Finders Keepers

Damn.

‘This is important, Jonas.’ The panic inside her gave a little edge to her voice.

He must have heard it. There was an interminable silence during which Kate Gulliver had to literally bite her lip to keep from begging.

‘Do I have to?’ he said flatly.

Never in her life had she been so close to a barefaced lie.

‘No,’ she said tightly. ‘Once I’ve signed off on a client, they are not obliged to undergo further therapy unless circumstances change.’

‘Then I’d rather not.’

‘Very well,’ she said like a humourless headmistress.

‘Thank you anyway,’ said Jonas, who didn’t sound as if he meant it.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Please remember I am here whenever you need me. Any time at all, OK?’

‘OK.’

She hung up and saw that she had dug a blue-ink hole right through next Thursday with the golden nib of her graduation pen.

As he put it back in its cradle, Jonas noticed that the phone was covered in blood.

Because his hand was covered in blood.

His arm didn’t sting until he noticed the two long shallow slits running down it, from bicep to wrist. The blood was all over the flagstones of the hallway, so he crooked his elbow and walked back into the kitchen, where the sink looked like a Francis Bacon. The fruit knife lay where he must have left it on the draining board. Blood droplets had hit the floor and splattered there like little red sunshines.

Jonas rinsed his arm under the cold tap.

He wrapped it in a tea towel and fell asleep on the couch.

* * *

Reynolds puzzled over the notes.

You don’t love her for Jess Took; You don’t love him for Peter Knox; You don’t love them for Maisie and Kylie.

He sat at the Formica desk in the mobile unit, with the door open to try to create a breeze that would dry the sweat on the back of his neck. Through the doorway he could see an obelisk of yellow-brown moorland dotted with gorse and heather and topped with a slice of Wedgwood sky.

‘Do you think the notes were written at the scenes?’ he asked.

‘Hmm?’ said Rice. She was looking at the computer screen. Reynolds had checked the history and someone had already visited Match.com. He wasn’t necessarily blaming Rice, but it did make him wonder what boxes her perfect man would have to tick. He’d bet none of them said ‘Balding’ and thanked God he’d taken action.

‘I said, do you think the notes were written at the scenes?’

‘Why?’

‘Because they’re tailored to the children abducted. You don’t love her. Him. Them. Either he took the time to write them at the scenes, or he chose his victims beforehand and had the notes prepared.’

Rice pouted in thought and then nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I agree.’

‘Thank you,’ he told her with a sarcastic eyebrow.

‘But taking Kylie and Maisie off the bus was pretty random,’ mused Rice. ‘He can’t have planned that. Maybe he just carries notes around with him and leaves whichever one suits the situation.’

Reynolds frowned and made a noise with his tongue that drove her nuts. Tu-tu-tu. Then he shook his head. ‘I don’t think that sounds right. It seems a bit organized.’

‘He’s only scribbling a note, not icing it on a birthday cake.’

‘Regardless,’ said Reynolds, ‘we should consider both scenarios. If he writes them at the scene, or has them prepared for any eventuality, that’s one thing. But if he wrote them in anticipation of abducting particular children, then that’s another thing entirely. It means he chose those children. Maybe watched them.’

Rice nodded. ‘We’ve already asked the parents about anyone who might have been hanging around before the abductions. Nobody remembers anything.’

‘That doesn’t mean he wasn’t there,’ shrugged Reynolds. ‘My point is, if he did watch them, then maybe he watched them for a reason. Maybe the children were being abused or neglected. Maybe he felt they really weren’t loved. It could be a link.’

‘And it’s a link they’d hardly reveal.’

‘Exactly.’ Reynolds nodded. ‘Would you mind having a little dig, Elizabeth?’

Of course she didn’t mind. How could she? He was the inspector and she was the sergeant.

26

LUCY HOLLY HAD BEEN buried without him.

Her body had been retained for more than a month for forensic examination as part of the investigation into the murders in Shipcott that winter, but Jonas had still been in hospital by the time it was finally released for interment. Her parents had arranged and paid for the funeral, but had been kind enough to have her buried in Shipcott, even though they lived in Surrey. They had always liked Jonas, and he had no other family of his own. When he eventually got home and realized what had been done in his absence, he was overwhelmed with gratitude. They still called him now and then – Lucy’s mother encouraging and practical, and her father quietly useless but no less kind.

Six months after the burial, the undertaker had called Jonas to let him know that the grave had ‘settled’ and that a headstone could now be erected in the little churchyard of St Mary’s, where his parents were also buried. For weeks after the call, Jonas had nightmares – and sometimes horrific daytime visions – of what the ‘settling’ of the grave really meant: that the flesh that had been Lucy had decomposed and liquefied and was now leaking from the crushed coffin into the Exmoor sod.

He’d thought of a thousand words to be carved on her stone, but in his shattered state the poetic always ran away from him and into maudlin doggerel, and so finally he’d kept it simple:

LUCY JANE HOLLY

Born April 21, 1982

Died January 29, 2011

Missed Every Day

The undertaker had provided an ugly stainless-steel jar with holes in the lid for flowers, which Jones never used and generally hid behind the headstone. Instead he’d installed two bird feeders – one filled with nyjer seeds and the other with peanuts – which attracted the blue tits and goldfinches to Lucy’s grave for most of the year. In the winter he’d hung a coconut shell filled with fat, and had often seen a robin there too.

From Lucy’s grave, it was fewer than twenty paces to the church door where they’d stood for their wedding photos.

Till death do us part.

Today Jonas had brought new peanuts.

But as soon as he got to the wooden gate of the churchyard, he saw there was someone already at Lucy’s grave.

Jonas immediately took his hand off the heavy iron handle and stayed within the shadow of the stone-built arbour.

People did leave flowers on her grave. Not often, but often enough to show that she’d made an impression on the village in the few short years she’d lived here with him. Probably once a month he’d come here to find the ugly jar gainfully employed by wilting poppies or a spray of heather and cow parsley. He knew that Mrs Paddon from next door left daffodils in spring and roses in the autumn, and he was pretty sure Alan Marsh sometimes left flowers on Lucy’s grave, because they were the same as the ones he left on the nearby graves of his wife and son.

From his slightly obscured viewpoint, it was only when the figure stood up that Jonas recognized Steven