Finders Keepers

Great. He’d have to ride Scotty on Monday, and Scotty was not half the horse Blue Boy was.

Took banged the tailgate shut on Blue Boy, removed his sweaty helmet and opened the door of the horsebox.

‘Not a bloody fox in sight,’ he told Jess.

Except Jess wasn’t there.

Instead there was a note on the steering wheel. A yellow square.

John Took’s mouth tightened. Bloody Jess and her teenage rebellion. She used to be such an easy kid before the divorce. Where’d she buggered off to now?

He reached up and peeled the note off the wheel. As he read it, his frown of annoyance became one of confusion. The note consisted of four words that were both simple and utterly mysterious.

You don’t love her.

2

THERE WAS A place between light and dark – between life and death – where Jonas Holly lived after his wife died.

He was split into the physical and the psychological – a keen division which saw him wake every day, get up, get dressed, move his arms and legs, blink, while all the time his mind just sat there as if on hold in the great switchboard of life. His mental processes stretched no further than the immediate and the practical. It got dark, he switched on a light; the milk arrived, he took it in; he had thirst, he drank water. On the rare occasions when he hungered, he ate. It took him almost two months to pick his way through what was left in the freezer, the larder, and Mrs Paddon’s doorstep donations. His already long frame became stretched; he ran out of notches on his belt. Finally, canned tomatoes over kidney beans marked the end of food and the start of starvation or shopping. It took Jonas three days before he walked into the village to choose the latter.

He was pared down to the primitive. Animalistic. He barely spoke. Every few days he would answer Mrs Paddon’s neighbourly inquiry with a mumbled ‘Fine, thanks’ and then immediately go indoors. For an hour once a week he was probed by the psychologist and managed to tell her virtually nothing. The only reason he went to Bristol for their sessions was because he had to be passed fit before he could go back to work, and the only reason he planned to go back to work was because he had absolutely no idea of what else he might do with the rest of his life. Or much interest in the subject.

Kate Gulliver, the psychologist, seemed OK but he didn’t trust her. Nothing personal – Jonas didn’t trust anyone any more, not even himself.

Especially not himself.

Occasionally Jonas would look hard into the bathroom mirror. He never saw anything but his own brown eyes staring back at him quizzically, doubting even his own memory of events. He remembered the knife. He remembered the blood. He remembered how one had led to the other. At least, he thought he did. His memory had always been shaky, and the lack of horror that accompanied these images made him wonder whether they had happened that way at all, or whether they were all his mind could cope with for now. Maybe the gaps would be filled in later, when he was better able to deal with another truth.

He hoped not.

It was already enough truth for Jonas that every time he went upstairs in their tiny cottage, he had to cross the flagstones behind the front door where Lucy had died – and where he had almost managed to follow her.

Sometimes he pissed in the garden and slept on the couch.

Truth was overrated.

Kate – who encouraged Jonas to call her that – talked about the stages of grief and wanted him to explore his feelings. Jonas thought that would be a bad idea. He knew his feelings were in there somewhere, on a high shelf in the wardrobe of his psyche, but he was wary of fetching the stool that might enable him to reach them.

He was worried about what else he might find there.

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Jonas knew the stages of grief by now. He knew them backwards. He could juggle them like plates. It didn’t mean he knew how they felt.

So instead he had done his best to demonstrate the appropriate emotions at what he guessed were appropriate intervals over the eight months they’d spent in each other’s sporadic company.

‘Do you ever feel guilty?’ Kate would ask.

‘Of course,’ he’d answer. ‘I should have got there sooner. In time. To stop it.’

She’d nod seriously and he’d look at his hands.

He’d spent three sessions in total silence, gazing dully at the cheap carpet in her stage-set office while she’d asked careful questions at long intervals. It had been calming and, he imagined, would be construed as depression.

Soon he would have to find the energy to have a go at anger. He kept putting it off.

In one way he hoped that affecting emotions might magically give rise to the real thing, but all he had felt since the death of his wife was a strange numbness that was a smoked-glass barrier to reality.

Only in his dreams did Jonas feel anything at all. In his dreams he often found Lucy. It was always somewhere unexpected. He would catch the Tiverton bus and find her sitting up front with shopping bags at her feet; he would steal a trinket in a foreign bazaar and then turn to find her at his shoulder. Once he saw her through the slats of Weston pier, and they kept flickering pace with one another – he above and she on the wet sand below – until they reached the beach, where they embraced.

Always they embraced.

Always they wept with joy.

I found you. I found you. He repeated it without moving his lips – a song sung by his heart that made his flesh tremble with happiness.

Always it ended the same way. Lucy sobbing in his ear: ‘You shouldn’t have come looking for me, Jonas.’

And he would realize for the first time that her body was cold when it should be warm, and – even as that horror struck him – he would feel her turn into a slab of dead meat in his arms.

He would wake, still groping for her, his pillow soaked in sweat and tears, calling ‘I love you’ into the darkness or the dawn.

Jonas didn’t tell Kate Gulliver any of that.

He also didn’t tell her how time slipped away from him. How he would fall asleep on the couch and wake in the kitchen with a knife in his hand. How the impulse to put the glittering blade into his mouth and jab and stab at his tongue and palate and cheeks until the blood ran from him like a hose was almost overwhelming. Or how, more than once, he’d watched his own hands twist a pair of his uniform trousers into a noose. They were an old pair, and missing a button – no good to anyone who wasn’t handy, or who didn’t have a handy wife.

He lost whole days – disappeared inside his head just as surely as if he’d been abducted by aliens. He would be returned to find that nothing had changed but the clocks.

Sometimes the calendar.

These were all things that his new, animal self knew were better left unsaid. Better not explored.

And so Jonas Holly said nothing, felt nothing, and hovered between the light and the dark – between life and death – until such time as he might be allowed to return to work as an Exmoor village policeman.

3

STEVEN LAMB WASN’T SURE exactly what he’d expected for his ?300, but this definitely wasn’t it.

Ronnie had told him the bike was not a runner. ‘We’ll get it going though, no bother,’ Ronnie had assured him as they drove to Minehead. And Steven was assured. Ronnie Trewell could get anything going – countless Somerset drivers who’d had cars stolen despite locks, alarms and immobilizers could attest to that.

But what Ronnie hadn’t told him was that the 125cc Suzuki was in what looked like a thousand bits. Two wheels and the frame were identifiable, but everything else – engine parts, cables, lights, tank, levers, nuts and bolts – was jumbled into two giant plastic boxes.