Finders Keepers

Steven felt as if he were teetering on the edge of a deep, dark precipice, rock crumbling below him and spinning into the abyss.

He’d been through a lot.

He’d been through a lot.

What if the last five years existed only in his head? What if Arnold Avery had won after all, that misty morning up at Blacklands …

Tears filled Steven like water in a jug, and poured out of his eyes in what felt like a never-ending stream.

‘I’m sorry,’ he sobbed. ‘I’m sorry.’

Through the blur, he saw Jonas’s stricken face become surprised, and then concerned. He moved as close as his tether would allow him and reached out to touch the wire between them.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Jonas.

‘I think I might be dead,’ said Steven, and kept on crying.

48

KATE GULLIVER CAME TO Shipcott and had dinner with Reynolds and Rice. Rice had never met her before and was taken aback by how attractive she was – with a mane of dark hair, Spanish eyes, and legs that were needlessly lengthened by spike-heeled patent-leather boots.

Rice felt dowdy drop over her like a potato sack.

The Red Lion only had one vegetarian option and it was always an omelette. Kate made a townie face and ordered two salad starters instead.

In a defiant countermeasure, Rice ordered pizza and a dessert. She could run it off in the morning. Or not.

Kate had spoken at length with Rose Hammond, the psychologist who had helped Steven in the year following his ordeal. She made little quote marks in the air around ‘helped’, leaving them in no doubt what a crappy therapist Kate considered her to be.

In his turn, Reynolds had spoken to the officer who’d dealt with the aftermath of the Arnold Avery case – a taciturn chief inspector, who seemed to hold Steven Lamb personally responsible for depriving the Avon and Somerset force of the pleasure of bringing Arnold Avery down in a hail of officially sanctioned bullets. Apart from that, he’d grudgingly conceded that the experience of being attacked by a psychopath must have been traumatic for a twelve-year-old boy.

Kate thought it was a trauma that might not necessarily have been resolved by a twice-monthly session with a country psychologist. Especially one who came cheap enough to be paid for by some Irish gardener who claimed to be the boy’s uncle.

She put air-quotes around ‘uncle’, too, and Reynolds laughed as if she’d been witty.

Rice felt like a stupid spare part. She wished there was someone across the table for her. Someone she could cock a secret eyebrow at, and whose mouth would twitch in amused support. She imagined Eric, but he’d never got her humour. He’d preferred jokes – often ones that started with an Englishman, an Irishman and a Pakistani going into a massage parlour. She imagined Jonas Holly instead – a quiet counterbalance, unimpressed by Kate Gulliver with her air-quotes and her Spanish eyes. Watching his plate or watching her, with absolute focus.

Just thinking about it made her feel warm. Everywhere.

After a lot of psychobabble that Reynolds nodded at eagerly – and that Rice largely tuned out – Kate said, ‘The legal system failed Steven and allowed a killer to track him down and almost kill him. I think any finger-pointing at a symbol of that system should be treated with the utmost caution.’

‘I agree,’ said Reynolds.

Big shock, thought Rice.

‘There’s another thing.’ Kate’s voice took on a sombre tone. She speared a cherry tomato before going on. ‘A child so traumatized, so damaged. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that Steven might be somehow culpable, and trying to deflect suspicion.’

‘Great minds!’ said Reynolds, smiling at Kate like a smug puppy.

Rice didn’t have the letters after her name to argue with them. But, although she was relieved that suspicion seemed to be falling further and further from Jonas, she hated the drama that Kate Gulliver had squeezed from the moment with her cherry-tomato pause. Triumph disguised as concern. Kate and Reynolds were peas in a bloody pod.

Unless she was very much mistaken, she was the only person at this table who’d ever actually spoken to Steven Lamb. And so, for what it was worth – which she realized wasn’t much – she told them that, to her, Steven hadn’t seemed the type to be a kidnapper, a killer – or even particularly resentful.

‘Interesting,’ said Kate. She put down her fork and clasped her elegant hands under her chin. ‘On what basis do you make that assessment?’

Reynolds snorted. ‘On the basis of a five-minute chat with a towel on your head, wasn’t it, Elizabeth?’

He and Kate showed each other their teeth.

Rice took her cheesecake upstairs. She ate it with her fingers, sitting in the bath.

49

THERE WAS A reason why Davey Lamb got up before his alarm every morning and often slipped from the house before his mother had stirred. Davey’s instincts told him that if he didn’t get out of the house while his mother was all doped up and watching bad TV, she might never let him leave again.

Every now and then Lettie focused on him with clear eyes, and then reached out and held him in arms that were so tight and desperate it made him itch to throw her off and skip away across the room to freedom. But – in the first consciously selfless act of his young life – Davey stayed put and allowed her to crush him to her breast as if she might re-absorb him straight through her skin.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t afraid. He was afraid.

He and Shane didn’t go to Springer Farm any more, or to the woods. Both now seemed like places where bad things had happened – and still might. Sometimes they went to the playing field and he watched Shane skate. That was all. He stopped bothering with homework or the fallout. Sometimes he didn’t go to school at all, but sat on the swings and shared a fag with Chantelle Cox, or swung himself so high and so fast that the world seemed easy to leave behind.

Gravity always dragged him back.

The Piper Parents came round for a meeting and pawed him like zombies. They asked him how he was and made sympathetic faces, but he knew they really wanted to grab him and shake him to make him tell them something – anything – that might help them to find their missing children.

He couldn’t. He had seen the kidnapper, heard his voice, been in his car, and yet his recollection was so patchy as to be useless. The only things he remembered for sure were the plan he and Shane had thought was so clever, and the way he’d shouted instead of shushed …

He went into Steven’s room and touched all the stuff he’d never been allowed to. He took down the Batman action figures, but found the fantasy of crime had been made dull by the reality. He looked through Steven’s school bag and read a story he’d written called ‘A Day in the Life of a Tree’, which sounded shit but was actually quite good, considering the tree never went anywhere or did anything. He searched for porn under the bed, but found only Steven’s name carved into the wall, and the crumpled receipt for the umbrella they had given Nan for her birthday.

?13.99.

It made him so angry he felt like crying.

If Steven ever came back, he’d tell everyone how Davey had lied about them running away together. Then, instead of a hero, he would be a baddie, who’d hit his own brother and left him behind.

Davey wanted his brother back – of course he did.