Finders Keepers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The memories crowded in anyway.

The night Mrs Holly had been murdered.

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

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

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

Come with me.

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

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

So instead he’d left her there to die.

The thought sent a chill through Steven.

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

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

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

He was almost past.

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

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

The security light came back on again.

‘Hello, Steven.’

His heart stopped.

Silhouetted in the bright white light was Jonas Holly.

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

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

‘You want a hand with that?’

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

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

There was no option.

‘OK.’

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

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

So much faster.

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

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

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

‘New gates,’ said Jonas.

‘New people,’ said Steven.

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

The gates opened almost silently.

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

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