Belinda Bauer - Finders Keepers

Big shock , thought Rice.

‘There’s another thing.’ Kate’s voice took on a sombre tone. She speared a cherry tomato before going on. ‘A child so traumatized, so damaged . It is not beyond the realms of possibility that Steven might be somehow culpable, and trying to deflect suspicion.’

‘Great minds!’ said Reynolds, smiling at Kate like a smug puppy.

Rice didn’t have the letters after her name to argue with them. But, although she was relieved that suspicion seemed to be falling further and further from Jonas, she hated the drama that Kate Gulliver had squeezed from the moment with her cherry-tomato pause. Triumph disguised as concern. Kate and Reynolds were peas in a bloody pod.

Unless she was very much mistaken, she was the only person at this table who’d ever actually spoken to Steven Lamb. And so, for what it was worth – which she realized wasn’t much – she told them that, to her, Steven hadn’t seemed the type to be a kidnapper, a killer – or even particularly resentful.

‘Interesting,’ said Kate. She put down her fork and clasped her elegant hands under her chin. ‘On what basis do you make that assessment?’

Reynolds snorted. ‘On the basis of a five-minute chat with a towel on your head, wasn’t it, Elizabeth?’

He and Kate showed each other their teeth.

Rice took her cheesecake upstairs. She ate it with her fingers, sitting in the bath.

THERE WAS A reason why Davey Lamb got up before his alarm every morning and often slipped from the house before his mother had stirred. Davey’s instincts told him that if he didn’t get out of the house while his mother was all doped up and watching bad TV, she might never let him leave again.

Every now and then Lettie focused on him with clear eyes, and then reached out and held him in arms that were so tight and desperate it made him itch to throw her off and skip away across the room to freedom. But – in the first consciously selfless act of his young life – Davey stayed put and allowed her to crush him to her breast as if she might re-absorb him straight through her skin.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t afraid. He was afraid.

He and Shane didn’t go to Springer Farm any more, or to the woods. Both now seemed like places where bad things had happened – and still might. Sometimes they went to the playing field and he watched Shane skate. That was all. He stopped bothering with homework or the fallout. Sometimes he didn’t go to school at all, but sat on the swings and shared a fag with Chantelle Cox, or swung himself so high and so fast that the world seemed easy to leave behind.

Gravity always dragged him back.

The Piper Parents came round for a meeting and pawed him like zombies. They asked him how he was and made sympathetic faces, but he knew they really wanted to grab him and shake him to make him tell them something – anything – that might help them to find their missing children.

He couldn’t. He had seen the kidnapper, heard his voice, been in his car, and yet his recollection was so patchy as to be useless. The only things he remembered for sure were the plan he and Shane had thought was so clever, and the way he’d shouted instead of shushed…

He went into Steven’s room and touched all the stuff he’d never been allowed to. He took down the Batman action figures, but found the fantasy of crime had been made dull by the reality. He looked through Steven’s school bag and read a story he’d written called ‘A Day in the Life of a Tree’, which sounded shit but was actually quite good, considering the tree never went anywhere or did anything. He searched for porn under the bed, but found only Steven’s name carved into the wall, and the crumpled receipt for the umbrella they had given Nan for her birthday.

£13.99.

It made him so angry he felt like crying.

If Steven ever came back, he’d tell everyone how Davey had lied about them running away together. Then, instead of a hero, he would be a baddie, who’d hit his own brother and left him behind.

Davey wanted his brother back – of course he did.

But only if he shushed, not shouted.

Through the bright-blue gap in the roof, Jonas could see a buzzard circling over the moor. Now and then it cried out – a strangely puny sound for such a big bird. He waved away a fly. They were always there, because of the meat. This one landed on his face again, and Jonas left it; took the decision that unless it was on his mouth, he no longer had the energy.

The children came back from the meadow with hands full of grass and dandelions, and Jonas’s stomach squealed in pathetic anticipation. This time, Steven had picked some too, and when Jonas thanked him, he said: ‘’s OK,’ and went immediately to his post at the back of his kennel, eye pressed to the chink in the wall. He had barely spoken since he’d broken down – not even to Jess.

Charlie touched Jonas’s arm. ‘Hello, Jonas. How do you do?’

‘How do you do, Charlie?’

‘Do you have some peanut butter?’

Jonas’s stomach wrenched at the mere words. ‘Sorry, Charlie.’

The boy screwed up his face. ‘I’m hungry,’ he said forlornly.

‘Why don’t you eat your meat?’ asked Jonas, pointing at the bones behind Charlie.

‘Why don’t you eat yours ?’

‘I don’t eat meat,’ Jonas told him patiently for the fiftieth time.

‘I don’t eat meat too,’ said the boy. He kicked out at one of the bones, yelping at the pain in his toes. The bone drubbed across the floor and rattled the bottom of the gate.

Charlie sat down on the edge of his bed and sniffled. ‘Hurt my toe,’ he said in a tiny voice.

Steven turned away from the wall and nodded at Charlie. ‘I think he’s scared of eating it,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘ ’Cos of the meat. You know?’

‘No.’

Steven sighed. ‘When the helicopter came over. He put us in the meat. Hanging up in the little room. You know?’

Jonas looked so confused that Steven asked, ‘Where were you, then?’

Jonas frowned. Where was he?

The helicopter, the cold splash, the banging on his legs, the sharp pricks on his chest and Lucy floating above him…

‘He held me underwater.’

Steven blinked. ‘Why?’

Jonas shrugged. He had no idea.

But now that he’d remembered the shock of the water, Jonas also remembered other things. Not all of it, just bits. Being so small, his head swimming with that smell, his arm hurting from the huntsman’s grip, concrete grazing his knees. He remembered the sudden bitter darkness, the loop of chain pulling him upwards, and the heavy things touching his face… heavy, cold things…

It was obvious .

‘Cold!’ he said. ‘The flesh room is cold and so is the water.’

Steven still looked blank.

‘Thermal-imaging cameras. On the chopper.’

Steven’s mouth opened in understanding. They’d all seen thermal imaging on Police Camera Action! Bright white shapes with arms and legs, trying to hide in bushes or run across fields away from the scene of the crime, their own body heat a beacon to the hunters overhead.

Jonas saw it clearly now. When the helicopter or the searchers had come, the children were drugged and gagged and forced into the icy flesh room and stuffed inside dead cows and horses until the coast was clear. The idea made his stomach recoil. No wonder poor Charlie had freaked out when he’d heard the sound of the blades.

How many times had they suffered so? He thought of the long-ago day of the search, the dry grass whispering against his legs, the smell of heather and sunblock and the helicopter droning overhead, coming and going. Bob Coffin had searched with the rest of them. That meant Pete and Jess had been inside the cold, cloying carcasses all day long, as rescue passed by so close – with the police helicopter triggering a fresh ordeal every time it launched.