‘I told you so,’ said Jonas.
‘You can have mine,’ Charlie said magnanimously, and threw them over the fence. They tumbled wetly across the cement.
Steven gave a short humourless laugh.
Jonas looked at the gross chunks of old animal. His stomach clenched like a fist in desperation.
How could he save anyone if he were dead?
The nearest chunk had a tube of thick, pink vein sticking from it. Jonas shuffled forward on his arse until he could grip the vein under his curled toes, then drew the slab of dead horse towards him.
50
IT WAS SIX weeks since Jess had been taken, and John Took couldn’t sleep.
Part of him – the ever-decreasing part that was in denial – was still hoping that Jess’s disappearance was a petulant teenaged prank. Even the thought of Jess running off with a much older boyfriend was preferable to the idea that she’d been abducted.
Since she’d started to get breasts a year earlier, John Took had lain awake on many a night worrying about the kind of boys who might lust after his daughter. Boys who were too old, boys with tattoos and nose-rings, boys without jobs, boys who were only after one thing.
Now, awake through the night again, he was astonished to find that he actually
Everything was relative.
Rachel stirred beside him and pulled even more of the covers on to her side.
She was going through the motions of support and sympathy and offering him tea at ridiculously short intervals, but he could tell her heart wasn’t in it. Why should it be? Jess wasn’t her daughter. Rachel was suitably sympathetic in his company, but she continued to have two dressage lessons a week with that young buck he’d got out of
No, it was the helpless terror he saw reflected in his ex-wife’s eyes that let him know he was not alone.
Like Jess was.
Took threw off the covers and sat on the side of the bed. This circularity of thought was nothing new. It was the same when he spoke to DC Berry, who was the ridiculous toddler of a family liaison officer assigned to the case. It was the same at those tortuous Piper Parents meetings. Everything went in circles. The same questions again and again:
It was that last question that really plagued him. With every abduction after Jess, the idea that this was personal became less and less likely. He knew that. But still it tormented him. The notion that somebody had chosen her – or had chosen her
At first it was hard. He’d led a life as reflective as a black hole. It took practice. At the beginning it was like learning to meditate at that dumb class Rachel had wanted to do in the village hall. Bored wives and benefit scroungers
At first he hadn’t been able to think of any more enemies than the people on the list he’d given DI Reynolds. But because it was for Jess, John Took had made a giant effort to rummage around inside his own head for anyone he’d offended. It took him literally days to come up with Will Bishop, the milkman, who had left him a rude note demanding payment one too many times. Bishop had been threatening the residents of central Exmoor for years and one morning John Took had felt enough was enough. It was the same morning Scotty had thrown the shoe off his near fore for the third time in a week, and Rachel had told him that the trainer had told
Maybe he could have handled that better.
After he’d thought of Will Bishop, the floodgates had opened.
Over the next few days, John Took was first surprised, then shocked, then ashamed by the sheer number of people he’d wronged, offended or simply hurt. The clues were in the looks, the mutterings, the silences when he approached a group of people in the pub or at a show. All those things he’d declined to notice, or had interpreted as respect, suddenly sprang up in his mind like tin ducks he’d missed on a fairground rifle range.
Charles Stourbridge – for telling him his new horse wasn’t worth a quarter of what he’d paid, when it plainly was; Mr Jacoby – for pointing out his man-boobs to Rachel; Linda Cobb – for telling her to keep her
If DI Reynolds asked him for another list now, he’d be forced to create a database. Or get Rachel to, because he could never be bothered with the computer and she typed with more than one finger …
Did he have to add
Or did she already hate him for something he had yet to remember?
How many others hated him?
Now Took sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the stars. He wondered whether Jess could see them from wherever she was now.
Wherever she was … was it because of him?
Steven watched the huntsman through the crack in the wall. It had become an obsession. It was a strange comfort to know that he was still there – that he had not drifted away from this madness and into a new one which would see him forget all about them and leave them to die of thirst in their kennels. They hated him, but he was all they had – and they feared his absence even more than they feared his crazy presence.
Even so, staying alive was becoming increasingly difficult. Although the days were still hot and dry, the nights had turned suddenly from chilly to cold. Steven woke every morning aching and stiff as an old man, despite the straw on his bed. He felt sorry for Jonas – out there on the bare cement – and wondered how long someone could survive with only his own chemistry to keep him warm.
The meat that the huntsman tossed into their cages every day was no good. The pieces were smaller and some bones had barely any meat on them at all – just fat or gristle, and some of it tasted as if it was already going bad.
All the children now started to eat flowers and leaves when they went out for exercise, and always brought some back for Jonas. But it was not enough to sustain them, and they had to eat what they could off the bones.
Charlie got sick. He spent forty-eight hours writhing and moaning over the drain in the floor of his kennel, while the bad meat rushed to evacuate his shaking body.
After every violent expulsion he crawled across the cement and – instead of making for his straw bed – lay curled up against the fence beside Jonas, who stroked his hair and held the hand that Charlie wormed through the chain link to reach him. Jonas murmured soothing sounds and sang ‘One Man Went to Mow’ in a low, hypnotic loop.
Bob Coffin came often – to clean up the mess and to try to feed Charlie chicken and rice, although the boy turned away from him and shook his cold, sweaty head.
‘He’s not a dog,’ said Jonas. ‘You know that, right? He needs a doctor, not chicken and rice.’
The huntsman ignored him. Of course.