Finders Keepers

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Shut up.’

She stuck her tongue out at him but not with any great feeling.

Steven put his eye back to the best chink in the wall. He watched the huntsman sharpen his knife in a series of sibilant swipes, and swallowed the resulting saliva. His stomach rumbled. He turned away before the cuts were made but soon there was the clink of chains as the winch was attached, and then the rising ssssssssss that was the hide separating from the flesh it had protected since birth.

‘Sorry, Jess,’ said Steven.

She stuck her tongue out at him again – but this time she smiled.

Down the row, Maisie and Kylie and Pete were playing I Spy. The game had limited scope – I spy a fence; I spy a gate; I spy concrete – but the three youngest children often played it anyway. Sometimes they played ‘Shout for Help’, in which one of them counted down from three and they all screamed ‘Help.’ Charlie usually joined in, but Jess never did; when Steven asked why, she just shrugged and said, ‘They build kennels where people won’t be bothered by the dogs howling. Nobody’s going to hear us.’

‘Somebody might,’ said Steven, and shouted with the rest of them. But the huntsman never seemed perturbed by the game, so Steven guessed Jess was probably right.

Steven squinted through the wall again. The cow’s carcass was being winched through a dark doorway within the big shed now, giant, pink and stripped of skin. The hide lay in a black-and-white pile along with the feet and the tail and the head, with eyes gone milky and its rude blue tongue lapping at a little ooze of blood on the floor.

Soon the air would stink of hair and horn. Something in the incinerator always popped loudly; Steven didn’t know what it was, but imagined the eyes, and was relieved every time it was over.

‘What do you think he wants?’ he said.

Jess shrugged. ‘Money, I suppose.’

‘My mum doesn’t have any money,’ said Steven.

‘Nor does my dad,’ said Jess. ‘The horses take it all.’

39

DAVEY SAW THE story in the paper on the rack outside Mr Jacoby’s shop as he walked to Shane’s house.

THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY

Davey stopped dead. He almost didn’t recognize the blurred photo of his own mother, one hand over her mouth, the other clutching the end of his hospital bed. There he was, propped against pillows and looking disappointingly eleven, and there was DI Reynolds, leaning back in his chair and frowning.

Davey picked up the Sunday Mirror. The story was labelled ‘Exclusive’ and had been written by someone called Marcie Meyrick. As he read it, Davey felt his whole body go hot and cold and squirmy.

The mother of kidnapped brothers weeps as her younger son reveals the gruelling details of their ordeal at the hands of the infamous Pied Piper.

Speaking from his hospital bed, little Davey Lamb—

‘Little Davey Lamb’? Davey’s heart plummeted. Shit, they were going to have him for breakfast at school.

… little Davey Lamb told police he and Steven had managed a daring escape from the serial kidnapper.

But, in a cruel twist of fate, Steven then got lost in the woods where they were both taken more than a week ago, and is presumed to have been recaptured.

‘We ran away together,’ a sobbing Davey told his distraught mum, Lettie Lamb, 39, of Shipcott.

Sobbing?! He hadn’t sobbed! Shit! Davey wanted to punch someone. Who the hell was Marcie Meyrick? What a fucking liar! He read on:

But the last little Davey heard of his big brother was Steven shouting at him to run home to his mother – and then they lost touch in the deep Landacre Woods in the middle of the moor.

The child snatcher has terrorized Exmoor for weeks, stealing children from parked cars, and cunningly eluding police.

Detectives leading the manhunt now presume that Steven Lamb is being held with six other captives – five children and police constable Jonas Holly, who was apparently abducted while trying to rescue young Davey.

The kidnaps are only the latest in a horrific series of crimes visited on the moor over the past thirty years.

Between 1980 and 1983, serial killer Arnold Avery buried six young victims on Exmoor, and two years ago another murderous spree left eight people dead in the small town of Shipcott. The killer has never been caught.

‘Exmoor is cursed,’ said one elderly resident who didn’t want to be named …

Davey threw the paper down furiously.

‘Steady now,’ said Mr Jacoby, who’d appeared in the doorway.

‘They’re writing lies!’ shouted Davey.

‘That’s what newspapers do.’

‘It shouldn’t be allowed!’

‘It’s not,’ said Mr Jacoby. ‘If they’ve lied and you can prove it, you can sue them.’

‘I’m going to! It said I cried and I didn’t cry! Shit!’

‘How’s your mum doing, Davey?’ asked Mr Jacoby soothingly.

Davey looked confused, then shrugged. ‘Fine.’

Mr Jacoby sighed and withdrew, then reappeared a moment later and handed Davey a Mr Kipling Dundee cake and a Mars bar.

‘Here you are. For teatime. I hope they find your brother soon. You give my best to your mother and gran, all right?’

Davey had pilfered industriously from Mr Jacoby’s shop for years and now felt a bit embarrassed as he took the offerings and mumbled his thanks.

Life had been so simple and suddenly everything was just so wrong. How had it happened? Davey had no idea, but as he walked away with the Mars bar melting in his jeans pocket, images kept crowding into his head. Images of the money he and Shane had failed to spend, of the piece-of-shit cardboard bird he’d made for Nan – and of Steven’s skateboard nose-diving gently into the silt.

He never had any luck, however hard he tried.

He carried on to Shane’s, where they ate the Dundee cake with their fingers in the back garden and threw what was left into Shane’s neighbour’s pond.

40

‘HOW DO YOU do?’ Charlie asked Jonas through the chain link. ‘How old are you? I’ve got a mouse in my house. He’s white. His name is Mickey. You can play with him if you want. Have you got any biscuits? I’m hungry.’

Charlie wiggled his fingers through the fence and touched Jonas, resting his pinkie on his shoulder, or stroking his hair like a child with a loved toy.

Jonas ignored him, just as he ignored Steven and the bones that thudded over the gate. It was food and he was hungry. But the thought of eating meat made him feel sick. He thought about Sunday lunchtimes, staring at the bloodied flesh on his plate while his mother cleared the table around him and his father became increasingly red- faced at the waste.

You liked meat a month ago.

But he didn’t like it now.