Finders Keepers

doorstep.

Inside, the cottage was dark but clean. Every available surface was crammed with nick-nacks. No, not nick- nacks, Rice thought as she looked more closely; nick-nacks implied miscellaneous bad-taste china kittens and Spanish holiday souvenirs. Mrs Paddon’s collection was a more unusual mix of chunky, practical objects and delicate glass animals. Brass barometers and copper kettles towered over dainty fauns and cut-glass hedgehogs. The mantelpiece held a parade of carnival glass ponies and a pickaxe handle. The ornaments gave the room a schizophrenic feel – as if a man and his wife warred constantly over the available space, and yet Mrs Paddon was a spinster, Rice remembered.

She offered them tea, then warned quickly that she had no milk. ‘Or sugar,’ she added discouragingly.

‘We’re fine, thanks,’ said Reynolds. ‘It’s nice to see you again, Mrs Paddon. How have you been?’

‘Well enough,’ she said brusquely.

The old woman had remained standing in the middle of the front room, and did not offer them a seat.

‘And Jonas? How’s he now?’

‘You’ll have to ask him that.’ Mrs Paddon took a string bag from the back of the front door. ‘I was just off to the shop, actually.’

Reynolds ignored the pointed invitation to leave. ‘We’re here about Jess Took.’

‘Oh.’ The old woman seemed a little taken aback, and then her tone softened. ‘Poor child.’

‘We asked Mr Took for a list of people who might wish him harm, and we were surprised to find your name on there.’

Mrs Paddon snorted. ‘I’m not! I certainly did wish him harm. Wished he’d fall off his horse into a pond, the fat buffoon.’

‘But not any more?’ Rice asked.

Mrs Paddon waved the very notion away with a flap of her string bag. ‘The Blacklands hunt’s gone. That was all I wanted. Of course, there’s another one, and another one, and another one after that, but we did what we set out to do, and I’m too old to start sabbing all across Britain.’

‘Sabbing?’ asked Reynolds.

‘Sabotaging. Being a hunt saboteur. You know,’ said Mrs Paddon. ‘Waving banners, blowing whistles, laying false trails.’

‘Damaging property, personal injury,’ added Reynolds dryly.

The string bag flapped again. ‘Oh, I did nothing like that. That’s for young folk and strangers. I just made life difficult for them, that’s all. Made life difficult for him. And it worked, and the hunt’s gone and I tell you what, being on that list is a badge of honour, far as I’m concerned.’

She winked one pale-blue eye at Reynolds, leaving him momentarily discombobulated.

‘I can’t wait to hear who else is on it,’ she continued.

‘I’m afraid that’s confidential information,’ said Rice.

Mrs Paddon snorted again. ‘Rubbish! Nothing’s confidential on the moor! Let’s see. Mike Haddon the blacksmith. Bill Merchant at the farm shop, Andy Coutt at the Star in Simonsbath, that timber fella – Cooper, is it? I bet he’s on there. Am I right so far?’

Reynolds shifted and cleared his throat.

‘And however many are on there, they’re just the ones John Took knows about.’ She laughed again. ‘Arrogant people are always surprised by how much they’re hated, don’t you find?’

Reynolds certainly did find. But he was reluctant to agree with Mrs Paddon when she’d hijacked his interview so completely. John Took’s list was being reduced to garden-fence gossip before his very eyes.

‘Well, thank you for your help, Mrs Paddon,’ he said stiffly.

‘Oh, don’t take it personally,’ she said. ‘I don’t mean to ruin your day, Mr Reynolds. I’m just saying that if someone has taken that poor girl to get back at her father, it’s probably someone John Took can’t even remember offending, that’s all.’

‘Do you have anyone particular in mind?’

The old lady seemed to give it a good deal of thought before shaking her head.

‘I wish I could help,’ she sighed. ‘But who knows what goes on in people’s heads?’

‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ said Rice as they got into the unmarked Peugeot they’d swapped the van for.

‘Indeed,’ said Reynolds.

They sat in silence for a minute or two, outside the twin cottages where eighteen months earlier their investigation had ended in abject failure.

‘She seemed almost relieved we were only there about Jess Took,’ mused Rice.

Reynolds nodded. ‘Must have thought we were there about the murder. She probably feels protective towards Holly.’

‘Can’t blame her after what happened, I suppose.’

Reynolds nodded, then sighed. ‘At least we know now that John Took seems to be universally hated – by more people than are on his list. That’s good news for us. It means it’s looking less and less like a random psycho, and more and more as if Jess was taken by someone in revenge.’

Rice nodded. ‘And that means there’s a good chance of us getting her back alive.’

Reynolds smiled at Rice and she smiled back. On a case like this, such sparks of optimism were few and far between, and to be enjoyed whenever they appeared.

Rice switched the engine on and put the car into gear. Reynolds’s phone rang.

It was the desk sergeant at Taunton.

‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I think we’ve got another one.

6

TARR STEPS WAS BEAUTIFUL at any time of the year. Early on a May morning, it was magical. The wide stone slabs that crossed the river at this point looked as if they’d been placed there by storybook giants. Under a tunnel of trees, the sunlight dappling through the broad expanse of dark water made the pebbled riverbed glow like Tiffany glass.

The only sounds were the river and the songs of a thousand birds.

And the faint wailing of Mrs Knox up at the car park.

She’d been wailing when they’d arrived and was still wailing now, almost half an hour later. From his time with Homicide, Reynolds knew she might keep wailing for a good while yet. Quite possibly a lifetime, on and off.

Very annoying, when he was trying to think.

PC Colin Walters, the local officer who’d been first on the scene, stood silently beside him as if waiting for instructions, his already weathered complexion further lined with concern.

Reynolds sighed and turned away from the river, and they both trudged back up the hill to the car park where nine-year-old Pete Knox had vanished from the family car and been replaced – as if by some slick, sick magic – by a square yellow note on the steering wheel.

You don’t love him.

‘But we do. We do love him! What does it mean?’ sobbed Mrs Knox, whose husband was trying to wrap his arms around her – trying to smother her grief and his own – while she was floppy and frantic by turn. Suddenly she thrashed out of his arms and turned back on him with her teeth bared. ‘It’s your fault!’ she screamed, making him wince in shock. ‘Your fault! You sent him back to the car. How could you do that? He’s nine years old! He’s a baby! You stupid. Stupid. Bastard!’

She rushed her stricken husband and started flailing at him – beating him about the face and head, before Reynolds and Walters prised her away. She collapsed face-down beside the six-year-old Golf in which her family had driven from Swindon to spend a week communing with nature. Reynolds and Walters both looked instinctively to Elizabeth Rice for help, and she rolled her eyes, but crouched beside Mrs Knox. The woman had deflated like an old lilo on the dusty tarmac, weeping herself out for a little while. Rice patted her back three times before Mrs Knox