Belinda Bauer - Finders Keepers

‘Yep.’

‘You’re alive.’

‘You’re a genius.’

He got slowly to his feet and stared stupidly down at his dark-blue briefs. ‘Where are my clothes?’

‘He took them. Don’t worry about it. He takes all our clothes.’

‘Who does?’

‘The huntsman. I can’t remember his name. But I know he’s the huntsman. Don’t worry, he’s not a perv. Not yet, anyway.’

Steven looked at her as if for the first time, taking in her grubby bra and matching knickers. It was only the second time he’d ever seen a girl in a bra, but this was nothing like the first.

‘I feel sick,’ he said.

‘It’s just the drugs,’ Jess told him. ‘Everyone feels sick when they first get here.’

Everyone .

Steven peered through the chain link beyond Jess Took and saw a little blonde girl, staring at him with solemn eyes; beyond her was a brown-haired child of about the same size. Kylie someone, and the other girl whose name he couldn’t remember – they’d been taken from the bus. In the furthest kennel of all was a thin, freckled boy with red hair. All the wire between them made the child he guessed must be Pete Knox indistinct and hazy in a block pattern, like a bad digital signal.

‘Hi,’ Pete said, and waved sombrely. Steven raised a slow hand.

‘What’s your name?’ said the blonde girl.

‘Steven,’ he said.

‘She’s Kylie,’ said Jess. ‘And that’s Maisie and Pete.’ She flicked her filthy hair and Steven noticed her collar for the first time. Almost simultaneously he put his hand to his own throat and felt the thick, soft leather collar there. His fingers worked at the buckle.

‘You can’t take it off. It’s locked on.’

His fingers found the little padlock. ‘Why?’

She shrugged. ‘’Cos he’s a loony, that’s why.’

A loony . The childish tag was not enough to describe anyone who would do this.

‘Hey!’ The shout and a metallic rattle behind him made Steven spin round, heart in his mouth. Two kennels down a youngster with bright-yellow hair slapped the chain link with the flats of both palms, and grinned happily.

‘Hey! Hello!’

‘Hi,’ said Steven cautiously.

‘Are we going home? Are we going home for tea? Can I have biscuits when we get home?’

Charlie Peach.

Steven had seen him occasionally, trailing behind his father into Mr Jacoby’s shop; once waiting for Mr Peach inside the secretary’s office after school. But mostly Charlie lived in a separate world, away from the normality of Shipcott. An indoors world where it was safe, or at the special school he went to. Steven had seen a Sunshine coach parked outside Mr Peach’s house on more than one occasion, waiting to take Charlie out for the day with the other vacant, smiling children packed inside.

Although once he’d met the eyes of a boy in that coach.

Above the boy’s crooked hands and shiny, wagging chin, he’d met a pair of eyes that had glared at him as if it was all his fault. Steven had looked away and never looked into the coach again. It was a different world in that coach.

Now he and Charlie Peach were in the same world. That made his already uneasy stomach feel still more sour.

‘Who’s he ?’ demanded Charlie, waggling a finger through the diamonds.

Steven looked down and sucked in his breath.

In the cage between them lay Jonas Holly – a bruise painting one eye as black as a pirate’s patch, and a three-foot chain leading from the metal hoop on his collar to a small brass padlock fed through the fence that separated him from Charlie.

Jonas Holly was a victim – just like him .

All the rules Steven had lived by for eighteen long months changed in an instant and he felt dizzy with the adjustment. What did it mean? If Jonas hadn’t kidnapped the children, then had he still killed his wife? Steven felt the two notions warring within him. He’d been almost sure of both those things, and now his own eyes were telling him that at least one of them was not true.

He thought of the woods. The memories came in disjointed flashes – the smooth-faced man trying to heave a limp body on to the back seat of the old Ford; Davey’s red shoulder just visible in the open boot; the fear of moving towards danger instead of away from it, the way his gut churned at him not to…

His brother in his arms – warm, and waking too loudly.

Ssssssh!

Davey hadn’t shushed. Instead he’d shouted and lashed out and caught Steven a stunning blow on the nose. Steven sighed. It wasn’t Davey’s fault; he hadn’t known what he was doing.

‘Where’s Davey?’ he said to no one.

‘Who’s Davey?’ said Jess.

Steven looked both ways through the wire and did not see his brother. He had made it! He smiled inside – then thought of Davey falling into his mother’s arms instead of him, and his face tingled with imminent tears.

‘Who’s he ?’ Charlie asked again, more forcefully, still wiggling a finger at Jonas Holly.

‘He’s a policeman,’ said Steven.

‘Oh,’ said Charlie. ‘Do you know “Ten Green Bottles”?’ He started to sing it without waiting for an answer.

‘Mr Holly?’ said Steven tentatively, but the man did not move. Steven frowned at his long flat body clad only in shorts. His abdomen was a shallow dish between his ribs and his hip bones, containing thick red scars that crawled and twisted across his pale skin like some strange delicacy that might require chopsticks.

The marks a killer had made.

‘I feel sick,’ Steven said again, and turned away.

When he wasn’t robbing banks, Davey had often fantasized about being a cop. As part of those fantasies he’d also imagined interrogating a suspect. In his fertile young mind – fed by television – chairs were scraped across concrete floors, fists were banged on Formica tables, and interviews were conducted in an atmosphere of such loud intensity that spittle landed on the used coffee cups between the adversaries.

So when Dr Evans asked if he felt up to speaking to the police, Davey – despite having passed a restless night at North Devon Hospital – was excited.

At first.

He’d imagined a cop who looked like Will Smith in Men In Black . Cool, wearing shades and a sharp suit, with a gun in his sock and a watch shaped like a Dairylea slice. The reality was more like being quizzed by his maths teacher, Mr Harris, who picked his nose when he thought no one was looking.

DI Reynolds asked the same boring questions over and over again, and wrote everything down in a little notebook. Then he flipped the pages of that notebook back and forth before he asked his next question. It made him seem like he’d lost his memory. Davey had told him three times that he hadn’t seen the face of the man who had snatched him, and yet he kept asking about him, but in another way – as if he could trap Davey into remembering who it was.

‘Did you see him coming?’

‘No. I told you that already. He came up behind me.’

‘Tell me about the car.’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘What colour was it?’

‘I told you.’

‘Can you tell me again?’

‘Dark. Blue or black. Or green maybe.’

‘Was the man wearing anything on his hands?’

‘I can’t remember .’

‘Did he tie your hands or mouth at any time?’

‘No.’

‘Not with rope?’

‘No.’

‘Or tape of any kind?’

‘ No! ’

‘But you did see Constable Holly?’

‘Yes, when they dragged me out from under the car.’

‘ They dragged you?’