Finders Keepers

How to say it? How to start? There was a right way and a wrong way – he remembered that much. Reynolds ran through it over and over in his head, like an Oscar speech.

Hello, Mr Peach. Can I come in? Get him away from the prying eyes of the neighbours and lingering press.

Can we sit down? Get him off his feet in case he faints and hits his head on the coffee table.

I’m here with bad news, I’m afraid. Too fast. But anything less fast only seemed like toying with the man when he needed to get to the point.

Charlie’s dead. That was the point. There was no sugar-coating it. DCI Marvel would have just said it and moved on. But DCI Marvel was no role model.

Reynolds looked up at the wall of the house, which was painted pale blue like the sky beyond it. In the top window was a piece of paper taped to the glass. It was covered with stickers and glitter and the carefully coloured- in words CHARLIE LIVES HERE.

Tears sprang unexpectedly to his eyes. Shit, shit, shit. He wiped them away roughly but more leaked out. He thought of Charlie in the hay with his thumb in his mouth, of Elizabeth Rice stroking his hair as though he were sleeping, and he couldn’t believe he’d asked her not to do that – or to do this.

Shameful.

He hoped David Peach wasn’t home. Please God, don’t let him be home.

Reynolds didn’t believe in God and apparently God didn’t believe in him either, because almost immediately he heard the sound of someone coming down the stairs, and then David Peach opened the door, took one look at his face, and said, ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

* * *

Bob Coffin opened the gate to Jonas’s run with hands that shook with fury.

He wasn’t wearing his mask. It was that that made Jonas’s stomach clench with fear. The man was so angry he’d forgotten it.

Instead he had a white hunting whip.

Jonas didn’t know what was happening, or why, but he scrambled to his feet. He was still tethered, but the animal in him wanted to be as upright as possible in the face of attack, and as Coffin came at him, he stuck out his hands in self-defence.

It made no difference. This was full-force, no-holds-barred fury, fuelled by madness. The blows landed everywhere – his hands, his head, his face, his back and ribs. Sometimes with the heavy stock of the whip, sometimes the stinging hide lash, sometimes with the huntsman’s boots. The noise was overwhelming – the sound of the assault on his flesh, the rattle of the fence, grunts of pain and of effort, and the shouting and crying of the children.

Bob Coffin hit Jonas so hard and for so long that Jonas knew the man was going to kill him.

Why?

He didn’t know if he had asked, or how, but the huntsman told him anyway – in short exhalations as his arm rose and fell.

‘He’s dead. He died. You said to let him go and now he’s DEAD!’

The words went through Jonas’s numbed mind like a railway spike.

Charlie was dead?

The huntsman kicked him in the stomach and he curled around the pain.

Charlie was dead? That couldn’t be possible.

Fingers in his hair. Not Charlie’s careful hands, but a gnarled fist, dragging him off the cement and to his knees. Something hard and cold dug so brutally into his temple that it pushed his head round to look at Steven. The boy was screaming and beating the fence, like a crazed zoo-ape. Jonas couldn’t make out the words, just the shape of his mouth and the fear in his eyes. He couldn’t hear anything. Couldn’t feel anything. He watched Steven shouting and thought about Lucy in the water.

I promise.

Something hit the back of his head and the cement rushed towards him.

Bob Coffin’s boots passed by his face; the whip was picked off the floor. Jonas’s breath whined loudly in his head. His eyes followed the boots as they left the kennel. It was only when the huntsman locked the gate behind him that Jonas saw the small black gun in his hand.

Steven was talking at Jonas and looking urgent, but Jonas couldn’t hear him and didn’t care. He never knew what Steven had said to keep Bob Coffin from shooting him.

It wasn’t important.

Charlie was dead.

He rolled to his side and vomited.

Then he lay, heaving for breath, with his cheek in the thin, warm puddle while his stomach creaked, and mourned the loss.

57

KIDNAP HAD BECOME murder.

It was a turning point and, despite the tragedy of Charlie’s death, Reynolds couldn’t help being energized by it. Until now they’d all been expecting to find the bodies of children who had been killed within hours or days of their abductions. It was the way things usually went. But Charlie Peach had been kept alive for almost two months – and that meant the other children could have been kept alive too, and suddenly they might all be Superman, swooping to the rescue. It was the first break they’d had in the case since … well, it was the first break they’d had, and the mobile incident room literally rocked with activity.

The children had not vanished into the side of a mountain in the wake of a pennywhistle tune. Charlie been taken from that very field, and returned there. Reynolds dispatched officers immediately to check on the other kidnap sites. It was unbearably tantalizing to think that all of the children could be alive and well, and within a half-hour drive of the Red Lion car park where this very trailer was parked.

Reynolds had to fight the urge to get in the Peugeot and race about the moor with the windows down, shouting their names, they seemed so close.

At the same time, he knew the clock was ticking. No longer just a normal clock that marked time on the wall, this new clock was bound to a bundle of dynamite in Reynolds’s head, and ticked far more urgently. Kidnap had become murder – and that irreversibility increased the threat to the other captives a thousand-fold. Whether it had been cruel intention or bungled release, Charlie Peach had died – and that put all seven remaining captives in serious danger.

He didn’t need Kate Gulliver to tell him the truth of that.

Having killed one, the kidnapper could kill them all. He might do it in a panic to cover up his crimes or he might do it out of rage or horror at a plan gone wrong. Or he might do it because he’d meant to all along, and now that he’d summoned up the courage to take the first life, things would get easier.

Or maybe he was killing them in order, and Jess Took and Pete Knox were already out there somewhere, rotting at the end of a rope.

Reynolds felt his good energy turn on him like a sly wolf, making him suddenly panicky.

‘Time’s running out.’

Reynolds jumped, then turned to Elizabeth Rice. ‘What?’ he snapped.

‘Time’s running out,’ she said again.

He understood. The white plastic tape on the broken windows, the notes. The things they’d been holding back to trap a future suspect.

A suspect they didn’t have.

Reynolds sighed. He hated to undermine his own forensic foundations. But kidnap had become murder and it was time for that evidence to earn its keep. The notes would get them most publicity, he knew. But there was the danger that they’d also get them copycats. There were crazies out there who had the capacity to hurt or kill, but