Belinda Bauer - Finders Keepers

‘Not worth fixing then, is it?’ She shrugged, leaning further back than was necessary to get a tobacco pouch from the front pocket of her cut-off jeans – and treating Jonas to a view of her belly ring and very nearly her Brazilian.

‘Probably not,’ he agreed.

She snorted ‘Typical’ and rolled a fag.

‘Did you see anything or anyone strange or noteworthy around the car park that day, Miss Skinner?’

She sucked smoke deep into her lungs and held it there while she shook her head. ‘I already told the police everything I know,’ she said with smoke curling out of her nose and mouth. ‘Saw nothing, heard nothing, noticed nothing. Nothing like that , anyway. You know.’

Jonas nodded. He had nothing else to ask, but given that he was unlikely to be able to go to Cumbria to interview Stanley Cotton or to see his car, he was reluctant to leave Tamzin Skinner’s meagre home with nothing to show for his day’s work.

There was a long silence between them, which became a little uncomfortable when it was plain that his visit should really be at an end. Mrs Tedworthy would have offered him another scone; Tamzin Skinner leaned backwards on her elbows and stuck out her tits.

Jonas turned away and did another circuit of the car. He seriously doubted that it was insured. She’d probably just said that to throw him off track. Certainly the tax was out of date by two months.

‘You need tax,’ he said – but not with any real intent to do anything about it.

She dropped her chest a little and said, ‘Yeah?’ as if it were a surprise.

He got back to the hole in the window and bent to look at it again.

‘You married?’ she said, out of the blue.

‘Yes,’ he told her.

‘All the good ones are.’

‘So they say,’ he said neutrally.

He didn’t want to look up and catch her eye, in case this conversation got awkward. Instead he pretended to be intensely interested in the hole with its surround of crazed glass, looking at it from every angle.

As he did, he saw something he hadn’t noticed before.

Halfway in and halfway out of the window – trapped by the broken glass – was a black hair about two inches long. Instantly he thought of Reynolds and his tufts, but this was darker than Reynolds’s hair.

He looked around at Tamzin Skinner, who was a bottle blonde, and whose parting was brown, not black.

A seed of excitement sprouted in Jonas’s belly. If this hair belonged to the kidnapper then they could have DNA within the week; mass testing across the moor; an arrest within the month. Maybe Jess and Pete and Charlie would still be alive in a month. Maybe they could be saved. Was that possible? The bumping of his heart was a response to the injection of pure hope – a sensation he hadn’t known for years. Literally years.

‘There’s a hair here,’ he said, and turned to point it out to the woman. She got up and came over with a little sway of the hips, and stood too close to him – her arm rubbing his as she peered at the hair.

She nodded. ‘That’ll be Jack’s.’

‘Who’s Jack?’ he said, feeling his hope teetering on the brink.

‘My dog.’

‘You have a dog,’ he said. Less a question than a statement.

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Lurcher.’

‘Oh,’ said Jonas, looking around. ‘Where is it, then?’

‘At the pub,’ she said. And then, when Jonas looked at her for more, she added defensively, ‘With my boyfriend.’

‘Oh,’ said Jonas again. He plucked the hair from the window and dropped it, wishing it were something heavy that he could throw hard into the scrub behind the caravan, to satisfy his disappointment. No hair from the kidnapper. No DNA and no arrest, and no found and rescued children.

Nothing.

He’d been so sure that the broken windows meant something .

But it was just a hair from a dog.

A dog .

It hit Jonas like something physical.

Dogs in the cars.

‘Did you have your dog with you that day at Tarr Steps?’

‘Yeah, we take Jack pretty much everywhere. If we leave him here he chews shit up.’

‘Was he in the car when the window was broken?’

‘Yeah. Why?’

‘Excuse me a minute.’ Jonas pulled his phone from his pocket and walked slightly away from the woman.

He asked David Tedworthy the same question.

They’d walked Gus down to Tarr Steps and back, then left him in the car while they did an hour-long hike. ‘He’s old and wobbly, you see. He can’t do long walks any more. He’s happier in the car.’

He called Directory Inquiries and had them connect him to Barbara Moorcroft. He asked whether she’d left her dogs in the car at any point while at the show.

‘Yes,’ she said, and Jonas could hear faint yapping in the background. ‘Just while I got the kids settled with the picnic and things. Then I went back and got them. That’s when I noticed the windows had been broken. Then the whole thing kicked off with the missing boy and I just grabbed the dogs and went back to make sure the kids were OK before seeing you near the cars. But by then you’d already seen it.’

Jonas hung up, his head spinning with new hope that made the old hope seem small and tawdry.

‘Is that important?’ said Skinner.

Jonas didn’t answer her. He barely heard her question. He mumbled something about having to go, and something else about getting new tax, and got back into the Land Rover.

At Tarr Steps Tamzin Skinner had left her dog in her car, and so had David Tedworthy. Both cars vandalized at the show had had dogs left in them. And here was the clincher: Barbara Moorcroft had left two dogs in the car – and there had been holes punched through two windows of her Renault Megane.

One for each dog.

With unsteady hands, he called Stanley Cotton. He misdialled three times and then, when he finally got it right, the phone rang endlessly and Jonas almost groaned with frustration in expectation of an answer machine. Instead a man finally answered impatiently. Jonas explained briefly who he was.

‘I spoke to the police already. They kept me there half the day. It wasn’t even a big hole. Big hole in my bloody pocket though.’

‘Did you have a dog in the car when the window was broken, Mr Cotton?’

‘Jesus! What kind of waste of time is this? Aren’t you supposed to be finding that little boy who was taken?’

‘ Did you?’ said Jonas forcefully.

‘Yes. What of it?’

Jonas hung up, feeling dizzy. It was all about the dogs. He didn’t know why , or what the hell it meant, or how it was connected to the disappearance of three children, but he was sure that was why the kidnapper had made holes in the car windows.

And Dunkery Beacon, where Jess Took was taken? Reynolds had told him no windows had been broken there. That was the piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit.

Jonas frowned at his own hands trembling on the steering wheel until the answer hit him with blinding ease.

The only dogs at Dunkery Beacon that early in the day would have been connected to the hunt – taken there to work.

No dogs left in cars. No windows broken.

He’d cracked it.

He wasn’t quite sure what he’d cracked, but Jonas felt instinctively that this brought him closer to keeping his promise to Lucy to save Charlie Peach.

DI REYNOLDS DIDN’T THINK Jonas Holly had cracked it at all.

‘Dogs?’ he said, with a lemon-sucking face.

‘Maybe,’ said Jonas, not so sure himself now.

He was confused by Reynolds. He had seemed such a reasonable, friendly man when he’d been here before, but Jonas was starting to understand that in the company of DCI Marvel, Josef Stalin might have appeared similarly blessed with social graces, so he was having to re-evaluate Reynolds from the ground up.