Finders Keepers

About the Book

At the height of summer a dark shadow falls across Exmoor. Children are being stolen. Each disappearance is marked only by a terse note - a brutal accusation.

There are no explanations, no ransom demands... and no hope.

Policeman Jonas Holly faces a precarious journey into the warped mind of the kidnapper if he’s to stand any chance of catching him. But - still reeling from a personal tragedy - is Jonas really up to the task?

Because there's at least one person on Exmoor who thinks that, when it comes to being the first line of defence, Jonas Holly may be the last man to trust...

FINDERS

KEEPERS

BELINDA BAUER

To Dr Robert Bracchi

PART ONE

MAY

1

IT WAS LATE in the season to go hunting. Although Jess Took wasn’t hunting really, just watching.

If you could call it even that.

Jess was thirteen, and over the past year ‘going hunting’ had become a euphemism for sitting in her father’s horsebox, deafened by hip-hop and blinded by the mist that formed quickly inside the windows in the early chill of a spring morning.

Although it was May, Exmoor had been prettied overnight by a sheen of sparkling frost that made it look gift-wrapped and Christmassy. The rising sun washed the hills with gold, making glittering gems of the dew. Tourists came from all over the world to see such sights. Sights like the one Jess Took was currently ignoring in favour of the sensory underload of opaque glass, an alien beat, and the faint smell of horse shit that she’d sucked into her wet lungs with her very first breath, and which none of her family had ever tried to clear from their nostrils.

John Took was the Master of the Midmoor Hunt. Joint Master, Jess was fond of reminding him. Since the divorce, Jess only spent the weekends with her father, and it had given her the distance to develop a critical eye and the almost uncanny ability to hit him where it hurt. In return for his having an affair and leaving her mother, Jess had stopped riding to hounds with him. She missed it but was determined to make him suffer.

In return, John Took refused to allow her to stay home alone on the Saturday mornings when he was scheduled to hunt, and instead loaded Blue Boy and then Jess into the box with equal brusqueness, then took the horse out and left her there on whatever gravel pull-off or grass verge they chose to park on that day. He always made some lumpy sandwiches for her, and – to teach him a lesson – she never ate them.

Now, as she turned the key so she could direct some heat on to her feet, Jess squinted against the new sunshine diffused through the misted windscreen. She was dimly aware that somewhere beyond her senses, her father would be shouting and bossing people about in that way she hated; pulling too sharply on Blue Boy’s mouth in his bid for the spectacular turns and stops that he thought made him a better rider.

She sighed. Sometimes she felt like giving up their battle of wills. She was beginning to suspect that it was hurting her more than it hurt him, and it certainly required more effort than she really wanted to expend on anything apart from texting her friends and craving Ugg boots.

She wondered whether 6.45am was too early to text Alison and tell her what a shit life she was having.

Probably.

The flat white glass of the passenger window was filled with the darkness of sudden approach, and the door yanked open. Jess flinched and opened her mouth, prepared to be rude to her father for scaring her. Then left it gaping in shock as a faceless man reached in, wrapped his arms around her – and simply dragged her out of the cab.

It all happened so fast.

Jess felt her feet smack the gravel and the cold hit the small of her back as her sweatshirt bunched up. She squirmed and kicked and tried to turn her head to bite the man’s strong arms, but all she got was a mouthful of the bitter grease of his waxed coat.

Jess felt herself being dragged across the dirt, half trying to find her feet, half trying to make herself heavy and hard to hold. Her earphones pulled out of her ears but she could still hear the beat – tinny and feeble – somewhere around her neck, along with the scrape of gravel and the squeezed sound of her own breath. Her father’s horsebox left her vision and she saw the early-morning clouds like puffs of cotton wool in a pale-blue sky; Mrs Barlow’s trailer flashed briefly and she grabbed for the loop of baler twine attached to the side. Her fingers burned as she was torn from it. She yelped.

This was real.

This was really happening.

The yelp reminded her that she had a voice and she said ‘help’, in a way that sounded both experimental and petulant.

She was embarrassed to be shouting for help like a victim in a movie, when she was Jess Took, who was just a normal girl in a boring place. Still, she said it again more loudly and the man’s hand banged across her mouth and nose hard enough to make her eyes water. She felt instantly violated in a way she hadn’t while being dragged from her father’s horsebox and across a gritty patch of moorland. The hand was woollen and smelled of dirt. She tried to shake it off but the man gripped her face tightly now – pressing her teeth into her tender lips, shutting off her airway, his overwhelming strength sapping what was left of hers.

He spoke calmly in her ear. ‘If you scream, I’ll shoot you in the head.’

The bone went out of Jess’s legs and she felt terror warm her thighs.

She sobbed fear and shame in equal measure.

He turned her, and pushed instead of pulled; something hard caught her across the buttocks and she tumbled backwards and landed just a couple of feet down on what felt like hard carpet.

Her legs were picked up and hoisted after her, and she just had time to register that she was in the boot of a car before the lid fell and cut off her cry, her light – and every idea she’d ever had of how her world was going to be – with a single metallic bang.

The hunt drew a blank.

The dogs followed the trails laid by terrier men on quad bikes to their anti-climactic conclusions and never had a sniff of an accidental fox to liven up the day. Blue Boy stumbled after jumping the stream at the bottom of Withypool Common, and by the end of the day he was uneven. The huntsman wasted fifteen minutes cutting a hound out of a barbed-wire fence. And that over-horsed fool Graham Gigman kept overtaking the field and the Master on his white-legged, wall-eyed beast that should have been shot as it slid out of the mare, in John Took’s not-so-humble opinion.

All in all, by the time they got back to the foot of Dunkery Beacon, where they’d left the boxes, Took’s mood was foul.

‘At least it didn’t rain,’ shouted Graham Gigman as his nasty animal skittered sideways past Took for the last time. Until the next time.

Took ignored him and slid sullenly from Blue Boy’s back. The bay’s near fore was swollen at the knee.