Belinda Bauer - Finders Keepers

It astonished Jonas that those same children could be right here in front of him, playing ‘I Spy’, making daisy chains, singing, gathering leaves for him to eat, being kind to each other in the midst of a waking nightmare. How did they do it?

Only Charlie was coming apart at the seams. He didn’t have the language or the understanding to cope with what was happening to him. Either he was bouncy, or in tears. Increasingly it was the latter. Right now he was grizzling the way a two-year-old does when it’s missed a feed or a nap.

‘Hey, Charlie,’ called Pete. ‘You want to sing?’

‘No.’

‘OK. One man went to mow, went to mow a meadow. One man and his dog …’

Kylie joined in, and then the others, but Charlie slumped listlessly against the shade of the back wall.

Jonas peered through the fence. ‘Hey, Charlie. Do you want to try my meat? It’s much better than yours.’

Charlie looked from Jonas to the untouched bones in Jonas’s kennel and back again, lips pursed. ‘You don’t eat meat.’

‘No, but if I did eat meat, this is the meat I’d eat.’

Behind him Jess said, ‘OK, Dr Seuss!’ and Steven laughed, which made Charlie laugh too.

‘You want to try it?’ Jonas asked.

Fresh from laughing, Charlie looked more malleable. He screwed up his face and twisted his hands in front of him while he decided. Finally he gave a huge melodramatic sigh and a shrug and said, ‘No.’

They all laughed then, even Jonas. It was crazy – laughing at a starving boy refusing food while they were all being held hostage by a lunatic – but it still felt good.

Jonas got to the end of his chain and reached out for the closest bone. It was too far to touch with his hand. Aware of Charlie watching his every move, he turned and stretched out one long leg. His toes felt the meat. He rocked it and it tumbled towards him. He pulled it the rest of the way until he could pick it up in his hands. Just the touch of it made his skin crawl. The double-fist-sized hunk of greying flesh, marbled with clots of yellow fat. All wrapped around the smooth protrusion of bone…

He closed his eyes and brought the chunk of meat to his lips. The smell! He swallowed sick. He couldn’t do this. He grimaced and opened his eyes. Charlie was watching him with interest. Without thinking about it again, Jonas sank his teeth into the meat.

It was like trying to bite the nose off a face. That horrible, that hard. And it wouldn’t come off. He had to start chewing while it was still attached.

Like an animal.

He retched but kept going, tears streaming from his eyes, until at last he was able to tear a small gristly chunk away and swallow it whole. He panted with tension and disgust, saliva running over his lower lip and his stomach cramping, as his traitorous system suddenly readied itself on a promise of nourishment.

He wiped his mouth and composed his features into something he hoped resembled appreciation, before looking at Charlie. ‘This is good,’ he said. ‘I feel a lot better now.’

Charlie seemed interested.

‘You want some?’

Charlie looked from his own untouched bones to the one in Jonas’s hands.

‘OK then,’ he said, and got up. Jonas once more stretched to the end of his chain and just managed to tip the joint of meat through the gap where the roof stopped.

Charlie looked doubtfully at it for a moment, then dug his teeth in close to the place where Jonas had.

‘Yours is nicer,’ he confirmed.

‘I told you so,’ said Jonas.

‘You can have mine,’ Charlie said magnanimously, and threw them over the fence. They tumbled wetly across the cement.

Steven gave a short humourless laugh.

Jonas looked at the gross chunks of old animal. His stomach clenched like a fist in desperation.

You have to save the boy, Jonas .

I will. I promise .

How could he save anyone if he were dead?

The nearest chunk had a tube of thick, pink vein sticking from it. Jonas shuffled forward on his arse until he could grip the vein under his curled toes, then drew the slab of dead horse towards him.

IT WAS SIX weeks since Jess had been taken, and John Took couldn’t sleep.

Part of him – the ever-decreasing part that was in denial – was still hoping that Jess’s disappearance was a petulant teenaged prank. Even the thought of Jess running off with a much older boyfriend was preferable to the idea that she’d been abducted.

Since she’d started to get breasts a year earlier, John Took had lain awake on many a night worrying about the kind of boys who might lust after his daughter. Boys who were too old, boys with tattoos and nose-rings, boys without jobs, boys who were only after one thing.

Now, awake through the night again, he was astonished to find that he actually hoped she was off in some grubby B&B being ravished by an old lech or a pierced punk – if only it meant she wasn’t being raped and murdered. Or was already lying dead in a field somewhere, waiting to be found by some random dog-walker.

Everything was relative.

Rachel stirred beside him and pulled even more of the covers on to her side.

She was going through the motions of support and sympathy and offering him tea at ridiculously short intervals, but he could tell her heart wasn’t in it. Why should it be? Jess wasn’t her daughter. Rachel was suitably sympathetic in his company, but she continued to have two dressage lessons a week with that young buck he’d got out of Horse & Hound , and he could hear them laughing from the house.

No, it was the helpless terror he saw reflected in his ex-wife’s eyes that let him know he was not alone.

Like Jess was.

Took threw off the covers and sat on the side of the bed. This circularity of thought was nothing new. It was the same when he spoke to DC Berry, who was the ridiculous toddler of a family liaison officer assigned to the case. It was the same at those tortuous Piper Parents meetings. Everything went in circles. The same questions again and again: Where? How? Who? Why?

It was that last question that really plagued him. With every abduction after Jess, the idea that this was personal became less and less likely. He knew that. But still it tormented him. The notion that somebody had chosen her – or had chosen her first – because of him. Because of something he’d done. DC Berry and DS Rice reassured him that it was now far from likely but, for the first time, John Took had started to reflect.

At first it was hard. He’d led a life as reflective as a black hole. It took practice. At the beginning it was like learning to meditate at that dumb class Rachel had wanted to do in the village hall. Bored wives and benefit scroungers Om -ing on the badminton court, while he watched the second hand linger on the wire-clad clock.

At first he hadn’t been able to think of any more enemies than the people on the list he’d given DI Reynolds. But because it was for Jess, John Took had made a giant effort to rummage around inside his own head for anyone he’d offended. It took him literally days to come up with Will Bishop, the milkman, who had left him a rude note demanding payment one too many times. Bishop had been threatening the residents of central Exmoor for years and one morning John Took had felt enough was enough. It was the same morning Scotty had thrown the shoe off his near fore for the third time in a week, and Rachel had told him that the trainer had told her that the £1,300 Stubben saddle he’d bought her didn’t fit. So he’d called the dairy and shouted very loudly until someone said something would be done. The notes had stopped and the milk had not, and Will Bishop had retired shortly afterwards, after more than fifty years on the job, so he’d considered the problem solved.