Belinda Bauer - Finders Keepers

‘I wanted to ask you something.’

Again, Steven gave him no encouragement.

‘Why did you put the money on Lucy’s grave?’

The question took Steven by surprise.

‘What money?’ he stalled.

‘This money,’ said Mr Holly, and leaned to one side until Steven heard the chink of coins and the rustle of notes coming out of his pocket. ‘Sixty-two pounds thirty.’

Steven was quiet again. The dark let him be so, when in daylight he would have felt compelled to answer immediately.

Mr Holly said nothing for a long while. And when he did speak again, it was not about the money.

‘People hurt children, you know,’ he said softly.

Steven’s heart began to beat hard. ‘I know.’

He started to edge down the hill until he was level with the policeman. Another few yards and he’d be beyond him, and then he could run if he had to. He thought he might have to, however stupid that would look.

‘Of course you do,’ said Mr Holly, nodding his head slowly. ‘We both know that.’

‘I have to get home now, Mr Holly,’ said Steven. He took the few paces that meant he was past the gate.

The man crossed the distance between them silently and with disturbing speed.

Steven retreated but found the sharp hedge at his back. He flinched at the contact he knew was coming. ‘What do you want ?’

Jonas Holly stopped, as if aware for the first time that Steven might be scared. He stood still and spoke softly. ‘Are you in trouble, Steven? Do you owe someone money?’

Steven was confused. His mind had to catch up.

Mr Holly seemed to take his silence as an admission. ‘Is it drugs? If someone’s threatening you I can help you; that’s my job.’

Steven said nothing. Mr Holly was the last person in the world he would go to for help.

As if reading that thought, the policeman continued, ‘I know I let people down before, but it won’t happen again. If you’re in danger, Steven—’

‘No! I’m fine . Leave me alone .’ Steven waved an arm in front of him in a subconscious attempt to clear himself some space. His knuckles grazed Jonas Holly’s chest.

‘Then why leave the money there?’

‘Because it’s hers .’

Steven held his breath.

Jonas Holly stood absolutely motionless, arms at his sides. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I have to go home now.’

‘What do you mean ?’

Steven tried to edge around him and Mr Holly grabbed his arm in an iron grip. ‘ Tell me .’

Steven hitched in a breath of shock. The voice was Mr Holly’s, but not . It was flat and harsh and inky black, and Steven felt a change in the warm night air as if somewhere God had left a door open and the cold had rushed in.

He started to shake. Brief seconds ago he’d felt like a man. Now he felt like a man about to die, without refuge or defence, a crab without a shell, scuttling in a bucket and with nothing to protect him from the looming threat that Mr Holly had suddenly become.

Shame burned Steven’s eyes. If Em could see him now – so small and frightened – she would never kiss him again. In the dark, Steven could not see the man’s eyes – only the faint twin glimmers where he knew his eyes to be. He couldn’t even pretend to be brave under that invisible gaze.

‘It’s hers ,’ he whispered. ‘She gave it to me but I didn’t want it, so I was giving it back. My mum is waiting for me. And my nan.’

‘Why would she do that?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know ! I didn’t ask. You’re hurting me.’

‘When did she give it to you?’

Steven’s voice cracked. ‘I have to go !’

‘ When? ’

Steven was scared but suddenly he was angry too. Angry that Mr Holly had stolen his joy over the kiss. Angry that he’d murdered his wife, when she’d been so kind and pretty and funny. So angry that for one terrible second he lost all sense of self-preservation…

‘The night you killed her.’

The darkness between the two of them became a slow vacuum that sucked the last of the bravado out of Steven, the tears from his eyes, the scream from his lips, the anger from his belly; he felt them all being extracted by the silent black shape before him, leaving him filled only with numb terror.

Right now, if Mr Holly had told him to stay there while he went to fetch a knife to kill him with, Steven would have sat down in the road and waited. Snivelling.

Instead Jonas let go of Steven’s arm.

He took a slow step backwards.

He tilted his head at the escape route down the hill.

‘You can run now,’ he said.

So Steven did.

ELIZABETH RICE HAD JUST got out of the shower when her phone rang. It was Reynolds.

‘There’s someone downstairs who wants to talk to the police. I’ve just got out of the shower, so would you mind, Elizabeth?’

Would you mind, Elizabeth?

Rice was getting pretty sick of those four words.

‘Sure,’ she said tightly.

Her hair was still dripping, so she wrapped it in a towel and piled it on her head, then pulled on a skirt, shirt and low, practical heels and was about to leave her room. Then she thought that there was an outside chance – about 0.5 per cent, but a chance none the less – that the person downstairs might be a handsome young farmer, so she quickly applied mascara and a swipe of lipstick. It was only on her way down the rickety staircase that she remembered the towel. She was about to take it off, but then wondered at her own optimism, when she’d long ago noticed that any phrase containing the words ‘handsome’, ‘young’ and ‘farmer’ was a kind of triple oxymoron, held together only by expectations nurtured by a Mills & Boon adolescence.

Her dimmed mood and wet towel were both vindicated when she saw that the visitor was not even a man but a schoolboy – a gangly, dark-eyed youth with jutting ears, a jagged haircut, and that crazily transient combination of fair, boyish complexion and shaving stubble.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Rice. How can I help you?’

The boy glanced at her makeshift turban, then looked away. ‘Um,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’

Rice sighed inwardly. Children were a mystery to her. She couldn’t really remember what it was like to be one, and the children of her friends and sisters always made her slightly uncomfortable. She would smile at them and they would stare solemnly back at her, as if they knew what she was thinking.

Babies cried on contact.

She didn’t dislike children, but they bored her. She even got impatient with cute children in Hollywood movies, with their curls and their adenoids and their smart-arse comebacks.

Before she could catch it, she sighed outwardly too, which made the boy in front of her blush. This made her feel bad enough to make an effort with him, even though she knew her hair was going to look like total shit for the rest of the day.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Steven,’ he said. ‘Lamb.’

The name rang a faint bell, but she didn’t waste time wondering why. She softened her tone consciously.

‘What did you want to tell me, Steven?’

Steven wished he hadn’t come. He hadn’t thought things through, and didn’t have the words ready to explain. He’d once played one of Fagin’s boys in a school production of Oliver! He’d only had one line – ‘Kill you as soon as look at you, he would’ – but had been astonished by the sheer number of ways he could get that line wrong. Either he forgot the words entirely, or remembered them but all in the wrong order. Even when he got the line right he sounded like Yoda.