Finders Keepers

blood from fresh wounds. Beside him – chained to him – Steven Lamb emitted a high, whining noise. His eyes were tightly shut, his teeth gritted with the effort of remaining blind, his hands pressed against his ears.

‘Steven?’ said Reynolds, and touched his shoulder. ‘Steven, you’re safe.’

Steven opened his eyes. For a brief second Reynolds saw relief on his face – then panic hit, and he started to shout and flail.

‘Get him off me! Get him off me! Please, just get him off me! Please …’

Jonas and Reynolds fended off what blows they could. Reynolds kept saying You’re safe and It’s over, but Steven was beyond sense. In the middle of it all, Jonas put his hands to Steven’s throat – and opened the lock that had held them together. Steven grabbed the key from his hand and pushed himself off Jonas. He fell to the floor and crawled rapidly away, only stumbling to his feet again as he burst out of the shed door.

Reynolds was so full of questions that he asked none of them. And Jonas Holly just stood there blinking, as if he’d been surprised out of sleep. The brief silence was plugged by the rain and – at last – the whup- whup-whup of the chopper.

Reynolds knelt and unwound the chain from Coffin’s neck as the ambulances approached. He was going to need one. Coffin was still breathing but not moving. Whatever the provocation, if Jonas Holly had done this to him, there was something wrong with the man. Something seriously wrong. Reynolds felt it in his guts and he didn’t care if it was unscientific.

He saw a gun lying in the middle of the floor. Under normal circumstances he’d insist that it was left where it was, for the scenes-of-crime officers to photograph in situ. But these were not normal circumstances, and Reynolds stepped swiftly over Bob Coffin to pick it up. He felt safer with it in his hand, and realized just how unsafe he’d felt until then.

God knows what the hell had happened here over the past two months or the past two minutes. He had an uneasy feeling that the Piper case had only just started giving up its secrets. He shivered. This hunch thing was like opening the window to a vampire – after letting the first one in, it seemed he had no choice in the matter.

Paramedics strode in, and he pointed at Bob Coffin. One of them put a blanket around Jonas’s shoulders and led him out of the big shed.

Reynolds watched him all the way.

Close to the door, Jonas bent and picked up the broken link. He held it up to the light and turned it in his fingers – twisted and bent out of shape, and rubbed shiny in the corner where it had snapped.

Reynolds heard him ask, ‘How did this get here?’

Rice was in one of the stables, in the dry, wrapping the children in blankets. They were all crying, but for once she felt blameless.

A medic moved among them with the key he’d taken from Steven, unlocking the collars they’d worn for so long.

Steven stood outside. When Rice tried to usher him out of the rain, he twisted away from her. ‘I don’t want to go inside!’ he said. Then, more calmly, ‘Thank you.’

She nodded and brought him a rough grey NHS blanket and he stood shivering against the wall of the stable block as, one by one, the other children were led to the waiting ambulances. Their tearful faces were freshly washed with rain and cautious hope as they waved goodbye. Jess Took hugged him as she left.

Two medics tried to lead him away, but Steven resisted.

‘I don’t want to go to hospital.’

‘You need to be checked out,’ said one medic.

‘I’m fine.’

The man took hold of his arm – gentle but firm. Steven shook him off and pushed him away, panic rising within him—

Elizabeth Rice was suddenly at his side. Her hair was wet again, but this time she didn’t look annoyed.

‘He won’t get in the ambulance,’ said the medic, but she just waved him away and then turned to Steven.

‘Shall we just go straight home?’ she said.

Steven’s eyes pricked and he felt joy cup his heart at the thought of his mother’s arms open to greet him, Nan’s eyes all big and shiny behind her glasses, Davey happy to see him, and Em’s warm back under his hands. The images were so powerful that he felt the muscles in his arms twitch to embrace them all.

‘Yes, please,’ he said. And he put his arms around Elizabeth Rice and let her hold him until his mother could.

Over her shoulder, Jonas Holly limped past between two paramedics. He turned his brown eyes towards Steven and raised a hand.

Steven didn’t raise one back. He watched the medics help Jonas into an ambulance and hoped that it crashed on the way to hospital.

Then he followed DS Rice to a car that still smelled of hot brakes.

64

THEIR HOMECOMINGS WERE just as they’d expected – and more.

Jess Took was clamped between her mother and her father so tight that she wondered how they could ever be prised apart. Rachel stood nearby – her smile and talons fixed – and wondered the same thing.

Pete Knox’s parents put on a united front and their neighbours threw a street party to welcome him home, with bunting and cakes. The council even agreed to close the road so that they wouldn’t all be mown down during the celebrations. Pete only managed half a cupcake and a sip of Coke before he began to feel queasy. It would take a while.

His mother followed him around like a mitten on a string, and his father watched her with a look on his face that suggested he could not forget what she’d said back in that early-morning car park, however hard he tried. Mercifully, Pete didn’t notice that right then. He was just happy to be home.

Maisie and Kylie were submerged in love and protection, and never took the bus to school again.

A few days after their return, the driver Ken Beard sat in his car outside their homes and shook so badly that he couldn’t do what he’d gone there for. Finally it was his daughter Karen and her boyfriend – whose name was simply Mark, despite the mascara – who encouraged him up the paths and knocked on the doors for him, so that he could beg the girls’ forgiveness in person.

They and their families were in forgiving moods, and would be for a long time to come.

Steven was bruised from all the hugging, Lettie cried and laughed for days, Uncle Jude bought him an Xbox still in its original packaging, and Nan kept saying, ‘I told you he’d be back!’ when she hadn’t at all.

Davey hugged him and almost cried, but then called him a wanker instead, which meant a lot, coming from him.

Physically Steven bounced back quickly. It took a few weeks to learn to eat right again, but that was hardly a chore. Mentally, he was … fine.

That surprised even him.

Sure, the smell of the bathroom disinfectant had the power to turn his stomach, and he often caught himself touching his own neck – feeling for the collar he’d worn for so long. But still, when DS Rice explained that Victim Support was arranging for all the children to see a psychologist to help them over the trauma, Steven politely declined.

He had survived, hadn’t he? The past was the past and surviving it was the important thing. Now he had the rest of his life to live, and more important things to think about.

Some more important than others …

Em had not hooked up with Lewis or Lalo; she had waited for Steven.

‘I would have waited for ever,’ she told him fiercely, as they lay dizzy and breathless after their first