Steven felt the questions that waited to be asked just under the surface, like the big gold and white fish in the Austins’ pond. The fish followed him from one end of the dark water to the other when he delivered the
It was enough to make Steven shake with tension.
But nothing was asked and nothing was told. Nothing of the mystery trailer, and nothing of the night when Lucy Holly had been murdered.
Instead Jonas Holly murmured ‘Good night,’ and peeled off at Rose Cottage, while Steven muttered ‘Thanks,’ and jogged home in a world that had just got that little bit stranger.
11
JONAS WOKE TO a dawn that promised everything.
It was a week since Jess Took had disappeared, and May had become almost fictional in its brilliance – the kind of balmy weather that only Enid Blyton really seemed to have believed possible.
During the night Jonas had thrown off the sheets, and now he looked down the landscape of his own naked body to the moors beyond the cottage window.
They were spectacular. Under a sky that was already pale Wedgwood, Exmoor had burst into life. Heather that had made the hills look scorched and black through the winter had magically revived and now mottled them green. Grass that had been muddy just a month before had become like straw, while the yellow sprays of gorse and broom hid countless birds, betrayed only by their summer songs. Foals tripped along behind sleek mares, and lambs that imagined themselves lost bleated plaintively – a sound that carried for miles on a still day. Buzzards and kestrels looked down on it all – poised to bring sudden death without disturbing the peace. Jonas’s parents, who had lived in the house before him, had never bothered with pictures or paintings. These windows on to Exmoor were all they’d ever wanted by way of decoration, and on a morning like this, Jonas understood them better than he ever had when they’d been alive. Van Goghs and Gauguins would be drab by comparison.
A starling darted up under the eaves outside the window and he heard the chicks clamouring like crickets, almost overhead. They were probably in the attic. When they’d flown he would go up there and block the holes and put up nesting boxes instead.
Maybe he would. He hadn’t been up there since …
Lucy died.
Jonas sighed and looked down at the narrow plank of flesh that his body had become. His genitals seemed ridiculously large, jutting uselessly between his sharp hips, and thrown into relief by the early sun his ribs looked like ripples on a flat sea. On the plain between the two, even the scars on his belly seemed worse than usual – red and ridged and twisted and puckered.
They’d told him they would fade to white with time.
Time.
He looked at his alarm clock – something he hadn’t done with any good reason in over a year. It was almost six thirty.
Jonas swung his legs to the creaking floor and headed to the shower. One bathroom window framed a picture of the edge of Shipcott and the towering moor behind it. The thought of going back to the village he’d let down so badly made his gut ache, but he almost welcomed the feeling. He deserved it.
The other window displayed the burned-out farmhouse on the closest hilltop, charred rafters piercing the sky. He stared at the remains of Springer Farm as if into a mirror, while he slid his soapy fingers over the slats of his own ribcage.
He sat silently on the bed until he was dry, then he put on his uniform.
Reynolds mustered his troops in the car park of the Red Lion. They were due to start the search at 8am. Reynolds was in the empty car park by seven fifteen and nervous by seven thirty. The only other people there were the press and TV crews.
Memories of his thirteenth birthday worried at the back of his mind. His primary-school classmates seemed to have taken the move to various secondary schools as an opportunity to abandon him as a friend. His mother told him it was because he was too clever for them and he was sure she was right. But he was also sure that many boys would still come to his party – if only for a magician called El Gran Supremo, complete with top hat, wand and rabbit.
But they hadn’t come.
At least, only two of them had, and they didn’t count: the wispy Digby Furnwild – who went everywhere with an asthma inhaler and a handkerchief impregnated with Olbas oil – and the giant Bruce Locksmith, who would have braved a pit of wolves for free cake, let alone a child’s party. Bruce had eaten almost all the cake, but only made it halfway through El Gran Supremo before announcing that it was shit and he was leaving. He’d taken several going- home bags with him. Reynolds and Digby had sat in moribund silence at either end of the day-bed until Digby’s mother had come to fetch him. After Digby had left, Reynolds’s mother had gone ballistic because she’d found rabbit droppings on the lounge carpet.
He’d never hosted another party.
Until now. And now the thought that nobody would show while the nation’s press bore witness made Reynolds sweat. He’d Google-mapped the middle of the moor and divided the resulting print-offs into numbered grids. He needed fifty people, at least, to cover the area properly. He wished he’d asked Rice to take the lead on this one; then it would look bad for
But by 7.45am there were a dozen or so police officers, including four dog-handlers, and eighteen Shipcott residents. It was better than nothing.
He took the officers aside and briefly ran through where they were right now. Forensics on the horsebox and the Knoxes’ Golf had been poor. The lab was checking out the green fibres found at both scenes, along with tiny traces of a sticky white plastic found in the broken car windows from the Pete Knox scene. They had no idea yet what that was or how – or even if – it was connected to the kidnap, and they were keeping these details from the press for now. He made no mention of the notes. They were his ace in the hole.
His men were already looking warm in their dark uniforms. It was going to be a scorcher. One asked if they could work in shirtsleeves and Reynolds was about to say ‘No’ when Elizabeth Rice said ‘Of course.’ He’d speak to her later.
With five minutes to go before the official start time, cars began to swing into the car park and disgorge dozens more occupants from surrounding villages. By 8am there must have been eighty people, all told, most of them ruddy-faced men and burly teenaged boys, several with dogs on bits of rope. Touching flat caps in greeting, leaning over to shake hands, voices curtailed and low out of respect for the reason they were here. There was an excited undercurrent of common purpose. They reminded Reynolds of a lynch-mob, and he could have kissed their feet just for showing up.
Rice moved through them, taking names and addresses and ignoring banter about taking down
Reynolds climbed on to a chair from the bar and from there on to the low roof of the coal bunker, so that everyone could see him and – hopefully – hear him.
He patted the edges of his notes together and ran through his opening lines in his head.
It was a good speech. And thank God there were now people to hear it. What might have sounded too grand for an audience of twenty was going to sound positively Churchillian to a crowd of nearly a hundred. And on TV too …
