Belinda Bauer - Finders Keepers

AFTER THE DEEPWATER show, Grant Farmer – who actually was a farmer – let the grass in the field grow for haylage.

The summer was hot and dry and by the end of July the field was packed with long well-mixed grass. Farmer usually took it off in the middle of August, but it was starting to look a little brittle and his wife, Jackie, who often knew best, suggested they cut it early and try to get another crop from the field before the weather turned. Jackie had to convince her husband. He didn’t like change or the unexpected, and he was still unsettled by the incident a week ago when someone had tried to steal one of the cows. Number 23 had come in at milking with a dirty rope halter on her head. Jack Biggins at Uphill Farm had lost one a few weeks before. Just disappeared. Grant didn’t like it.

His wife didn’t like it either, but two crops of good haylage from a twelve-acre field would keep their small herd of Friesians in feed all winter, maybe with extra to sell.

Money never comes amiss to a farmer. Or a Farmer.

So on 23 July, Grant unhitched the muck-spreader, hitched the rotary mower to his tractor instead and drove the eight-hundred yards up the road to the show field, leaving a broad swathe of mud and dung along the entire length, to test the mettle of unwary motorcyclists.

He turned left inside the gate that Jonas Holly had once banged shut so hard, and lowered the blades. Like many farmers, he liked to cut his hay in concentric squares, rather than in stripes. It was how his father had always done it. So he rolled a cigarette, then trundled along the edge of the field in his old John Deere, high above the broad hedges and far away from responsibilities.

He turned right in the first corner. Three-quarters of the way along this side, the field sloped away to the corner where the stile and the oak tree were. This slope stopped the field being great. One corner dropping away like that was never good. The ground there got boggy in winter, and care had to be taken that the farmhand – a twenty-year-old fool named Stuart Clegg – did not roll the tractor down the camber and kill himself, leading to increased paperwork.

At least the slope hid the stile. And Grant Farmer always let the nettles grow around it to further discourage ramblers. He’d never actually seen a rambler in this particular field, but he always came over the brow of the hill half expecting there’d be a gaggle of them there, tramping across his livelihood.

He set his face to ‘hostile’ and the tractor nosed downwards.

There was someone under the oak tree. As he came over the brow, he caught a glimpse of summer clothing, which disappeared below the level of the grass as the tractor descended.

Picnickers. Even worse than ramblers. Vandals and litterbugs.

Grant resisted the urge to steer straight over there and ruin the line of his mowing. He drove to where the nettles started and then turned sharp right towards the oak.

As he got closer he could see the clothes again. White shorts and a blue T-shirt. Just one person, in fact. And by the time he was twenty yards away, he could see it was a youngster with yellow-blond hair, lying on his side.

Grant stopped the big green tractor and walked the last several yards through the long grass to where the boy lay curled on a flattened patch of hay, with his thumb in his mouth.

He was quite, quite dead.

Grant Farmer was used to death. Death was sad but that was just life.

This was different, though – and even he had to sit down for a moment and stare at the boy, who was tethered to the oak tree by a slim rope attached to a collar around his neck. Like a dog.

Grant pulled out his phone and dialled 999. There was no signal, so he put the phone away again. He’d have to drive back up the hill to find a signal. He walked to the tractor and climbed in. From here the body was at a slightly different angle. He started the engine, but let it idle.

He’d call the police. The police would come. Lots of police would come. Grant Farmer could see them now, driving across his hay in their four-by-fours, putting tape across the gate, and maybe a man there to bar access – maybe even to him. A long slow line of officers searching for clues, flattening the grass underfoot as they moved across the field like a human mangle. Grant was not the most imaginative man alive, but even he could see all this so clearly in his mind that it looked like a series of photographs in a book about crime.

He could certainly imagine what it would cost to feed his forty-two Friesians all winter.

Grant Farmer rolled another cigarette, then looked at his watch.

The boy wasn’t getting any deader.

It took him two hours to finish cutting the hay, and then he called the police.

Charlie liked things just the way they were. So when the bone man had told him to wait under the tree, that’s what he had done. He hadn’t even tried to undo the knots that kept him there. It was just like waiting in the minibus. Jonas had promised him he’d be OK and told him to do what the man said. So he’d sat down, waved goodbye, and waited for his daddy to come and take him home.

He’d sung his songs to keep himself amused.

One man went to MOW

Went to mow a MEDAL .

He’d shouted ‘Hello!’ and ‘Daddy!’ a few times, but the little slope kept the sound close at hand.

He’d eaten grass when he’d got hungry. The heavy dew ensured he’d had water. But it also ensured he’d got wet and cold.

On the third night Charlie Peach had died of exposure.

He’d never made a fuss.

Elizabeth Rice didn’t know all this as she stared down at Charlie’s body.

She would know it later, once the pathologist had examined the knots and fingernails; once he’d opened Charlie’s taut little stomach and found old meat and new grass inside it. Later she’d also know that Charlie hadn’t been sexually abused, and that would be a small comfort.

All she knew right now , though, was that her throat ached from trying not to cry, here in the open, with Reynolds beside her and the forensic and medical teams unloading their vans and trucks and ambulances behind them.

It was the thumb in the mouth that had undone her – that little-boy gesture that betrayed the teenager for what he really was, and what he always would have been, if he weren’t lying dead at her feet.

‘We’ll have to inform Mr Peach,’ said Reynolds tentatively. ‘Would you mind, Elizabeth?’

‘Yes, I fucking would ,’ said Rice, and burst into loud sobs. She knelt down next to Charlie. There was a fly at the corner of his mouth and she flapped it away. It came straight back and danced on his lip.

‘Don’t touch him,’ said Reynolds, but she put a hand on Charlie’s head anyway, and stroked his fine yellow hair the way a mother would.

If she found the man who’d done this, she’d kill him the way a mother would too.

The doctor came over in white paper overalls. He set his bag down at Charlie’s feet and cleared his throat.

Reynolds was at her back. Rice thought that if he tried to drag her away from Charlie she’d have to gouge his eyes out, and then her career would be over. Instead, he touched her shoulder and said gently, ‘Come on, Elizabeth. We should leave him to the doctor now.’

The doctor who was going to saw the top of Charlie’s soft blond head off. For a nanosecond Elizabeth Rice wanted to kill him too. Then all the anger left her and she felt limp without it to hold her up.

It was over. They were too late. For Charlie Peach the Pied Piper case had ended badly.

Rice nodded and wiped her eyes and thanked God for waterproof mascara. Reynolds helped her to her feet with a hand on her elbow.