Belinda Bauer - Finders Keepers

‘Leave me!’

She didn’t. She tugged him gently towards her. With every grudging step he felt his shell of brittle anger crack and flake.

‘ Leave me!’

Lettie didn’t again. Instead she turned him and eased him on to her lap, and started to rub his back in warm circles, as if he were a small child.

‘Just leave me alone !’ he shouted.

Then he put his face in her neck so no one could see him cry.

After tea, Lettie took Davey to the Red Lion to see DI Reynolds.

‘I lied,’ Davey muttered, examining his own trainers as if he’d never seen them before.

‘I know,’ said DI Reynolds.

Davey was confused. DI Reynolds didn’t seem angry – or even surprised. In fact, he then answered the question Davey hadn’t asked. ‘We do come across our fair share of liars, you know.’

‘He’s not a liar,’ said Lettie firmly. ‘He just lied about this because he felt so bad about leaving Steven.’

‘Of course,’ said DI Reynolds.

Davey bit his lip and – to his amazement – DI Reynolds winked at him. Or maybe he just twitched. Davey looked away, uncertain of how he should respond and hoping his mother hadn’t seen it.

They sat down in the lounge bar where children were allowed, and Detective Sergeant Rice agreed with DI Reynolds that she didn’t mind buying Davey a Coke and his mother a white wine. Davey guessed she was DI Reynolds’s secretary.

DI Reynolds got out the same notebook he’d used before and they went through everything again. This time Davey did his best, however annoying it was, and told him even those details he wasn’t sure were real – those dreamlike snatches that had seemed too small and uncertain to bother with. A paper sack with a torn picture of a dog’s back legs and tail on it; black boots; zig-zag tyres. DI Reynolds made careful notes of everything and asked him all the same questions over and over again and even made his little train noise, and suddenly – out of nowhere – Davey remembered that the car was navy blue!

DI Reynolds wrote it down and Davey grinned in delight.

‘And he wore gloves!’ he shocked himself by saying.

‘What kind of gloves?’

‘Green woolly ones. That’s what smelled like medicine.’

DI Reynolds hissed something that sounded like ‘Shit’ to Davey. He got up abruptly and walked to the fireplace and back, and then walked there again and stared up at the shiny dead eyes of the big stuffed stag. DS Rice watched him eagerly and when he turned round they exchanged meaningful nods.

‘Does that help?’ said Davey.

‘Tons,’ said DS Rice.

Lettie gently twisted the little hairs at the back of Davey’s neck, and he didn’t even mind that people were watching.

DI Reynolds came back and they went through things again, but Davey had nothing more to offer. Even so, when the officer finally snapped a strip of black elastic around his notebook, it was with a satisfied air.

‘Well done, Davey,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

Davey was sorry it was over. He was high on the joy of true things.

DI Reynolds shook his hand and then his mother’s. ‘Don’t you blame yourself about what happened with Steven either,’ he told Davey. ‘You were drugged. Not your fault.’

Davey nodded wholeheartedly, and thought DI Reynolds was a lot less disappointing this time round.

‘Mum?’ said Davey cautiously as they walked home. ‘Sometimes I have lied about other stuff.’

‘I know,’ said Lettie.

EVEN A DOG learns how to get what it wants – a bone, a pat on the head, a place by the fire – by watching and learning and licking the hand that feeds it.

Steven had said nothing, but Jonas could tell by his restless pacing that the boy was excited and filled with new hope that the huntsman might be starting to crack. His mood was infectious, and the younger children played games and giggled, while Jess sang fragments of pop songs.

And the next day – when his jaw had almost stopped hurting – Jonas screwed up his courage and simply went on talking to the huntsman as if he’d never been interrupted.

‘You’re wrong about the children. People do love them.’

Coffin gave no indication of having heard him. His face was stretched and blank. He skirted Jonas like a dangerous whirlpool, spraying the cement with the brick-coloured hose.

‘They weren’t abandoned. Not like the dogs.’

He didn’t expect a response, but he got one, gruff and muffled.

‘Dogs die in hot cars. Seen it with my own eyes.’

Jonas flicked a look at Steven, who nodded encouragingly.

‘You only wanted to protect them. I understand that.’

Coffin dropped the hose into the water bucket, then picked up the broom. Jonas flinched, but Coffin just swept around him and said nothing more.

Jonas had to keep him engaged. If it was only dogs the huntsman would talk about, he’d start there. With a vague motion of his arm, he asked, ‘What happened to all the hounds?’

There was a long pause, then: ‘Had to go.’

‘Go where?’

The huntsman stopped sweeping and picked at the wooden handle of the broom. Jonas looked at Steven, who gave a little shrug.

Coffin bent to his task again, but now his strokes were short and jerky.

‘The Midmoor took a few. The others I had to get rid.’

Jonas said nothing, but pictures raced through his head like a flicker book. He had hunted as a boy, and he knew how hounds were ‘got rid’. He thought of the sixty or so animals that had made up the Blacklands pack. All his life he’d seen them milling about outside pubs, moving as one through the village by night and loping muddily across the moor. A joyous jigsaw of pied coats, silken ears and lolling tongues – vital and vibrant and singing for fun. The thought of spending years whelping them, raising them, training them – and then shooting them all in the head made him feel ill.

The strokes of the broom got louder and the huntsman spoke without any further prompting. ‘Had to be done, Mr Took said.’

He angrily thrust the broom at the wet cement, his voice rising rapidly. ‘Well, I say bollocks to him. Bollocks to him and them fox-loving incomers driving down from London for the weekend and tell us how to live our lives! Take our lives away from us! After a hundred years! Take everything away and then tell me I don’t fucking love them!’

He hurled the broom across the run. It bounced off the fence next to Jonas’s head and Charlie started to wail. The children watched the huntsman, their eyes wide with the fear of uncertainty.

Coffin’s open mouth stretched the stocking mask into a darker shadow that fluttered with vehemence.

‘Now I’ve took everything away from them ,’ he said, low and vicious. ‘See how they like it.’ Then he slowly retrieved the broom and carried on sweeping as if nothing had happened.

Jonas felt everything falling into place in his head like a little Chinese puzzle box. He watched Coffin with unseeing eyes, and thought of the emptiness Lucy had left in Rose Cottage – that deep, sucking silence that tugged at his soul and lured him to follow as surely as a siren’s lament from a jagged rock. If he could have filled that void, he would have. If he had been able to forget for one single second the sheer absence signalled by the quiet clock, the folded rug and the empty vase, he would have done anything – anything – to make that happen.

Revenge may have sparked Coffin’s madness, but at some point, Jonas guessed, he had started to steal children simply to fill the runs left echoing bare by the loss of his hounds. What he had done was unpardonable, reprehensible and utterly insane – and Jonas understood it completely.