Finders Keepers

Lately Elizabeth Rice had greeted the homily with stony silence.

Pity. There’d been a time a few years back when he’d thought Rice might be girlfriend material. Even wife. But then they’d spent time together on cases and he’d seen all the things that were wrong with her. It wasn’t just the toast and the baked-bean juice. She often wore jeans, she laughed too loudly, and she sang in the shower. She didn’t have a bad voice but she had no taste in music – or consideration for those who did, and who might be trying to work just the other side of the Travelodge wall.

Slowly those faults had eroded any ideas he might once have harboured about a possible future together, and her burgeoning intellectual jealousy was very unattractive.

Kate said she would contact Steven Lamb’s old therapist.

‘Excellent,’ said Reynolds. ‘Keep me informed.’ He hung up and turned to Rice, who immediately held up two thin, white-bread sandwiches in plastic boxes – a barrier to his victory.

‘Chicken or ham?’ she said.

They both looked like the antithesis of nutrition. He thought of DCI Marvel and felt a single solitary pang of guilt. No, not guilt – empathy. It was tough at the top.

‘Chicken.’

They ate in the hot car. He was halfway through his sandwich before he realized it was, in fact, ham. He grimaced and sighed loudly but Rice didn’t ask him what was wrong.

Reynolds hoped his new hair made her realize just how badly she’d blown it.

* * *

The big one’s not eating, but the youngster’s settling in. Didn’t want either of ’em, but what’s to be done? The big one come sneaking up on me just as I’m winkling the first bay out from under the car. Grabs me hard and so I hit him with the stick. I know him too – and he knows me – so I had to bring him with. And right when I’m getting him in the car, here come another one trying to steal the first! It were Piccadilly Circus in the middle of Landacre Wood. Lucky they’re both scrawny.

But it fills up the yard again. That’s the main thing. Bin empty too long; made me itch with the emptiness. Every one I filled made the others look even emptier. Now I look at the runs, all full of life, and it’s like a sigh of relief in my head.

They’re still searching, but I’m not bothered. Let ’em come. I got my hiding places. Serves all them folk right. Teach ’em to value what they got, be it children or traditions. You can’t get ’em back. Once they’re gone they’re gone for good.

Still, I don’t like the big one. Something not right with that one, I always thought. Reminds me of a hound I had once off the Beaufort – Bosun. Huge brute, he were. A demon in the field, Jim Wetherall said when he offloaded him, but the wily old bastard never mentioned him were mazed in the yard. Bit a horse once. Imagine that – a bloody foxhound biting a horse! Not a nip either – a right proper chunk out the belly and I had to whip him raw before him let go.

Only dog I were ever wary of, Bosun, and the only one I ever shot and was happy to do it. Mostly him was as waggy as the rest, and that’s what made him so dangerous, see – the way he’d turn, sudden like.

The big one’s like that, I reckon – pretending to be weak, not eating, not moving. But I never had a hound fool me twice and I won’t be starting now.

So the big one’s chained up. Because of Bosun.

The others are free in the runs, like the old ones. They get hungry when they hear the knife like the old ones too! Already come running to the gates, slavering – specially the smallest bay – he’s a hungry one! The maids are little charmers, too. Make daisy chains in the meadow! Like a storybook.

They’re not as noisy as the old ones, but maybe that’ll come with time. They can make all the noise they like up here and no one to hear ’em for miles.

I miss the noise. That quiet made me mazed.

Maybe I can walk ’em too, some time. At night maybe, and coupled up like pups to keep ’em from darting off all over. It would be good for ’em, and good for me. Watching ’em get fit and strong and biddable.

Don’t know if I were happy before. Never rightly thought of it. But this makes me feel something like happy again.

It’s good to get back in the old routine.

Good to have something to love.

38

THE INCINERATOR IGNITED with a soft whump and made Steven’s mouth fill with saliva. It angered him, and he resisted the urge to rise and move to the front of the kennel to await feeding like the other children did. It made him think of the polar bears he’d once seen at Bristol Zoo – pacing tirelessly, staring up at the crowds, waiting for feeding time.

Instead he lay on the straw that was his bed and looked up through the yellowing corrugated plastic. Strips of dead flies and bird shit and little bits of grit. That had been his sky for six days now. His new horizons were close and diamond-meshed.

Steven wiped the drool off his lips and got to his knees.

The crumbling grey block wall at the back of the kennel had chinks that allowed him to see straight across the yard to the row of empty stables. If he leaned to one side, a chink showed him the ramp and partly inside the big shed – and the huntsman going about his work.

Today his work was a cow.

Steven watched the black-and-white beast walk cautiously off the trailer. It stopped at the bottom and gazed around with empty eyes. Steven had been to the new supermarket in Barnstaple once and seen old people doing the same thing, standing in the cheese aisle, looking for the tea.

‘Hup! Hup!’

The huntsman touched her hip and the cow moved down the rutted ramp into the big shed, skidding a little and leaning back to maintain her balance, her giant udders swinging.

The huntsman followed her down in his green overalls, boots and flat cap. He didn’t wear his stocking mask in the big shed and Steven could see the years of wrinkles and creases, the small blue eyes, the lipless mouth and the yellowing teeth.

‘He doesn’t know we can see him,’ whispered Jess beside him, and he nodded. It was a small thing, but it was worth noting. Maybe they could use it one day. He didn’t know how, but most things were useful, he’d always found.

The gunshot cracked loudly in the shed, and Steven jumped. Two cages away, Charlie sucked in a shocked breath and then started to howl like a child who’s fallen off a bicycle – with a wide mouth and uninhibited lungs.

Jess turned away and sat down on her raised straw bed. ‘It’s hot,’ she said dully.

Steven didn’t answer. They all knew it was hot. It hadn’t rained for ever.

He felt the collar around his neck. It was not uncomfortable, but it was annoying and confusing. The little padlock that held it shut lay in the hollow at the base of his throat like a cold pendant, but if he lay too long in the sun it grew hot enough to hurt. The collar itself was old leather, soft and tactile. There was a flat metal strip on it, perhaps two inches long; Steven imagined that it was where a dog’s name might be engraved. He ran his fingernail over it carefully but could feel nothing that might indicate that his own name – or another’s – had been marked there. He took some comfort in that; the collar had not been waiting for him. He was not chosen for this. Not special.

He thought of Em, who was.

Too special for him.

She probably would have realized it soon anyway, but now that he was gone, what was there to keep her true?

Was she already with someone else? Maybe even one of his friends? Lewis or Lalo Bryant. Lewis was definitely capable of turning comfort into copping a feel. The thought made Steven’s lips thin, and he thumped the wall with the side of his fist.

‘What’s up?’ said Jess Took.