Finders Keepers

but a schoolboy – a gangly, dark-eyed youth with jutting ears, a jagged haircut, and that crazily transient combination of fair, boyish complexion and shaving stubble.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Rice. How can I help you?’

The boy glanced at her makeshift turban, then looked away. ‘Um,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’

Rice sighed inwardly. Children were a mystery to her. She couldn’t really remember what it was like to be one, and the children of her friends and sisters always made her slightly uncomfortable. She would smile at them and they would stare solemnly back at her, as if they knew what she was thinking.

Babies cried on contact.

She didn’t dislike children, but they bored her. She even got impatient with cute children in Hollywood movies, with their curls and their adenoids and their smart-arse comebacks.

Before she could catch it, she sighed outwardly too, which made the boy in front of her blush. This made her feel bad enough to make an effort with him, even though she knew her hair was going to look like total shit for the rest of the day.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Steven,’ he said. ‘Lamb.’

The name rang a faint bell, but she didn’t waste time wondering why. She softened her tone consciously.

‘What did you want to tell me, Steven?’

Steven wished he hadn’t come. He hadn’t thought things through, and didn’t have the words ready to explain. He’d once played one of Fagin’s boys in a school production of Oliver! He’d only had one line – ‘Kill you as soon as look at you, he would’ – but had been astonished by the sheer number of ways he could get that line wrong. Either he forgot the words entirely, or remembered them but all in the wrong order. Even when he got the line right he sounded like Yoda.

That was how he felt now. As if saying the words he’d come to say would only complicate things that were already fuzzy and fleeting in his own head. Still, he couldn’t go without saying something. He didn’t know much about women, but he knew that they were always more grumpy when they had wet hair, so he’d better make an effort.

‘It’s about Mr Holly,’ he said.

The woman – DS Rice – looked slightly more interested than she had a second ago, but Steven was lost again. How could he tell her all the stuff that was in his head?

He killed his wife! I think he did; I saw him hit her. He grabbed my arm. He said something about hurting children. Maybe he took those children. He could do it. If he could kill his wife he could murder children, couldn’t he? People hurt children – that’s what he said. People hurt children. And he scared me. I thought he was going to kill me. His voice wasn’t his voice and his eyes were like nothing. He could kill children. He could kill anyone. I know he could.

Here, in daylight, in the stale-beer bar of the Red Lion, talking to a policewoman with a towel on her head, it sounded like a case for Scooby-Doo.

DS Rice glanced at her watch.

‘I don’t think he likes children,’ Steven said carefully.

‘Why do you think that? Did he say something?’

‘Kind of. He told me people hurt children.’

‘But that’s true. Sadly. Isn’t it? People sometimes do hurt children.’

‘Yes. But …’ He struggled to explain and finally couldn’t. ‘It was just the way he said it.’ He paused and then finished in a rush: ‘I think maybe he took those children. And I think he could hurt someone. I know he could.’

‘That’s a serious allegation, Steven. Do you have any proof of that?’ DS Rice was looking at him sharply now, as if she was about to get angry with him.

Did he have proof? He knew it was true – he’d seen Mr Holly slap his wife – but did he have proof? He knew what proof was, what evidence was, and it wasn’t just saying you’d seen something when there was nobody else there to back you up. That was just his word against the word of a policeman.

‘Not really,’ he said finally.

‘And what reason do you have to think he might have taken the children?’

‘Just … I don’t know.’ That was never going to be enough, he knew. ‘Just a feeling really.’

DS Rice looked at her watch quite openly this time. ‘OK, Steven. Is there anything else?’

He shook his head. He knew he’d failed. She’d already lost interest.

‘Well, thanks for coming in to speak to us, all right?’

‘OK,’ he said. ‘But I’m not making it up.’

‘I didn’t say you were.’

He thought she kind of had, but let it go.

Then she glanced down at his scuffed school bag. ‘You off to school now?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Anything else you want to tell us, you just come to the mobile unit in the car park, all right? Anything you think could help with finding the children. OK? After nine.’

‘OK,’ he said.

‘Thanks, Steven.’

Elizabeth Rice watched Steven Lamb leave the bar, hoisting his backpack on to his shoulders as he went. She didn’t remember what it was to be a child, but one thing he’d said had made her remember something.

It was just the WAY he said it.

It made her think of being sixteen and telling her mother that a neighbour, Mr Craddock, had made suggestive remarks to her at the bus stop on her way to school one day. She’d known Mr Craddock since she was small, and always thought he was a nice man. In the summer he would let Elizabeth walk his dog, Fuzzy, because her parents wouldn’t let her have one. Once he’d shouted at some boys who’d been teasing her. He always waved and smiled, and his wife did too.

And then that day at the bus stop – when she was sixteen years old – he’d asked her if they spanked her at school.

‘No!’ She’d laughed. The idea was silly. Nobody got spanked at school any more. Even the word was laughable. ‘They just give us detention.’

‘What about at home?’ Mr Craddock had said. ‘Does your daddy spank you?’

‘No,’ said Elizabeth, and hadn’t laughed, because suddenly this was making her feel uncomfortable.

They’d got on the bus together and she remembered how she’d hated the fact that he’d come up the steps behind her, knowing that he must be looking at her bare legs under the school skirt she’d always insisted on wearing just a little too short. Feeling that Mr Craddock had moved from the column marked ‘Nice Man’ to the one marked ‘Pervert’ in the mental list she kept. A list that seemed to be growing in direct proportion to her breasts.

It had been a week before she’d told her mother about it.

‘I’m sure he was just joking,’ her mother had said.

‘He wasn’t,’ Rice could hear herself saying now. ‘It was the way he said it.’

Now the grown-up Elizabeth Rice watched the boy pass the small leaded window, head down, frowning.

She went upstairs and dried her hair – which was shit – and mentioned the conversation to Reynolds over breakfast.

‘Steven Lamb?’ he said, prissily rubbing his fingers and thumb together to dislodge crumbs.

‘Yes,’ said Rice. She thought that Reynolds might be a lot more attractive if he didn’t always have the continental breakfast. Croissants weren’t manly.

‘He’s that kid who nearly got killed by Arnold Avery.’

‘I thought it rang a bell.’

‘Interesting,’ mused Reynolds, raising a Roger Moore eyebrow.

Rice didn’t ask why. That was what Reynolds wanted and she hated playing silly games, in or out of a