Finders Keepers

stopped throwing her hand off, and then settled down to talking to her as if she were a hurt child – soft words of calm and hope that Reynolds couldn’t have managed if his life had depended on it, and which he was almost as surprised to hear coming from Rice.

At least it was quiet enough now to think.

‘She doesn’t mean it,’ he told Mr Knox. ‘She’s upset, that’s all. It’s understandable.’

Jeff Knox nodded dumbly, but looked unconvinced – as if his wife’s words would never leave him now, whether they found their son or not.

‘I did send him back to the car,’ he said miserably. ‘For a towel. He fell in the water. Just one foot up to his knee. Mucking about on the stepping stones, you know?’

Reynolds nodded and Mr Knox looked down at his slack wife again before going on – staring at the opposite side of the valley as if he might yet spot his son. As if there still might be a happy ending.

‘It’s only a couple of hundred yards and he’s a sensible boy. I thought he would be safe. There were other cars here. Other people. We were only five minutes behind him. It’s nine o’clock in the morning, for God’s sake!’

He halted angrily, and Reynolds knew that if God were here right now, Mr Knox would flail at him with the same hopeless, helpless terror as his wife had done.

‘I’ve got all the other car numbers, sir,’ said Walters. ‘A couple of them look to have been vandalized.’

Reynolds turned to him in interest.

‘Not much. Just a couple of windows broken.’

‘Anything taken?’

‘Not that I know of so far, but not everyone’s back at their cars, so we’ll find out then.’

‘Maybe he was disturbed.’

Walters led him over to a Toyota RAV4 with a hole the size of a tennis ball punched in the back window. Reynolds stooped and cupped his hands so that he could peer into the dark interior. He jerked backwards as a flurry of fur, teeth and saliva slammed against the glass an inch from his face.

‘Shit!’

His heart racing, Reynolds banged the glass in retaliation at the German Shepherd that took up most of the rear of the car.

He glanced at Walters to see if he was laughing, but the PC looked concerned, if anything. Thank God.

Reynolds scanned the car park. Unlike the scene at Dunkery Beacon, this was a proper car park – maybe thirty bays, and a new toilet block made carefully rustic. The day was young. There were perhaps a dozen cars. A few of them had bored-looking owners standing or sitting close by. People in hiking gear, children in shorts, dogs on leads, bikes and backpacks.

‘OK, Walters. Don’t let anyone come in or leave.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And the note on the steering wheel. We’re keeping that back.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Reynolds’s optimistic mood had gone. John Took might be besieged by arseholes, but the hopeful theory that one of those arseholes had kidnapped Jess Took out of personal revenge had just been blown straight out of the water.

The promise of the stag had become evil voodoo. He looked at the moor, which rose around them on all sides. The birdsong and dappled sunlight were an alluring veil. Underneath, something smelled rotten.

Reynolds sighed and stepped over Mrs Knox’s slack legs to peer into the Golf. It was filled with the usual detritus of a holiday – maps, water bottles, sandwich wrappers, coolbox, beach towels.

But once you knew it was also supposed to contain a nine-year-old boy, it seemed very empty.

* * *

Look at them.

Now they care. Now when it’s too late. Where were they when he needed them? Arsing about down on the steps, thinking nothing could go wrong with their lives. Not thinking of how much they got to lose. Not thinking of consequences. And now consequences is all they’ve got.

It’s funny really, in one way. And not in another. Not if you’re the mother down there bawling like a calf. She should cry. She’s a disgrace. They all are.

Ah well, reckon they’ll just have to get used to it. Amazing what a person can get used to. Or what they’ll do if they can’t …

Anyway. There it is. I need him more than they do.

And I’ll love him more, too.

7

TWO CHILDREN HAD disappeared in four days, and the press descended on Exmoor like gulls on a freshly ploughed field, screeching and flapping and pecking each other for the best bits.

Peckiest of them all was the formidable Marcie Meyrick.

Three things made Marcie formidable. First, she was thirty-nine – which was so far beyond thirty that it might as well be fifty. In terms of newsgathering, she was a dinosaur, a fossil, a dodo. A dodo who used her sharp little wings to prod rivals out of her way, and trampled them under her prehistoric dodo feet as she rushed headlong towards a story. Having rejected both her boyfriend and her biological clock for her work, Marcie Meyrick was not about to stand aside for the bouncy pre-teens who passed for journalists nowadays.

Second, Marcie was a freelance reporter, which meant she got paid by column inches, not because she’d signed some nambypamby employment contract that included four weeks’ holiday and a pension plan. Her whole aim in life was to sneak copy into newspapers past news desks that already had their own reporters, the Press Association and the might of Google at their fingertips. Pickings were increasingly thin, and so was Marcie Meyrick.

The third thing that made her formidable was that she was Australian – to which there was no defence. It made her bold enough to doorstep the most hostile of targets, thick-skinned enough to deflect the most brutal of insults, and so whiny that unfaithful politicians, lifelong criminals and hardened police press officers routinely crumbled before her – preferring exposure, censure and even jail to another minute of her nasal, mosquito-in-the- ear wheedling.

Two winters back she’d attended a press conference about the murders that had left Shipcott in tatters. The police had been insisting that they remained hopeful of an arrest.

‘This year, next year, some time, never?’ Marcie had drawled at that particular briefing – further endearing herself to one and all.

Now – with two children stolen in a week, every news outlet in the country wanted another bite of the Exmoor cherry. Pete Knox had disappeared on the Wednesday after Jess Took. By Thursday morning, more than fifty reporters, camera crews and photographers swarmed across Exmoor – each chasing the breakout story that would get them on to Newsnight.

Being ancient, Marcie Meyrick knew that only two things really mattered in a story involving both murders and children: scaremongering and a catchy headline. Scaremongering was simple in this case: children missing on a moor where a killer had been at large promised much in the way of repeat performances – and a ready-made climate of fear and suspicion. It was a climate that suited Marcie just fine.

She wrote the story fast, rather than well, and spent every additional second she could thinking of her headline. It was vital to capture the imagination of first the news desk, then the nation. Nothing was set in stone, of course, but she’d been around long enough to know that no sub-editor could resist a good pun-based headline, even if it did come from a lowly stringer.

She wasn’t thrilled with it, but she finally punched the Send button on ‘New Terror on Murder Moor’ and then – confirming her status as dinosaur – she reached for a cigarette.

8

FOR SOME REASON, the paperboy had stopped bringing Jonas’s copy of the Bugle.