at it in the bathroom mirror. It wasn’t big – just a red mark on his back that had become pale pink over the years. Nothing like the jagged ridges that criss-crossed Jonas Holly’s abdomen. He tried to imagine how much they must have hurt.

With an angry jolt, he hoped they still did.

‘Why did you kill her?’

Jonas looked confused. ‘Who?’

‘Your wife, of course!’

Jonas swayed on his haunches. Somewhere a long way off, he could hear a plaintive cow. He looked at Steven’s mouth as if to check that the boy had indeed spoken and this was not all in his head, along with his guilty heartbeat.

He hadn’t killed Lucy. That was the truth.

He was sure of it.

He remembered the knife. He remembered the blood. Those things were confusing. There were some things he couldn’t remember, and other things he didn’t want to, but if he had lived a million lifetimes he could not have killed Lucy. Even denying it out loud seemed to be too much for him. His jaw worked but no words came out.

Steven leaned against the fence and asked coldly, ‘Didn’t you love her any more?’

‘I still love her!’ The words came out of Jonas so fast, it was as though they always lived there, at the back of his throat, crowding to be heard.

‘But you hit her! You wouldn’t hit her if you loved her.’

‘That’s a lie,’ said Jonas. ‘That’s a lie.’

‘I saw it with my own eyes,’ said Steven.

Steven realized he was trembling at his own daring. Jonas stared at him. No, not at him – through him.

‘You said Lucy gave you money the night she died.’

‘So what?’

‘Why would she do that?’ Jonas spoke haltingly and with a little frown on his face – as if he was working things out as he was going along.

‘I don’t know,’ said Steven warily. ‘She never did before.’

‘Maybe,’ said Jonas, ‘maybe… she knew she was going to die.’

Steven said nothing, but something in Jonas’s words – or the way he said them – was making his heart fill up with sadness. Or horror. Or a combination of the two. Either way, he had the uncomfortable feeling that something beyond his control was about to unfold. He turned away from the fence, hoping that it would stop the man talking.

But it didn’t.

‘Who knows they’re going to be murdered, Steven?’ said Jonas, with a soft break in his voice. ‘Did you?’

Gooseflesh rippled across Steven’s warm skin.

He hadn’t known Arnold Avery was going to kill him. If he’d known he wasn’t coming back, he would have prepared better – he would have given Davey the fiver he’d kept hidden in the shed, told his mother he loved her.

Lucy Holly had given him £500.

She had hugged him in a fierce goodbye.

Those things meant she could not have been murdered.

Steven’s mind tumbled and spun. Could everything he knew be wrong? Had Lewis been right? Had he been paranoid all along? Had he seen danger in Jonas Holly because of his own demons?

Now he searched Jonas’s face, but saw only pain there. No deception, no anger. No threat.

Not like that night outside Rose Cottage.

Where was that face when Steven needed it?

Then Jonas’s eyes had been holes in his head. Dead black wells, like the old mines up at Brendon Hills. You felt a give in the turf and looked behind to see you’d stepped over a hole that would have killed you – dropped you into blackness so deep and narrow that by the time you hit the bottom you’d be skinned as well as dead. You shivered and then laughed too loudly to show you weren’t scared.

And small, dark places invaded your dreams.

Today Jonas Holly’s eyes were brown. That was all. Brown with a sheen that looked disturbingly like tears.

He doesn’t know what you’re talking about. He really did love her.

Steven thought about someone hurting Em and found wild fury in his chest – there as if by dark magic – and knew that he would rather kill himself than watch her in pain. If Jonas Holly had loved his wife that same way, then he could never have killed her, whatever Steven thought he had seen.

With a horrible jag of remorse, Steven started to wonder whether he’d also imagined the danger he’d felt coming off Jonas Holly that night outside Rose Cottage.

The little vertical line between his eyes deepened.

That was impossible. He hadn’t imagined it.

Had he?

Had he?

What else might his brain have invented? The slap that had knocked Lucy Holly to her knees? The money falling from a black-and-white sky? The hedge at his back with nowhere to run.

Em?

She was too good for him, wasn’t she? Too good to be true. Her heart ticking under his hand, her Super-Sour sweetness. Had he imagined that? Had he imagined her?

Steven blinked and shuddered. How much was real? All of a sudden, he wasn’t sure any more. The heat and the stink of the kennels was his only truth now. How long had he been here? A month? A year? He no longer knew. Jess and Charlie and Maisie and Kylie and Pete were all real. He knew that. Jonas was just Jonas and his eyes were just brown, and his stomach bore the marks that a killer had made. Of those things he was sure. Anything else could be in his head alone. All the fears.

Steven felt as if he were teetering on the edge of a deep, dark precipice, rock crumbling below him and spinning into the abyss.

He’d been through a lot.

He’d been through a lot.

What if the last five years existed only in his head? What if Arnold Avery had won after all, that misty morning up at Blacklands…

Tears filled Steven like water in a jug, and poured out of his eyes in what felt like a never-ending stream.

‘I’m sorry,’ he sobbed. ‘I’m sorry.’

Through the blur, he saw Jonas’s stricken face become surprised, and then concerned. He moved as close as his tether would allow him and reached out to touch the wire between them.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Jonas.

‘I think I might be dead,’ said Steven, and kept on crying.

48

KATE GULLIVER CAME TO Shipcott and had dinner with Reynolds and Rice. Rice had never met her before and was taken aback by how attractive she was – with a mane of dark hair, Spanish eyes, and legs that were needlessly lengthened by spike-heeled patent-leather boots.

Rice felt dowdy drop over her like a potato sack.

The Red Lion only had one vegetarian option and it was always an omelette. Kate made a townie face and ordered two salad starters instead.

In a defiant countermeasure, Rice ordered pizza and a dessert. She could run it off in the morning. Or not.

Kate had spoken at length with Rose Hammond, the psychologist who had helped Steven in the year following his ordeal. She made little quote marks in the air around ‘helped’, leaving them in no doubt what a crappy therapist Kate considered her to be.

In his turn, Reynolds had spoken to the officer who’d dealt with the aftermath of the Arnold Avery case – a taciturn chief inspector, who seemed to hold Steven Lamb personally responsible for depriving the Avon and Somerset force of the pleasure of bringing Arnold Avery down in a hail of officially sanctioned bullets. Apart from that, he’d grudgingly conceded that the experience of being attacked by a psychopath must have been traumatic for a twelve-year-old boy.

Kate thought it was a trauma that might not necessarily have been resolved by a twice-monthly session with a country psychologist. Especially one who came cheap enough to be paid for by some Irish gardener who claimed to be the boy’s uncle.

She put air-quotes around ‘uncle’, too, and Reynolds laughed as if she’d been witty.

Rice felt like a stupid spare part. She wished there was someone across the table for her. Someone she could cock a secret eyebrow at, and whose mouth would twitch in amused support. She imagined Eric, but he’d never got her humour. He’d preferred jokes – often ones that started with an Englishman, an Irishman and a Pakistani going into a massage parlour. She imagined Jonas Holly instead – a quiet counterbalance, unimpressed by Kate Gulliver with her air-quotes and her Spanish eyes. Watching his plate or watching her, with absolute focus.

Just thinking about it made her feel warm. Everywhere.

After a lot of psychobabble that Reynolds nodded at eagerly – and that Rice largely tuned out – Kate said, ‘The legal system failed Steven and allowed a killer to track him down and almost kill him. I think any finger-pointing at a symbol of that system should be treated with the utmost caution.’

‘I agree,’ said Reynolds.

Big shock, thought Rice.

‘There’s another thing.’ Kate’s voice took on a sombre tone. She speared a cherry tomato before going on. ‘A child so traumatized, so damaged. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that Steven might be somehow culpable, and trying to deflect suspicion.’

‘Great minds!’ said Reynolds, smiling at Kate like a smug puppy.

Rice didn’t have the letters after her name to argue with them. But, although she was relieved that suspicion seemed to be falling further and further from Jonas, she hated the drama that Kate Gulliver had squeezed from the moment with her cherry-tomato pause. Triumph disguised as concern. Kate and Reynolds were peas in a bloody pod.

Unless she was very much mistaken, she was the only person at this table who’d ever actually spoken to Steven Lamb. And so, for what it was worth – which she realized wasn’t much – she told them that, to her, Steven hadn’t seemed the type to be a kidnapper, a killer – or even particularly resentful.

‘Interesting,’ said Kate. She put down her fork and clasped her elegant hands under her chin. ‘On what basis do you make that assessment?’

Reynolds snorted. ‘On the basis of a five-minute chat with a towel on your head, wasn’t it, Elizabeth?’

He and Kate showed each other their teeth.

Rice took her cheesecake upstairs. She ate it with her fingers, sitting in the bath.

49

THERE WAS A reason why Davey Lamb got up before his alarm every morning and often slipped from the house before his mother had stirred. Davey’s instincts told him that if he didn’t get out of the house while his mother was all doped up and watching bad TV, she might never let him leave again.

Every now and then Lettie focused on him with clear eyes, and then reached out and held him in arms that were so tight and desperate it made him itch to throw her off and skip away across the room to freedom. But – in the first consciously selfless act of his young life – Davey stayed put and allowed her to crush him to her breast as if she might re-absorb him straight through her skin.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t afraid. He was afraid.

He and Shane didn’t go to Springer Farm any more, or to the woods. Both now seemed like places where bad things had happened – and still might. Sometimes they went to the playing field and he watched Shane skate. That was all. He stopped bothering with homework or the fallout. Sometimes he didn’t go to school at all, but sat on the swings and shared a fag with Chantelle Cox, or swung himself so high and so fast that the world seemed easy to leave behind.

Gravity always dragged him back.

The Piper Parents came round for a meeting and pawed him like zombies. They asked him how he was and made sympathetic faces, but he knew they really wanted to grab him and shake him to make him tell them something – anything – that might help them to find their missing children.

He couldn’t. He had seen the kidnapper, heard his voice, been in his car, and yet his recollection was so patchy as to be useless. The only things he remembered for sure were the plan he and Shane had thought was so clever, and the way he’d shouted instead of shushed…

He went into Steven’s room and touched all the stuff he’d never been allowed to. He took down the Batman action figures, but found the fantasy of crime had been made dull by the reality. He looked through Steven’s school bag and read a story he’d written called ‘A Day in the Life of a Tree’, which sounded shit but was actually quite good, considering the tree never went anywhere or did anything. He searched for porn under the bed, but found only Steven’s name carved into the wall, and the crumpled receipt for the umbrella they had given Nan for her birthday.

£13.99.

It made him so angry he felt like crying.

If Steven ever came back, he’d tell everyone how Davey had lied about them running away together. Then, instead of a hero, he would be a baddie, who’d hit his own brother and left him behind.

Davey wanted his brother back – of course he did.

But only if he shushed, not shouted.

Through the bright-blue gap in the roof, Jonas could see a buzzard circling over the moor. Now and then it cried out – a strangely puny sound for such a big bird. He waved away a fly. They were always there, because of the meat. This one landed on his face again, and Jonas left it; took the decision that unless it was on his mouth, he no longer had the energy.

The children came back from the meadow with hands full of grass and dandelions, and Jonas’s stomach squealed in pathetic anticipation. This time, Steven had picked some too, and when Jonas thanked him, he said: ‘’s OK,’ and went immediately to his post at the back of his kennel, eye pressed to the chink in the wall. He had barely spoken since he’d broken down – not even to Jess.

Charlie touched Jonas’s arm. ‘Hello, Jonas. How do you do?’

‘How do you do, Charlie?’

‘Do you have some peanut butter?’

Jonas’s stomach wrenched at the mere words. ‘Sorry, Charlie.’

The boy screwed up his face. ‘I’m hungry,’ he said forlornly.

‘Why don’t you eat your meat?’ asked Jonas, pointing at the bones behind Charlie.

‘Why don’t you eat yours?’

‘I don’t eat meat,’ Jonas told him patiently for the fiftieth time.

‘I don’t eat meat too,’ said the boy. He kicked out at one of the bones, yelping at the pain in his toes. The bone drubbed across the floor and rattled the bottom of the gate.

Charlie sat down on the edge of his bed and sniffled. ‘Hurt my toe,’ he said in a tiny voice.

Steven turned away from the wall and nodded at Charlie. ‘I think he’s scared of eating it,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘ ’Cos of the meat. You know?’

‘No.’

Steven sighed. ‘When the helicopter came over. He put us in the meat. Hanging up in the little room. You know?’

Jonas looked so confused that Steven asked, ‘Where were you, then?’

Jonas frowned. Where was he?

The helicopter, the cold splash, the banging on his legs, the sharp pricks on his chest and Lucy floating above him…

‘He held me underwater.’

Steven blinked. ‘Why?’

Jonas shrugged. He had no idea.

But now that he’d remembered the shock of the water, Jonas also remembered other things. Not all of it, just bits. Being so small, his head swimming with that smell, his arm hurting from the huntsman’s grip, concrete grazing his knees. He remembered the sudden bitter darkness, the loop of chain pulling him upwards, and the heavy things touching his face… heavy, cold things…

It was obvious.

‘Cold!’ he said. ‘The flesh room is cold and so is the water.’

Steven still looked blank.

‘Thermal-imaging cameras. On the chopper.’

Steven’s mouth opened in understanding. They’d all seen thermal imaging on Police Camera Action! Bright white shapes with arms and legs, trying to hide in bushes or run across fields away from the scene of the crime, their own body heat a beacon to the hunters overhead.

Jonas saw it clearly now. When the helicopter or the searchers had come, the children were drugged and gagged and forced into the icy flesh room and stuffed inside dead cows and horses until the coast was clear. The idea made his stomach recoil. No wonder poor Charlie had freaked out when he’d heard the sound of the blades.

How many times had they suffered so? He thought of the long-ago day of the search, the dry grass whispering against his legs, the smell of heather and sunblock and the helicopter droning overhead, coming and going. Bob Coffin had searched with the rest of them. That meant Pete and Jess had been inside the cold, cloying carcasses all day long, as rescue passed by so close – with the police helicopter triggering a fresh ordeal every time it launched.

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.

50

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.

‘Charlie needs to be at home with his dad.’

The broom swung through a short arc and smashed into Jonas’s face. It knocked him sideways so fast that his head bounced off the fence with a rattle. Bob Coffin loomed over him.

‘He don’t love him!’ he spat. Then he clanged out of the run and stormed up the walkway.

Jonas sat up and touched his jaw cautiously. The side of his face was numb and blood dripped slowly over his lower lip.

Charlie looked scared, so Jonas said, ‘Don’t worry, Charlie,’ and held his hand again.

The other children had been stunned into silence by the outburst.

All except Steven.

He rattled the fence, his eyes wide with excitement.

‘He heard you!’ he hissed at Jonas. ‘He heard you!’

51

DAVEY STOPPED HANGING out with Shane and now spent most of his days holding his PS2 console loosely in his hand, while pimps crashed their cars pointlessly into whores without any help from him. Uncle Jude tried to get him to help in the garden but he was already exhausted. He slept a lot, although not at night when he was supposed to; then he lay and stared into the darkness and thought of the way his mother would look at him when Steven came home. When she knew what a coward he was. What a liar.

Em called him downstairs for tea. She only came after school now and always cooked for them. It was spaghetti hoops on toast, his favourite, but his mum and his nan didn’t eat it, and that made everything taste crap.

‘I don’t like this,’ he told Em.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I thought you did.’

He dropped his fork with a clatter. ‘Why do you keep coming here?’

Everyone looked at Davey.

‘Well, why does she?’ he demanded. ‘Is she going to keep coming for ever?’

There was a short silence before Nan covered Em’s hand with hers. ‘She’s here because she loves Steven. Like we all do.’

‘I don’t!’ said Davey.

‘Of course you do,’ said Lettie. ‘Don’t be silly.’

Davey stood up sharply, with a loud scrape of his chair. ‘I don’t! I hate him! I hope he never comes home!’

Em bit her lip and Nan looked down at her toast.

Davey waited for his mother to get up and slap him hard. He didn’t care. Let her! She’d slap him and he’d cry and then she’d feel bad instead of him.

Instead Lettie reached for his hand. He tried to pull it away from her but she held on to it.

‘Leave me!’

She didn’t. She tugged him gently towards her. With every grudging step he felt his shell of brittle anger crack and flake.

‘Leave me!’

Lettie didn’t again. Instead she turned him and eased him on to her lap, and started to rub his back in warm circles, as if he were a small child.

‘Just leave me alone!’ he shouted.

Then he put his face in her neck so no one could see him cry.

After tea, Lettie took Davey to the Red Lion to see DI Reynolds.

‘I lied,’ Davey muttered, examining his own trainers as if he’d never seen them before.

‘I know,’ said DI Reynolds.

Davey was confused. DI Reynolds didn’t seem angry – or even surprised. In fact, he then answered the question Davey hadn’t asked. ‘We do come across our fair share of liars, you know.’

‘He’s not a liar,’ said Lettie firmly. ‘He just lied about this because he felt so bad about leaving Steven.’

‘Of course,’ said DI Reynolds.

Davey bit his lip and – to his amazement – DI Reynolds winked at him. Or maybe he just twitched. Davey looked away, uncertain of how he should respond and hoping his mother hadn’t seen it.

They sat down in the lounge bar where children were allowed, and Detective Sergeant Rice agreed with DI Reynolds that she didn’t mind buying Davey a Coke and his mother a white wine. Davey guessed she was DI Reynolds’s secretary.

DI Reynolds got out the same notebook he’d used before and they went through everything again. This time Davey did his best, however annoying it was, and told him even those details he wasn’t sure were real – those dreamlike snatches that had seemed too small and uncertain to bother with. A paper sack with a torn picture of a dog’s back legs and tail on it; black boots; zig-zag tyres. DI Reynolds made careful notes of everything and asked him all the same questions over and over again and even made his little train noise, and suddenly – out of nowhere – Davey remembered that the car was navy blue!

DI Reynolds wrote it down and Davey grinned in delight.

‘And he wore gloves!’ he shocked himself by saying.

‘What kind of gloves?’

‘Green woolly ones. That’s what smelled like medicine.’

DI Reynolds hissed something that sounded like ‘Shit’ to Davey. He got up abruptly and walked to the fireplace and back, and then walked there again and stared up at the shiny dead eyes of the big stuffed stag. DS Rice watched him eagerly and when he turned round they exchanged meaningful nods.

‘Does that help?’ said Davey.

‘Tons,’ said DS Rice.

Lettie gently twisted the little hairs at the back of Davey’s neck, and he didn’t even mind that people were watching.

DI Reynolds came back and they went through things again, but Davey had nothing more to offer. Even so, when the officer finally snapped a strip of black elastic around his notebook, it was with a satisfied air.

‘Well done, Davey,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

Davey was sorry it was over. He was high on the joy of true things.

DI Reynolds shook his hand and then his mother’s. ‘Don’t you blame yourself about what happened with Steven either,’ he told Davey. ‘You were drugged. Not your fault.’

Davey nodded wholeheartedly, and thought DI Reynolds was a lot less disappointing this time round.

‘Mum?’ said Davey cautiously as they walked home. ‘Sometimes I have lied about other stuff.’

‘I know,’ said Lettie.

52

EVEN A DOG learns how to get what it wants – a bone, a pat on the head, a place by the fire – by watching and learning and licking the hand that feeds it.

Steven had said nothing, but Jonas could tell by his restless pacing that the boy was excited and filled with new hope that the huntsman might be starting to crack. His mood was infectious, and the younger children played games and giggled, while Jess sang fragments of pop songs.

And the next day – when his jaw had almost stopped hurting – Jonas screwed up his courage and simply went on talking to the huntsman as if he’d never been interrupted.

‘You’re wrong about the children. People do love them.’

Coffin gave no indication of having heard him. His face was stretched and blank. He skirted Jonas like a dangerous whirlpool, spraying the cement with the brick-coloured hose.

‘They weren’t abandoned. Not like the dogs.’

He didn’t expect a response, but he got one, gruff and muffled.

‘Dogs die in hot cars. Seen it with my own eyes.’

Jonas flicked a look at Steven, who nodded encouragingly.

‘You only wanted to protect them. I understand that.’

Coffin dropped the hose into the water bucket, then picked up the broom. Jonas flinched, but Coffin just swept around him and said nothing more.

Jonas had to keep him engaged. If it was only dogs the huntsman would talk about, he’d start there. With a vague motion of his arm, he asked, ‘What happened to all the hounds?’

There was a long pause, then: ‘Had to go.’

‘Go where?’

The huntsman stopped sweeping and picked at the wooden handle of the broom. Jonas looked at Steven, who gave a little shrug.

Coffin bent to his task again, but now his strokes were short and jerky.

‘The Midmoor took a few. The others I had to get rid.’

Jonas said nothing, but pictures raced through his head like a flicker book. He had hunted as a boy, and he knew how hounds were ‘got rid’. He thought of the sixty or so animals that had made up the Blacklands pack. All his life he’d seen them milling about outside pubs, moving as one through the village by night and loping muddily across the moor. A joyous jigsaw of pied coats, silken ears and lolling tongues – vital and vibrant and singing for fun. The thought of spending years whelping them, raising them, training them – and then shooting them all in the head made him feel ill.

The strokes of the broom got louder and the huntsman spoke without any further prompting. ‘Had to be done, Mr Took said.’

He angrily thrust the broom at the wet cement, his voice rising rapidly. ‘Well, I say bollocks to him. Bollocks to him and them fox-loving incomers driving down from London for the weekend and tell us how to live our lives! Take our lives away from us! After a hundred years! Take everything away and then tell me I don’t fucking love them!’

He hurled the broom across the run. It bounced off the fence next to Jonas’s head and Charlie started to wail. The children watched the huntsman, their eyes wide with the fear of uncertainty.

Coffin’s open mouth stretched the stocking mask into a darker shadow that fluttered with vehemence.

‘Now I’ve took everything away from them,’ he said, low and vicious. ‘See how they like it.’ Then he slowly retrieved the broom and carried on sweeping as if nothing had happened.

Jonas felt everything falling into place in his head like a little Chinese puzzle box. He watched Coffin with unseeing eyes, and thought of the emptiness Lucy had left in Rose Cottage – that deep, sucking silence that tugged at his soul and lured him to follow as surely as a siren’s lament from a jagged rock. If he could have filled that void, he would have. If he had been able to forget for one single second the sheer absence signalled by the quiet clock, the folded rug and the empty vase, he would have done anything – anything – to make that happen.

Revenge may have sparked Coffin’s madness, but at some point, Jonas guessed, he had started to steal children simply to fill the runs left echoing bare by the loss of his hounds. What he had done was unpardonable, reprehensible and utterly insane – and Jonas understood it completely.

‘You did the right thing,’ he said quietly.

‘What the hell!’ said Steven.

Jonas didn’t even glance at him. He looked only at the huntsman, who had cocked his unformed face towards him in rare attention.

‘I know what you’re trying to do here, Bob. I can understand it now. I can see how much you love them, and how much you want to take care of them.’

‘Yes,’ said the huntsman.

‘You just want them to be safe.’

‘That’s right,’ said the huntsman.

‘And we’re very grateful,’ said Jonas gently.

The huntsman nodded. ‘Good.’

‘You’re nuts!’ shouted Steven. ‘Both of you!’

Jonas looked calmly at Steven and the boy closed his mouth.

Jonas felt confidence coursing through him. Starving, half naked and chained at the feet of a maniac, he felt suddenly buoyant and completely sure of himself. Coffin’s face was turned towards him. It was blank and stretched, but Jonas knew he had the man’s attention.

‘But Charlie doesn’t understand it,’ he said carefully. ‘He’s not clever like you. Look at him, Bob.’

To his surprise, Bob Coffin did look through the fence. Charlie sniffed miserably and said, ‘My tooth is sore.’

Everything was suddenly very quiet, as if the sky itself was holding its breath while the huntsman stood there, motionless in the sun, the broom held loosely in his hand.

Loose and close to Jonas.

Loose enough and close enough for him to grab? Coffin never got this close to him. The man was always wary around him, even though he was the one who was chained to a fence. Jonas shifted position slowly and slightly, testing his wasting muscles, wondering how fast he could still move.

He licked his dry lips and went on, ‘Look how sad he is. What’s the point of keeping him here when it’s not making him happy?’

Coffin raised his arm and Jonas’s whole body seized in readiness. But the man only touched the bottom of his stocking mask, as if he might lift it.

Jonas watched Coffin walk a tightrope strung between compassion and craziness. The wind thrummed the high wire, and the huntsman wobbled – and Jonas swayed a little closer to the broom. From the corner of his eye he could see Steven gripping the fence, tense with anticipation. Jonas’s hand twitched—

Coffin grunted. He dropped his hand from the stocking mask. He picked the hose out of the overflowing bucket, walked out, and locked the kennel gate behind him.

‘Shit,’ said Steven.

Jonas slumped back against the fence, sick with disappointment. He’d hesitated. On the off-chance that Coffin would be rational, he’d put all his eggs in one basket case.

Lucy, I blew it.

He covered his face with his hands and his body let go of the tension in a long, shuddering breath. He felt fingers in his hair, smoothing him like a loved pet.

‘One man went to mow,’ sang Charlie cautiously. ‘Went to mow a medal. One man and his dog…’ He waited for one of the others to supply the part that Teddy had sometimes sung. Jess or Steven often did. But today there was only a yawning hole in the air.

And then Jonas felt his heart jolt as if he’d touched a live wire.

One man and his dog…

Bob Coffin had got rid of the hounds. That meant he had shot them.

And that meant he had a gun.

53

REYNOLDS HELD A press conference in the Red Lion’s skittle alley, and released the information about the green woollen gloves. It wasn’t huge, but any breakthrough was enough to keep the story in the news, and Davey swelled with pride as he heard DI Reynolds say that this latest information had come from him.

‘Davey’s memory of events is becoming clearer all the time,’ he added, ‘and he’s making a tremendous effort to help his brother in whatever way he can.’

Lettie stroked his back and Nan said, ‘Well done, Davey,’ and Davey went to bed so excited about the green-woollen-glove breakthrough that he could hardly sleep. He was sure that by that night the police would have received a tip-off. Steven could be home by tomorrow!

But by the next evening Davey had learned another valuable lesson – that sometimes truth has to be its own reward.

I love them.

Funny how it’s the big un what understands that. Appreciates what I done. I always thought he was a bit mazed, but turns out he’s the one with the brains, after all!

Anyway, it’s good to know that someone’s on my side. Made me happy when he said that.

But that poor little Charlie. Can’t be having ’em sickly and shitting that way. That’s not right. Them’s my responsibility and I got to take better care of ’em. Else I’m as bad as them what left ’em alone.

Old Murton always told me, if you can’t feed it, don’t keep it. And he were right about most things.

So if I want to keep ’em, I got to try harder to feed ’em.

54

THE HUNTSMAN WAS late.

There was no bang as he left the cottage in the morning, no squealing rumble as the big shed door was pushed aside on its metal runner, no soft explosion in the incinerator, no sssssshh of the knife that would separate bone from cartilage from tendon for them to eat.

Within minutes of his being overdue, the children grew restless, and before the hour was up they were nervous and fractious.

‘Where is he?’ Jess Took kept saying. ‘He’s never late.’

But he was.

Jonas and Steven exchanged worried looks.

Charlie sang ‘Ten Green Bottles’ quietly, while Pete clung to the chain link at the front of his kennel, craning to see up the walkway and occasionally murmuring, ‘I thought that was him’ under his breath.

‘He’s never late,’ Jess said again, as if words alone would make it true.

Steven turned his back to her and spoke softly to Jonas. ‘How long should we wait?’

Jonas frowned. ‘Before what?’

Steven opened his mouth, then closed it again. Before what indeed? Before escaping? Before calling for help? If those things had been realistic options then they would have worked already.

‘Maybe we should save our water a bit,’ said Jonas.

Steven nodded and passed the message down the line. Then he did something he hadn’t done for weeks – he started to test the boundaries of his prison, kicking at the wall, pushing a stalk of grass into the padlock, tugging at the ends of the wire fence as if he might unravel the chain link like an old jumper.

The .22 pistol was a waste of time.

What worked well when pressed between the eyes was completely useless when trying to hit a galloping pony at fifty paces. Bob Coffin thought he’d winged a couple but not even badly enough to be able to hunt them down and kill them. The deer didn’t even let him get within firing distance.

Bob Coffin threw the pistol on to the passenger seat of his old diesel and slammed the door hard.

Time was there was a never-ending parade of old, broken-down livestock coming into the yard, and the Park Rangers would let him know when a pony or deer was dead on the moor. Then the flesh room was always packed with fresh meat.

Not now the hounds were gone.

He’d stolen the last cow. Just walked into Jack Biggins’s field by night and taken the first one he’d come to. It was so easy it didn’t even feel like theft.

But when he’d tried it again over at Deepwater, the herd had gone off like a bovine car alarm – mooing and lowing and milling about him until he’d feared they would knock him down and trample him. But he’d needed the meat, and clung on to the cow until a skin-and-bone collie with one white eye had scattered the beasts and then bitten his ankle as he scrambled back over the five-bar gate.

He had a sheep, but it would last no time.

After that, he didn’t know what he would do.

Jonas saw Steven wince as a sharp point of wire pricked his finger. The boy didn’t give up, though – he shook his hand, then bent to his task again, even though it was hopeless.

Jonas thought of the grim truth – that Bob Coffin was their captor and tormentor, but he was also their lifeline. If he fell down and broke his leg, they were all dead; if he had a car accident and was taken to hospital, they were all dead; if he simply lost interest or got scared, or took a long weekend by the seaside, they were all dead.

Now the huntsman was somewhere else and they were here.

Helpless as infants.

As he watched Steven, Jonas cursed himself. A strip of leather and a small padlock, and he’d simply resigned himself to his fate, along with the children he was sworn to protect. He should have remembered the gun and realized the danger they were in. He should have been planning an escape for weeks, not waited until there was a crisis like this one. He’d been afraid, and frozen by that fear, and it had stopped him thinking.

He’d better start again right now.

Jonas ran his fingers along the chain that tethered him to the fence. He examined every link minutely, tried their strength with his hands and his teeth. He picked a link in the middle of the tether, and scraped it repeatedly across the cement, making a graze in the grey of the floor, and a shiny new corner on the metal.

That might work. Although an escape plan that relied on the erosion of metal was an escape plan that should have been formulated long before they were each left with half a bucket of water and no food.

The link became shiny but it didn’t get thin. It seemed hopeless, but Jonas beat down the feeling that he was wasting his time. Right now this was the most important thing in the world. The only thing left within his control.

The thought made him strangely optimistic, and he went at the task with new vigour.

Steven said ‘Shitshitshit’ and flapped his hand again.

‘You OK?’ said Jonas.

‘Cut it,’ said Steven, holding it up to the fence for Jonas to see.

Jonas reached out and wiped away the blood with his own thumb. Immediately it squeezed out again in a pretty red sphere.

‘It’s just a flesh wound,’ said Jonas with a smile.

‘Yeah,’ said Steven. He smiled back, but it didn’t last long. ‘Jonas?’ he said tentatively, ‘do you think he’s going to come back for us?’

‘Of course,’ said Jonas. ‘He loves us, doesn’t he?’

The sun was high in the sky before Pete said, ‘I hear him!’ and he was right.

Bob Coffin came down the walkway without meat, but with purpose, carrying a coil of thin cord. He wore his mask but no gloves. He strode past them all and unlocked Charlie’s kennel, then shook an end out of the coil like a cowboy about to rope a calf. Charlie stood up and moved away, like that same calf.

Jonas knelt against the fence. ‘What are you doing?’

Coffin ignored him and lunged at Charlie, who dodged him, then burst into tears.

Bob Coffin tried again, arms outstretched, and Charlie cowered, then darted away, bawling his lungs out.

‘Hold still, bay!’

Charlie rattled the gate in blind panic and twisted out of Bob Coffin’s grip once more. ‘No meat! No meat!’

‘Stay! Or I’ll get the gloves.’

Charlie ran to Jonas at the fence, clutching at the wire. ‘I don’t want to go!’ he cried. ‘Jonas!’

The terrified boy fell to his knees as Bob Coffin tried to drag him away.

‘Leave him alone! What are you doing?’

Charlie tried to feed his hand through the fence, but Bob Coffin yanked it backwards. ‘Trying to let the little bugger go!’ he grunted.

Jonas took a second to realize what he’d said. He looked at the man’s face, distorted despite the smoothing stocking.

He couldn’t see his eyes, but it felt like the truth.

I promise.

Jonas couldn’t afford to disbelieve him.

‘Charlie! Charlie, calm down!’

Charlie cried and struggled and clung to the wire while Coffin hauled on his arms.

‘Let him go,’ Jonas told the huntsman sharply. ‘Let him go so I can talk to him.’

Coffin did. He stepped back from Charlie, leaving the boy gripping the fence, facing Jonas with his arms spread in an incomplete hug.

Jonas had to work fast. He touched Charlie’s fingers with his. ‘Charlie, listen to me. Listen to me. You’re going home.’

Charlie’s brimming eyes met his. ‘Home?’

Jonas nodded vehemently. ‘Yes, home. Today. Right now. You’re going to go home and see your dad.’

Charlie nodded, bottom lip still wobbling.

‘But you have to go with him, Charlie. Go with him and be a good boy.’

‘Don’t make a fuss,’ said Charlie.

‘That’s right. Be a good boy and don’t make a fuss.’

Charlie looked warily over his shoulder at the huntsman.

Jonas tugged his fingers to bring his attention back to him. ‘You’ll be fine, Charlie. He’s not going to hurt you. I promise.’

Charlie nodded but still looked doubtful. Coffin moved towards them, hand out. Charlie leaned away.

‘I promise, Charlie.’

Charlie knelt still, hitching with sobs, as Coffin pushed the end of the cord through the metal loop on his collar.

‘Good bay,’ said Coffin soothingly.

‘Where are you going to take him?’ Jonas asked.

‘Back,’ said Coffin.

‘To his house?’

‘I’ll leave him where he’ll be found.’

Jonas felt uneasy. ‘Somewhere safe, right?’

Coffin’s voice rose. ‘He’ll be found.’

‘Somewhere close to—’

‘I’m taking him back!’ Coffin spat angrily.

Jonas bit his lip. He had to shut up. If he didn’t, the huntsman might change his crazy mind.

Coffin helped Charlie to his feet.

Jonas rose with him, and his heart rose too. Charlie was going home. He was going to save the boy, after all. Then he was seized with sudden panic.

What about the others?

He’d told Coffin the truth – Charlie probably didn’t know where he was and so was unlikely to be able to lead the police back to the kennels. He did not have the capacity to relay any whispered instructions. Too late, Jonas realized that Charlie was the last captive he should have been working to free. Steven or Jess would have had the police up here within the hour; even little Maisie could have given them enough information to bring this nightmare to a swift close.

He was saving the boy – and leaving the other children to their fates. In a second Charlie would be gone – along with any faint chance of help. He had to send a message with him somehow. A clue. Where they were, or at least that they were still alive.

As Coffin turned to lead Charlie from the run, Jonas pushed his hand through the wire. His hand was big and the diamond pattern was small. He grimaced and twisted and shoved brutally, and watched the skin curl off in a bloody strip between his thumb and his wrist.

He cupped Charlie’s neck and held him there a moment longer at the end of his rope leash.

‘Bye, Charlie.’

‘Bye, Jonas,’ said Charlie. ‘Dog! Spot!’

Jonas pressed his thumb firmly on to the brass nameplate on the boy’s collar. It was all he could think of.

Charlie was led from the yard to a chorus of tearful farewells.

Jonas watched him waving until he disappeared, then gouged another strip of flesh out of his hand as he pulled it back through the wire.

‘Brilliant!’ said Steven. ‘That was fucking brilliant!’

55

AFTER THE DEEPWATER show, Grant Farmer – who actually was a farmer – let the grass in the field grow for haylage.

The summer was hot and dry and by the end of July the field was packed with long well-mixed grass. Farmer usually took it off in the middle of August, but it was starting to look a little brittle and his wife, Jackie, who often knew best, suggested they cut it early and try to get another crop from the field before the weather turned. Jackie had to convince her husband. He didn’t like change or the unexpected, and he was still unsettled by the incident a week ago when someone had tried to steal one of the cows. Number 23 had come in at milking with a dirty rope halter on her head. Jack Biggins at Uphill Farm had lost one a few weeks before. Just disappeared. Grant didn’t like it.

His wife didn’t like it either, but two crops of good haylage from a twelve-acre field would keep their small herd of Friesians in feed all winter, maybe with extra to sell.

Money never comes amiss to a farmer. Or a Farmer.

So on 23 July, Grant unhitched the muck-spreader, hitched the rotary mower to his tractor instead and drove the eight-hundred yards up the road to the show field, leaving a broad swathe of mud and dung along the entire length, to test the mettle of unwary motorcyclists.

He turned left inside the gate that Jonas Holly had once banged shut so hard, and lowered the blades. Like many farmers, he liked to cut his hay in concentric squares, rather than in stripes. It was how his father had always done it. So he rolled a cigarette, then trundled along the edge of the field in his old John Deere, high above the broad hedges and far away from responsibilities.

He turned right in the first corner. Three-quarters of the way along this side, the field sloped away to the corner where the stile and the oak tree were. This slope stopped the field being great. One corner dropping away like that was never good. The ground there got boggy in winter, and care had to be taken that the farmhand – a twenty-year-old fool named Stuart Clegg – did not roll the tractor down the camber and kill himself, leading to increased paperwork.

At least the slope hid the stile. And Grant Farmer always let the nettles grow around it to further discourage ramblers. He’d never actually seen a rambler in this particular field, but he always came over the brow of the hill half expecting there’d be a gaggle of them there, tramping across his livelihood.

He set his face to ‘hostile’ and the tractor nosed downwards.

There was someone under the oak tree. As he came over the brow, he caught a glimpse of summer clothing, which disappeared below the level of the grass as the tractor descended.

Picnickers. Even worse than ramblers. Vandals and litterbugs.

Grant resisted the urge to steer straight over there and ruin the line of his mowing. He drove to where the nettles started and then turned sharp right towards the oak.

As he got closer he could see the clothes again. White shorts and a blue T-shirt. Just one person, in fact. And by the time he was twenty yards away, he could see it was a youngster with yellow-blond hair, lying on his side.

Grant stopped the big green tractor and walked the last several yards through the long grass to where the boy lay curled on a flattened patch of hay, with his thumb in his mouth.

He was quite, quite dead.

Grant Farmer was used to death. Death was sad but that was just life.

This was different, though – and even he had to sit down for a moment and stare at the boy, who was tethered to the oak tree by a slim rope attached to a collar around his neck. Like a dog.

Grant pulled out his phone and dialled 999. There was no signal, so he put the phone away again. He’d have to drive back up the hill to find a signal. He walked to the tractor and climbed in. From here the body was at a slightly different angle. He started the engine, but let it idle.

He’d call the police. The police would come. Lots of police would come. Grant Farmer could see them now, driving across his hay in their four-by-fours, putting tape across the gate, and maybe a man there to bar access – maybe even to him. A long slow line of officers searching for clues, flattening the grass underfoot as they moved across the field like a human mangle. Grant was not the most imaginative man alive, but even he could see all this so clearly in his mind that it looked like a series of photographs in a book about crime.

He could certainly imagine what it would cost to feed his forty-two Friesians all winter.

Grant Farmer rolled another cigarette, then looked at his watch.

The boy wasn’t getting any deader.

It took him two hours to finish cutting the hay, and then he called the police.

Charlie liked things just the way they were. So when the bone man had told him to wait under the tree, that’s what he had done. He hadn’t even tried to undo the knots that kept him there. It was just like waiting in the minibus. Jonas had promised him he’d be OK and told him to do what the man said. So he’d sat down, waved goodbye, and waited for his daddy to come and take him home.

He’d sung his songs to keep himself amused.

One man went to MOW

Went to mow a MEDAL.

He’d shouted ‘Hello!’ and ‘Daddy!’ a few times, but the little slope kept the sound close at hand.

He’d eaten grass when he’d got hungry. The heavy dew ensured he’d had water. But it also ensured he’d got wet and cold.

On the third night Charlie Peach had died of exposure.

He’d never made a fuss.

Elizabeth Rice didn’t know all this as she stared down at Charlie’s body.

She would know it later, once the pathologist had examined the knots and fingernails; once he’d opened Charlie’s taut little stomach and found old meat and new grass inside it. Later she’d also know that Charlie hadn’t been sexually abused, and that would be a small comfort.

All she knew right now, though, was that her throat ached from trying not to cry, here in the open, with Reynolds beside her and the forensic and medical teams unloading their vans and trucks and ambulances behind them.

It was the thumb in the mouth that had undone her – that little-boy gesture that betrayed the teenager for what he really was, and what he always would have been, if he weren’t lying dead at her feet.

‘We’ll have to inform Mr Peach,’ said Reynolds tentatively. ‘Would you mind, Elizabeth?’

‘Yes, I fucking would,’ said Rice, and burst into loud sobs. She knelt down next to Charlie. There was a fly at the corner of his mouth and she flapped it away. It came straight back and danced on his lip.

‘Don’t touch him,’ said Reynolds, but she put a hand on Charlie’s head anyway, and stroked his fine yellow hair the way a mother would.

If she found the man who’d done this, she’d kill him the way a mother would too.

The doctor came over in white paper overalls. He set his bag down at Charlie’s feet and cleared his throat.

Reynolds was at her back. Rice thought that if he tried to drag her away from Charlie she’d have to gouge his eyes out, and then her career would be over. Instead, he touched her shoulder and said gently, ‘Come on, Elizabeth. We should leave him to the doctor now.’

The doctor who was going to saw the top of Charlie’s soft blond head off. For a nanosecond Elizabeth Rice wanted to kill him too. Then all the anger left her and she felt limp without it to hold her up.

It was over. They were too late. For Charlie Peach the Pied Piper case had ended badly.

Rice nodded and wiped her eyes and thanked God for waterproof mascara. Reynolds helped her to her feet with a hand on her elbow.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said.

56

REYNOLDS KNOCKED AND then waited on the pavement outside David Peach’s front door.

A dozen times in his head he’d run through a rota of other officers he could have sent, but had finally accepted that this was something he had to do himself. He’d done it a couple of times as a rookie and been appalled that he’d been allowed to inflict himself on the bereaved. But children were different. Reynolds recognized that, even though he’d never had one. Anyone who had lost a child deserved the most senior officer available to break the news, and that buck stopped with him. All the bucks seemed to stop with him now. It didn’t make him feel any better. He kept clearing his throat, and was suddenly very aware of every single finger and what each was doing. He stilled them all by clasping his hands together like Prince Charles, and felt even more nervous.

How to say it? How to start? There was a right way and a wrong way – he remembered that much. Reynolds ran through it over and over in his head, like an Oscar speech.

Hello, Mr Peach. Can I come in? Get him away from the prying eyes of the neighbours and lingering press.

Can we sit down? Get him off his feet in case he faints and hits his head on the coffee table.

I’m here with bad news, I’m afraid. Too fast. But anything less fast only seemed like toying with the man when he needed to get to the point.

Charlie’s dead. That was the point. There was no sugar-coating it. DCI Marvel would have just said it and moved on. But DCI Marvel was no role model.

Reynolds looked up at the wall of the house, which was painted pale blue like the sky beyond it. In the top window was a piece of paper taped to the glass. It was covered with stickers and glitter and the carefully coloured-in words CHARLIE LIVES HERE.

Tears sprang unexpectedly to his eyes. Shit, shit, shit. He wiped them away roughly but more leaked out. He thought of Charlie in the hay with his thumb in his mouth, of Elizabeth Rice stroking his hair as though he were sleeping, and he couldn’t believe he’d asked her not to do that – or to do this.

Shameful.

He hoped David Peach wasn’t home. Please God, don’t let him be home.

Reynolds didn’t believe in God and apparently God didn’t believe in him either, because almost immediately he heard the sound of someone coming down the stairs, and then David Peach opened the door, took one look at his face, and said, ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

Bob Coffin opened the gate to Jonas’s run with hands that shook with fury.

He wasn’t wearing his mask. It was that that made Jonas’s stomach clench with fear. The man was so angry he’d forgotten it.

Instead he had a white hunting whip.

Jonas didn’t know what was happening, or why, but he scrambled to his feet. He was still tethered, but the animal in him wanted to be as upright as possible in the face of attack, and as Coffin came at him, he stuck out his hands in self-defence.

It made no difference. This was full-force, no-holds-barred fury, fuelled by madness. The blows landed everywhere – his hands, his head, his face, his back and ribs. Sometimes with the heavy stock of the whip, sometimes the stinging hide lash, sometimes with the huntsman’s boots. The noise was overwhelming – the sound of the assault on his flesh, the rattle of the fence, grunts of pain and of effort, and the shouting and crying of the children.

Bob Coffin hit Jonas so hard and for so long that Jonas knew the man was going to kill him.

Why?

He didn’t know if he had asked, or how, but the huntsman told him anyway – in short exhalations as his arm rose and fell.

‘He’s dead. He died. You said to let him go and now he’s DEAD!’

The words went through Jonas’s numbed mind like a railway spike.

Charlie was dead?

The huntsman kicked him in the stomach and he curled around the pain.

Charlie was dead? That couldn’t be possible.

Fingers in his hair. Not Charlie’s careful hands, but a gnarled fist, dragging him off the cement and to his knees. Something hard and cold dug so brutally into his temple that it pushed his head round to look at Steven. The boy was screaming and beating the fence, like a crazed zoo-ape. Jonas couldn’t make out the words, just the shape of his mouth and the fear in his eyes. He couldn’t hear anything. Couldn’t feel anything. He watched Steven shouting and thought about Lucy in the water.

I promise.

Something hit the back of his head and the cement rushed towards him.

Bob Coffin’s boots passed by his face; the whip was picked off the floor. Jonas’s breath whined loudly in his head. His eyes followed the boots as they left the kennel. It was only when the huntsman locked the gate behind him that Jonas saw the small black gun in his hand.

Steven was talking at Jonas and looking urgent, but Jonas couldn’t hear him and didn’t care. He never knew what Steven had said to keep Bob Coffin from shooting him.

It wasn’t important.

Charlie was dead.

He rolled to his side and vomited.

Then he lay, heaving for breath, with his cheek in the thin, warm puddle while his stomach creaked, and mourned the loss.

57

KIDNAP HAD BECOME murder.

It was a turning point and, despite the tragedy of Charlie’s death, Reynolds couldn’t help being energized by it. Until now they’d all been expecting to find the bodies of children who had been killed within hours or days of their abductions. It was the way things usually went. But Charlie Peach had been kept alive for almost two months – and that meant the other children could have been kept alive too, and suddenly they might all be Superman, swooping to the rescue. It was the first break they’d had in the case since… well, it was the first break they’d had, and the mobile incident room literally rocked with activity.

The children had not vanished into the side of a mountain in the wake of a pennywhistle tune. Charlie been taken from that very field, and returned there. Reynolds dispatched officers immediately to check on the other kidnap sites. It was unbearably tantalizing to think that all of the children could be alive and well, and within a half-hour drive of the Red Lion car park where this very trailer was parked.

Reynolds had to fight the urge to get in the Peugeot and race about the moor with the windows down, shouting their names, they seemed so close.

At the same time, he knew the clock was ticking. No longer just a normal clock that marked time on the wall, this new clock was bound to a bundle of dynamite in Reynolds’s head, and ticked far more urgently. Kidnap had become murder – and that irreversibility increased the threat to the other captives a thousand-fold. Whether it had been cruel intention or bungled release, Charlie Peach had died – and that put all seven remaining captives in serious danger.

He didn’t need Kate Gulliver to tell him the truth of that.

Having killed one, the kidnapper could kill them all. He might do it in a panic to cover up his crimes or he might do it out of rage or horror at a plan gone wrong. Or he might do it because he’d meant to all along, and now that he’d summoned up the courage to take the first life, things would get easier.

Or maybe he was killing them in order, and Jess Took and Pete Knox were already out there somewhere, rotting at the end of a rope.

Reynolds felt his good energy turn on him like a sly wolf, making him suddenly panicky.

‘Time’s running out.’

Reynolds jumped, then turned to Elizabeth Rice. ‘What?’ he snapped.

‘Time’s running out,’ she said again.

He understood. The white plastic tape on the broken windows, the notes. The things they’d been holding back to trap a future suspect.

A suspect they didn’t have.

Reynolds sighed. He hated to undermine his own forensic foundations. But kidnap had become murder and it was time for that evidence to earn its keep. The notes would get them most publicity, he knew. But there was the danger that they’d also get them copycats. There were crazies out there who had the capacity to hurt or kill, but lacked originality. They might be only too eager to copy the Piper’s notes in an attempt to appear more prolific than they were – muddying already murky waters for the Exmoor team.

Plus, the notes reflected unfairly on the families of the missing children.

You don’t love them.

They passed judgement – even though that judgement was obviously made by someone with a screw loose, at the very least. Reynolds had no desire to expose the already suffering families to the torment of self-righteous blame from the same kind of idiots who wrote racist letters to the Sun, or launched hate-filled rants on MSN.

‘We need all the help we can get.’ Rice said it gently, as if she had read his mind.

She was right, of course.

Reynolds nodded. ‘OK. The notes and the tape.’

‘Shall I call the press?’

‘Would you mind?’ he said, as someone handed him a ringing phone.

It was Jos Reeves from the lab in Portishead.

Rice watched Reynolds’s face anxiously for clues. She saw the surprise in his eyes and itched to know what he knew. If he didn’t tell this time, she would ask.

After an eternity, Reynolds hung up. He sighed and ran his hand through his hair.

‘They found Jonas Holly’s thumbprint on Charlie’s collar.’

Rice’s heart leaped at the news. Jonas was alive!

‘In blood,’ Reynolds continued.

She caught her breath. Reynolds had more to say – and his sombre face told her she didn’t want to hear it.

‘The blood is Steven Lamb’s.’

58

CHARLIE’S DEATH WAS a turning point for the children.

They all cried. They all held hands through the fences. Steven shouted ‘Fucking pig!’ at Bob Coffin as he walked away from Jonas’s cage with the gun, and Jess Took threw her bones back over the gate into the walkway as he passed. She missed him, but made her point.

The beating left Jonas curled on the cement, bloodied and weak. But more than that, Steven could see that he was mentally emptied out by the news.

‘It’s not your fault,’ he insisted.

‘I promised him he’d be OK,’ said Jonas with brutal honesty.

‘The guy’s a nut, Jonas. It’s his fault, not yours.’

‘I promised him he’d be OK.’

It was the only response Steven got from Jonas, whatever truths he told. And Steven understood his misery, because that was true too – he had promised Charlie, and if Charlie hadn’t believed him and given in and gone with Bob Coffin, he might still be alive now.

He’d still be here, though.

Steven wondered what he’d do if the huntsman offered him freedom now. Take it, even if it meant he might die somehow before he reached his family, or remain where he was, in the same blue underpants he’d worn for a month.

‘At least you gave him a chance,’ he said finally.

Jonas gave no indication of having heard. He lay on his side and continued to scrape the link on the cement.

To Steven it now looked more like madness than hope.

The press conference was going to be well attended. As before, it was being held in the skittle alley at the Red Lion – a cold, cavernous place with the acoustics of a canyon, which made the twenty or so journalists sound like a factory floor.

Reynolds and Rice stood just outside the door – still arguing.

She’d never argued with him before.

She’d disagreed, which was her right, of course. He liked to engender a spirit of debate in his team. As long as they understood that he was best equipped to make the final decisions.

But this was different. This had started almost immediately after the phone call from Jos Reeves, with Reynolds saying he would be appealing for Jonas Holly to get in touch so he could be eliminated from the investigation.

Before he’d got any further, Rice had gone off on one.

‘Why?’ she demanded, close to rudely.

‘We’d be remiss in our duty not to consider the implications of this new evidence.’

‘The print is evidence that Jonas was with Charlie and Steven – not evidence that he took them.’

‘I know that.’

‘He might be trying to send us a message.’

‘A message in Steven’s blood?’ said Reynolds. ‘Look, I’m not suggesting we release the thumbprint right now – we don’t know enough about it, and it’s too emotive. I’m not even telling Steven’s family at this point.’

Rice nodded her grudging agreement.

Reynolds went on, ‘Saying that we want to speak to Jonas is not saying that we think he did it, but—’

‘That’s exactly what it’s saying.’

‘I beg to differ. What it will do is open the door for anyone who has… information about him which they might hitherto have felt unable to share, to come forward.’

Rice snorted. ‘You need a suspect and he’s the closest thing you’ve got. It’s a witch hunt.’

Bob Stripe from Points West came out of the Gents’ toilets. ‘Not interrupting, I hope?’ he said, when it was quite clear to all present that he fervently hoped he was.

‘Not at all,’ said Reynolds as he squeezed between them.

Reynolds waited until he’d closed the skittle-alley door behind him. ‘Steven Lamb raised a question—’

‘Which was bollocks. Even Kate Gulliver said so.’

‘Kate Gulliver’s changed her mind.’

Rice’s jaw dropped. ‘Is she allowed to do that?’

Reynolds turned his face away from her for a moment. He looked through the little square window in the skittle-alley door at the noisy throng.

Rice could tell he was wondering whether or not to share.

To her surprise, he did.

‘I spoke to her earlier. She told me that she was frightened by Jonas Holly during their final session. So frightened that she feels it might have influenced her decision to clear him for duty.’

Rice was stunned. She couldn’t imagine the super-confident Kate Gulliver being frightened or admitting she might have made a mistake – especially to a by-the-book man like Reynolds.

‘Jesus! What did he do?’

‘Nothing. Or at least, nothing that sounds like anything. She said he brought up the abduction of Jess Took. Then he said that people hurt children.’

People hurt children. Jonas had said the same thing to Steven Lamb, Rice remembered.

Reynolds continued, ‘She said she felt an overwhelming sense of threat and danger from him.’

‘A sense?’ Rice struggled to stick to her guns. ‘Not much to base an accusation of kidnap and murder on, is it?’

‘She says it was just the way he said it.’

Rice felt the sands of reality shift under her feet. With sudden clarity she remembered Jonas saying he understood the Piper’s anger. What was it he’d said? That people left their children on display in their cars like old umbrellas. At the time it had sounded sane. Harmless.

Now she wasn’t so sure.

She bit her lip and turned her face to stare through the little window in the door. Framed like a Hogarth, Bob Stripe spooned one, two, three sugars into his teacup. Marcie Meyrick frowned up into the dark toe of her own empty shoe, while Mike Armstrong from the Bugle set up the skittles.

‘You don’t believe he killed his wife, do you?’ Rice said flatly.

‘I don’t know what to believe,’ said Reynolds, more cautiously than she’d ever heard him.

‘We were there…’

‘I know.’

She nodded. She was all out of fight.

‘I understand your concerns, Elizabeth. But we have to weigh the reputation of one man against the lives of six children.’

‘Five now,’ said Rice sombrely.

‘Exactly,’ said Reynolds.

After the press conference, Rice went back to Rose Cottage with a sense of foreboding.

Mrs Paddon let her in and then stood in the hallway. ‘What are you looking for?’ she said suspiciously.

‘I don’t know.’ Rice started in the kitchen, looking with different eyes this time.

‘You’re wasting your time.’

Rice ignored her.

The bottle of red wine that Jonas had opened for her was still on the counter; still half full. The bills were routine, the laundry still washed but un-ironed, the sink still empty. There was a glass of water on the table with faint dirty smears where the fingers would grip, and Rice remembered that Jonas had been gardening when he’d been interrupted by the children on their way to the woods.

She bent down and examined the glass. The smears were just that – no prints. She straightened up and started to look around her.

‘What are you looking for?’ said Mrs Paddon from the kitchen doorway.

‘Gloves,’ said Rice.

Mrs Paddon stared at her, unblinking.

‘Maybe woollen or gardening gloves?’ She made it a question but Mrs Paddon didn’t give her any help. Rice wished she’d go back to her own house.

She went out into the garden. It was easy to see where Jonas had been. The beds there were clear and turned over, only the flowers remaining in the newly turned soil. Rice didn’t know a lot about flowers – not even cut ones, which Eric had never bought her – but she enjoyed these blue delphiniums, the heady phlox and the great bushes of pink daisies.

No gloves.

There was a little wooden shed at the end of the garden. Inside was dark and stuffy and smelled of earth. The single window was festooned with cobwebs, heavy with dust. She reached to brush them aside, then saw a fat spider stretched out along the sill.

She would make do with the light that she had.

There were tools in the shed and a couple of mountain bikes with webs between the spokes. The single shelf that ran at head-height held countless cans and bottles and containers: slug pellets, weedkiller, rose food, fly spray. There was a plastic bin filled with birdseed. Rice dug into it, in case it concealed something incriminating, and kept her arm there for a bit, up to the elbow, because it felt so odd and interesting.

At the back of the shed was a stack of three cardboard boxes. The bottom one was collapsing due to being plundered for bedding by rats. The confetti-like results were spread all over the floor back here in the deep gloom. Rice had kept rats as a child, Roland and Ratty, and was not deterred.

The top box held paperwork: insurance for window repairs, old bank statements and endless warranties and manuals for fax machines, cameras, phones and electric sanders. The second box was filled with children’s drawings, exercise books and home-made cards inscribed in careful but haphazard hands.

Good lucky in yor new howse.

Goodbye Mrs Holly. Weel miss you!

Love from Tiff. Love frim Linling. Luv from Toby.

XXX

Rice thought about Charlie Peach lying in the hay meadow and, for the first time, she thought she understood the kind of person who loved children, and who could elicit such love in return.

The third box was much older. At some stage it had been damp, which meant that all the photos inside it had stuck together or been damaged beyond repair. Solid sandwiches of photos, crimped and curled and covered in mildew. The rats had destroyed what was left. Rice could only make out a few faded and stained faces. From the 1980s, judging by the shoulder pads and poodle perms. There was a couple standing in the garden she had just walked through, with a little boy on a toy tractor – all in sunshine made even brighter for fading. She guessed it must be Jonas and his parents. She squinted at them, just as they squinted back at her across the years – all equally unaware of what their futures would bring.

It was sad. To hold these people in her hands. Their hopes, their dreams, their happiness.

All gone.

She re-stacked the boxes and went back inside.

‘Did you find anything?’ said Mrs Paddon.

‘Yes,’ said Rice, just to fuck with her.

She went into the living room.

In dusty daylight, she stared at the photo of Lucy Holly – also squinting into the sun; also ignorant. Rice wondered whether she or Jonas had planted the flowers that were blooming in the garden now, with neither of them here to see.

The clock was stopped at 7.39 as before; the blue vase was still empty of flowers.

The letter knife was gone.

Rice frowned and looked around the room. She went back into the kitchen and searched under the mail and the clothes. The jagged edges of the few open envelopes told her they had not been opened with a letter knife.

‘What are you looking for?’ said Mrs Paddon again. Rice wondered if she was a bit touched in the head. She was old enough.

‘There was a letter knife on the mantelpiece.’

‘Oh. I don’t know about that.’

Neither did Rice. But the fact that it was gone suddenly seemed significant.

She remembered the cold feel of it in her hand while Jonas sat there, not drinking, just watching her; watching the knife. The brownish flecks that had come off it with a scrape of her nail.

The way old blood might.

Elizabeth Rice felt panic spurt into her chest. Had she held vital evidence in her hands? Had she missed something she should have spotted because she had been thinking of fucking Jonas Holly?

It had been right here.

She leaned in to get a close-up of the mantelpiece – certain that the flecks would still be here. Then she would know for sure.

There was nothing. She ran the pad of her forefinger slowly along the wooden mantel, then looked at it. Nothing. Here in the grey-tinged room, this shelf alone had been dusted.

A twinge of suspicion. It was the way he said it.

Rice went upstairs and made a methodical search, while Mrs Paddon watched silently from the door of each room.

The letter knife was nowhere to be found.

By six o’clock, the Pied Piper story was back at the top of every news bulletin. Every single news outlet rode roughshod over DI Reynolds’s careful words about being eliminated from the investigation, and was reporting that Police Constable Jonas Holly was the number-one suspect.

For the first time, Elizabeth Rice thought it might be true.

Em heard the news on the radio and burst into tears.

Mr Holly was the Piper.

The same Mr Holly Steven had been so wary of, and the same one she had insisted on taking with them to the woods. The same Mr Holly who had probably killed his wife and Charlie Peach – and who might be killing Steven right this very minute, while she stood here in the yard, hoof-pick in her hand, and with Skip nudging her pockets for the Polo mints he knew were always there.

59

TO HIS GREAT surprise, Teddy had missed Charlie. Specifically, he missed his singing. Bus rides now were dulled by silence. Or the silence was fractured by Dean Peaceman’s meaningless jabber about cowboys and custard and little plastic cups. Dean Peaceman drove Teddy crazy. Not only because he talked utter shit, but because every syllable of that utter shit was enunciated with complete perfection. Dean Peaceman – a fourteen-year-old who’d just moved to Simonsbath from Cheshire – had a head full of rubbish and the mouth to prove it, while Teddy had a head full of wonders and a tongue so cruelly disconnected from his brain that those wonders turned to baby talk as soon as he let them loose from his lips. As if he lived his life in a pram, not a wheelchair.

Teddy tried so hard. Not a day went by when he did not think a coherent, important thought and then imagine escorting that thought – perfectly formed – from his brain to his mouth. He imagined holding its hand as he led it down behind the orbs of his eyeballs, past the snotty black ovals of his nasal cavities, past the ridges of his palate to his spongy tongue. There he imagined checking the thought was still intact and sensible before brushing it down, pointing it in the direction of his lips and releasing it like a proud parent on the first day of big school.

And then that thought would kick off its shoes, tear off its clothes, ruffle its hair into lunatic spikes, and run babbling out of his mouth and into the confused ears of other people, who bent over his wheelchair as if proximity were a cure for gibberish.

Nobody had ever asked him about the day Charlie went missing. Nobody had thought he had anything to add.

And he hadn’t. Right up until the day when the police in their desperation released certain details that they’d kept carefully guarded.

Including the white plastic tape.

Sitting at home in front of the wide-screen TV, where his mother always let him hold the remote, Teddy watched from the wobbling corner of his eye as the news report showed the field where the horse show had been and where Charlie had been lost and found.

With total recall, Teddy the Spy immediately thought of the sun that had made his headrest so hot against his ear, the waving tails of the foxhounds that had surrounded him like a shiny brown-and-white sea, the huntsman in his red coat and black velvet cap. And the handle of the huntsman’s whip – which had been bound up its entire length in white plastic tape.

Teddy grunted loudly for his mother, who always knew exactly what he meant to say.

60

THE SUNSHINE HAD died along with Charlie Peach. Overnight the August air got heavy, grey and motionless – and the huntsman went mad.

Madder.

He had spent the past two sultry days pacing the walkway, without his mask or gloves. Or he stood at the kennel gates, brooding over his charges, lips moving soundlessly and sweat trickling down the side of his face. He opened and closed the door of the big shed ten times a day, and from the flesh room the children heard the clanking of the chains that held the meat, although he brought them nothing to eat.

Fear hung over them all, as pendulous and dark as the thunderclouds that were gathering in the west. Maisie and Kylie cried in fits and starts, and Jess stayed at the wire on that side of her cage and tried to keep them calm. She started to sing ‘Ten Green Bottles’, but didn’t get past the first line before her voice cracked and stopped. After that, Maisie and Kylie just cried uninterrupted.

There was a cartoon – a little yellow bird in a cage, tormented by a cat. Even as a small child, Steven had hated it. The bars of the cage were too widely spaced. The cat could have snaked its paw through them at any time and pinioned the bird with one needle-sharp claw. It never did, but Steven remembered the constant fear that it would.

Under the glittering eye of the huntsman, Steven felt like that bird.

Even after the man strode purposefully back to the big shed, Steven couldn’t stop shaking.

Jonas lay on his broken ribs so that it didn’t hurt so much to breathe. He scraped the link on the floor like a metronome. When he made too deep a groove in the cement, he moved his operations half an inch to the left. When he did sleep, he slept with that single thinning link in his fingers, and sometimes he woke to the sound of the soft scraping beside his ear. Because the link was small and hard to grip, his nails tore and the skin was grazed from his fingertips.

There was no point in it. He knew that logically, and yet still he did it.

His life had come down to this closed loop of galvanized steel, rubbed shiny in his dulled fingers. For the thousandth time, Jonas pressed it against the floor until his hand went white, but it didn’t bend or break.

No food. No water. No escape.

He was a goat, tethered for a tiger.

‘I think he’s going to kill us,’ Steven Lamb whispered.

Jonas looked at him with his one good eye.

‘Don’t tell the others,’ was all he said.

The huntsman stared at the children, but instead of being prized possessions, each frail figure now only reflected his own failure.

He’d been here all his life.

This was all his life.

He’d spent forty years rearing the hounds of the Blacklands Hunt. More backbreaking hours than any mother would ever spend on raising her child. More cold, more shit, more sweat, more blood. More mud, more miles, more nipped fingers, more freezing ears.

His life stretched out behind him in one long harsh winter.

Sometimes at night – before the hounds were… disposed of – he would sit in the dark and recite the generations, like an Apache wise man gifting history to his braves. Robbie to Bumper to Rufus to Stanley to Marcus to Major to Patch to Scout. And so on, back through time.

Those nights had brought him comfort. A sense of place and of purpose. A knowledge that everything he’d done and everything he would do was part of a whole. There was old Murton before him, and Townend before that. Beyond that, Coffin barely knew, because it was not important. The pack was the history of his tribe. The pack was his legacy – the proof of his skill and his dedication. Of his love. There were ribbons and trophies in the cottage, and old photos too. The smiling men in bowler hats were strangers who’d once lived in his home, but he would have known the hounds anywhere. He knew Rupert ’71 because Pitcher ’97 had had the same three marks on his ear; Dipper ’85 was one of the family because Daisy ’09 had that same high hock. And there was Fern ’91 – smiling for the camera just the way she’d taught all her pups, and the way they’d taught theirs, all the way to little Frankie.

Once the last shot had rung out, the kennels had been silent for the first time in 163 years. After that his night-time soliloquies brought no comfort or pleasure. There were no braves to listen in the darkness, nor history for them to be part of.

No wife, no children. He had never had the time.

His only legacy now was his own bitter memory of warm bodies piled high, and the undignified wrestle to feed the stiffened carcasses into the flames.

He had destroyed the only things he’d ever cared about.

The pain was overwhelming. He gripped the wire gate and focused.

The child before him looked like John Took. Something about the eyes and the shape of the mouth was very like her father. She held out her empty bucket and moved her father’s lips.

You don’t love them.

Unconsciously, Bob Coffin touched the warm cotton of his overalls and felt the weight of the cold gun beneath it.

Everything was coming to an end.

Again.

61

REYNOLDS COULDN’T UNDERSTAND a word Teddy said. Or even how he said it.

Every syllable appeared to be agony and took an eternity. His head wagged, his chin jerked, his eyes screwed up and his hands flapped.

And yet Teddy’s mother nodded at Reynolds and Rice throughout each garbled passage and then translated it all into English. It was like watching a medium at work, cocking her ear at knocks and swaying curtains, and deciphering them into a message about Uncle Arthur’s missing will.

Except that the message Mrs Loosemore received was far more interesting than one from a dead uncle.

Reynolds and Rice walked to the car in silence, but the looks they exchanged held a thing called hope that neither of them had experienced for quite some time.

Because he knew less than nothing about hunting, Reynolds called John Took and put him on speakerphone for Rice to hear. He asked him about the white tape.

Took said, ‘Hunt servants use white tape on their whips so they can be identified easily in the field.’

‘Hunt servants?’ said Reynolds.

‘Employees of the hunt.’

‘And do you have any enemies among the ranks of hunt employees?’

‘Not that I know of,’ said Took.

Rice mouthed, ‘Shit.’

Reynolds very nearly hung up. Then he remembered the man in the yard below the helicopter. Waving like a cannibal at the iron bird in the sky. Reynolds got a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach.

‘Mr Took, we flew over the hunt kennels a few weeks back.’

‘Yes,’ said Took. ‘They’re empty now.’

‘But we saw a man there,’ said Reynolds carefully.

‘That’ll be Bob Coffin. Our old huntsman. He still lives in the cottage. For a bit. The place’ll be sold off this winter.’

The feeling in Reynolds’s gut splashed through his body like spilled milk. A sick, excited feeling that he’d never felt before. Never believed he would feel.

He tried to deny it. Tried to suppress it. But it defied him.

It was a hunch.

He was having a fucking hunch!

He tried to keep his voice from shaking. ‘There’s an incinerator there, right?’

‘Yes. We’ve got an incinerator up there,’ said John Took.

‘What’s it for?’

‘For burning what’s left of the fallen stock after it’s been slaughtered for the dogs. Hoofs and hides and the like.’

‘But why would the incinerator be in use if the kennels are empty?’

There was a silence on the line that seemed to last for the whole of Reynolds’s life up to that moment.

‘It shouldn’t be,’ said John Took.

The incinerator roared softly to life and the children pricked up their ears like Dobermanns.

Even Jonas felt the dull flames in his stomach as he scrape-scrape-scraped the link on the cement immediately in front of his face.

The knives started to sharpen, and saliva trickled into his mouth. It disgusted him, but he couldn’t help it. It was a relief, in fact. He’d drunk the last of his water yesterday, and his tongue already felt too big, as if it were trying to crowd down his sticky throat.

The children pressed diamonds into their own meagre flesh as they squeezed themselves against the fence, their eyes fixed unwaveringly on the big shed. They waited for the rumble of the trolley piled with meat.

But it never came.

In the big shed Bob Coffin took the coupling chains from the hooks on the wall.

They would give him something to hold them still by.

62

RICE DROVE AS fast as the roads allowed.

At least.

Reynolds kept his right foot pressed hard on the brake he didn’t have and – now and then – slapped a steadying hand on the dashboard.

‘Sorry,’ Rice said, after one particularly close shave with a caravan.

‘Not at all,’ said Reynolds. He assumed Rice had done the Advanced Driver course, but thought that now would be a poor time to double-check.

He leaned forward and tilted his head to the left to peer into the wing mirror. They’d lost the other three cars in the convoy somewhere. They should really wait for them, but Reynolds wasn’t about to slow Rice down. His hunch had segued into a feeling of such imminent disaster – such impending doom – that getting to the hunt kennels as fast as humanly possible was the only thing that mattered. He’d already summoned ambulances from Weston and Minehead, and the police helicopter from Filton. He didn’t care who got there first, as long as they got there fast.

He sat up straight again, and fake-braked through an S-bend.

‘I was getting worried it was Jonas,’ said Rice.

‘Me too.’ He nodded.

‘I’m glad it’s not.’

‘Me too,’ he admitted, and braced himself for a collision with a bank of trees that loomed across the road.

‘Your hair looks good,’ said Rice.

Reynolds was surprised. ‘Thanks.’ He touched his fringe self-consciously.

Rice swung around a hairpin, then stamped on the accelerator and picked up frightening speed on a rare straight.

We’re going to make it, thought Reynolds, with hope unfurling in his heart.

They passed a group of deer so fast they didn’t even have time to scatter, only to flinch and then stand and quiver post-fright. In his wing mirror, Reynolds saw the buck pointing after them, its dark nose raised and its antlers laid along its back in fury.

He wished he hadn’t looked.

The first fat drops of rain fell on to the concrete, releasing the hot smell of dust. More rang slowly off the corrugated plastic roofs.

Bob Coffin padlocked one end of a coupling chain to Steven’s collar and handed him the other end. He unlocked the gate next door, and pointed at Jonas.

‘Put it on him, bay,’ he said.

Steven walked slowly into Jonas’s cage. It was strange to be so close to him after all the time they’d spent in separate spaces. It made everything seem brighter, more real. Jonas lay twisted on one side, like a dead fox in a ditch. His stretched skin was split in a dozen swollen yellow-purple places, the way a loaf cracks open as it rises. As Steven approached, Jonas stopped scraping the chain on the cement and watched him through one eye, the shallow rise of his ribs now the only thing that showed he was alive.

‘Can you sit up?’

Slowly, Jonas put a flat hand on the cement, and Steven helped him to sit against the mesh.

Steven knelt and attached the other end of the coupling chain to his collar. Now they were harnessed to each other.

‘Here.’

Steven looked round. The huntsman was leaning towards him with the key. He nodded at the padlock that held Jonas to the fence. Steven noticed that as soon as he took the key, the huntsman stepped quickly away, afraid of getting too close to Jonas.

Steven unlocked Jonas from the fence and helped him to his unsteady feet.

‘Where are we going?’ said Jonas.

‘Exercise. Put your arm on my shoulder,’ said Steven, and Jonas did, and together they left the stinking kennel. As they passed the huntsman, he held out his hand for the key and then slipped it into his pocket.

The others were already on the walkway, waiting for them: Pete and Jess linked together, and Kylie with Maisie.

Jonas was all bones. Steven guessed they all were, but to feel another man’s bones against his own was strangely sad.

The rain got louder on the roofs, and the children turned their faces to it and opened their mouths.

‘Hup!’ said the huntsman.

They were facing the meadow, as usual, but the huntsman spread his arms and encouraged them to turn the other way – towards the big shed.

‘Hup! Hup!’

Pete and the girls started to shuffle slowly round, but Steven stood his ground.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Hup!’ said the huntsman.

Steven didn’t move. This didn’t feel right. Routine had kept them alive for so long and this was not routine. First Jonas had been let out, and now they were being herded towards the big shed instead of the meadow. Steven started to feel bad. He didn’t exactly feel sick, but he thought he might quite soon.

‘Why aren’t we going to the meadow?’

‘Hup!’

‘Where are we going?’ said Steven stubbornly.

The huntsman paused and then gestured vaguely at the sky. ‘Helicopter.’

They all looked up, but saw nothing, heard nothing. Even so, Maisie began to sob loudly, which set Kylie off like a twin.

The younger children continued to move, searching the sky. Even Jonas moved his weight as if he expected Steven to start walking.

But Steven didn’t.

Instinct had served Steven well in his short life, and every instinct he possessed now told him something was wrong.

‘Hup!’ said Bob Coffin, poking and pushing at Jonas and Steven to try to get them started. ‘Get on now!’

‘We’re not cows,’ said Steven, shaking him off angrily. ‘We’re not bloody cows.’

Bob Coffin calmly pulled the gun out of his pocket and pointed it at Steven’s face. Steven ducked and Jess shrieked.

‘Helicopter,’ said the huntsman flatly.

There was no helicopter, but, galvanized by the gun, they all moved up the walkway made slippery by the rain.

Jonas wasn’t leaning too heavily on Steven, but it was still awkward to walk without stumbling. They were bumpingly close – all sharp elbows and hips. The loose end of the yard-long chain that had tethered Jonas to the fence for so long swung between them, the padlock bouncing off their thighs. Steven thought he should have unlocked it at the collar end, but whatever – it didn’t seem like a big problem after the gun.

They walked down the rutted concrete ramp into the big shed.

Steven looked around him at the room he’d only ever seen half of when fully conscious – and through a crack in a wall. It was bigger than he’d thought – big enough for a couple of tractors, at least – and almost empty. There was an old wooden bench on one side of the room, where he could see three knives laid out as if for supper at a grand house: neatly, and in order of length. There was a whetstone gripped in a shiny blue metal vice, a couple of lengths of heavy chain, some shackles and spring clips and a few rusting cans; Steven recognized 3-in-1 oil and Castrol grease from Ronnie’s garage.

Em’s arms around him, her warm breath on his neck… ‘I don’t care’…

His heart ached to think of it.

On one wall was the electric winch, its steel cable the only thing in the shed that glinted with newness. Bolted low on the wall directly opposite was a heavy curled hook. Directly between the two was a drain and a small dark patch – the only evidence, Stephen realized, of countless animals that had been butchered on the spot – the place where the head was severed from the neck and the blood leaked out.

Beside the hook was the half-open door to the flesh room, and Steven’s stomach rolled at what was to come. The memory of being enclosed in the cold, fetid flesh was shockingly clear.

‘I don’t want to! I don’t want to!’ Maisie’s continuing sobs echoed loudly in his head, joining forces with the rain beating on the iron roof.

Even if the helicopter were directly overhead, Steven doubted that any of them would hear it now. He wondered what they might look like through a thermal-imaging camera: an odd party of white blobs shuffling together across the shed, becoming greyer in the cold of the flesh room, and then disappearing altogether once they were inside the meat. Maybe a grey foot would protrude, or a charcoal elbow – but the crew overhead would have to know what they were looking for. What they were looking at.

Bob Coffin turned on a flickering fluorescent strip light and squealed the shed door shut on its un-oiled runners. As the yard and the kennels and the darkening sky disappeared behind them, Steven’s instincts gifted him a powerful mental image of the stone lid of an ancient tomb closing over his head.

Jonas saw the same things they all did: the bench, the vice, the winch, the chains. But he truly looked at only one thing – the half-open door to the flesh room, where Bob Coffin would soon stuff the weeping, terrified children into the stinking carcasses like pimentos in olives. Already the huntsman had a hold of the chain between Jess and Pete. Already he was tugging them away from the others, the gun in his hand making things easy.

But there was something wrong…

Jonas frowned and strained his eyes, and leaned away from Steven to see as much of the small room as possible. It was dark but his eyes were adjusting, and it shouldn’t be that hard to see…

When he realized what he was seeing – or what he wasn’t seeing – Jonas felt the world tilt under him. He stumbled and Steven grabbed him before he could fall.

‘You OK?’

Jonas shook his head.

He wasn’t OK.

None of them were.

Jonas said something that Steven didn’t catch.

‘What?’ said Steven.

‘There’s no meat,’ said Jonas faintly. ‘In the flesh room.’

No meat. Steven frowned. That must be wrong. No meat meant there was nowhere to hide them. Nowhere to hide their heat. If there was no meat, how would the huntsman conceal them from the thermal-imaging camera?

How would he make them all cold?

It took Steven for ever to understand. Time slowed to a virtual standstill. He blinked at Jonas with rusty eyelids, then turned his creaking head to stare into the infinite flesh room. The neurons in his brain fired up the message like a sputtering candle; it plodded slowly down axons, and connected to other neurons via two tin cans and a piece of string.

When the answer finally came, it hit him like a sledgehammer.

‘Steven!’

He spun round at the sound of Jess’s desperate cry.

She and Pete were on their hands and knees; Jess was trying to get back up, but the huntsman’s right boot was on the coupling chain, holding it to the concrete floor. The muzzle of the small black gun banged and slid against Pete’s thrashing head.

Steven and Jonas moved as one – the only way they could.

The gunshot was deafening.

They fell over Pete and on to Bob Coffin. Steven had the hand with the gun in it in both of his hands, pressing it to the floor like a snake, too scared to let go. The shot still rang inside his head like thunder in an iron bucket.

Jonas and the huntsman struggled beside him and under him, but Steven just focused on the gun. His only job was the gun. The huntsman fought like the insane thing he was, and Jonas’s knees and elbows and head slammed into Steven repeatedly, like a boat tied to a dock in a storm.

Slowly the waves subsided but still Steven leaned on the wrist, trembling with effort, until he saw Coffin’s grip on the gun start to slacken. Even then he was too frightened to let go and grab it. Instead he banged the hand against the cement until the gun fell from it, and then used the same slack hand to knock the gun across the floor, where Maisie and Kylie shuffled over to it.

‘Leave it!’ he yelled, and they left it, looking almost as frightened of him as they had been of Coffin.

For a long moment, Steven just lay there, gripping the still wrist, wondering if this could really be the end of it all, or whether Bob Coffin might suddenly throw them both off and murder them all – the way things happened in the movies.

He looked around. Jess was helping Pete to his feet; Pete had pissed himself and Steven didn’t blame him.

Finally, finally, Steven looked over at the huntsman’s face.

Jonas Holly had wrapped the long, loose end of his tether chain around Bob Coffin’s neck. Coffin was puce, his small blue eyes wide and staring up into Jonas’s, small bubbles of spit popping at the corners of his mouth.

‘It’s OK, Jonas! I got the gun!’ panted Steven.

Jonas felt for the key in the huntsman’s pocket and then sat up on his chest. He fumbled for the lock under his own chin, and the padlock clicked open. The chain snaked on to Bob Coffin’s chest with a musical hiss.

Then Jonas rose to his feet, dragging Steven up with him, and hauled the slack-kneed Coffin across the shed. He seemed to have no regard for the fact that they were still chained together, and the movement hurt Steven’s neck.

‘Give me the key,’ he gasped, but Jonas ignored him. Instead he looped the free end of the tether chain over the low hook bolted to the wall. Then he squatted down beside Coffin, whose hands now clawed desperately at the links biting into his flesh.

Jonas stared hard into Coffin’s face and jerked the chain around his neck. ‘This is not love,’ he said softly.

Steven shuddered. He’d heard that voice before. He had not imagined it.

You can run now.

Jonas stood up and crossed the shed as if Steven wasn’t lurching and stumbling beside him, and pulled the end of the cable from the winch. The huntsman was lying on the floor, barely moving, his hands at his throat and a faint whine coming from his bloodless lips. Jonas looped the cable around his boots.

‘Stop!’ croaked Steven. ‘Stop!’

But Jonas walked right through him, knocking him off his feet once more. He kept going, pulling Steven along with him, backwards and in a crude headlock. The feeble hostage who had looked like roadkill now seemed to have the strength of ten men; the teenager hanging from his throat was a drag, not a bar to his progress. Steven clutched at Jonas’s arm for support and looked up at the ceiling – at the curtains of cobwebs in the rafters, and the old-fashioned strip lighting like in Ronnie’s garage. He arched his back and craned his head to see where they were going, and saw the buttons on the wall beside the winch.

Jonas Holly was going to tear Bob Coffin apart.

In his mind, Steven could already see the huntsman stretch, hear the shrieks and the ripping muscles, watch the neck lengthen and split, exposing red-liquorice veins and chewing-gum skin. He could already see the head jerk and pop off, and roll twitching into a corner, while the rest of Bob Coffin fishtailed across the floor, spraying fountains of blood, until the soles of his dead feet hit the wall.

Jonas stopped at the winch and Steven twisted to look up into his eyes.

They were as blank as a shark’s – as cold and dark as the muzzle of the huntsman’s gun – in a face Steven had seen before and would never make the mistake of forgetting again.

‘You killed her,’ he whispered. ‘I know you did.’

Jonas said nothing. And – even over the battle-drum roar of the rain on the roof – Steven heard the winch whirr into life.

‘Get out!’ he shouted at the rafters. ‘Jess, get them OUT!’

Then he squeezed his eyes shut and covered his ears, but he heard the screams anyway, as Bob Coffin started to die.

63

RICE BEAT THE helicopter to the Blacklands Hunt kennels.

Reynolds knew she would.

The rain was biblical now and the second they stepped out of the car they were drenched. Reynolds ran through the yard – past the row of empty kennels on his left, stables on his right.

‘Be careful!’ yelled Rice behind him, but he wasn’t. Irrational fear had gripped him and made him reckless for the first time in his life.

Ahead of him the concrete sloped down towards a large shed. Reynolds faltered as the huge door squealed open, then stopped dead as four children spilled out of the light and into the storm. They were half naked, weeping and terrified, but even through the driving rain Reynolds recognized them as if he’d fathered them.

‘Elizabeth!’ he yelled, and he ran down the ramp.

Jess Took pointed into the shed and cried, ‘He’s killing him.’

Reynolds burst through the door in time to see the final screaming agony of Bob Coffin.

Too late.

There was a loud crack and the chain wound around Coffin’s neck snapped in two. It whipped up and hit the wall, sending a single broken link skittering past Reynolds’s feet like money. The huntsman skidded across the concrete in the other direction, his boots hitting the opposite wall, his knees crumpling behind them.

‘Christ!’ Reynolds bounded across the room and hit the cutoff switch. Jonas Holly and Steven Lamb were right there and he turned to them now, fizzing with adrenaline.

The sight of them stopped him dead.

Jonas Holly was covered in blood and bruises, one eye was barely open and his chest and stomach ran with blood from fresh wounds. Beside him – chained to him – Steven Lamb emitted a high, whining noise. His eyes were tightly shut, his teeth gritted with the effort of remaining blind, his hands pressed against his ears.

‘Steven?’ said Reynolds, and touched his shoulder. ‘Steven, you’re safe.’

Steven opened his eyes. For a brief second Reynolds saw relief on his face – then panic hit, and he started to shout and flail.

‘Get him off me! Get him off me! Please, just get him off me! Please…’

Jonas and Reynolds fended off what blows they could. Reynolds kept saying You’re safe and It’s over, but Steven was beyond sense. In the middle of it all, Jonas put his hands to Steven’s throat – and opened the lock that had held them together. Steven grabbed the key from his hand and pushed himself off Jonas. He fell to the floor and crawled rapidly away, only stumbling to his feet again as he burst out of the shed door.

Reynolds was so full of questions that he asked none of them. And Jonas Holly just stood there blinking, as if he’d been surprised out of sleep. The brief silence was plugged by the rain and – at last – the whup-whup-whup of the chopper.

Reynolds knelt and unwound the chain from Coffin’s neck as the ambulances approached. He was going to need one. Coffin was still breathing but not moving. Whatever the provocation, if Jonas Holly had done this to him, there was something wrong with the man. Something seriously wrong. Reynolds felt it in his guts and he didn’t care if it was unscientific.

He saw a gun lying in the middle of the floor. Under normal circumstances he’d insist that it was left where it was, for the scenes-of-crime officers to photograph in situ. But these were not normal circumstances, and Reynolds stepped swiftly over Bob Coffin to pick it up. He felt safer with it in his hand, and realized just how unsafe he’d felt until then.

God knows what the hell had happened here over the past two months or the past two minutes. He had an uneasy feeling that the Piper case had only just started giving up its secrets. He shivered. This hunch thing was like opening the window to a vampire – after letting the first one in, it seemed he had no choice in the matter.

Paramedics strode in, and he pointed at Bob Coffin. One of them put a blanket around Jonas’s shoulders and led him out of the big shed.

Reynolds watched him all the way.

Close to the door, Jonas bent and picked up the broken link. He held it up to the light and turned it in his fingers – twisted and bent out of shape, and rubbed shiny in the corner where it had snapped.

Reynolds heard him ask, ‘How did this get here?’

Rice was in one of the stables, in the dry, wrapping the children in blankets. They were all crying, but for once she felt blameless.

A medic moved among them with the key he’d taken from Steven, unlocking the collars they’d worn for so long.

Steven stood outside. When Rice tried to usher him out of the rain, he twisted away from her. ‘I don’t want to go inside!’ he said. Then, more calmly, ‘Thank you.’

She nodded and brought him a rough grey NHS blanket and he stood shivering against the wall of the stable block as, one by one, the other children were led to the waiting ambulances. Their tearful faces were freshly washed with rain and cautious hope as they waved goodbye. Jess Took hugged him as she left.

Two medics tried to lead him away, but Steven resisted.

‘I don’t want to go to hospital.’

‘You need to be checked out,’ said one medic.

‘I’m fine.’

The man took hold of his arm – gentle but firm. Steven shook him off and pushed him away, panic rising within him—

Elizabeth Rice was suddenly at his side. Her hair was wet again, but this time she didn’t look annoyed.

‘He won’t get in the ambulance,’ said the medic, but she just waved him away and then turned to Steven.

‘Shall we just go straight home?’ she said.

Steven’s eyes pricked and he felt joy cup his heart at the thought of his mother’s arms open to greet him, Nan’s eyes all big and shiny behind her glasses, Davey happy to see him, and Em’s warm back under his hands. The images were so powerful that he felt the muscles in his arms twitch to embrace them all.

‘Yes, please,’ he said. And he put his arms around Elizabeth Rice and let her hold him until his mother could.

Over her shoulder, Jonas Holly limped past between two paramedics. He turned his brown eyes towards Steven and raised a hand.

Steven didn’t raise one back. He watched the medics help Jonas into an ambulance and hoped that it crashed on the way to hospital.

Then he followed DS Rice to a car that still smelled of hot brakes.

64

THEIR HOMECOMINGS WERE just as they’d expected – and more.

Jess Took was clamped between her mother and her father so tight that she wondered how they could ever be prised apart. Rachel stood nearby – her smile and talons fixed – and wondered the same thing.

Pete Knox’s parents put on a united front and their neighbours threw a street party to welcome him home, with bunting and cakes. The council even agreed to close the road so that they wouldn’t all be mown down during the celebrations. Pete only managed half a cupcake and a sip of Coke before he began to feel queasy. It would take a while.

His mother followed him around like a mitten on a string, and his father watched her with a look on his face that suggested he could not forget what she’d said back in that early-morning car park, however hard he tried. Mercifully, Pete didn’t notice that right then. He was just happy to be home.

Maisie and Kylie were submerged in love and protection, and never took the bus to school again.

A few days after their return, the driver Ken Beard sat in his car outside their homes and shook so badly that he couldn’t do what he’d gone there for. Finally it was his daughter Karen and her boyfriend – whose name was simply Mark, despite the mascara – who encouraged him up the paths and knocked on the doors for him, so that he could beg the girls’ forgiveness in person.

They and their families were in forgiving moods, and would be for a long time to come.

Steven was bruised from all the hugging, Lettie cried and laughed for days, Uncle Jude bought him an Xbox still in its original packaging, and Nan kept saying, ‘I told you he’d be back!’ when she hadn’t at all.

Davey hugged him and almost cried, but then called him a wanker instead, which meant a lot, coming from him.

Physically Steven bounced back quickly. It took a few weeks to learn to eat right again, but that was hardly a chore. Mentally, he was… fine.

That surprised even him.

Sure, the smell of the bathroom disinfectant had the power to turn his stomach, and he often caught himself touching his own neck – feeling for the collar he’d worn for so long. But still, when DS Rice explained that Victim Support was arranging for all the children to see a psychologist to help them over the trauma, Steven politely declined.

He had survived, hadn’t he? The past was the past and surviving it was the important thing. Now he had the rest of his life to live, and more important things to think about.

Some more important than others…

Em had not hooked up with Lewis or Lalo; she had waited for Steven.

‘I would have waited for ever,’ she told him fiercely, as they lay dizzy and breathless after their first time.

Steven held her close. He was a man now, but he felt like the same boy – only much happier. He wondered whether Lewis would guess he’d had sex and he hoped not. The only witnesses he needed to this moment were the silent ones gazing down at them from his walls. Uncle Billy, Angelina Jolie and the Liverpool first eleven.

‘For ever is a long, long time,’ he said carefully.

‘Good,’ said Em. ‘Then we’ll spend it together.’

The next day they walked up the hill to continue rebuilding their lives and the Suzuki, only to find that Ronnie and Dougie had finished the bike for him, and that all Steven had to do was turn the key and kick it over.

He would never have to walk past Rose Cottage again.

The newspapers and TV were all over the children – particularly Steven, who had cheated death twice before he was old enough to drink. Marcie Meyrick came to the door four times – each time with a higher offer. On the final visit, she actually cried.

Much to Davey’s annoyance, his brother had no interest in getting free money, so he sold his own story to a rival reporter from the Star. It appeared under the headline MY BROTHER THE NUT MAGNET. Davey spent £115 of the proceeds on a new skateboard for Steven, and felt cleansed. And the next time he and Shane went up to Springer Farm, they took with them a can of black paint and obliterated Mr PEach is a COCK from the farmhouse wall.

They pretty much stopped going there after that, although for many years afterwards Davey would think about the blackened rafters, the dark chimney, and the box of gay junk that Shane hadn’t wanted.

There was, of course, no homecoming to celebrate for David Peach. While the other children were being returned to their families, he watched Channel 4 Racing with DI Reynolds by his side. For some reason, the man who’d led the investigation had chosen to allow his sergeant to bask in the sunshine of the TV cameras and the grateful parents, while they worked their way through a bottle of Glenfiddich and pretended to give a shit about who won the 3.45 from Doncaster.

DI Reynolds was no drinker and almost choked on the first shot. But by the fourth he’d got the hang of it.

So they sat and got more and more slumped and slurred – surrounded by a bright sea of flowers and teddy bears that countless well-wishers had left on the doorstep of the little blue house where Charlie had lived…

For a while after his son’s funeral David Peach did think of moving away, but finally he stayed among friends.

Among those he now counted John Took, who wasn’t half the prick he used to be.

Jonas was the only person who was truly surprised by his homecoming.

After three days in hospital he took a taxi home. He arrived at Rose Cottage as the sun dipped below the moor, and found Elizabeth Rice on his doorstep with a bottle of Rioja.

‘The hospital called. Said you’d discharged yourself.’

‘I had things to do.’

‘DI Reynolds wants a chat tomorrow morning.’

‘But not tonight,’ he said.

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘Not tonight.’

They went inside and shared the wine at the kitchen table, where Mrs Paddon had left a vegetarian stew and a yellow Post-it note:

45 mins at 140 (Centigrade, Jonas!)

Jonas peeled off the note and rolled it into a tight tube between his fingers as they talked.

Actually she talked. He just listened, but he did it well enough.

They took the bottle into the living room in an action replay that she knew in her loins was going to have a different result this time.

They stood at the window and, as they watched the coming night turn the Exmoor sky as green as the sea, she kissed him properly.

For a moment there was a rush of hunger between them – then he stepped away awkwardly and looked at the rising moon.

‘It’s getting dark,’ he said.

Rice nodded and felt like a fool. An unwanted fool.

From the mantel Lucy Holly watched her, trowel in hand, smiling in a place that was always warm.

‘Where’s that little gold letter knife you had here?’ she said dully.

Jonas turned and looked at her, silhouetted against the oceanic sky, with the moon on one shoulder and Venus at the other.

‘I don’t remember,’ he shrugged.

As Rice left Rose Cottage, Mrs Paddon opened her front door. ‘I told you you were wasting your time,’ she said.

Rice bit her lip.

But only as far as the gate. Then she turned. ‘Why don’t you just piss off, you nosey old bitch?’

Mrs Paddon closed her door quietly and Rice cried all the way back to the Red Lion.

Elizabeth Rice woke hours later because she was cold, and she was cold because the window was open.

She closed it and looked across the haphazard roofs below, and then up at the moon – a brilliant coin with dove-grey oceans. If she’d had a book, she could have read by this light alone, but her books were packed away now in the small bag by the bedroom door, awaiting tomorrow’s departure. Instead, she held up her hand and looked at the lines criss-crossing her silver palm. She wondered whether her future really could be written in those lines, like music in the grooves of an old 45. She wondered what tunes they might play. Love songs or bitter country heartbreakers.

Rice sighed and dropped her hand, and rested her forehead against the cold glass.

The letter knife was on the window-sill.

She flinched as if burned. She failed to breathe.

She stepped gingerly away from the window, and went quickly into the bathroom – coming back with a few sheets of tissue paper. With that, she picked up the little gold dagger with the engraved handle.

By the light of the moon she could read A Gift from Weston-super-Mare.

Even though the window was now closed, Elizabeth Rice started to shiver.

65

JONAS SHOULD HAVE been in Shipcott at the debrief with DI Reynolds, but instead he was walking across the vast flat sands of Weston-super-Mare beach, eating an ice cream.

He’d left his shoes and socks under the ice-cream van; he didn’t think anyone would take them. Not until the van left for the night, at least – but that particular night was hours away.

It was another spectacular day, and he had to eat fast to keep the vanilla from rolling down his knuckles.

There were plenty of holidaymakers, but the beach was so wide, and they were all so close to the ice-cream van, that it seemed deserted.

He approached the new pier. The old one of his dreams had burned down, surrounded by water. He looked around as he passed between the pilings, even though he would not find Lucy here.

He knew that now.

The thought didn’t make him sad. How could he be sad on a day like this? The sun was hot, the sand was cool, the ice cream was sweet, and he’d kept his promise.

He had saved the boy.

Not Charlie, sadly, but the boy that was himself.

People hurt children. Of course they did. That was the truth. But it was also true that children escaped, they recovered and they survived. Steven Lamb was proof of that twice over. Until Bob Coffin had shown him, Jonas had had no idea how resilient children were. How resilient he finally was.

Lucy had been right to want children and he had been wrong to prevent her. Jonas could see that now. But he knew she would forgive him; he had been a different person then. Now he felt complete. He had never felt so whole.

Jonas reached the water’s edge and the flat waves cooled his bare feet. The wet sand shifted slightly under his toes as the outgoing tide tried to suck the beach back into the ocean. He couldn’t help smiling, and excited butterflies filled his stomach.

He finished his ice cream, then leaned down to rinse his hands in the sea, before straightening up and squinting into the blue. Steep Holm island seemed very close, although it was miles away – high in the water and brilliant green in the sunshine. He’d never been there, but he’d heard it was covered in wild peonies. He’d like to see that some time. On the horizon was the hazy grey stripe of Wales.

Jonas stretched like a dog in the sun, and felt calm settle warmly into his bones.

Everything was going to be fine. Elizabeth Rice was smart; she would discover that the blood on the handle of the knife was not Lucy’s.

Jonas hoped that Steven would learn of it somehow, and know that he had told him the truth about that.

There were other truths about himself that were more disturbing, and Bob Coffin on the winch had finally convinced him of those too.

Jonas took off his uniform, folding each item and leaving them in a neat pile. He looked around before removing his trousers, but there was nobody close by. They slipped off easily because of the missing button that he’d never got around to sewing back on.

A button was like a wife. They both held things together. He’d lost a button and he’d lost a wife. But at least he knew where to find one of them.

Wearing only his shorts, Jonas walked into the cold water until it covered his scars, and then he started to swim.

It was years since he’d swum in the ocean. It was easier than he’d remembered; the salt was his friend. He headed for Steep Holm, even though he wasn’t planning to swim there. It gave him something to point at. He didn’t want to go round in embarrassing circles like a broken motor-boat.

The further he went, the happier he got. He swam freestyle, breathing under his right arm, the way they’d been taught at school. Sometimes it worked and sometimes he got a noseful of brine. But he felt strong, and he felt clean and he felt whole, and nothing was going to stop him. Not ever.

Finally Jonas tired.

His arms barely cleared the surface, and his lungs seemed to have shrunk. His legs were far heavier than when he’d first launched himself into the waves. He trod water for a moment, then paddled himself around to look back at the beach.

He was surprised by how far he’d come. Weston-super-Mare was draped across his horizon like a toy village. As the sea swelled under him, he could pinpoint the Winter Gardens, and the new white pier glinting in the sunshine, but nothing else was recognizable from this distance. The broad beach was no more than a narrow brown line.

He wondered whether anyone had stolen his shoes yet, and remembered he’d only put an hour’s parking ticket on the Land Rover.

He laughed. A short sound, which was all his burning lungs could spare him. He was too far out, and his arms were too tired and his legs were too heavy. But he didn’t feel frightened and he didn’t feel alone.

Jonas turned his back on the beach and kept swimming. He concentrated on lifting his weary arms and kicking his leaden legs and turning his mouth to suck in the sunshine.

Every weakening stroke pumped more joy into his heart.

He couldn’t wait to tell Lucy all that he had learned.