Finders Keepers

‘No,’ said Mr Tedworthy. ‘We only wish we had. That poor boy.’

Mrs Tedworthy nodded in agreement. ‘Our granddaughter’s the same age.’ She handed Jonas a photo of the ugliest child he had ever seen.

‘Chloe,’ she said, as if it mattered – or improved things.

‘Lovely,’ he managed.

‘If anything happened to her, well—’ She glanced at her husband and he put a reassuring hand on hers, as if he’d taken care of things so that they’d never have to suffer something so awful, so she should stop worrying her pretty little head about it.

You’re wrong, thought Jonas sadly. No child was ever completely safe. To imagine that it was possible was a delusion. Lucy had wanted children, but Jonas had known better. Not that it gave him any satisfaction to have been proven right once again. Lucy just hadn’t understood how dangerous the world could be.

And never would now.

It was small comfort, but it was something.

He stood up to go.

‘There was one thing, though,’ said Mrs Tedworthy. ‘It struck us both as strange, didn’t it?’ she said, looking at her husband, who nodded.

‘What was that?’ said Jonas, suddenly alert.

‘Well, I had some embroidery supplies on the parcel shelf. Quite a lot, and they’re not cheap, you know. Right there in plain sight. And yet … they didn’t steal them.’

Jonas waited for a beat, in case she was joking.

‘Isn’t that strange, Mr Holly?’ she insisted.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Maybe the kidnapper wasn’t the needlework type.’

* * *

Tamzin Skinner sat on the metal steps of her mobile home, showing off her dirty toenails in pink flip- flops.

‘So though I’ve got insurance, it’s not worth claiming. They really screw you, these insurance companies, don’t they?’

‘They certainly do,’ Jonas said as he peered into the hole punched in the rear window of her rustbucket 1987 Nissan Sunny. Even though the hole was only the size of a ping-pong ball, Jonas guessed that the cost of repairing it would probably be more than the car was worth. Which was virtually nothing.

Skinner – a stick-thin forty-year-old with the dusty complexion and lip wrinkles of a lifelong smoker – was the only one of the three people on the list who had a police record. Low-level drugs and one caution for soliciting.

‘Not worth fixing then, is it?’ She shrugged, leaning further back than was necessary to get a tobacco pouch from the front pocket of her cut-off jeans – and treating Jonas to a view of her belly ring and very nearly her Brazilian.

‘Probably not,’ he agreed.

She snorted ‘Typical’ and rolled a fag.

‘Did you see anything or anyone strange or noteworthy around the car park that day, Miss Skinner?’

She sucked smoke deep into her lungs and held it there while she shook her head. ‘I already told the police everything I know,’ she said with smoke curling out of her nose and mouth. ‘Saw nothing, heard nothing, noticed nothing. Nothing like that, anyway. You know.’

Jonas nodded. He had nothing else to ask, but given that he was unlikely to be able to go to Cumbria to interview Stanley Cotton or to see his car, he was reluctant to leave Tamzin Skinner’s meagre home with nothing to show for his day’s work.

There was a long silence between them, which became a little uncomfortable when it was plain that his visit should really be at an end. Mrs Tedworthy would have offered him another scone; Tamzin Skinner leaned backwards on her elbows and stuck out her tits.

Jonas turned away and did another circuit of the car. He seriously doubted that it was insured. She’d probably just said that to throw him off track. Certainly the tax was out of date by two months.

‘You need tax,’ he said – but not with any real intent to do anything about it.

She dropped her chest a little and said, ‘Yeah?’ as if it were a surprise.

He got back to the hole in the window and bent to look at it again.

‘You married?’ she said, out of the blue.

‘Yes,’ he told her.

‘All the good ones are.’

‘So they say,’ he said neutrally.

He didn’t want to look up and catch her eye, in case this conversation got awkward. Instead he pretended to be intensely interested in the hole with its surround of crazed glass, looking at it from every angle.

As he did, he saw something he hadn’t noticed before.

Halfway in and halfway out of the window – trapped by the broken glass – was a black hair about two inches long. Instantly he thought of Reynolds and his tufts, but this was darker than Reynolds’s hair.

He looked around at Tamzin Skinner, who was a bottle blonde, and whose parting was brown, not black.

A seed of excitement sprouted in Jonas’s belly. If this hair belonged to the kidnapper then they could have DNA within the week; mass testing across the moor; an arrest within the month. Maybe Jess and Pete and Charlie would still be alive in a month. Maybe they could be saved. Was that possible? The bumping of his heart was a response to the injection of pure hope – a sensation he hadn’t known for years. Literally years.

‘There’s a hair here,’ he said, and turned to point it out to the woman. She got up and came over with a little sway of the hips, and stood too close to him – her arm rubbing his as she peered at the hair.

She nodded. ‘That’ll be Jack’s.’

‘Who’s Jack?’ he said, feeling his hope teetering on the brink.

‘My dog.’

‘You have a dog,’ he said. Less a question than a statement.

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Lurcher.’

‘Oh,’ said Jonas, looking around. ‘Where is it, then?’

‘At the pub,’ she said. And then, when Jonas looked at her for more, she added defensively, ‘With my boyfriend.’

‘Oh,’ said Jonas again. He plucked the hair from the window and dropped it, wishing it were something heavy that he could throw hard into the scrub behind the caravan, to satisfy his disappointment. No hair from the kidnapper. No DNA and no arrest, and no found and rescued children.

Nothing.

He’d been so sure that the broken windows meant something.

But it was just a hair from a dog.

A dog.

It hit Jonas like something physical.

Dogs in the cars.

‘Did you have your dog with you that day at Tarr Steps?’

‘Yeah, we take Jack pretty much everywhere. If we leave him here he chews shit up.’

‘Was he in the car when the window was broken?’

‘Yeah. Why?’

‘Excuse me a minute.’ Jonas pulled his phone from his pocket and walked slightly away from the woman.

He asked David Tedworthy the same question.

They’d walked Gus down to Tarr Steps and back, then left him in the car while they did an hour-long hike. ‘He’s old and wobbly, you see. He can’t do long walks any more. He’s happier in the car.’

He called Directory Inquiries and had them connect him to Barbara Moorcroft. He asked whether she’d left her dogs in the car at any point while at the show.

‘Yes,’ she said, and Jonas could hear faint yapping in the background. ‘Just while I got the kids settled with the picnic and things. Then I went back and got them. That’s when I noticed the windows had been broken. Then