Finders Keepers (41 page)

Something hit the back of his head and the cement rushed towards him.

Bob Coffin’s boots passed by his face; the whip was picked off the floor. Jonas’s breath whined loudly in his head. His eyes followed the boots as they left the kennel. It was only when the huntsman locked the gate behind him that Jonas saw the small black gun in his hand.

Steven was talking at Jonas and looking urgent, but Jonas couldn’t hear him and didn’t care. He never knew what Steven had said to keep Bob Coffin from shooting him.

It wasn’t important.

Charlie was dead.

He rolled to his side and vomited.

Then he lay, heaving for breath, with his cheek in the thin, warm puddle while his stomach creaked, and mourned the loss.

KIDNAP HAD BECOME
murder.

It was a turning point and, despite the tragedy of Charlie’s death, Reynolds couldn’t help being energized by it. Until now they’d all been expecting to find the bodies of children who had been killed within hours or days of their abductions. It was the way things usually went. But Charlie Peach had been kept alive for almost two months – and that meant the other children could have been kept alive too, and suddenly they might all be Superman, swooping to the rescue. It was the first break they’d had in the case since … well, it was the first break they’d had, and the mobile incident room literally rocked with activity.

The children had not vanished into the side of a mountain in the wake of a pennywhistle tune. Charlie been taken from that very field, and returned there. Reynolds dispatched officers immediately to check on the other kidnap sites. It was unbearably tantalizing to think that
all
of the children could be alive and well, and within a half-hour drive of the Red Lion car park where this very trailer was parked.

Reynolds had to fight the urge to get in the Peugeot and race about the moor with the windows down, shouting their names, they seemed so close.

At the same time, he knew the clock was ticking. No longer just a normal clock that marked time on the wall, this new clock was bound to a bundle of dynamite in Reynolds’s head, and ticked far more urgently. Kidnap had become murder – and that irreversibility increased the threat to the other captives a thousand-fold. Whether it had been cruel intention or bungled release, Charlie Peach had died – and that put all seven remaining captives in serious danger.

He didn’t need Kate Gulliver to tell him the truth of that.

Having killed one, the kidnapper could kill them all. He might do it in a panic to cover up his crimes or he might do it out of rage or horror at a plan gone wrong. Or he might do it because he’d meant to all along, and now that he’d summoned up the courage to take the first life, things would get easier.

Or maybe he was killing them in order, and Jess Took and Pete Knox were already out there somewhere, rotting at the end of a rope.

Reynolds felt his good energy turn on him like a sly wolf, making him suddenly panicky.

‘Time’s running out.’

Reynolds jumped, then turned to Elizabeth Rice. ‘What?’ he snapped.

‘Time’s running out,’ she said again.

He understood. The white plastic tape on the broken windows, the notes. The things they’d been holding back to trap a future suspect.

A suspect they didn’t have.

Reynolds sighed. He hated to undermine his own forensic foundations. But kidnap had become murder and it was time for that evidence to earn its keep. The notes would get them most publicity, he knew. But there was the danger that they’d also get
them
copycats. There were crazies out there who had the capacity to hurt or kill, but lacked originality. They might be only too eager to copy the Piper’s notes in an attempt to appear more prolific than they were – muddying already murky waters for the Exmoor team.

Plus, the notes reflected unfairly on the families of the missing children.

You don’t love them
.

They passed judgement – even though that judgement was obviously made by someone with a screw loose, at the very least. Reynolds had no desire to expose the already suffering families to the torment of self-righteous blame from the same kind of idiots who wrote racist letters to the
Sun
, or launched hate-filled rants on MSN.

‘We need all the help we can get.’ Rice said it gently, as if she had read his mind.

She was right, of course.

Reynolds nodded. ‘OK. The notes and the tape.’

‘Shall I call the press?’

‘Would you mind?’ he said, as someone handed him a ringing phone.

It was Jos Reeves from the lab in Portishead.

Rice watched Reynolds’s face anxiously for clues. She saw the surprise in his eyes and itched to know what he knew. If he didn’t tell this time, she would ask.

After an eternity, Reynolds hung up. He sighed and ran his hand through his hair.

‘They found Jonas Holly’s thumbprint on Charlie’s collar.’

Rice’s heart leaped at the news. Jonas was alive!

‘In blood,’ Reynolds continued.

She caught her breath. Reynolds had more to say – and his sombre face told her she didn’t want to hear it.

‘The blood is Steven Lamb’s.’

CHARLIE’S DEATH WAS
a turning point for the children.

They all cried. They all held hands through the fences. Steven shouted ‘Fucking pig!’ at Bob Coffin as he walked away from Jonas’s cage with the gun, and Jess Took threw her bones back over the gate into the walkway as he passed. She missed him, but made her point.

The beating left Jonas curled on the cement, bloodied and weak. But more than that, Steven could see that he was mentally emptied out by the news.

‘It’s not your fault,’ he insisted.

‘I promised him he’d be OK,’ said Jonas with brutal honesty.

‘The guy’s a nut, Jonas. It’s
his
fault, not
yours
.’

‘I promised him he’d be OK.’

It was the only response Steven got from Jonas, whatever truths he told. And Steven understood his misery, because that was true too – he
had
promised Charlie, and if Charlie hadn’t believed him and given in and gone with Bob Coffin, he might still be alive now.

He’d still be
here
, though.

Steven wondered what he’d do if the huntsman offered him freedom now. Take it, even if it meant he might die somehow before he reached his family, or remain where he was, in the same blue underpants he’d worn for a month.

‘At least you gave him a chance,’ he said finally.

Jonas gave no indication of having heard. He lay on his side and continued to scrape the link on the cement.

To Steven it now looked more like madness than hope.

*

The press conference was going to be well attended. As before, it was being held in the skittle alley at the Red Lion – a cold, cavernous place with the acoustics of a canyon, which made the twenty or so journalists sound like a factory floor.

Reynolds and Rice stood just outside the door – still arguing.

She’d never argued with him before.

She’d disagreed, which was her right, of course. He liked to engender a spirit of debate in his team. As long as they understood that he was best equipped to make the final decisions.

But this was different. This had started almost immediately after the phone call from Jos Reeves, with Reynolds saying he would be appealing for Jonas Holly to get in touch so he could be eliminated from the investigation.

Before he’d got any further, Rice had gone off on one.

‘Why?’ she demanded, close to rudely.

‘We’d be remiss in our duty not to consider the implications of this new evidence.’

‘The print is evidence that Jonas was
with
Charlie and Steven – not evidence that he
took
them.’

‘I know that.’

‘He might be trying to send us a message.’

‘A message in Steven’s blood?’ said Reynolds. ‘Look, I’m not suggesting we release the thumbprint right now – we don’t
know
enough about it, and it’s too emotive. I’m not even telling Steven’s family at this point.’

Rice nodded her grudging agreement.

Reynolds went on, ‘Saying that we want to speak to Jonas is not saying that we think he did it, but—’

‘That’s
exactly
what it’s saying.’

‘I beg to differ. What it
will
do is open the door for anyone who has …
information
about him which they might hitherto have felt unable to share, to come forward.’

Rice snorted. ‘You need a suspect and he’s the closest thing you’ve got. It’s a witch hunt.’

Bob Stripe from
Points West
came out of the Gents’ toilets. ‘Not interrupting, I hope?’ he said, when it was quite clear to all present that he fervently hoped he
was
.

‘Not at all,’ said Reynolds as he squeezed between them.

Reynolds waited until he’d closed the skittle-alley door behind him. ‘Steven Lamb raised a question—’

‘Which was bollocks. Even Kate Gulliver said so.’

‘Kate Gulliver’s changed her mind.’

Rice’s jaw dropped. ‘Is she allowed to do that?’

Reynolds turned his face away from her for a moment. He looked through the little square window in the skittle-alley door at the noisy throng.

Rice could tell he was wondering whether or not to share.

To her surprise, he did.

‘I spoke to her earlier. She told me that she was frightened by Jonas Holly during their final session. So frightened that she feels it might have influenced her decision to clear him for duty.’

Rice was stunned. She couldn’t imagine the super-confident Kate Gulliver being frightened
or
admitting she might have made a mistake – especially to a by-the-book man like Reynolds.

‘Jesus! What did he do?’

‘Nothing. Or at least, nothing that sounds like anything. She said he brought up the abduction of Jess Took. Then he said that people hurt children.’

People hurt children
. Jonas had said the same thing to Steven Lamb, Rice remembered.

Reynolds continued, ‘She said she felt an overwhelming sense of threat and danger from him.’

‘A
sense
?’ Rice struggled to stick to her guns. ‘Not much to base an accusation of kidnap and murder on, is it?’

‘She says it was just the way he said it.’

Rice felt the sands of reality shift under her feet. With sudden clarity she remembered Jonas saying he understood the Piper’s anger. What was it he’d said? That people left their children on display in their cars like old umbrellas. At the time it had sounded sane. Harmless.

Now she wasn’t so sure.

She bit her lip and turned her face to stare through the little window in the door. Framed like a Hogarth, Bob Stripe spooned one, two, three sugars into his teacup. Marcie Meyrick frowned up into the dark toe of her own empty shoe, while Mike Armstrong from the
Bugle
set up the skittles.

‘You don’t believe he killed his wife, do you?’ Rice said flatly.

‘I don’t know what to believe,’ said Reynolds, more cautiously than she’d ever heard him.

‘We were
there
…’

‘I know.’

She nodded. She was all out of fight.

‘I understand your concerns, Elizabeth. But we have to weigh the reputation of one man against the lives of six children.’

‘Five now,’ said Rice sombrely.

‘Exactly,’ said Reynolds.

*

After the press conference, Rice went back to Rose Cottage with a sense of foreboding.

Mrs Paddon let her in and then stood in the hallway. ‘What are you looking for?’ she said suspiciously.

‘I don’t know.’ Rice started in the kitchen, looking with different eyes this time.

‘You’re wasting your time.’

Rice ignored her.

The bottle of red wine that Jonas had opened for her was still on the counter; still half full. The bills were routine, the laundry still washed but un-ironed, the sink still empty. There was a glass of water on the table with faint dirty smears where the fingers would grip, and Rice remembered that Jonas had been gardening when he’d been interrupted by the children on their way to the woods.

She bent down and examined the glass. The smears were just that – no prints. She straightened up and started to look around her.

‘What are you looking for?’ said Mrs Paddon from the kitchen doorway.

‘Gloves,’ said Rice.

Mrs Paddon stared at her, unblinking.

‘Maybe woollen or gardening gloves?’ She made it a question but Mrs Paddon didn’t give her any help. Rice wished she’d go back to her own house.