Belinda Bauer - Finders Keepers

‘You need to be checked out,’ said one medic.

‘I’m fine.’

The man took hold of his arm – gentle but firm. Steven shook him off and pushed him away, panic rising within him—

Elizabeth Rice was suddenly at his side. Her hair was wet again, but this time she didn’t look annoyed.

‘He won’t get in the ambulance,’ said the medic, but she just waved him away and then turned to Steven.

‘Shall we just go straight home?’ she said.

Steven’s eyes pricked and he felt joy cup his heart at the thought of his mother’s arms open to greet him, Nan’s eyes all big and shiny behind her glasses, Davey happy to see him, and Em’s warm back under his hands. The images were so powerful that he felt the muscles in his arms twitch to embrace them all.

‘Yes, please,’ he said. And he put his arms around Elizabeth Rice and let her hold him until his mother could.

Over her shoulder, Jonas Holly limped past between two paramedics. He turned his brown eyes towards Steven and raised a hand.

Steven didn’t raise one back. He watched the medics help Jonas into an ambulance and hoped that it crashed on the way to hospital.

Then he followed DS Rice to a car that still smelled of hot brakes.

THEIR HOMECOMINGS WERE just as they’d expected – and more.

Jess Took was clamped between her mother and her father so tight that she wondered how they could ever be prised apart. Rachel stood nearby – her smile and talons fixed – and wondered the same thing.

Pete Knox’s parents put on a united front and their neighbours threw a street party to welcome him home, with bunting and cakes. The council even agreed to close the road so that they wouldn’t all be mown down during the celebrations. Pete only managed half a cupcake and a sip of Coke before he began to feel queasy. It would take a while.

His mother followed him around like a mitten on a string, and his father watched her with a look on his face that suggested he could not forget what she’d said back in that early-morning car park, however hard he tried. Mercifully, Pete didn’t notice that right then. He was just happy to be home.

Maisie and Kylie were submerged in love and protection, and never took the bus to school again.

A few days after their return, the driver Ken Beard sat in his car outside their homes and shook so badly that he couldn’t do what he’d gone there for. Finally it was his daughter Karen and her boyfriend – whose name was simply Mark, despite the mascara – who encouraged him up the paths and knocked on the doors for him, so that he could beg the girls’ forgiveness in person.

They and their families were in forgiving moods, and would be for a long time to come.

Steven was bruised from all the hugging, Lettie cried and laughed for days, Uncle Jude bought him an Xbox still in its original packaging, and Nan kept saying, ‘I told you he’d be back!’ when she hadn’t at all.

Davey hugged him and almost cried, but then called him a wanker instead, which meant a lot, coming from him.

Physically Steven bounced back quickly. It took a few weeks to learn to eat right again, but that was hardly a chore. Mentally, he was… fine.

That surprised even him.

Sure, the smell of the bathroom disinfectant had the power to turn his stomach, and he often caught himself touching his own neck – feeling for the collar he’d worn for so long. But still, when DS Rice explained that Victim Support was arranging for all the children to see a psychologist to help them over the trauma, Steven politely declined.

He had survived, hadn’t he? The past was the past and surviving it was the important thing. Now he had the rest of his life to live, and more important things to think about.

Some more important than others…

Em had not hooked up with Lewis or Lalo; she had waited for Steven.

‘I would have waited for ever,’ she told him fiercely, as they lay dizzy and breathless after their first time.

Steven held her close. He was a man now, but he felt like the same boy – only much happier. He wondered whether Lewis would guess he’d had sex and he hoped not. The only witnesses he needed to this moment were the silent ones gazing down at them from his walls. Uncle Billy, Angelina Jolie and the Liverpool first eleven.

‘For ever is a long, long time,’ he said carefully.

‘Good,’ said Em. ‘Then we’ll spend it together.’

The next day they walked up the hill to continue rebuilding their lives and the Suzuki, only to find that Ronnie and Dougie had finished the bike for him, and that all Steven had to do was turn the key and kick it over.

He would never have to walk past Rose Cottage again.

The newspapers and TV were all over the children – particularly Steven, who had cheated death twice before he was old enough to drink. Marcie Meyrick came to the door four times – each time with a higher offer. On the final visit, she actually cried.

Much to Davey’s annoyance, his brother had no interest in getting free money, so he sold his own story to a rival reporter from the Star . It appeared under the headline MY BROTHER THE NUT MAGNET. Davey spent £115 of the proceeds on a new skateboard for Steven, and felt cleansed. And the next time he and Shane went up to Springer Farm, they took with them a can of black paint and obliterated Mr PEach is a COCK from the farmhouse wall.

They pretty much stopped going there after that, although for many years afterwards Davey would think about the blackened rafters, the dark chimney, and the box of gay junk that Shane hadn’t wanted.

There was, of course, no homecoming to celebrate for David Peach. While the other children were being returned to their families, he watched Channel 4 Racing with DI Reynolds by his side. For some reason, the man who’d led the investigation had chosen to allow his sergeant to bask in the sunshine of the TV cameras and the grateful parents, while they worked their way through a bottle of Glenfiddich and pretended to give a shit about who won the 3.45 from Doncaster.

DI Reynolds was no drinker and almost choked on the first shot. But by the fourth he’d got the hang of it.

So they sat and got more and more slumped and slurred – surrounded by a bright sea of flowers and teddy bears that countless well-wishers had left on the doorstep of the little blue house where Charlie had lived…

For a while after his son’s funeral David Peach did think of moving away, but finally he stayed among friends.

Among those he now counted John Took, who wasn’t half the prick he used to be.

Jonas was the only person who was truly surprised by his homecoming.

After three days in hospital he took a taxi home. He arrived at Rose Cottage as the sun dipped below the moor, and found Elizabeth Rice on his doorstep with a bottle of Rioja.

‘The hospital called. Said you’d discharged yourself.’

‘I had things to do.’

‘DI Reynolds wants a chat tomorrow morning.’

‘But not tonight,’ he said.

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘Not tonight.’

They went inside and shared the wine at the kitchen table, where Mrs Paddon had left a vegetarian stew and a yellow Post-it note:

45 mins at 140 (Centigrade, Jonas!)

Jonas peeled off the note and rolled it into a tight tube between his fingers as they talked.

Actually she talked. He just listened, but he did it well enough.

They took the bottle into the living room in an action replay that she knew in her loins was going to have a different result this time.

They stood at the window and, as they watched the coming night turn the Exmoor sky as green as the sea, she kissed him properly.