Finders Keepers

Inside the car, the dog heaved itself to its feet and pressed its snout to the hole. A few blocks of safety glass tinkled free of the window.

Jonas heard the whoop of police sirens and walked back to the minibus to meet Reynolds.

Charlie Peach was not hiding or playing a joke. Charlie Peach had just plain vanished.

Reynolds blamed Jonas Holly. One hundred per cent. His only task had been to stop anyone leaving the show ground through the single exit with a child that was not his own – and he’d failed miserably.

The man was a jinx.

Reynolds looked again at the note stuck to the steering wheel. Even without touching it he could see a tiny fibre of greenish wool clinging to its gummed edge.

The man they were hunting had been right here, in the confines of a field that also contained a policeman who had been specifically assigned to look for him.

The more Reynolds thought about it, the worse it got.

Jonas appeared at his shoulder and Reynolds was suddenly uncomfortably aware that, at his height, Jonas probably had a bird’s eye view of his plugs. He hunched away from him angrily, then bitterly slapped the roof of the minibus where Charlie Peach used to be.

‘Welcome back, Holly,’ he said.

Reynolds’s words would sting Jonas later, but right now he ignored them and told the DI what he knew so far. Reynolds asked follow-up questions while Rice made notes. Reynolds handed Jonas a roll of police tape and told him to secure the scene, then he and Rice went to look at the other cars.

Someone fetched Jonas some metal stakes and helped him to hammer them into the firm ground around the minibus, then Jonas unwound the tape, watched by a wide-eyed audience of children in jodhpurs and ribbons.

When he’d done that, Jonas stood by the minibus and stared at the empty seats. In his mind’s eye he saw Charlie Peach, left there, maybe scared, maybe just interested, as the man approached. Had he followed him on a promise of sweets or an Xbox? Had he been dragged from his harness kicking and biting? Had he shouted for help? Would he even have understood what was going on? A mental age of four, the carers had said. Jonas felt a surge of anger at whoever had stolen such a child.

You have to save the boy, Jonas.

Lucy’s voice was so clear in his head that his heart leaped, and he had to stop himself turning to find her.

She wasn’t there. Lucy was dead. She wasn’t there.

She never was.

After the initial shock, the echo of her voice calmed him – just as it always had.

Jonas stared sightlessly at the little yellow note. ‘I’ll save him,’ he whispered fiercely. ‘I promise.’

* * *

Steven and Em had been allowed out soon after the police arrived, and walked the two miles home in silence broken only by the pony’s metallic hoofs scraping the tarmac. Em was distracted and hadn’t offered to let him ride. He hoped she was thinking about the missing boy, but he feared she was bored – or irritated by his weirdness over Jonas Holly.

At the entrance to Old Barn Farm she said, ‘Bye then.’

She wasn’t even going to let him back through the gates. He was crushed.

‘Bye then,’ he said awkwardly, then added ‘Thanks,’ because he meant it.

‘See you at school.’

‘See you at school.’

He patted Skip’s warm neck and turned towards home, hearing the gates opening behind him.

‘Do you … want to go out again some time?’

He looked back in surprise.

Em looked uncharacteristically nervous. ‘Only if you want to.’

‘I want to.’

‘Good.’ She smiled. ‘Me too.’

She waved.

‘Bye,’ he said again, and held his hand up in return.

She pointed Skip down the driveway, and Steven walked home. At least, he assumed later that he must have walked home, but only because home was where he found himself when he finally stopped running in circles, laughing and shouting with joy, inside his own head.

* * *

There were 127 cars and horseboxes on the site, and by 6pm all but three had been searched as they left through the gate, past a yawning Graham Nash and an industrious Elizabeth Rice.

Only the minibus and the Focus and Megane that had suffered broken windows remained, with three men from the forensics lab at Portishead poring over them.

Their disgorged occupants, with assorted children and dogs, got more and more hungry, tired and fractious until finally Jonas offered to drive them all home himself, just for some peace and quiet. He took them in two shifts – first Alison Marks, the chatty owner of the Focus, along with her family, who lived in Exford. There was no conversation to be had with Barbara Moorcroft on their way to Loxhore. Her two hysterical Patterdales barked relentlessly and her three children sat in pained silence throughout the ride, apparently used to being yapped into submission.

On his way home, Jonas stopped at the highest point of the road that draped across Withypool Common. He cut the engine and listened to the silence swell around him like a balm.

He’d become so used to silence since Lucy had died that he’d forgotten how stressful noise could be. How stressful talking and people could be. The thought that he’d once talked to people every day seemed impossible to him now. And the idea that he would have to get used to it again was sobering.

He wasn’t sure he could.

Jonas expelled a long, shuddering breath that he felt he might have drawn in hours ago when Charlie Peach first went missing. Everything after that point was hazy to him – a fairground blur of panic and shouting and movement and guilt.

But now – here atop the moor, with the window down and the summer evening breeze soothing his mind – he could start to think again. He drank in the stillness, even as he started to recognize its separate components: a blackbird somewhere close by, the swish of the long grass and the dry rattle of gorse; the ebb and flow of the air itself against his ear – a coded whisper in breathy Morse.

Jonas sat and allowed the moor to clear his head.

He didn’t want to think about the day just gone, but the broken windows nagged him.

He was sure a couple of cars at Tarr Steps, where Pete Knox was taken, had also been vandalized. He would have to ask Reynolds about Dunkery Beacon. If windows had been broken there too, the connection with the kidnapper would be undeniable.

But it still begged the question: why?

The answer stayed in the shadows like a wolf skirting a campfire.

17

THREE CHILDREN GONE in the space of a fortnight.

The Sun called him the Pied Piper, this man who was spiriting the children of Exmoor away, right under the noses of their guardians, and the other tabloids fell on the name with glee. Even the broadsheets picked up on it, although they sniffily referred to it as ‘the case some are calling the Pied Piper’, which meant they could use the name while somehow maintaining a dignified distance from it.

Either way, Reynolds found it unhelpful. The name conjured up a damning image of the police stupidly failing to spot an endless crocodile of children being danced away across the moor by a man in a jester’s outfit playing a tin whistle.

The tabloids also seemed to imply that the kidnapper of three children must be an awful lot easier to catch than the kidnapper of one, and with the national media spotlight turned so brightly on the case, he was now at risk