Finders Keepers (43 page)

No wife, no children. He had never had the time.

His only legacy now was his own bitter memory of warm
bodies
piled high, and the undignified wrestle to feed the stiffened carcasses into the flames.

He had destroyed the only things he’d ever cared about.

The pain was overwhelming. He gripped the wire gate and focused.

The child before him looked like John Took. Something about the eyes and the shape of the mouth was very like her father. She held out her empty bucket and moved her father’s lips.

You don’t love them
.

Unconsciously, Bob Coffin touched the warm cotton of his overalls and felt the weight of the cold gun beneath it.

Everything was coming to an end.

Again.

REYNOLDS COULDN’T UNDERSTAND
a word Teddy said. Or even how he said it.

Every syllable appeared to be agony and took an eternity. His head wagged, his chin jerked, his eyes screwed up and his hands flapped.

And yet Teddy’s mother nodded at Reynolds and Rice throughout each garbled passage and then translated it all into English. It was like watching a medium at work, cocking her ear at knocks and swaying curtains, and deciphering them into a message about Uncle Arthur’s missing will.

Except that the message Mrs Loosemore received was far more interesting than one from a dead uncle.

Reynolds and Rice walked to the car in silence, but the looks they exchanged held a thing called hope that neither of them had experienced for quite some time.

Because he knew less than nothing about hunting, Reynolds called John Took and put him on speakerphone for Rice to hear. He asked him about the white tape.

Took said, ‘Hunt servants use white tape on their whips so they can be identified easily in the field.’

‘Hunt servants?’ said Reynolds.

‘Employees of the hunt.’

‘And do you have any enemies among the ranks of hunt employees?’

‘Not that I know of,’ said Took.

Rice mouthed, ‘Shit.’

Reynolds very nearly hung up. Then he remembered the man in the yard below the helicopter. Waving like a cannibal at the iron bird in the sky. Reynolds got a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach.

‘Mr Took, we flew over the hunt kennels a few weeks back.’

‘Yes,’ said Took. ‘They’re empty now.’

‘But we saw a man there,’ said Reynolds carefully.

‘That’ll be Bob Coffin. Our old huntsman. He still lives in the cottage. For a bit. The place’ll be sold off this winter.’

The feeling in Reynolds’s gut splashed through his body like spilled milk. A sick, excited feeling that he’d never felt before. Never believed he
would
feel.

He tried to deny it. Tried to suppress it. But it defied him.

It was a hunch.

He was having a fucking hunch!

He tried to keep his voice from shaking. ‘There’s an incinerator there, right?’

‘Yes. We’ve got an incinerator up there,’ said John Took.

‘What’s it for?’

‘For burning what’s left of the fallen stock after it’s been slaughtered for the dogs. Hoofs and hides and the like.’

‘But why would the incinerator be in use if the kennels are empty?’

There was a silence on the line that seemed to last for the whole of Reynolds’s life up to that moment.

‘It shouldn’t be,’ said John Took.

*

The incinerator roared softly to life and the children pricked up their ears like Dobermanns.

Even Jonas felt the dull flames in his stomach as he scrape-scrape-scraped the link on the cement immediately in front of his face.

The knives started to sharpen, and saliva trickled into his mouth. It disgusted him, but he couldn’t help it. It was a relief, in fact. He’d drunk the last of his water yesterday, and his tongue already felt too big, as if it were trying to crowd down his sticky throat.

The children pressed diamonds into their own meagre flesh as they squeezed themselves against the fence, their eyes fixed unwaveringly on the big shed. They waited for the rumble of the trolley piled with meat.

But it never came.

In the big shed Bob Coffin took the coupling chains from the hooks on the wall.

They would give him something to hold them still by.

RICE DROVE AS
fast as the roads allowed.

At least.

Reynolds kept his right foot pressed hard on the brake he didn’t have and – now and then – slapped a steadying hand on the dashboard.

‘Sorry,’ Rice said, after one particularly close shave with a caravan.

‘Not at all,’ said Reynolds. He assumed Rice had done the Advanced Driver course, but thought that now would be a poor time to double-check.

He leaned forward and tilted his head to the left to peer into the wing mirror. They’d lost the other three cars in the convoy somewhere. They should really wait for them, but Reynolds wasn’t about to slow Rice down. His hunch had segued into a feeling of such imminent disaster – such impending doom – that getting to the hunt kennels as fast as humanly possible was the only thing that mattered. He’d already summoned ambulances from Weston and Minehead, and the police helicopter from
Filton
. He didn’t care who got there first, as long as they got there fast.

He sat up straight again, and fake-braked through an S-bend.

‘I was getting worried it was Jonas,’ said Rice.

‘Me too.’ He nodded.

‘I’m glad it’s not.’

‘Me too,’ he admitted, and braced himself for a collision with a bank of trees that loomed across the road.

‘Your hair looks good,’ said Rice.

Reynolds was surprised. ‘Thanks.’ He touched his fringe self-consciously.

Rice swung around a hairpin, then stamped on the accelerator and picked up frightening speed on a rare straight.

We’re going to make it
, thought Reynolds, with hope unfurling in his heart.

They passed a group of deer so fast they didn’t even have time to scatter, only to flinch and then stand and quiver post-fright. In his wing mirror, Reynolds saw the buck pointing after them, its dark nose raised and its antlers laid along its back in fury.

He wished he hadn’t looked.

*

The first fat drops of rain fell on to the concrete, releasing the hot smell of dust. More rang slowly off the corrugated plastic roofs.

Bob Coffin padlocked one end of a coupling chain to Steven’s collar and handed him the other end. He unlocked the gate next door, and pointed at Jonas.

‘Put it on him, bay,’ he said.

Steven walked slowly into Jonas’s cage. It was strange to be so close to him after all the time they’d spent in separate spaces. It made everything seem brighter, more real. Jonas lay twisted on
one
side, like a dead fox in a ditch. His stretched skin was split in a dozen swollen yellow-purple places, the way a loaf cracks open as it rises. As Steven approached, Jonas stopped scraping the chain on the cement and watched him through one eye, the shallow rise of his ribs now the only thing that showed he was alive.

‘Can you sit up?’

Slowly, Jonas put a flat hand on the cement, and Steven helped him to sit against the mesh.

Steven knelt and attached the other end of the coupling chain to his collar. Now they were harnessed to each other.

‘Here.’

Steven looked round. The huntsman was leaning towards him with the key. He nodded at the padlock that held Jonas to the fence. Steven noticed that as soon as he took the key, the huntsman stepped quickly away, afraid of getting too close to Jonas.

Steven unlocked Jonas from the fence and helped him to his unsteady feet.

‘Where are we going?’ said Jonas.

‘Exercise. Put your arm on my shoulder,’ said Steven, and Jonas did, and together they left the stinking kennel. As they passed the huntsman, he held out his hand for the key and then slipped it into his pocket.

The others were already on the walkway, waiting for them: Pete and Jess linked together, and Kylie with Maisie.

Jonas was all bones. Steven guessed they all were, but to feel another man’s bones against his own was strangely sad.

The rain got louder on the roofs, and the children turned their faces to it and opened their mouths.

‘Hup!’ said the huntsman.

They were facing the meadow, as usual, but the huntsman spread his arms and encouraged them to turn the other way – towards the big shed.

‘Hup! Hup!’

Pete and the girls started to shuffle slowly round, but Steven stood his ground.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Hup!’ said the huntsman.

Steven didn’t move. This didn’t feel right. Routine had kept them alive for so long and this was not routine. First Jonas had been let out, and now they were being herded towards the big shed instead of the meadow. Steven started to feel bad. He didn’t exactly feel sick, but he thought he might quite soon.

‘Why aren’t we going to the meadow?’

‘Hup!’

‘Where are we going?’ said Steven stubbornly.

The huntsman paused and then gestured vaguely at the sky. ‘Helicopter.’

They all looked up, but saw nothing, heard nothing. Even so, Maisie began to sob loudly, which set Kylie off like a twin.

The younger children continued to move, searching the sky. Even Jonas moved his weight as if he expected Steven to start walking.

But Steven didn’t.

Instinct had served Steven well in his short life, and every instinct he possessed now told him something was wrong.

‘Hup!’ said Bob Coffin, poking and pushing at Jonas and Steven to try to get them started. ‘Get on now!’

‘We’re not cows,’ said Steven, shaking him off angrily. ‘We’re not bloody
cows
.’

Bob Coffin calmly pulled the gun out of his pocket and pointed it at Steven’s face. Steven ducked and Jess shrieked.

‘Helicopter,’ said the huntsman flatly.

There was no helicopter, but, galvanized by the gun, they all moved up the walkway made slippery by the rain.

Jonas wasn’t leaning too heavily on Steven, but it was still awkward to walk without stumbling. They were bumpingly close – all sharp elbows and hips. The loose end of the yard-long chain that had tethered Jonas to the fence for so long swung
between
them, the padlock bouncing off their thighs. Steven thought he should have unlocked it at the collar end, but whatever – it didn’t seem like a big problem after the gun.

They walked down the rutted concrete ramp into the big shed.

Steven looked around him at the room he’d only ever seen half of when fully conscious – and through a crack in a wall. It was bigger than he’d thought – big enough for a couple of tractors, at least – and almost empty. There was an old wooden bench on one side of the room, where he could see three knives laid out as if for supper at a grand house: neatly, and in order of length. There was a whetstone gripped in a shiny blue metal vice, a couple of lengths of heavy chain, some shackles and spring clips and a few rusting cans; Steven recognized 3-in-1 oil and Castrol grease from Ronnie’s garage.

Em’s arms around him, her warm breath on his neck … ‘I don’t care’ …

His heart ached to think of it.

On one wall was the electric winch, its steel cable the only thing in the shed that glinted with newness. Bolted low on the wall directly opposite was a heavy curled hook. Directly between the two was a drain and a small dark patch – the only evidence, Stephen realized, of countless animals that had been butchered on the spot – the place where the head was severed from the neck and the blood leaked out.

Beside the hook was the half-open door to the flesh room, and Steven’s stomach rolled at what was to come. The memory of being enclosed in the cold, fetid flesh was shockingly clear.

‘I don’t want to! I don’t want to!’ Maisie’s continuing sobs echoed loudly in his head, joining forces with the rain beating on the iron roof.

Even if the helicopter were directly overhead, Steven doubted that any of them would hear it now. He wondered what they might look like through a thermal-imaging camera: an odd party of white blobs shuffling together across the shed,
becoming
greyer in the cold of the flesh room, and then disappearing altogether once they were inside the meat. Maybe a grey foot would protrude, or a charcoal elbow – but the crew overhead would have to know what they were looking for. What they were looking
at
.

Bob Coffin turned on a flickering fluorescent strip light and squealed the shed door shut on its un-oiled runners. As the yard and the kennels and the darkening sky disappeared behind them, Steven’s instincts gifted him a powerful mental image of the stone lid of an ancient tomb closing over his head.