Belinda Bauer: Finders Keepers

‘OK then,’ said Steven miserably, and tried to shake the man’s outstretched hand, only to be embarrassed to realize that it was held out palm-up for the money, not to seal the deal like gentlemen. Gary laughed as he fumbled, and Steven felt like a boy among men.

Feeling slightly sick, he took out the envelope stuffed with notes and – like Jack handing over his mother’s cow for a handful of magic beans – gave it to Gary.

He wanted desperately to ask for a receipt, as his mother had insisted he must, but Gary had already stuffed the money into his back pocket and was picking up one of the boxes.

‘Give you a hand,’ he said, as if he wanted rid of the evidence as quickly as possible before anyone rumbled his scam.

Lewis took the frame, which was the lightest thing on offer, Ronnie picked up the other box despite his limp, and Steven took a wheel in each hand.

They loaded what Steven desperately hoped was a complete motorcycle into the trailer Ronnie had borrowed from somewhere, and got into the Fiesta. Lewis in the front, Steven squashed up behind with an old greyhound, which was obviously used to stretching out on the back seat – and which gave way only grudgingly, before flopping back down across his legs.

They drove back to Ronnie’s home in Shipcott too fast, and with the dog’s bony elbows sticking into Steven’s thighs round every precarious turn.

DETECTIVE INSPECTOR REYNOLDS was worried about his fringe. He was worried about the girl as well, of course, but his fringe was a constant and the girl was just a case, like those that had come before and many that would follow. She had probably run away. Most of them had. If not – if she had been abducted – then she would be found or she would not; she would live or she would die – or she would live the rest of her life in a way that would make her wish she could die.

It sounded callous, but that was just the way things were with missing children. Naturally, Reynolds would do everything in his power to find her, but right now the girl’s fate was an open-ended question. His fringe, on the other hand, was here to stay.

He hoped.

He examined it in the mirror and pushed it first to one side and then the other. It was a chilly morning and so he’d chickened out and worn a woollen beanie in to work. But he couldn’t hide for ever. Somehow the plugs looked more obvious here under the cold fluorescents of the gents’ toilet at Taunton police station than they had in his bathroom at home.

He pushed the fringe back the other way. It made no difference. He sighed. Maybe he shouldn’t have let them cut it so short, but the spectre of Elton John’s moptop had made him uncharacteristically macho.

Fuck it.

He’d spent almost four thousand pounds of his hard-earned savings on the bloody things – he couldn’t hide in the bogs all day.

DI Reynolds took a deep breath and banged out of the toilets to take charge of the hunt for Jess Took.

You don’t love her .

Reynolds had the note with him in an evidence bag for safekeeping. He’d ordered its presence at the possible crime scene not to be made public. If Jess Took had been abducted, then it was a detail that could be useful in trapping her kidnapper in a lie. Alternatively it could weed out the weirdos who might like to claim the crime as their own.

He’d looked at it a hundred times as they drove from Taunton to Exmoor. Jess Took had only been missing for thirty-six hours and the graphologist hadn’t wanted to commit himself without further investigation, but had told him that, due to the care taken with the lettering, the note was unlikely to have been written by a person who wrote every day. Very helpful. That really narrowed it down. Who the hell wrote every day – or any day – using a pen and paper? Reynolds himself couldn’t remember the last time he’d picked up a pen with any real purpose other than to jot a few notes or to click the end of it while he mused. It was all keyboards now. Words were created and disappeared into a box and then you switched them off and back on again and hoped that they were still there. Reynolds was all for the paperless office, but for some reason the Taunton Serious Crime office seemed more paper ful by the week. It was an enigma, he thought, wrapped in endless reams of A4.

He smiled inwardly and wished he could have said something that clever out loud and to an appreciative audience. Detective Sergeant Elizabeth Rice was far from dull, but she did not share his erudition.

Rice was , however, a conscientious driver and Reynolds always handed her the keys. Then he could think, instead of being plagued by the mirror, signal, manoeuvre mantra that had been driven into his head so hard by his father that it had never found its way out again.

The roads started twisting the moment they left the motorway. There was no transition: one minute they were in the twenty-first century, the next in what felt like the 1950s. Thorn trees and hedges squeezed narrow lanes between them like black toothpaste curling out across Exmoor, and Reynolds knew that in his pocket his mobile phone would already be casting about for a signal.

‘It feels weird to be back.’

Rice could not have mirrored his feelings more accurately.

Reynolds had not been back since a killer had cut a brutal swathe across the moor. Not since he’d driven Jonas Holly home from hospital just over a year ago and sworn to him that they’d catch the man who’d murdered his wife.

That hadn’t happened.

But he had phoned Jonas on three separate occasions – each time more suspicious than the last that the man was screening his calls, and guiltily relieved by it: he was never phoning with any positive news. The few skinny forensic leads they’d had had dwindled to nothing and, although the case was still officially open, Reynolds knew that it would take a huge stroke of luck or another murder to see it shuffle its way back to the top of Homicide’s must-do list.

He remembered that as recently as this January – a year after her death – Jonas Holly’s answerphone still had his wife’s voice on it. ‘ Hi, you’ve reached Jonas and Lucy. Please leave a message and we’ll call you back, or you can ring Jonas on his mobile …’

The voice of a ghost.

It gave Reynolds the creeps.

‘It does,’ he agreed with Rice. ‘Very weird.’

It also felt strange to be in a grubby white van instead of an unmarked pool car. The van was a genuine one from RJ Holding & Sons Builders in Taunton. Roger Holding was a cousin of the desk sergeant, and had offered the loan of one of his vans so they could approach the Took family without revealing their identities. Kidnapping for ransom was virtually obsolete now outside some Eastern European communities, but it was best to follow procedure until they were sure. However, Reynolds thought Elizabeth Rice looked suspiciously attractive to be behind the wheel of a builder’s van, even in jeans and sweatshirt, and with her straight blonde hair tied into a utilitarian ponytail. He should have brought Tim Jones from drugs, who looked and smelled like a navvy.

The van was littered with fast-food wrappers and underfoot was a dirty magazine, in every sense of the word. Reynolds had spotted it as he climbed into the cab, and had spent the whole journey trying to cover as much of it as possible with his feet, so that Rice would not be offended or – worse – make a joke about it.

He put the note back in the folder on his lap labelled JESSICA TOOK, and stared at the photo of the girl.

When it came to vanishing teenagers, the word ‘runaway’ was always above the word ‘abducted’ on the list of possibilities. Even an ostentatious liberal like Reynolds knew that if they treated every teenage disappearance like a kidnap, they’d spend their lives winkling sulky kids from under their best friends’ beds or throwing a big net over them in London bus stations. The truth was that most kids simply went home, and – unless there was clear evidence of abduction – there was an unofficial 24-hour period when it was assumed that that was exactly what would happen.