Finders Keepers

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

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

‘What about?’

‘The newspaper thing?’

Of course. That was why he was here.

‘Oh, OK. Yes. Please.’

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

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

I like your horse.

Where did you live before coming here?

Where’s your green ribbon today?

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

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

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

9

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

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

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

‘You mean lighter fuel?’

‘That’s the stuff.’

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

‘So he’s a smoker,’ said Reynolds.

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

‘Hoodies use it to get high, right?’

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

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

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

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

‘Nope.’

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

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

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

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

Only the notes made the connection certain.

You don’t love her.

You don’t love him.

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

* * *

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

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

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

Usually.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Have you only just noticed it?’

He shrugged.

‘Interesting,’ she mused.

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

He shrugged again.

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

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

So she’d gone through the motions with Jonas. No, no! That wasn’t true … She knew her stuff. She did her