Belinda Bauer - Finders Keepers

She was mentally couching her next question for maximum probe when Jonas carried on without prompting – again.

‘People hurt children,’ he said bluntly.

Kate hesitated. She had to be careful here; they were breaking new ground. ‘Sometimes they do.’

He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again.

‘How does that make you feel?’ she ventured, with little expectation of a reply. Another standard, stalling question. She wasn’t sure where this was going.

She watched his throat work as he stared at the sampler; noticed his hands ball into fists in his pockets.

And suddenly, as surely as if she’d opened a window and felt the breeze, Kate Gulliver felt a wave of threat hit her from across the room. He was about to smash the sampler – strike it from the wall and grind it underfoot – then turn on her. She knew it in her gut. Panic rose in her like mercury, and she jerked in her seat from the sheer rush. She glanced at the door. If she had to, could she reach it before him? She didn’t think so. There was an alarm button, but it was under her desktop and Jonas Holly was between her and the desk. If she screamed would someone hear her? Would they come running? Or would it just provoke him? Would she be dead before help came? Choked and lifeless on the carpet? Her throat slashed with a shard of glass from the broken frame?

All this flashed through her mind in the blink of an eye and left her feeling kicked in the heart.

Then she got a grip.

Ridiculous! She was being ridiculous. She was an experienced psychologist and Jonas was her client – a man of the law, who’d suffered a terrible loss and who needed help. Not some raving lunatic who might murder her over a bit of cross-stitch! She must be completely mad to have thought it, even for a second.

Jonas had not moved.

Kate almost laughed, but stopped the sound before it came out of her mouth because she thought she might appear as crazy as she felt. It was not like her to be irrational. She’d never done a single thing on impulse – always considered the consequences of every action. Now she tried to analyse where that feeling of danger had come from, how it had seized her – her physical responses to that flash of overwhelming fear.

It made her feel better to dissect it like this, but in her belly she could still feel the terror fizzing slowly away. A seltzer of instinct. Her body insisting that this thing had been real.

She concentrated on her breathing. She made herself wait longer than she needed to before she spoke – just to show herself that she could.

‘I think that’s the hour, Jonas.’

He looked round as if he’d forgotten she was there. ‘OK. Thanks.’

He gave her a shy half-smile, and left without another glance at the sampler.

Kate released all her tension in one long, jolting breath. Her hands shook and she felt the corners of her mouth tremble downwards like a grazed toddler’s. She felt tears close to the surface and made a giant effort to get a grip.

Stupid. You’re being stupid. Stop it!

She cleared her throat and sat up straight. Something had triggered her fear response. More than likely it was something inside her – nothing to do with Jonas Holly at all. Maybe something to do with her grandmother, who had been a right old cow, if truth be told. Living in that gloomy house with the curtains always drawn. She’d been creeped out then; no wonder she was creeped out now. It was something she should be exploring with her own therapist, not something she should be blaming on a client.

She pressed a tissue to her eyes. She’d have to check her make-up before the next appointment.

Kate took a deep breath and felt everything inside her returning slowly to normal.

Jonas had shown his anger at last – albeit confined to a fist in his pocket – and had been fine by the end of the session. Calm. That was a kind of acceptance, wasn’t it?

The missing pieces of his grief jigsaw.

You’re scared of him .

She ignored the voice in her head. It wasn’t logical or professional. What was logical and professional was to know when she had done all she could for a client and to allow him to move on. To get on with his life.

Kate Gulliver opened his file and ticked the box that cleared Jonas Holly to return to duty.

STEVEN LAMB WAS RIGHT about his brother. Their mother’s dire warnings about the deathtrap that was Springer Farm had made it a magnet – and Davey and his best friend Shane played up there among the ruins whenever they could. The farmhouse was black and filthy and open to the skies through a skeleton of charred oak beams, with the stone chimney sternum piercing them like a monument to the dead. The row of cottages across the courtyard had been so vandalized by local children (Davey and Shane prime among them) that anyone could walk in and set up home – the few remaining sticks of furniture were so decrepit that the estate of the deceased had failed to assign any value to them. There was even an old bed, complete with mattress, in one of the rooms – where small black handmarks on the ceiling bore testament to the fact that the springs still worked.

The boys loved to sift through the ashes of the main house, looking for treasures, while sniffing chunks of charcoal, or using them to draw crude graffiti on the cottage walls.

D + S CrEw

This propEty bElongs to Lamb and Collins. KEEP OUT .

Mr PEach is a COCK .

They did occasionally find what they considered to be treasures in the ruin of the house. Once a green marble egg, another time a fox’s mask, only slightly blackened down one side and mounted on a wooden shield. They’d wrestled over the mask and – from within a stiff headlock – Shane had decided he didn’t want it anyway. He’d got the egg.

Once, when they were seeing how far up the chimney they could climb before getting stuck, Shane’s foot dislodged an old biscuit tin that had been wedged there. Disappointingly, it contained nothing but a few dozen fuzzy and faded snapshots of boys and ponies. Davey said it was Shane’s turn to keep the treasure, but Shane resisted; he didn’t want to waste his turn on gay junk. So they just jammed the tin back where they’d found it.

Davey got furthest up the chimney – over twelve feet, according to the twine tied to his ankle, which was their judge and jury. He came down looking Victorian, and spent that night marvelling at the additional treasure of black snot that he discovered in his nose.

Of course, the boys weren’t supposed to be at Springer Farm at all – or anywhere vaguely interesting. Davey blamed Steven, who’d ruined it for everybody by almost getting killed a while back. Davey was hazy on the details – he just knew that his nan loved Steven better than she loved him, and that that was why. Now he had to pay the price of his mother only working in the mornings so that she was there when they got home from school. Luckily, both Davey and Shane felt that lying to their mothers in order to be able to play properly was hardly lying at all, and so did it routinely. Davey’s mother was told they were in Shane’s back garden, and Shane’s was told they were at Davey’s. Once that lie had been told and believed, it was a simple matter to go anywhere they pleased for as long as they liked. And, more often than not, they pleased to walk up the hill until they reached Rose and Honeysuckle cottages. Then they always ran, because everyone knew that a woman had been murdered in one cottage and that a witch lived in the other. Once she had been at the gate and had asked them if their parents knew where they were. They’d run past her, laughing with self-imposed fear, and Shane had turned and – from a safe distance – had given her a V sign. They weren’t sure she’d seen it – and Davey secretly hoped she hadn’t – but it was exhilarating none the less.