Belinda Bauer - Finders Keepers

‘Someone dragged me. I was backwards.’

‘But Mr Holly and this smooth man were two different people?’

Davey rolled his eyes and didn’t bother answering.

Lettie gave him a look. ‘Don’t be rude, Davey,’

‘Yes,’ sang Davey. ‘They were two different people.’

‘What happened then?’

‘I dunno. I was all… whirly.’

‘And then you remember being in the boot—’

‘Yes.’

‘And that’s when you saw Steven.’

‘Yes.’

‘And what happened then?’

Davey hesitated. There were things he couldn’t remember. Lots of them. But there were other things he could remember that he’d rather not tell. Specially not with his mother and Dr Evans hovering anxiously at the foot of his bed, listening to everything. His mother clutched the metal rail with both hands, as if DI Reynolds might carry him and his bed off, just for a laugh.

He remembered being jostled and opening his eyes to see Steven’s face so close…

‘ Ssssssh! ’

‘ What? Go away .’

‘ Davey, shush! ’

Hands under his shoulders and knees, lifting him out of the boot of the car; the sky and the treetops above him, and sweat rolling off a spiky fringe .

His feet hitting the ground .

‘ Go AWAY! I’ll tell my brother! ’

‘ Davey, shut up! It’s me. Ssssssh! ’

But he hadn’t shushed. He could remember that . With shame coating his innards like hot syrup, Davey remembered fighting instead – fighting Steven ! Waving his fists blindly and shouting so loud that it echoed. He couldn’t remember what. He’d connected with one fist. Hard. And then he’d just run – all wobbly and tumbly and knee-scrapey through the stumps and the ferns.

He hadn’t even looked back…

‘Yes?’ said DI Reynolds.

‘And he helped me out and we ran away.’

‘And where was Mr Holly while you were running away?’

‘Dunno.’ Davey shrugged.

‘And where was the other man?’

‘Dunno.’

A tiny, elderly Pakistani woman pushed a filthy mop shaped like a V into the ward and past the end of his bed while nodding into a mobile phone, and Davey longed for a life like that, where he didn’t have to think, and nobody asked him difficult questions.

‘They just let you run away? Didn’t try to catch you?’

‘I ran fast ,’ said Davey. Then, without prompting, he added hurriedly, ‘Steven was right behind me; he must have got lost or something.’

DI Reynolds said nothing but flipped back several pages, clicking his pen and making a small tu-tu-tu sound through his pursed lips, like a tiny train.

Why do I always get the retard? thought Davey. This guy was such a loser. Plus, there was something weird about DI Reynolds’s hair, although Davey couldn’t say quite what.

‘We ran away together ,’ he provided for free.

‘After he helped you out of the car, did your brother say anything to you?’

Ssssssh!

‘I can’t remember.’

Davey’s mother bit her lip and blinked out of the window.

DI Reynolds didn’t sigh, but Davey could tell he wanted to. Maybe the policeman was as disappointed with the interview as he was.

‘Try,’ said DI Reynolds.

‘OK,’ Davey said, and put on a trying face, but all the time his mind squirmed with the dawning awfulness of it all. Steven had come to help him, but he hadn’t helped Steven back. Instead he’d punched him; he’d shouted when Steven had told him to shush; he’d given them both away and then only saved himself. This was not the kind of cop or bank robber he’d ever imagined being. The kind who abandoned a friend to his fate. A brother .

‘What’s wrong, Davey?’ said DI Reynolds.

Davey shook his head. His mother gazed at him with eyes like a cartoon puppy in a rainstorm, and Davey could barely look at her straight.

‘He did say something!’

The sudden hope in his mother’s eyes triggered a tumble of words. ‘He said… Steven said… “Run, Davey! I’m right behind you! Run home to Mum.” And so I did.’

At the foot of the bed, Lettie clutched her mouth and nodded hard as tears rolled down her cheeks.

DI Reynolds clicked his pen, but did not write it down.

THERE WAS A sharp hiss and the children got up as one and moved towards the gates of their kennels. The hiss came again, and again, a slow metallic scraping of the knife being sharpened.

They clung to the chain link, waiting expectantly. Finally there was the dull thump of something hitting metal, and the low rumble of an approach on wheels across the rutted concrete walkway.

A low flatbed trolley emerged from the back door of the big shed. The huntsman propelled it, his legs bowed but sturdy, his face smoothed and distorted by a stocking mask, like a bad fabric puppet.

Steven got a flash of the clearing in the woods, of Davey curled in the boot of the old blue saloon while the man with the smooth head held Jonas Holly’s legs; the slow stagger towards the trees; the grip on his arm; the kick to the backs of his knees. He remembered the hot chemical wool over his face and the way everything swam away from him like fish spiralling away through the tops of the trees…

Something heavy dropped into Pete’s kennel and Steven flinched.

The huntsman moved down the line.

It wasn’t until he got to Jess’s kennel that Steven could see clearly what he was throwing over the gates…

Bones.

As if they were dogs!

And Jess Took picked one up and started to chew on it as if no one had told her she wasn’t a dog.

‘All right, bay?’ the huntsman said to Steven without looking at him and not waiting for an answer.

‘Why am I here? What do you want?’

‘Good lad,’ said the huntsman, and leaned up to drop a couple of big bones over the fence. Steven looked down at the crude grey-pink chunks, with shiny white knobs protruding.

‘I’m not eating that,’ he said firmly.

The huntsman ignored him and moved on.

‘He doesn’t listen,’ said Jess sadly. ‘He only talks.’

The huntsman dropped bones into Jonas Holly’s kennel and then into Charlie’s.

Charlie picked up a rack of ribs and said, ‘Thank you.’

The huntsman turned his trolley and wheeled it back down the line. It made a different sound when it was empty.

As he passed her kennel, Jess Took bared her teeth at him and said, ‘Woof!’

Kate Gulliver also thought that it was ‘very interesting’ that Steven Lamb had implicated Jonas in the abductions – and then disappeared himself.

Reynolds was delighted. He’d rung Kate – who’d always encouraged him to call her that – and told her of Elizabeth Rice’s conversation with the boy.

Very interesting , she’d said – and Reynolds wished he could turn back time and put her call on speakerphone just so he could give Rice a triumphant look.

‘That’s what I said,’ he told Kate in Rice’s hearing instead, but Rice gave no indication she had heard anything – triumphant or otherwise. She was rummaging in a bag from the Spar shop they were parked outside.

Kate continued, ‘The trauma of Steven’s experiences at a formative age could have damaged him in countless ways. He might have paranoid tendencies which make him focus his suspicions on an innocent party.’

She sounded quite enthusiastic about the idea. ‘I can even see a scenario where he might visit similar experiences on other children. Abuse begets abuse; it’s not unusual.’

‘Exactly,’ Reynolds nodded, hoping Rice was getting this: that he’d been right and that Kate Gulliver said so.