Finders Keepers

The drive back to Old Barn Farm was stuffed to the brim with cold silence, but the noise started again back at home, while Em started to feel detached from the people who’d made her and loved her, yet couldn’t understand her.

‘This is ridiculous,’ her father snapped at her. ‘You’re ruining your life for a boy you hardly know!’

‘I do know him. And I love him.’

Her mother shouted, ‘You don’t even know what love is.’

‘Don’t tell me how I feel,’ said Em, tilting further and further towards calm on this see-saw of hysteria.

‘I’m selling Skip!’ her father yelled. ‘If you’re going to start running off after boys!’

‘OK.’ Em nodded sadly.

And that’s when they finally shut up and stopped treating her like a baby.

47

AS STEVEN WATCHED Jonas Holly reach out for the dandelions like some kind of starved but gentle ape, he had to keep reminding himself that Jonas had murdered his wife.

He thought of Em, and wondered whether Jonas and Lucy Holly had ever been that happy, that in love. Did Jonas Holly remember the feel of his wife’s back under his hands, or the first time he’d seen her breasts inside her bra?

Jonas’s stomach squealed and he put his hand under his ribs and grimaced. It was a big hand but it didn’t hide the scars completely. They still squirmed out from underneath like dark maggots escaping his fist. Steven had a scar in the middle of his back that matched the tear in his Liverpool shirt; it was where Arnold Avery had hit him with a spade. He could no longer remember the pain with his body, but he did remember that it had hurt and then itched and then become a fading ache that had lasted months. He had twisted to look at it in the bathroom mirror. It wasn’t big – just a red mark on his back that had become pale pink over the years. Nothing like the jagged ridges that criss-crossed Jonas Holly’s abdomen. He tried to imagine how much they must have hurt.

With an angry jolt, he hoped they still did.

‘Why did you kill her?’

Jonas looked confused. ‘Who?’

‘Your wife, of course!’

Jonas swayed on his haunches. Somewhere a long way off, he could hear a plaintive cow. He looked at Steven’s mouth as if to check that the boy had indeed spoken and this was not all in his head, along with his guilty heartbeat.

He hadn’t killed Lucy. That was the truth.

He was sure of it.

He remembered the knife. He remembered the blood. Those things were confusing. There were some things he couldn’t remember, and other things he didn’t want to, but if he had lived a million lifetimes he could not have killed Lucy. Even denying it out loud seemed to be too much for him. His jaw worked but no words came out.

Steven leaned against the fence and asked coldly, ‘Didn’t you love her any more?’

‘I still love her!’ The words came out of Jonas so fast, it was as though they always lived there, at the back of his throat, crowding to be heard.

‘But you hit her! You wouldn’t hit her if you loved her.’

‘That’s a lie,’ said Jonas. ‘That’s a lie.’

‘I saw it with my own eyes,’ said Steven.

Steven realized he was trembling at his own daring. Jonas stared at him. No, not at him – through him.

‘You said Lucy gave you money the night she died.’

‘So what?’

‘Why would she do that?’ Jonas spoke haltingly and with a little frown on his face – as if he was working things out as he was going along.

‘I don’t know,’ said Steven warily. ‘She never did before.’

‘Maybe,’ said Jonas, ‘maybe … she knew she was going to die.’

Steven said nothing, but something in Jonas’s words – or the way he said them – was making his heart fill up with sadness. Or horror. Or a combination of the two. Either way, he had the uncomfortable feeling that something beyond his control was about to unfold. He turned away from the fence, hoping that it would stop the man talking.

But it didn’t.

‘Who knows they’re going to be murdered, Steven?’ said Jonas, with a soft break in his voice. ‘Did you?’

Gooseflesh rippled across Steven’s warm skin.

He hadn’t known Arnold Avery was going to kill him. If he’d known he wasn’t coming back, he would have prepared better – he would have given Davey the fiver he’d kept hidden in the shed, told his mother he loved her.

Lucy Holly had given him ?500.

She had hugged him in a fierce goodbye.

Those things meant she could not have been murdered.

Steven’s mind tumbled and spun. Could everything he knew be wrong? Had Lewis been right? Had he been paranoid all along? Had he seen danger in Jonas Holly because of his own demons?

Now he searched Jonas’s face, but saw only pain there. No deception, no anger. No threat.

Not like that night outside Rose Cottage.

Where was that face when Steven needed it?

Then Jonas’s eyes had been holes in his head. Dead black wells, like the old mines up at Brendon Hills. You felt a give in the turf and looked behind to see you’d stepped over a hole that would have killed you – dropped you into blackness so deep and narrow that by the time you hit the bottom you’d be skinned as well as dead. You shivered and then laughed too loudly to show you weren’t scared.

And small, dark places invaded your dreams.

Today Jonas Holly’s eyes were brown. That was all. Brown with a sheen that looked disturbingly like tears.

He doesn’t know what you’re talking about. He really did love her.

Steven thought about someone hurting Em and found wild fury in his chest – there as if by dark magic – and knew that he would rather kill himself than watch her in pain. If Jonas Holly had loved his wife that same way, then he could never have killed her, whatever Steven thought he had seen.

With a horrible jag of remorse, Steven started to wonder whether he’d also imagined the danger he’d felt coming off Jonas Holly that night outside Rose Cottage.

The little vertical line between his eyes deepened.

That was impossible. He hadn’t imagined it.

Had he?

Had he?

What else might his brain have invented? The slap that had knocked Lucy Holly to her knees? The money falling from a black-and-white sky? The hedge at his back with nowhere to run.

Em?

She was too good for him, wasn’t she? Too good to be true. Her heart ticking under his hand, her Super-Sour sweetness. Had he imagined that? Had he imagined her?

Steven blinked and shuddered. How much was real? All of a sudden, he wasn’t sure any more. The heat and the stink of the kennels was his only truth now. How long had he been here? A month? A year? He no longer knew. Jess and Charlie and Maisie and Kylie and Pete were all real. He knew that. Jonas was just Jonas and his eyes were just brown, and his stomach bore the marks that a killer had made. Of those things he was sure. Anything else could be in his head alone. All the fears.