Finders Keepers

* * *

By six o’clock, the Pied Piper story was back at the top of every news bulletin. Every single news outlet rode roughshod over DI Reynolds’s careful words about being eliminated from the investigation, and was reporting that Police Constable Jonas Holly was the number-one suspect.

For the first time, Elizabeth Rice thought it might be true.

* * *

Em heard the news on the radio and burst into tears.

Mr Holly was the Piper.

The same Mr Holly Steven had been so wary of, and the same one she had insisted on taking with them to the woods. The same Mr Holly who had probably killed his wife and Charlie Peach – and who might be killing Steven right this very minute, while she stood here in the yard, hoof-pick in her hand, and with Skip nudging her pockets for the Polo mints he knew were always there.

59

TO HIS GREAT surprise, Teddy had missed Charlie. Specifically, he missed his singing. Bus rides now were dulled by silence. Or the silence was fractured by Dean Peaceman’s meaningless jabber about cowboys and custard and little plastic cups. Dean Peaceman drove Teddy crazy. Not only because he talked utter shit, but because every syllable of that utter shit was enunciated with complete perfection. Dean Peaceman – a fourteen-year-old who’d just moved to Simonsbath from Cheshire – had a head full of rubbish and the mouth to prove it, while Teddy had a head full of wonders and a tongue so cruelly disconnected from his brain that those wonders turned to baby talk as soon as he let them loose from his lips. As if he lived his life in a pram, not a wheelchair.

Teddy tried so hard. Not a day went by when he did not think a coherent, important thought and then imagine escorting that thought – perfectly formed – from his brain to his mouth. He imagined holding its hand as he led it down behind the orbs of his eyeballs, past the snotty black ovals of his nasal cavities, past the ridges of his palate to his spongy tongue. There he imagined checking the thought was still intact and sensible before brushing it down, pointing it in the direction of his lips and releasing it like a proud parent on the first day of big school.

And then that thought would kick off its shoes, tear off its clothes, ruffle its hair into lunatic spikes, and run babbling out of his mouth and into the confused ears of other people, who bent over his wheelchair as if proximity were a cure for gibberish.

Nobody had ever asked him about the day Charlie went missing. Nobody had thought he had anything to add.

And he hadn’t. Right up until the day when the police in their desperation released certain details that they’d kept carefully guarded.

Including the white plastic tape.

Sitting at home in front of the wide-screen TV, where his mother always let him hold the remote, Teddy watched from the wobbling corner of his eye as the news report showed the field where the horse show had been and where Charlie had been lost and found.

With total recall, Teddy the Spy immediately thought of the sun that had made his headrest so hot against his ear, the waving tails of the foxhounds that had surrounded him like a shiny brown-and-white sea, the huntsman in his red coat and black velvet cap. And the handle of the huntsman’s whip – which had been bound up its entire length in white plastic tape.

Teddy grunted loudly for his mother, who always knew exactly what he meant to say.

60

THE SUNSHINE HAD died along with Charlie Peach. Overnight the August air got heavy, grey and motionless – and the huntsman went mad.

Madder.

He had spent the past two sultry days pacing the walkway, without his mask or gloves. Or he stood at the kennel gates, brooding over his charges, lips moving soundlessly and sweat trickling down the side of his face. He opened and closed the door of the big shed ten times a day, and from the flesh room the children heard the clanking of the chains that held the meat, although he brought them nothing to eat.

Fear hung over them all, as pendulous and dark as the thunderclouds that were gathering in the west. Maisie and Kylie cried in fits and starts, and Jess stayed at the wire on that side of her cage and tried to keep them calm. She started to sing ‘Ten Green Bottles’, but didn’t get past the first line before her voice cracked and stopped. After that, Maisie and Kylie just cried uninterrupted.

There was a cartoon – a little yellow bird in a cage, tormented by a cat. Even as a small child, Steven had hated it. The bars of the cage were too widely spaced. The cat could have snaked its paw through them at any time and pinioned the bird with one needle-sharp claw. It never did, but Steven remembered the constant fear that it would.

Under the glittering eye of the huntsman, Steven felt like that bird.

Even after the man strode purposefully back to the big shed, Steven couldn’t stop shaking.

Jonas lay on his broken ribs so that it didn’t hurt so much to breathe. He scraped the link on the floor like a metronome. When he made too deep a groove in the cement, he moved his operations half an inch to the left. When he did sleep, he slept with that single thinning link in his fingers, and sometimes he woke to the sound of the soft scraping beside his ear. Because the link was small and hard to grip, his nails tore and the skin was grazed from his fingertips.

There was no point in it. He knew that logically, and yet still he did it.

His life had come down to this closed loop of galvanized steel, rubbed shiny in his dulled fingers. For the thousandth time, Jonas pressed it against the floor until his hand went white, but it didn’t bend or break.

No food. No water. No escape.

He was a goat, tethered for a tiger.

‘I think he’s going to kill us,’ Steven Lamb whispered.

Jonas looked at him with his one good eye.

‘Don’t tell the others,’ was all he said.

* * *

The huntsman stared at the children, but instead of being prized possessions, each frail figure now only reflected his own failure.

He’d been here all his life.

This was all his life.

He’d spent forty years rearing the hounds of the Blacklands Hunt. More backbreaking hours than any mother would ever spend on raising her child. More cold, more shit, more sweat, more blood. More mud, more miles, more nipped fingers, more freezing ears.

His life stretched out behind him in one long harsh winter.

Sometimes at night – before the hounds were … disposed of – he would sit in the dark and recite the generations, like an Apache wise man gifting history to his braves. Robbie to Bumper to Rufus to Stanley to Marcus to Major to Patch to Scout. And so on, back through time.

Those nights had brought him comfort. A sense of place and of purpose. A knowledge that everything he’d done and everything he would do was part of a whole. There was old Murton before him, and Townend before that. Beyond that, Coffin barely knew, because it was not important. The pack was the history of his tribe. The pack was his legacy – the proof of his skill and his dedication. Of his love. There were ribbons and trophies in the cottage, and old photos too. The smiling men in bowler hats were strangers who’d once lived in his home, but he would have known the hounds anywhere. He knew Rupert ’71 because Pitcher ’97 had had the same three marks on his ear; Dipper ’85 was one of the family because Daisy ’09 had that same high hock. And there was Fern ’91 – smiling for the camera just the way she’d taught all her pups, and the way they’d taught theirs, all the way to little Frankie.