Finders Keepers

He always did his best worrying in the shower – even one as small as this. The worry used to be inextricably linked with watching his hair swirl down the drain between his feet, and had become a Pavlovian response, even though his hair was now silkily anchored. The second the water burst from the shower-head, Reynolds started to doubt himself and those around him; began to wonder why he’d become a police officer in the first place, to debate whether he should call his mother more, and to question what the future could possibly hold for him if he were unable to solve the case/get a girlfriend/finish that day’s Times crossword.

Like a metaphysical plumber, no job was too small for Reynolds to worry about once he’d stepped under the flow.

He had called Kate Gulliver and they’d had an interesting chat, but even she’d had no answers for him for this one – at least none he hadn’t already postulated in his own mind with an increasing sense of helplessness.

The Pied Piper (God, even he was calling him that now!) must have stopped for a reason. He might be dead. The children might be dead. He might have moved house along with his adoring wife and tow-headed babies. He might simply have run out of storage or his car could have broken down; or perhaps he’d become a born-again Christian and was even now preparing to release his captives, citing divine intervention. The possibilities were endless.

All Reynolds knew was that something had changed.

Not knowing what was just another bitter pill to swallow. Something in DI Reynolds almost hoped for another abduction – anything that might add to his pool of knowledge and give them a fighting chance of catching the culprit.

Because if the Piper had stopped for good, they’d never catch him.

45

HUNGER WAS A funny thing. Sometimes it hurt like a blade in Jonas’s gut – and he should know. Other times it was almost wonderful.

When it hurt, the pain came in long spasms that rippled up his body like a tsunami, tearing and squeezing the beaches of his organs and leaving him breathless and flattened. When it was wonderful, it freed him from the confines of his wire-mesh prison and speeded up the tortuous process that turned each day into the next.

His mouth was dry or drooling by turn, his thoughts either repulsed by the idea of sustenance or filled with fruit and potatoes and – bizarrely – cupcakes. Cupcakes he’d seen on TV, with thick, soft, fairytale icing, sprinkled with chocolate and little silver balls.

Instead of sweet cakes, he was served stinking slabs of dead flesh. He told the huntsman every day that he couldn’t eat meat, and every day he was ignored, so the children had taken it upon themselves to keep him alive. Maisie and Kylie had started it and the others had quickly joined in. They returned from the meadow twice a day with handfuls of grass, dandelions and clover. They carefully pushed the increasingly mushy handfuls through the fences down the line to Steven, who dropped them into Jonas’s kennel.

At first the idea of eating such offerings seemed ridiculously over-dramatic to Jonas. Then he reminded himself that he was being held in a dog kennel by a crazy man – and eating grass didn’t seem like such an outlandish response after all.

The grass was bitter and hard to swallow. The dandelions were strangely creamy and tickled his throat like yellow feathers, while the clover was stiff and tasted only of green. Once Kylie found some wild strawberries – each the size of a pea, and so sweet it made everything else taste foul again, just as he’d been getting used to it. He noticed little improvement in his hunger pangs, but chewing was good and he imagined that the children’s offerings must contain some worthwhile calories, so he was grateful.

He noticed that Steven Lamb never brought anything back from the meadow for him. He collected the assembled green stuff from Jess and dutifully pushed it through the wire, but, while Jonas thanked him, Steven never said a word.

Jonas was confused. Steven used to be a friendly kid. Used to keep an eye on Lucy for him as her disease progressed. Jonas had tipped him a fiver a month, but he knew Steven would have done it for nothing, and he’d given far more than a fiver’s worth of time and effort to the task. And Lucy had adored Steven. She’d never had a bad thing to say about him. Jonas had always got on with him just fine. But that night when Jonas had tried to talk to him about the money, he’d acted like a boy who had something to hide – or something to fear.

He frowned at Steven through the mesh, and tried to work out what he could have done to upset him.

* * *

Now that he’d stopped being a mental patient, the Jonas Holly that Steven feared and hated was back.

Except he wasn’t. Not quite, anyway.

Seeing the scars that patterned Jonas’s stomach had shaken Steven. The scars could not lie, however much he wished they could. He was a fair-minded boy, and now had to consider that he might have been wrong about Jonas Holly killing his wife, just as he’d been wrong about him stealing the children.

But although his suspicions had been reduced, Steven was reluctant to let them go entirely. He was curious about that other person. That cringing ball of child-like fear with the trembling lip and night-time tears, who seemed to have vacated the kennel next to his as suddenly and completely as a dog retrieved at the end of a family holiday. The Jonas he saw now bore no resemblance to that pathetic other, and seemed to have no recollection of his time in captivity so far. He asked stupid questions; he expected to be taken out for exercise. He asked about a bloody vegetarian option! It was as if he’d only just arrived.

It was all too weird, and so Steven determined to keep hold of his caution, even if his hatred was deserting him.

46

THERE WAS A fracas at the school. Nobody ever agreed on precisely who had called the parents, but whoever did had managed to pick the biggest, strongest and most belligerent. They descended on Marcie Meyrick and the photographers just as they were lining up the first of several immaculately made-up, blow-dried teenaged girls to have their photos taken.

By the time Reynolds and Rice got there, all the witnesses seemed to have gone to work, and the only people left at the scene had all apparently arrived too late to see anything but five journalists disappearing up Barnstaple Road.

‘Running like hell,’ laughed Ronnie Trewell, who was there in loco parentis for his brother, Dougie.

‘Jogging,’ corrected Mike Haddon, the blacksmith. ‘I think they’re from London.’

It seemed they had also dropped their cameras, which were smashed to pieces on the pavement. And at some point during what Reynolds gathered must have been a very confusing melee, someone had had the time to key the word LIER down both sides of a black Subaru Impreza with gold alloys which had been parked on the school-crossing zigzags.

Rice ran a quick check and found it was registered to Marcie Meyrick.

Reynolds walked twice around the car inspecting the damage. He shook his head in despair.

‘Outrageous,’ he said. ‘Can’t spell or park.’ Then he told Rice to issue a ticket.

* * *

Because she’d been delayed by the fuss at the school gates, Emily Carver’s mother was late driving back home along Barnstaple Road. But she was just in time to see her daughter – whom she had dropped off at school less than fifteen minutes before – knocking on the door of number 111.

She pulled over, demanded an explanation and called the school when Em’s story didn’t ring true. Then she hit the roof. Right there on the pavement outside the Lambs’ house, complete with waving arms and crazy hair. At one point Em glanced over her mother’s shoulder to see Lettie and Nan watching round-eyed from the front window, and gave a nervous giggle.

‘It’s not funny!’ shouted Mrs Carver, and slapped Em’s face. ‘I want you to be safe. You could be lying dead in a ditch!’

Em held her cheek and fought back tears.