Finders Keepers (12 page)

If Davey and Shane weren’t at Springer Farm, they could almost always be found deep in the woods in Ronnie Trewell’s burned-out car.

Today they were bored and fractious. Things had started well. They’d robbed the bank two or three times – each time stealing the five £20 notes they’d found but not yet settled on how to spend. But after that things had gone awry when Davey had mown Shane down into a patch of nettles, for which he quite unfairly blamed Davey, given that – at the end of the day – the car
was
stationary.

They’d fought briefly over that and told each other to piss off, then sat together in the Mazda in bolshy silence.

Out of nowhere, Davey’s mouth dropped open. ‘I have an
awesome
game!’

Shane was on board instantly – everything forgiven – before he’d even heard the idea.

‘Kidnap,’ said Davey. ‘Like those kids.’

‘Cool! How does it work?’ said Shane.

‘One of us sits in the car and the other has to creep up and kidnap him.’

A slow smile spread across Shane’s features. ‘That
is
awesome.’

‘I know,’ said Davey, getting out of the driver’s seat. ‘I’ll be the kidnapper first.’

‘OK,’ said Shane. ‘But if I see you coming, I win.’

Davey frowned deeply at this amendment to the non-existent rules of the un-played game, but finally nodded his approval.

‘OK, but don’t
lie
.’

‘OK,’ agreed Shane, because he often did lie, so that was fair comment.

Davey ran into the woods and then carefully circled around until he was about forty yards behind the Mazda. He knelt in the ferns and found a couple of sticks.

Keeping trees between himself and his target, he moved quietly towards the car. There was a point where he had to move across an open patch of ground to get to another tree big enough to give him cover. He hurled a stick above the Mazda and was gratified to see Shane’s head turn sharply away at the sound of it landing. Quickly he crept to the new tree. Only fifteen yards to go now, and Shane’s head was still turned away from him, seeking any glimpse of his friend on the opposite side of the car.

Davey didn’t even need the second stick. He crossed the last few yards like a cat and grabbed Shane’s neck in the crook of his elbow.

‘This is a kidnap,’ he said harshly. ‘Move and you’re dead.’

‘Shit,’ said Shane.

Davey started to manhandle Shane out of the car.

‘You’re hurting!’ yelled Shane.

‘It’s a
kidnap
. It’s got to be realistic,’ panted Davey.

Shane made it more realistic by struggling and trying to punch Davey in the face, while Davey hauled Shane out of the door, pushed him down into the wild garlic, pulled a length of twine from his jeans pocket and tried to tie his hands behind him.

‘Owwww! Shit, Davey!’ Shane wriggled free and knelt up, flushed and angry. ‘You always go too far.’ His mother sometimes said that about
him
, and it had a wonderfully self-righteous ring to it.

‘Oh, bullshit,’ said Davey dismissively. ‘It’s no fun if it’s not real. Anyway, I win.’

‘My turn,’ said Shane, and they swapped places.

Davey didn’t like being the victim half as much as being the kidnapper. Once Shane had disappeared, the sudden silence of the woods was unnerving and wherever he looked the back of his neck always felt exposed. It was as if the trees themselves were watching him. He became aware of his heart beating and
didn’t
like it. He kept craning round to see where Shane was, but couldn’t see him or even hear him.

Shit. If Shane was going to be better at Kidnap than he was, then they wouldn’t play it again.

He scanned the woods methodically but without luck.

It was creepy, this vast silence under the green canopy. A gentle breeze whispered through the leaves and, from somewhere beyond his vision, a tree creaked and groaned as if in pain. Far above his head, he heard the mechanical drill of a woodpecker.

‘Shane?’ he said tentatively. ‘Hey, Shane! Come out, I just noticed the time. We’d better go.’ It was only five o’clock, but he could say he’d promised to weed the garden or something.

‘Shane?’

Davey wriggled up into a kneeling position and looked out across the back of the car into the darkening woods. He strained his eyes and tried to hear any movement that would give his friend away – but all he could hear was his own shallow breathing and his heart beating in his ears.

‘Shane, you div!’

Something grabbed him so hard from behind that it made him grunt, then yanked him sideways and over the door of the car so that he fell headfirst to the ground. A knee in his back and a mouthful of fern.

‘I win!’ yelled Shane, and pushed Davey’s face once more into the cool leaves for good measure, before standing up, laughing.

Davey was so relieved it was only Shane that for a moment he just lay there, face down, pulling himself together again. Then he arced his fist out to the side and slammed it into Shane’s knee so hard that his friend joined him on the forest floor with a shout of pain.

Davey got up and stood over him. ‘You
cheat
.’

‘I didn’t cheat.’ Shane sat up, holding his knee. ‘You almost broke my leg, you
tosser
.’

Davey was about to come back at him, but suddenly the idea of falling out with Shane and having to walk home alone through the forest made him bite back his own insult.

‘Sorry, mate,’ he said instead, and extended his hand. Shane looked at it suspiciously, then allowed himself to be helped up.

‘You OK?’ said Davey, and his friend’s unusual deference made Shane similarly noble.

‘Yeah, it’s fine,’ he said.

‘You want to lean on me?’

‘Yeah, OK.’

Their games over for the day, Shane and Davey walked home, Shane making a meal of hobbling and leaning on Davey’s shoulder once they reached the village, and Davey happy to let him show off his injury. He’d have done the same.

‘Awesome game though,’ said Shane as he reached his own house.

‘Yeah,’ said Davey. ‘Awesome.’

THEY WERE IN
English class when Emily said, ‘Do you want to go to the show on Saturday?’

‘OK,’ said Steven, then was forced to ask, ‘What show?’

Emily smiled, but in a good way. ‘The hunt show. At Deepwater Farm.’

Steven had never been to a horse show before. He knew they went on, of course, just as he vaguely knew farming and hunting and sheep-trialling and jam-making went on around him – all without the benefit of his active involvement.

He had no idea where Deepwater Farm was, nor any concept of what going to the show might be like, but those were trifles – and no bar to his feeling a little thrill that Emily had asked him. He was low-key about it though, because others were watching.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Sure.’

*

The Midmoor Hunt had cancelled its annual show out of deference to its Master’s loss.

Joint
Master, several disgruntled members had pointed out at a meeting where John Took was not present. Charles Stourbridge stood up for John Took, but in an arthritic kind of way, and the motion to cancel only survived by six votes.

The old Blacklands Hunt had been subsumed by the Midmoor last winter after years of decline. The rot had started years before, when it was discovered that the serial killer Arnold Avery had turned the hunt’s patch of moorland into his own personal cemetery. It was an uneasy thing – galloping across the graves of murdered children – and many hunt supporters had lost their taste for it.

Later, in the wake of the hunting ban, saboteurs had stepped up their campaigns of harassment. Not all of them were incomers and professional agitators – some were local people who finally felt able to make their feelings known now that they had the law – albeit pallid – on their side. There had been clashes. Angry clashes. At Edgcott, a local sab named Frank Munk had his foot run over and crushed by a hunt follower’s Land Rover, and in retaliation young David Lodge was pulled from his horse and broke his collar bone. His horse had bolted into a bog and died of exhaustion before they could get it out. Hunting stopped being fun and started being dangerous for more than the fox. Devout hunt followers were suddenly reluctant to bring their children out with them, and turn-out – and vital subscriptions – dipped alarmingly. Some members saw the writing on the wall and deserted to the bigger Dulverton West or the Exmoor Foxhounds on the basis that there was safety in numbers.

It only hastened the end for the Blacklands. As the smaller of the two beleaguered hunts, the Blacklands had come off worst. Jobs had been lost, horses sold and hounds disposed of. Sad but necessary. The Blacklands Master, John Took, had been made joint Master of the Midmoor, but it was clear
to
all just who the poor relations were within the new hunt.

Now – a mere six months into the uneasy alliance – many original Midmoor members blamed Took’s crisis for the loss of their traditional summer show. To add insult to injury, the Exmoor Foxhounds had been indecently hasty to offer to run the show instead. After all, their secretary had reasoned, the field was booked, the jumps and tents paid for, the date publicized and the entries received.

‘I mean,’ she’d told Charles Stourbridge on the phone, ‘the kidnapper’s already taken poor Jess Took and that other boy. We shouldn’t let him ruin a good day out into the bargain.’

When this fuzzy logic was relayed to them, the Midmoor members prayed for rain on Saturday, but an unusually reliable summer let them all down.

*

Saturday morning. Exactly two weeks since Jess Took had been taken.

She had not called home from a boyfriend’s mobile or a London phone box. And no farmer had been surprised to find Pete Knox in his hay barn.

The two children had simply gone.

And every minute they remained gone was a minute when DI Reynolds’s frustration quotient rose another notch.

It was the memory of his previous failure on Exmoor that haunted him as much as this new one unfolding. Of course, DCI Marvel had been in charge of that investigation, not him. And two children stolen from parked cars across the moor didn’t compare with a rampage that had left eight people dead.

But Reynolds had a very bad feeling that it might yet.

It wasn’t a hunch. Reynolds would have put his own eyes out before admitting to a hunch. Marvel had lived by his instincts, his hunches, his gut – and Reynolds had despised him with a passion worthy of opera. It was an embarrassment to base
investigative
decisions on whimsy and prejudice. This was the twenty-first century, for God’s sake; Reynolds hadn’t got two degrees – a first in Criminology and a 2:1 in Law – so he could lynch monkeys and burn witches. But now – when the searches and the lab had yielded next to nothing – DI Reynolds had a
theory
that things might get worse before they got better.

This theory was substantiated by all the cars that were going to be parked on Exmoor on a daily basis now that it was tourist season. In villages, on verges, behind pubs, in gravel lay-bys, in beauty-spot car parks, at flower shows and steam rallies and village fêtes. Most of them would be empty, of course, in the wake of the publicity about Jess Took and Pete Knox, but if simply being alive for thirty-seven years had taught DI Reynolds anything, it had taught him this:

People. Are. Stupid.

Reynolds tried never to underestimate how dumb his fellow human beings could be. How ignorant, how reckless, how cruel. Despite an avalanche of warnings, people still drank and drove, still thought trying crack just once might be fun … Still wouldn’t bother taking their kids with them when they popped into the post office or bought a pint of milk at the corner shop.

Some people just never thought it would happen to them, even when it was happening all
around
them to people just
like
them.

Of course, thought Reynolds with a mental sniff, those were probably the same stupid people who were going into the corner shop for a lottery ticket – never considering the bleak maths that showed they were more likely to lose their child to a passing pervert than they were to win the jackpot.

No, if the kidnapper desired more victims, Reynolds was sure there’d be no great shortage of potential prey. All he could do was deploy his men as cleverly as possible in an attempt to get through what he hoped would be a weekend operation of prevention, nothing more.

At least Jonas Holly’s reappearance meant he had another
body
on the ground, and Reynolds assigned him to the hunt show at Deepwater Farm.

*

Steven watched Em plait the horse’s pale mane, and wondered why he felt so strange. A little short of breath. A little worried; a little excited; his mouth the wrong shape to say words.

Maybe he was allergic to horses.

Skip. That was the horse’s name, and it stood with its eyes half closed and its lower lip loose as Em’s fingers separated the creamy hairs, then started to weave them into plaits. Steven watched her hands twist this way and that, the braid growing magically between them. Her face was set with concentration. He watched her secure the plait with a needle and thread and then deftly roll it into a little knot on the horse’s neck and sew it into place like a shiny gold button.