Finders Keepers

There are children starving in Africa.

Jonas didn’t care. Africa was welcome to his meat.

Every day the faceless man came into the kennel to clean it, and Jonas squeezed his eyes shut and curled up small so the man wouldn’t notice him.

It worked.

Since that first night of those cold hands, the huntsman hadn’t even come close to him. He carried a single key in his pocket that opened every padlock. He let himself into the kennel each day, scraped up shit with a short- handled shovel and sluiced the cement with milky disinfectant. Then he unwound a thick brick-coloured hose and sprayed any remaining mess into the little drain hole, refilled the water bucket and moved on.

Once he’d finished, Jonas could breathe again. Feel his ribs press down on to the ground again like long chill fingers cupping his torso, reminding him that he was still alive.

He was not let out into the meadow with the children. He could not even stand upright because he was never let off the short chain. He didn’t know why, but he also didn’t care about the lack of movement. Moving would only draw attention to himself, when he wanted to be invisible.

Only his stomach seemed aware of the time that had passed.

‘I heard your tummy!’ Charlie said beside him. ‘Grrrrrrr. Grrrrrrr. Like that.’ His smile faded and he added a plaintive, ‘I’m hungry.’

‘Give him your meat if you’re not going to eat it,’ said Steven Lamb.

Jonas didn’t look at Steven and tried not to look at anything else either.

Cages filled with children, with no one to protect them.

This problem was too big and he was too small to do anything about it.

People hurt children. He’d had no answer when he was a child up at Springer Farm and he had no answer now that he was a child again.

All he could do was to close his eyes curl up tight, and hope it was all over quickly.

* * *

‘Hey,’ said Steven. ‘Mr Holly?’

No answer. The man had barely moved since they arrived. He hadn’t eaten at all. A few times Steven had seen him drink from the steel bucket, and he had pissed into the drain at the front of the cage. Once he’d cried in the night, like a baby.

It was embarrassing and it was bloody annoying.

Mr Holly was an adult. And a policeman. And he was doing nothing to help them – or even himself.

Unless he was playing some sick game. Trying to pretend to be one of them, when really he was in on it with the huntsman … Steven knew it was unlikely but he was still loathe to give the man the benefit of any doubt.

‘Hey!’ he said more sharply. ‘Charlie’s talking to you.’

Jonas Holly slowly closed his eyes.

Steven kicked the fence. ‘Hey!’

Nothing.

Behind him, Jess started to sing quietly. ‘Waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda …’

Charlie twisted his fist back through the fence.

‘C’mon, Charlie!’ said Kylie, and she and Maisie started to sing along. ‘You’ll come a waltzing Matilda with me …’

Charlie clapped and joined in. ‘We all sing Matilda, we all sing Matilda …’

Steven got up and ran his eyes and his fingers around his tiny prison, seeking escape.

Not for the first time.

The ends of the wire that folded over the steel struts were too stiff to unwind by hand; he could climb up and poke his head through the twelve-inch gap between the plastic roof and the top of the gate, but it was too narrow to do more. And although the grey block wall at the back of the kennel was crumbling around the edges, it was solid in all the important places. He had sat and kicked it repeatedly with his heel – and achieved nothing but a blister.

‘You can’t get out,’ Jess Took had told him the first time he’d made this circuit, but he was still reluctant to concede the point.

He’d had to concede every other point. He’d had to sleep on the straw bed, drink from the steel bucket, pee down the drain, and – after three agonizing days desperate for rescue – he had finally shat on the cold cement floor. The full house of humiliation.

They were exercised every morning and every afternoon. Everyone but Jonas Holly was led out of their cages and clipped to each other by short coupling chains that meant they could walk but not run or climb – although ballroom dancing would probably have been an option, as long as it was a slow tune. The huntsman led them to a small fenced meadow in pairs roughly according to height, which meant that Steven was always with Charlie, who often forgot that he was restrained and would wander off to pick up grit or stop suddenly to watch a cloud – each time jerking on Steven’s neck.

While the other children walked or sat together, Steven ran a hand along the perimeter. The fence was high – maybe twelve feet – and its base was sunk in a kerb of concrete, so there was no burrowing under it. The gate was secured with a large, rusted padlock. Beyond the meadow was a small cottage. Once it had been whitewashed, but now it was grey-green with age. While they were locked in the meadow, the huntsman went to the cottage. Sometimes – like now – Steven could see him standing a little way back from the window with a mug of tea, watching them.

Always watching them.

Steven was a resourceful boy but, dogged though he was, he could see no way of escape – especially with Charlie hanging off his neck.

He stood for a moment and watched the huntsman, who shuffled backwards into the darkness where Steven could no longer see him.

He was a rubbish kidnapper.

But a good enough guard.

‘Butterfly!’ shouted Charlie, and yanked Steven sideways.

41

EM COULDN’T BELIEVE what was happening.

Steven had disappeared before her eyes and yet for a week her mother insisted that she get up every day and continue to go to school.

As if the sky hadn’t fallen.

At first she refused. At first she wanted to saddle up Skip and spend the rest of the summer – the rest of her life – searching for Steven. Instead she was expected to put on her uniform, pick up her sandwiches and get in the car to be driven to school like a five-year-old.

‘But I love him!’ she’d told her mother, who’d looked at her father, who’d raised his eyebrows the same way he had when she’d said she wanted to do Chemistry instead of History. As if he didn’t believe she was capable of such a thing.

She’d got an A in Chemistry though – and it was the thought of that which made her get out of the Range Rover at the school gates every day, wave her mother goodbye, then – once she’d been to registration – walk back down Barnstaple Road to Steven’s house.

His nan was in a terrible state. Who could blame her? The doctor came often and gave her pills to add to the pills she already had for angina. He was a young, modern doctor who wore chinos, deck shoes and a pale-pink Ralph Lauren polo shirt, and his tanned presence made the Lambs’ little front room seem even dingier than it was. It took a good half-hour after he’d gone for it all to seem quite cosy again.

Steven’s mother, Lettie, took pills too. She sat on the sofa next to Nan, crying at Homes under the Hammer, with an old Spiderman pyjama top crumpled in her hands. Once – when Lettie left it on the sofa while she went to the bathroom – Em picked it up and pressed it to her nose. To her it smelled only of