Belinda Bauer - Finders Keepers

Steven leaned against the fence and asked coldly, ‘Didn’t you love her any more?’

‘I still love her!’ The words came out of Jonas so fast, it was as though they always lived there, at the back of his throat, crowding to be heard.

‘But you hit her! You wouldn’t hit her if you loved her.’

‘That’s a lie,’ said Jonas. ‘That’s a lie.’

‘I saw it with my own eyes,’ said Steven.

Steven realized he was trembling at his own daring. Jonas stared at him. No, not at him – through him.

‘You said Lucy gave you money the night she died.’

‘So what?’

‘Why would she do that?’ Jonas spoke haltingly and with a little frown on his face – as if he was working things out as he was going along.

‘I don’t know,’ said Steven warily. ‘She never did before.’

‘Maybe,’ said Jonas, ‘maybe… she knew she was going to die.’

Steven said nothing, but something in Jonas’s words – or the way he said them – was making his heart fill up with sadness. Or horror. Or a combination of the two. Either way, he had the uncomfortable feeling that something beyond his control was about to unfold. He turned away from the fence, hoping that it would stop the man talking.

But it didn’t.

‘Who knows they’re going to be murdered, Steven?’ said Jonas, with a soft break in his voice. ‘Did you ?’

Gooseflesh rippled across Steven’s warm skin.

He hadn’t known Arnold Avery was going to kill him. If he’d known he wasn’t coming back, he would have prepared better – he would have given Davey the fiver he’d kept hidden in the shed, told his mother he loved her.

Lucy Holly had given him £500.

She had hugged him in a fierce goodbye.

Those things meant she could not have been murdered.

Steven’s mind tumbled and spun. Could everything he knew be wrong? Had Lewis been right? Had he been paranoid all along? Had he seen danger in Jonas Holly because of his own demons?

Now he searched Jonas’s face, but saw only pain there. No deception, no anger. No threat.

Not like that night outside Rose Cottage.

Where was that face when Steven needed it?

Then Jonas’s eyes had been holes in his head. Dead black wells, like the old mines up at Brendon Hills. You felt a give in the turf and looked behind to see you’d stepped over a hole that would have killed you – dropped you into blackness so deep and narrow that by the time you hit the bottom you’d be skinned as well as dead. You shivered and then laughed too loudly to show you weren’t scared.

And small, dark places invaded your dreams.

Today Jonas Holly’s eyes were brown. That was all. Brown with a sheen that looked disturbingly like tears.

He doesn’t know what you’re talking about. He really did love her .

Steven thought about someone hurting Em and found wild fury in his chest – there as if by dark magic – and knew that he would rather kill himself than watch her in pain. If Jonas Holly had loved his wife that same way, then he could never have killed her, whatever Steven thought he had seen.

With a horrible jag of remorse, Steven started to wonder whether he’d also imagined the danger he’d felt coming off Jonas Holly that night outside Rose Cottage.

The little vertical line between his eyes deepened.

That was impossible. He hadn’t imagined it.

Had he?

Had he?

What else might his brain have invented? The slap that had knocked Lucy Holly to her knees? The money falling from a black-and-white sky? The hedge at his back with nowhere to run.

Em?

She was too good for him, wasn’t she? Too good to be true. Her heart ticking under his hand, her Super-Sour sweetness. Had he imagined that? Had he imagined her ?

Steven blinked and shuddered. How much was real? All of a sudden, he wasn’t sure any more. The heat and the stink of the kennels was his only truth now. How long had he been here? A month? A year? He no longer knew. Jess and Charlie and Maisie and Kylie and Pete were all real. He knew that . Jonas was just Jonas and his eyes were just brown, and his stomach bore the marks that a killer had made. Of those things he was sure. Anything else could be in his head alone. All the fears.

Steven felt as if he were teetering on the edge of a deep, dark precipice, rock crumbling below him and spinning into the abyss.

He’d been through a lot.

He’d been through a lot .

What if the last five years existed only in his head? What if Arnold Avery had won after all, that misty morning up at Blacklands…

Tears filled Steven like water in a jug, and poured out of his eyes in what felt like a never-ending stream.

‘I’m sorry,’ he sobbed. ‘I’m sorry.’

Through the blur, he saw Jonas’s stricken face become surprised, and then concerned. He moved as close as his tether would allow him and reached out to touch the wire between them.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Jonas.

‘I think I might be dead,’ said Steven, and kept on crying.

KATE GULLIVER CAME TO Shipcott and had dinner with Reynolds and Rice. Rice had never met her before and was taken aback by how attractive she was – with a mane of dark hair, Spanish eyes, and legs that were needlessly lengthened by spike-heeled patent-leather boots.

Rice felt dowdy drop over her like a potato sack.

The Red Lion only had one vegetarian option and it was always an omelette. Kate made a townie face and ordered two salad starters instead.

In a defiant countermeasure, Rice ordered pizza and a dessert. She could run it off in the morning. Or not.

Kate had spoken at length with Rose Hammond, the psychologist who had helped Steven in the year following his ordeal. She made little quote marks in the air around ‘helped’, leaving them in no doubt what a crappy therapist Kate considered her to be.

In his turn, Reynolds had spoken to the officer who’d dealt with the aftermath of the Arnold Avery case – a taciturn chief inspector, who seemed to hold Steven Lamb personally responsible for depriving the Avon and Somerset force of the pleasure of bringing Arnold Avery down in a hail of officially sanctioned bullets. Apart from that, he’d grudgingly conceded that the experience of being attacked by a psychopath must have been traumatic for a twelve-year-old boy.

Kate thought it was a trauma that might not necessarily have been resolved by a twice-monthly session with a country psychologist. Especially one who came cheap enough to be paid for by some Irish gardener who claimed to be the boy’s uncle.

She put air-quotes around ‘uncle’, too, and Reynolds laughed as if she’d been witty.

Rice felt like a stupid spare part. She wished there was someone across the table for her . Someone she could cock a secret eyebrow at, and whose mouth would twitch in amused support. She imagined Eric, but he’d never got her humour. He’d preferred jokes – often ones that started with an Englishman, an Irishman and a Pakistani going into a massage parlour. She imagined Jonas Holly instead – a quiet counterbalance, unimpressed by Kate Gulliver with her air-quotes and her Spanish eyes. Watching his plate or watching her, with absolute focus.

Just thinking about it made her feel warm. Everywhere.

After a lot of psychobabble that Reynolds nodded at eagerly – and that Rice largely tuned out – Kate said, ‘The legal system failed Steven and allowed a killer to track him down and almost kill him. I think any finger-pointing at a symbol of that system should be treated with the utmost caution.’

‘I agree,’ said Reynolds.