Finders Keepers

‘You think he could have got through there?’ said Em.

Steven examined the nettles, then shook his head. ‘They’d be broken if anyone had gone through them.’

They walked on. Even though they were only a hundred yards from where people were searching desperately for the missing boy, it was quiet here. The loudest sound was the chirrup of crickets in the long grass, and the occasional thump and rustle of rabbits as they warned each other and ran away. One baby, too young to understand danger, sat in the open as they approached. They were less than ten feet away before it gave a playful binky and hopped into the hedge, making them both laugh.

The ensuing silence was such that they could hear the rain-starved grass crackle underfoot.

‘Thanks for bringing back the trailer,’ said Em suddenly.

Steven’s stomach lurched. ‘I didn’t take it.’

‘It doesn’t matter who took it,’ said Em with a shrug.

Steven stopped her with a hand on her arm. He felt a little thrill at touching her skin and took his hand back hurriedly as she turned to him.

‘I promise,’ he said urgently. ‘I didn’t take it.’

Em nodded her understanding that the distinction was important to him. ‘But you brought it back,’ she said. ‘You remembered the code.’ She looked at him until he broke eye-contact.

When they walked on this time, she took his hand.

A tingle ran up Steven’s arm and spread across his chest, kick-starting his allergy again.

He stole a glance at her. She seemed unaffected. Their arms formed a V between them, his wiry and too long, hers bare and slim and perfect. At the point of the V, their hands tied a knot that swung easily – as if they’d been holding hands for years.

She said something and he didn’t hear her, so she said it again.

‘We should let that policeman know about the stile, just in case.’

Steven saw she was leading him back up the hill to the rows of cars. Even from this low angle, he could see Mr Holly towering above the roofs. Following him was one thing; initiating a conversation with him was another thing entirely.

‘No,’ he said, and stopped walking.

She stopped too and their hands slid apart.

‘Why?’

Steven floundered. ‘Just. No. Just because. He’s busy. And we shouldn’t walk over their … Over the … you know, crime scene and stuff.’

‘Crime scene? Kids go missing all the time at shows. They always find them and everything goes on the same.’ She spoke a little sharply – as if saying it would make it happen, and Steven took his uneasy cue from that.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘They’ll probably find him in a minute.’

But the genie was out of the bottle, and Em looked worried.

‘I’m going to tell him. You coming?’

She started walking. He didn’t follow her.

As Em spoke to Jonas Holly, the policeman looked across the roofs of the cars towards the corner of the field and made fleeting eye-contact with Steven.

Em returned to him. ‘He said he’d check it out.’

‘OK. Good.’

As they walked away, she looked at him quizzically. ‘Are you in trouble with the police?’

‘No. Of course not.’

‘Then why are you being so weird?’

What could he say? Explaining that he alone suspected that the village policeman had murdered his wife would make him sound crazy.

And now there was another suspicion as well. A new feeling just starting to take shape in Steven’s mind. Mr Holly had re-emerged, just as three children went missing. Steven didn’t have strong views on the validity of coincidence, but he had learned to trust his gut, and it rarely lied to him.

He could tell Em nothing of this, of course. Trying to justify odd behaviour by revealing insanity was unlikely to impress her. He knew this instinctively, too, and was relieved that that, at least, implied some sort of normality.

She was still looking at him, waiting for an answer.

‘Sorry,’ he said finally.

She stared at him for a long moment, then turned away.

He trailed behind her to where Skip was dozing in the sunshine.

* * *

You don’t love him.

Jonas stared at the yellow note on the wheel and still hoped it was a hoax. A joke. Maybe Charlie was an attention-seeker – or another child had put him up to it. Charlie could be hiding in a Portaloo right now, giggling at the mayhem he’d caused, Jonas thought.

He hoped.

Because if it wasn’t a hoax, Jonas had an awful sinking feeling that Charlie Peach was already beyond their help.

All around the showground, people were searching. Maybe three hundred people in a single large field. If Charlie were still on the site, he’d have been found by now, surely?

If he weren’t, that meant that the gate had been shut too late.

At this time of day, the priority was to get people into the show, not to keep tabs on those few who were leaving after early classes or drop-offs. He couldn’t blame Graham Nash. The man on the gate was expected to do nothing more than make sure cars leaving didn’t crash into cars coming in. He was not there to check whether they were leaving with a stolen child stuffed in the boot or hog-tied on the back seat …

No, that was his job.

Jonas wandered up the hill a little so he would have a better view of the whole site. He looked across the rows of cars and horseboxes that covered the side of the sloping field like bright scales. His eye was caught by a dot of darkness on the window of a car a few rows in. He frowned and walked over to it. As he got closer he could see that the darkness was a neat hole in the rear passenger window of a silver Renault Megane. He cupped his hands and peered through the window into the dark interior, expecting to see something worth stealing on the back seat. There was a ripped map book, a scattering of wax crayons, a little girl’s cardigan. He noticed a similar hole in the opposite rear window and walked around the car to look at that too. It was not big enough to put even a child’s hand through and he noticed that the Megane’s doors were still locked. If someone had attempted to feed some kind of instrument through the window to pull open the locks, they’d been interrupted.

Interrupted in their quest to steal wax crayons.

Jonas looked over his shoulder and could see the minibus. He stepped away from the Megane and started to make his way back to it. As he passed a Ford Focus he saw that it, too, had a broken window – a small, neat hole surrounded by a mosaic of cracked safety glass. He peered through the two-inch hole and saw a large, tubby chocolate Labrador draped awkwardly across the rear seat. It raised its head and gave a token bark, but looked too hot to do any more.

Before he even thought about it, Jonas tried to open the door but it was locked.

Shit.

Now his prints would be on the handle. Bollocks and shit. Reynolds would be justifiably furious with him – especially after the debacle during the last case, when his prints and hair had been found at more than one scene. Even though Jonas had been there in an official capacity, Marvel had made a song and dance about it and had been gunning for him from then on. He didn’t want to alienate Reynolds in the same way.

Instead he needed to glean as much information as possible that might help them to find Charlie Peach.

Jonas looked towards the minibus again; it was easily visible, maybe sixty yards away. Had the kidnapper broken this window and then had his eye caught by Charlie? Maybe his ear? Jonas bent at the knees a little to reduce his six-foot-four to more average proportions. Even from six inches lower he could see the minibus clearly.