Finders Keepers

‘She says it was just the way he said it.’

Rice felt the sands of reality shift under her feet. With sudden clarity she remembered Jonas saying he understood the Piper’s anger. What was it he’d said? That people left their children on display in their cars like old umbrellas. At the time it had sounded sane. Harmless.

Now she wasn’t so sure.

She bit her lip and turned her face to stare through the little window in the door. Framed like a Hogarth, Bob Stripe spooned one, two, three sugars into his teacup. Marcie Meyrick frowned up into the dark toe of her own empty shoe, while Mike Armstrong from the Bugle set up the skittles.

‘You don’t believe he killed his wife, do you?’ Rice said flatly.

‘I don’t know what to believe,’ said Reynolds, more cautiously than she’d ever heard him.

‘We were there …’

‘I know.’

She nodded. She was all out of fight.

‘I understand your concerns, Elizabeth. But we have to weigh the reputation of one man against the lives of six children.’

‘Five now,’ said Rice sombrely.

‘Exactly,’ said Reynolds.

* * *

After the press conference, Rice went back to Rose Cottage with a sense of foreboding.

Mrs Paddon let her in and then stood in the hallway. ‘What are you looking for?’ she said suspiciously.

‘I don’t know.’ Rice started in the kitchen, looking with different eyes this time.

‘You’re wasting your time.’

Rice ignored her.

The bottle of red wine that Jonas had opened for her was still on the counter; still half full. The bills were routine, the laundry still washed but un-ironed, the sink still empty. There was a glass of water on the table with faint dirty smears where the fingers would grip, and Rice remembered that Jonas had been gardening when he’d been interrupted by the children on their way to the woods.

She bent down and examined the glass. The smears were just that – no prints. She straightened up and started to look around her.

‘What are you looking for?’ said Mrs Paddon from the kitchen doorway.

‘Gloves,’ said Rice.

Mrs Paddon stared at her, unblinking.

‘Maybe woollen or gardening gloves?’ She made it a question but Mrs Paddon didn’t give her any help. Rice wished she’d go back to her own house.

She went out into the garden. It was easy to see where Jonas had been. The beds there were clear and turned over, only the flowers remaining in the newly turned soil. Rice didn’t know a lot about flowers – not even cut ones, which Eric had never bought her – but she enjoyed these blue delphiniums, the heady phlox and the great bushes of pink daisies.

No gloves.

There was a little wooden shed at the end of the garden. Inside was dark and stuffy and smelled of earth. The single window was festooned with cobwebs, heavy with dust. She reached to brush them aside, then saw a fat spider stretched out along the sill.

She would make do with the light that she had.

There were tools in the shed and a couple of mountain bikes with webs between the spokes. The single shelf that ran at head-height held countless cans and bottles and containers: slug pellets, weedkiller, rose food, fly spray. There was a plastic bin filled with birdseed. Rice dug into it, in case it concealed something incriminating, and kept her arm there for a bit, up to the elbow, because it felt so odd and interesting.

At the back of the shed was a stack of three cardboard boxes. The bottom one was collapsing due to being plundered for bedding by rats. The confetti-like results were spread all over the floor back here in the deep gloom. Rice had kept rats as a child, Roland and Ratty, and was not deterred.

The top box held paperwork: insurance for window repairs, old bank statements and endless warranties and manuals for fax machines, cameras, phones and electric sanders. The second box was filled with children’s drawings, exercise books and home-made cards inscribed in careful but haphazard hands.

Good lucky in yor new howse.

Goodbye Mrs Holly. Weel miss you!

Love from Tiff. Love frim Linling. Luv from Toby.

XXX

Rice thought about Charlie Peach lying in the hay meadow and, for the first time, she thought she understood the kind of person who loved children, and who could elicit such love in return.

The third box was much older. At some stage it had been damp, which meant that all the photos inside it had stuck together or been damaged beyond repair. Solid sandwiches of photos, crimped and curled and covered in mildew. The rats had destroyed what was left. Rice could only make out a few faded and stained faces. From the 1980s, judging by the shoulder pads and poodle perms. There was a couple standing in the garden she had just walked through, with a little boy on a toy tractor – all in sunshine made even brighter for fading. She guessed it must be Jonas and his parents. She squinted at them, just as they squinted back at her across the years – all equally unaware of what their futures would bring.

It was sad. To hold these people in her hands. Their hopes, their dreams, their happiness.

All gone.

She re-stacked the boxes and went back inside.

‘Did you find anything?’ said Mrs Paddon.

‘Yes,’ said Rice, just to fuck with her.

She went into the living room.

In dusty daylight, she stared at the photo of Lucy Holly – also squinting into the sun; also ignorant. Rice wondered whether she or Jonas had planted the flowers that were blooming in the garden now, with neither of them here to see.

The clock was stopped at 7.39 as before; the blue vase was still empty of flowers.

The letter knife was gone.

Rice frowned and looked around the room. She went back into the kitchen and searched under the mail and the clothes. The jagged edges of the few open envelopes told her they had not been opened with a letter knife.

‘What are you looking for?’ said Mrs Paddon again. Rice wondered if she was a bit touched in the head. She was old enough.

‘There was a letter knife on the mantelpiece.’

‘Oh. I don’t know about that.’

Neither did Rice. But the fact that it was gone suddenly seemed significant.

She remembered the cold feel of it in her hand while Jonas sat there, not drinking, just watching her; watching the knife. The brownish flecks that had come off it with a scrape of her nail.

The way old blood might.

Elizabeth Rice felt panic spurt into her chest. Had she held vital evidence in her hands? Had she missed something she should have spotted because she had been thinking of fucking Jonas Holly?

It had been right here.

She leaned in to get a close-up of the mantelpiece – certain that the flecks would still be here. Then she would know for sure.

There was nothing. She ran the pad of her forefinger slowly along the wooden mantel, then looked at it. Nothing. Here in the grey-tinged room, this shelf alone had been dusted.

A twinge of suspicion. It was the way he said it.

Rice went upstairs and made a methodical search, while Mrs Paddon watched silently from the door of each room.

The letter knife was nowhere to be found.