Finders Keepers (24 page)

They separated everywhere except their pinky fingers.

‘Your T-shirt has dirty handmarks all over it,’ he said.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Bye then.’ But she didn’t let go.

‘Bye then,’ he agreed.

‘I’m going now,’ she warned.

‘Go,’ he said. ‘See if I care.’

She slowly stuck out her tongue, then squeezed his little finger. ‘Aren’t you going to kiss me goodnight?’

Steven might have thought of a dozen clever, funny answers.
But
it spoke well for his future happiness that he simply did what she asked.

As the gates slid shut behind Em, Steven looked at his watch. It was gone 11pm and his mother would kill him.

It seemed a very small price to pay.

He walked through the moonless summer night feeling …
chosen
. Em loved him. She
loved
him. Him with the sticky-out ears. Him with no moves and no money.
Him!
She loved
him
. He played their kisses over and over and over in his mind – the thrill of touching her lips with his; her breath in his mouth, her lashes on his cheek. Nothing had ever felt like this. Nothing, nothing,
nothing
was like this – or ever could be.

With a sense of wonder, Steven Lamb felt one part of his life end and another part begin. This was the part where he loved a girl and she loved him back – and he felt instinctively that nothing that had gone before would ever seem quite as important as it once had.

An enormous feeling of goodwill swept through him. The skateboard meant nothing. He would apologize to Davey and explain about the money. Maybe even give him some cash. Maybe. For the first time in his life, Steven felt so much like a grown-up that he knew he could lose a battle without losing face. It was a good feeling.

Without the moon, the Milky Way seemed closer – touchable – like stars stuck on a blue velvet ceiling. He smiled up at Orion, and reached a single finger out into the universe to darken the mighty Mars. Em loved him and he could do anything.

Anything
.

‘Hello, Steven.’

Steven’s heart jerked in his chest.

He dropped his arm and looked around.

It took him a couple of turns. Then, in the blackness a few yards down the hill, he saw the vague form of Jonas Holly sitting on the stone steps that led from his garden gate into the lane.

‘What are you doing?’ The fright made him blunt.

‘Waiting for you,’ said Jonas Holly.

Steven’s neck prickled like a dog’s. He didn’t want to ask why. Not here in the darkness between the towering hedges that made the lane feel like a funnel.

During the silence, Mr Holly just sat there, forearms on his knees, hands clasped loosely in front of him. Steven wondered how long he’d been there. Wondered whether he’d watched him and Em walk up the hill. He didn’t like that idea.

‘I wanted to ask you something.’

Again, Steven gave him no encouragement.

‘Why did you put the money on Lucy’s grave?’

The question took Steven by surprise.

‘What money?’ he stalled.

‘This money,’ said Mr Holly, and leaned to one side until Steven heard the chink of coins and the rustle of notes coming out of his pocket. ‘Sixty-two pounds thirty.’

Steven was quiet again. The dark let him be so, when in daylight he would have felt compelled to answer immediately.

Mr Holly said nothing for a long while. And when he did speak again, it was not about the money.

‘People hurt children, you know,’ he said softly.

Steven’s heart began to beat hard. ‘I know.’

He started to edge down the hill until he was level with the policeman. Another few yards and he’d be beyond him, and then he could run if he had to. He thought he might have to, however stupid that would look.

‘Of course you do,’ said Mr Holly, nodding his head slowly. ‘We
both
know that.’

‘I have to get home now, Mr Holly,’ said Steven. He took the few paces that meant he was past the gate.

The man crossed the distance between them silently and with disturbing speed.

Steven retreated but found the sharp hedge at his back. He flinched at the contact he knew was coming. ‘What do you
want
?’

Jonas Holly stopped, as if aware for the first time that Steven might be scared. He stood still and spoke softly. ‘Are you in trouble, Steven? Do you owe someone money?’

Steven was confused. His mind had to catch up.

Mr Holly seemed to take his silence as an admission. ‘Is it drugs? If someone’s threatening you I can help you; that’s my job.’

Steven said nothing. Mr Holly was the last person in the world he would go to for help.

As if reading that thought, the policeman continued, ‘I know I let people down before, but it won’t happen again. If you’re in danger, Steven—’

‘No! I’m
fine
. Leave me
alone
.’ Steven waved an arm in front of him in a subconscious attempt to clear himself some space. His knuckles grazed Jonas Holly’s chest.

‘Then why leave the money there?’

‘Because it’s
hers
.’

Steven held his breath.

Jonas Holly stood absolutely motionless, arms at his sides. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I have to go home now.’

‘What do you
mean
?’

Steven tried to edge around him and Mr Holly grabbed his arm in an iron grip. ‘
Tell me
.’

Steven hitched in a breath of shock. The voice was Mr Holly’s, but
not
. It was flat and harsh and inky black, and Steven felt a change in the warm night air as if somewhere God had left a door open and the cold had rushed in.

He started to shake. Brief seconds ago he’d felt like a man. Now he felt like a man about to die, without refuge or defence, a crab without a shell, scuttling in a bucket and with nothing to protect him from the looming threat that Mr Holly had suddenly become.

Shame burned Steven’s eyes. If Em could see him now – so small and frightened – she would never kiss him again. In the
dark
, Steven could not see the man’s eyes – only the faint twin glimmers where he knew his eyes to be. He couldn’t even pretend to be brave under that invisible gaze.

‘It’s
hers
,’ he whispered. ‘She gave it to me but I didn’t want it, so I was giving it back. My mum is waiting for me. And my nan.’

‘Why would she do that?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t
know
! I didn’t ask. You’re hurting me.’

‘When did she give it to you?’

Steven’s voice cracked. ‘I have to
go
!’

‘
When?
’

Steven was scared but suddenly he was angry too. Angry that Mr Holly had stolen his joy over the kiss. Angry that he’d murdered his wife, when she’d been so kind and pretty and funny. So angry that for one terrible second he lost all sense of self-preservation …

‘The night you killed her.’

The darkness between the two of them became a slow vacuum that sucked the last of the bravado out of Steven, the tears from his eyes, the scream from his lips, the anger from his belly; he felt them all being extracted by the silent black shape before him, leaving him filled only with numb terror.

Right now, if Mr Holly had told him to stay there while he went to fetch a knife to kill him with, Steven would have sat down in the road and waited. Snivelling.

Instead Jonas let go of Steven’s arm.

He took a slow step backwards.

He tilted his head at the escape route down the hill.

‘You can run now,’ he said.

So Steven did.

ELIZABETH RICE HAD JUST
got out of the shower when her phone rang. It was Reynolds.

‘There’s someone downstairs who wants to talk to the police. I’ve just got out of the shower, so would you mind, Elizabeth?’

Would you mind, Elizabeth?

Rice was getting pretty sick of those four words.

‘Sure,’ she said tightly.

Her hair was still dripping, so she wrapped it in a towel and piled it on her head, then pulled on a skirt, shirt and low, practical heels and was about to leave her room. Then she thought that there was an outside chance – about 0.5 per cent, but a chance none the less – that the person downstairs might be a handsome young farmer, so she quickly applied mascara and a swipe of lipstick. It was only on her way down the rickety staircase that she remembered the towel. She was about to take it off, but then wondered at her own optimism, when she’d long ago noticed that any phrase containing the words ‘handsome’, ‘young’ and ‘farmer’ was a kind of triple oxymoron, held
together
only by expectations nurtured by a Mills & Boon adolescence.

Her dimmed mood and wet towel were both vindicated when she saw that the visitor was not even a man but a schoolboy – a gangly, dark-eyed youth with jutting ears, a jagged haircut, and that crazily transient combination of fair, boyish complexion and shaving stubble.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Rice. How can I help you?’

The boy glanced at her makeshift turban, then looked away. ‘Um,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’

Rice sighed inwardly. Children were a mystery to her. She couldn’t really remember what it was like to be one, and the children of her friends and sisters always made her slightly uncomfortable. She would smile at them and they would stare solemnly back at her, as if they knew what she was thinking.

Babies cried on contact.

She didn’t
dislike
children, but they bored her. She even got impatient with cute children in Hollywood movies, with their curls and their adenoids and their smart-arse comebacks.

Before she could catch it, she sighed outwardly too, which made the boy in front of her blush. This made her feel bad enough to make an effort with him, even though she knew her hair was going to look like total shit for the rest of the day.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Steven,’ he said. ‘Lamb.’

The name rang a faint bell, but she didn’t waste time wondering why. She softened her tone consciously.

‘What did you want to tell me, Steven?’

Steven wished he hadn’t come. He hadn’t thought things through, and didn’t have the words ready to explain. He’d once played one of Fagin’s boys in a school production of
Oliver!
He’d only had one line – ‘Kill you as soon as look at you, he would’ –
but
had been astonished by the sheer number of ways he could get that line wrong. Either he forgot the words entirely, or remembered them but all in the wrong order. Even when he got the line right he sounded like Yoda.

That was how he felt now. As if saying the words he’d come to say would only complicate things that were already fuzzy and fleeting in his own head. Still, he couldn’t go without saying
something
. He didn’t know much about women, but he knew that they were always more grumpy when they had wet hair, so he’d better make an effort.

‘It’s about Mr Holly,’ he said.

The woman – DS Rice – looked slightly more interested than she had a second ago, but Steven was lost again. How could he tell her all the stuff that was in his head?

He killed his wife! I think he did; I saw him hit her. He grabbed my arm. He said something about hurting children. Maybe he took those children. He could do it. If he could kill his wife he could murder children, couldn’t he? People hurt children – that’s what he said. People hurt children. And he scared me. I thought he was going to kill me. His voice wasn’t his voice and his eyes were like nothing. He could kill children. He could kill anyone. I know he could
.

Here, in daylight, in the stale-beer bar of the Red Lion, talking to a policewoman with a towel on her head, it sounded like a case for Scooby-Doo.

DS Rice glanced at her watch.

‘I don’t think he likes children,’ Steven said carefully.

‘Why do you think that? Did he say something?’

‘Kind of. He told me people hurt children.’

‘But that’s true. Sadly. Isn’t it? People sometimes
do
hurt children.’

‘Yes. But …’ He struggled to explain and finally couldn’t. ‘It was just the
way
he said it.’ He paused and then finished in a rush: ‘I think maybe he took those children. And I think he could hurt someone. I
know
he could.’

‘That’s a serious allegation, Steven. Do you have any proof of
that?
’ DS Rice was looking at him sharply now, as if she was about to get angry with him.

Did
he have proof? He knew it was true – he’d seen Mr Holly slap his wife – but did he have
proof
? He knew what proof was, what evidence was, and it wasn’t just saying you’d seen something when there was nobody else there to back you up. That was just his word against the word of a policeman.