Belinda Bauer - Finders Keepers

At first the idea of eating such offerings seemed ridiculously over-dramatic to Jonas. Then he reminded himself that he was being held in a dog kennel by a crazy man – and eating grass didn’t seem like such an outlandish response after all.

The grass was bitter and hard to swallow. The dandelions were strangely creamy and tickled his throat like yellow feathers, while the clover was stiff and tasted only of green. Once Kylie found some wild strawberries – each the size of a pea, and so sweet it made everything else taste foul again, just as he’d been getting used to it. He noticed little improvement in his hunger pangs, but chewing was good and he imagined that the children’s offerings must contain some worthwhile calories, so he was grateful.

He noticed that Steven Lamb never brought anything back from the meadow for him. He collected the assembled green stuff from Jess and dutifully pushed it through the wire, but, while Jonas thanked him, Steven never said a word.

Jonas was confused. Steven used to be a friendly kid. Used to keep an eye on Lucy for him as her disease progressed. Jonas had tipped him a fiver a month, but he knew Steven would have done it for nothing, and he’d given far more than a fiver’s worth of time and effort to the task. And Lucy had adored Steven. She’d never had a bad thing to say about him. Jonas had always got on with him just fine. But that night when Jonas had tried to talk to him about the money, he’d acted like a boy who had something to hide – or something to fear.

He frowned at Steven through the mesh, and tried to work out what he could have done to upset him.

Now that he’d stopped being a mental patient, the Jonas Holly that Steven feared and hated was back.

Except he wasn’t. Not quite, anyway.

Seeing the scars that patterned Jonas’s stomach had shaken Steven. The scars could not lie, however much he wished they could. He was a fair-minded boy, and now had to consider that he might have been wrong about Jonas Holly killing his wife, just as he’d been wrong about him stealing the children.

But although his suspicions had been reduced, Steven was reluctant to let them go entirely. He was curious about that other person. That cringing ball of child-like fear with the trembling lip and night-time tears, who seemed to have vacated the kennel next to his as suddenly and completely as a dog retrieved at the end of a family holiday. The Jonas he saw now bore no resemblance to that pathetic other, and seemed to have no recollection of his time in captivity so far. He asked stupid questions; he expected to be taken out for exercise. He asked about a bloody vegetarian option! It was as if he’d only just arrived.

It was all too weird, and so Steven determined to keep hold of his caution, even if his hatred was deserting him.

THERE WAS A fracas at the school. Nobody ever agreed on precisely who had called the parents, but whoever did had managed to pick the biggest, strongest and most belligerent. They descended on Marcie Meyrick and the photographers just as they were lining up the first of several immaculately made-up, blow-dried teenaged girls to have their photos taken.

By the time Reynolds and Rice got there, all the witnesses seemed to have gone to work, and the only people left at the scene had all apparently arrived too late to see anything but five journalists disappearing up Barnstaple Road.

‘Running like hell,’ laughed Ronnie Trewell, who was there in loco parentis for his brother, Dougie.

‘Jogging,’ corrected Mike Haddon, the blacksmith. ‘I think they’re from London.’

It seemed they had also dropped their cameras, which were smashed to pieces on the pavement. And at some point during what Reynolds gathered must have been a very confusing mêlée, someone had had the time to key the word LIER down both sides of a black Subaru Impreza with gold alloys which had been parked on the school-crossing zigzags.

Rice ran a quick check and found it was registered to Marcie Meyrick.

Reynolds walked twice around the car inspecting the damage. He shook his head in despair.

‘Outrageous,’ he said. ‘Can’t spell or park.’ Then he told Rice to issue a ticket.

Because she’d been delayed by the fuss at the school gates, Emily Carver’s mother was late driving back home along Barnstaple Road. But she was just in time to see her daughter – whom she had dropped off at school less than fifteen minutes before – knocking on the door of number 111.

She pulled over, demanded an explanation and called the school when Em’s story didn’t ring true. Then she hit the roof. Right there on the pavement outside the Lambs’ house, complete with waving arms and crazy hair. At one point Em glanced over her mother’s shoulder to see Lettie and Nan watching round-eyed from the front window, and gave a nervous giggle.

‘It’s not funny !’ shouted Mrs Carver, and slapped Em’s face. ‘I want you to be safe . You could be lying dead in a ditch!’

Em held her cheek and fought back tears.

The drive back to Old Barn Farm was stuffed to the brim with cold silence, but the noise started again back at home, while Em started to feel detached from the people who’d made her and loved her, yet couldn’t understand her.

‘This is ridiculous,’ her father snapped at her. ‘You’re ruining your life for a boy you hardly know!’

‘I do know him. And I love him.’

Her mother shouted, ‘You don’t even know what love is .’

‘Don’t tell me how I feel,’ said Em, tilting further and further towards calm on this see-saw of hysteria.

‘I’m selling Skip!’ her father yelled. ‘If you’re going to start running off after boys!’

‘OK.’ Em nodded sadly.

And that’s when they finally shut up and stopped treating her like a baby.

AS STEVEN WATCHED Jonas Holly reach out for the dandelions like some kind of starved but gentle ape, he had to keep reminding himself that Jonas had murdered his wife.

He thought of Em, and wondered whether Jonas and Lucy Holly had ever been that happy, that in love. Did Jonas Holly remember the feel of his wife’s back under his hands, or the first time he’d seen her breasts inside her bra?

Jonas’s stomach squealed and he put his hand under his ribs and grimaced. It was a big hand but it didn’t hide the scars completely. They still squirmed out from underneath like dark maggots escaping his fist. Steven had a scar in the middle of his back that matched the tear in his Liverpool shirt; it was where Arnold Avery had hit him with a spade. He could no longer remember the pain with his body, but he did remember that it had hurt and then itched and then become a fading ache that had lasted months. He had twisted to look at it in the bathroom mirror. It wasn’t big – just a red mark on his back that had become pale pink over the years. Nothing like the jagged ridges that criss-crossed Jonas Holly’s abdomen. He tried to imagine how much they must have hurt.

With an angry jolt, he hoped they still did.

‘Why did you kill her?’

Jonas looked confused. ‘Who?’

‘Your wife, of course!’

Jonas swayed on his haunches. Somewhere a long way off, he could hear a plaintive cow. He looked at Steven’s mouth as if to check that the boy had indeed spoken and this was not all in his head, along with his guilty heartbeat.

He hadn’t killed Lucy. That was the truth.

He was sure of it.

He remembered the knife. He remembered the blood. Those things were confusing. There were some things he couldn’t remember, and other things he didn’t want to, but if he had lived a million lifetimes he could not have killed Lucy. Even denying it out loud seemed to be too much for him. His jaw worked but no words came out.