Finders Keepers

the loss of their traditional summer show. To add insult to injury, the Exmoor Foxhounds had been indecently hasty to offer to run the show instead. After all, their secretary had reasoned, the field was booked, the jumps and tents paid for, the date publicized and the entries received.

‘I mean,’ she’d told Charles Stourbridge on the phone, ‘the kidnapper’s already taken poor Jess Took and that other boy. We shouldn’t let him ruin a good day out into the bargain.’

When this fuzzy logic was relayed to them, the Midmoor members prayed for rain on Saturday, but an unusually reliable summer let them all down.

* * *

Saturday morning. Exactly two weeks since Jess Took had been taken.

She had not called home from a boyfriend’s mobile or a London phone box. And no farmer had been surprised to find Pete Knox in his hay barn.

The two children had simply gone.

And every minute they remained gone was a minute when DI Reynolds’s frustration quotient rose another notch.

It was the memory of his previous failure on Exmoor that haunted him as much as this new one unfolding. Of course, DCI Marvel had been in charge of that investigation, not him. And two children stolen from parked cars across the moor didn’t compare with a rampage that had left eight people dead.

But Reynolds had a very bad feeling that it might yet.

It wasn’t a hunch. Reynolds would have put his own eyes out before admitting to a hunch. Marvel had lived by his instincts, his hunches, his gut – and Reynolds had despised him with a passion worthy of opera. It was an embarrassment to base investigative decisions on whimsy and prejudice. This was the twenty-first century, for God’s sake; Reynolds hadn’t got two degrees – a first in Criminology and a 2:1 in Law – so he could lynch monkeys and burn witches. But now – when the searches and the lab had yielded next to nothing – DI Reynolds had a theory that things might get worse before they got better.

This theory was substantiated by all the cars that were going to be parked on Exmoor on a daily basis now that it was tourist season. In villages, on verges, behind pubs, in gravel lay-bys, in beauty-spot car parks, at flower shows and steam rallies and village fetes. Most of them would be empty, of course, in the wake of the publicity about Jess Took and Pete Knox, but if simply being alive for thirty-seven years had taught DI Reynolds anything, it had taught him this:

People. Are. Stupid.

Reynolds tried never to underestimate how dumb his fellow human beings could be. How ignorant, how reckless, how cruel. Despite an avalanche of warnings, people still drank and drove, still thought trying crack just once might be fun … Still wouldn’t bother taking their kids with them when they popped into the post office or bought a pint of milk at the corner shop.

Some people just never thought it would happen to them, even when it was happening all around them to people just like them.

Of course, thought Reynolds with a mental sniff, those were probably the same stupid people who were going into the corner shop for a lottery ticket – never considering the bleak maths that showed they were more likely to lose their child to a passing pervert than they were to win the jackpot.

No, if the kidnapper desired more victims, Reynolds was sure there’d be no great shortage of potential prey. All he could do was deploy his men as cleverly as possible in an attempt to get through what he hoped would be a weekend operation of prevention, nothing more.

At least Jonas Holly’s reappearance meant he had another body on the ground, and Reynolds assigned him to the hunt show at Deepwater Farm.

* * *

Steven watched Em plait the horse’s pale mane, and wondered why he felt so strange. A little short of breath. A little worried; a little excited; his mouth the wrong shape to say words.

Maybe he was allergic to horses.

Skip. That was the horse’s name, and it stood with its eyes half closed and its lower lip loose as Em’s fingers separated the creamy hairs, then started to weave them into plaits. Steven watched her hands twist this way and that, the braid growing magically between them. Her face was set with concentration. He watched her secure the plait with a needle and thread and then deftly roll it into a little knot on the horse’s neck and sew it into place like a shiny gold button.

Then she started on the next one.

The silence in the stable had worried him at first. He should really be saying stuff. Entertaining stuff. Stuff that would impress her.

But after a while he was relieved. The more he watched her, the more he realized how little he knew about anything that was happening: Em, the horse, the show – anything. If he’d spoken, it would only have been empty noise. So he just sat there and watched, with barely a word passing between them.

Everything she did was right. The horse knew it and, even in his ignorance, Steven could see it too. She was so deft and quietly confident that all the two of them could do to help was to let her get on with it and not get in the way. When she clicked at Skip and touched his chest, the pony stepped backwards obligingly to let her duck under his throat. She asked Steven to pass her a little wooden box so that she could stand on it to reach the mane more easily. He placed it as carefully as he could, trying to gauge exactly how close she’d like to be – then was pleased when she stepped on to it without adjustment.

He looked into Skip’s drowsy brown eye and felt they were on the same team.

Em saddled the horse with gleaming black leather that smelled of money, then led him on to the concrete yard to the pantomime echo of coconut shells.

She stripped off her mucky blue overalls to reveal dazzling white jodhpurs and sleeveless cotton shirt, like an angel appearing in a Sunday-school story.

‘Do you ride?’ she asked, and Steven shook his head dumbly. ‘Want a go?’

He wondered what the right response would be. He didn’t want to look scared, but he also didn’t want to fall off.

‘I’m scared I’ll fall off,’ he said, immediately stunned by his own stupidity.

But Em only nodded in understanding. ‘Yeah. Falling off is crap.’

She put on a flared jacket with a blue velvet collar and swung into the saddle. ‘You can ride home,’ she said. ‘Then if you fall off it won’t ruin the whole day.’

When he looked up in surprise, she was showing him her little white teeth.

‘Deal,’ he laughed.

The black gates clicked shut behind them and they meandered through the lanes, the air buzzing with summer and her polished boot nudging his arm. Em cooed to the horse and flicked flies off his twitching skin with her whip. Or she just left the silence to settle, reflective and clear, until one of them felt like throwing a little pebble of conversation into it. The ripples seemed effortless, and the closer they came to the show, the better Steven’s allergy got.

15

CHARLIE PEACH WAS USED to sitting and waiting in the minibus. He didn’t mind it. In fact, he liked it. Charlie liked things just the way they were. He liked things not to change. When his dad put him to bed, he liked being in bed; when his dad got him up, he liked being up. So whenever he was in the minibus, he preferred not to get out.

He would get out, of course. Not like Robbie or Miranda. Always kicking and shouting and falling on the ground if they didn’t get their way. Making a fuss, Mrs Johnson called it.

But Charlie never made a fuss. When the time came to get out, he would sit still while Mrs Johnson or Mr King un buckled his harness, and let them help him from the minibus.

This minibus was new. It was much more comfy than the old one, which had ripped vinyl seats and smelled of toilets. Charlie would happily sit here all day – even though it was hot.