Finders Keepers (18 page)

Once more, Steven seemed to know he was lying. ‘If you go up there again I’ll tell Mum on you.’

‘It’s only an old ruin. Nobody cares.’

‘You don’t understand. Going up there is dangerous.’

Davey rolled his eyes. ‘OK, Granny.’

Steven grabbed his upper arm so hard and so fast that Davey yelped. ‘I’m serious! Don’t go up that hill, OK?’

Davey twisted away from him. ‘OK! Shit. I said OK, didn’t I?’ He rubbed his arm. ‘You going to get our money back or not?’

‘Yes,’ said Steven quietly.

‘Really?’ said Davey suspiciously.

Steven didn’t answer – just got off the bed and pulled on his trainers.

Mark Trumbull was reading
Beaver Patrol
in the bus shelter when Steven Lamb walked up to him and snatched it out of his hands.

‘Hey!’ he said and stood up. He was two years younger than Steven, but only a bit shorter and far heavier – and he wasn’t used to taking shit from anyone.

‘Where’s the money?’ said Steven coldly.

‘What money?’ said Mark Trumbull. ‘Gimme back my magazine.’

‘I’m Davey Lamb’s brother.’

‘Yeah? So what?’

‘So where’s the money?’ said Steven again.

‘I haven’t got his money. Gimme back my
magazine
.’

Steven looked down at the magazine for the first time and then back at Mark Trumbull.

‘I know where you live,’ he said, and started walking.

‘No you fucking don’t.’

‘Number seventy-two.’

Mark Trumbull hurried after him. His right hand was in a fist, but he wasn’t sure whether he should actually hit Davey’s brother or not. Some vague notion he’d picked up about Steven Lamb from the collective consciousness of school made him unusually cautious. ‘You gimme my magazine or I’ll fuck you up, shithead.’

Steven Lamb said nothing and kept walking. Mark Trumbull looked nervously up the street. His house was only fifty yards away and his parents were home.

‘Hey!’ he said angrily and clutched the back of Steven’s T-shirt.

Steven turned and slapped him so hard with the rolled-up copy of
Beaver Patrol
that Mark Trumbull staggered off the pavement and into the road, clutching the side of his head.

Steven kept walking.

He was at the front door.

‘Where’s the money?’

Mark Trumbull stood a few feet away – panic-stricken. He didn’t know how to stop Steven knocking. Maybe he was bluffing. He’d never knock.

Steven knocked. ‘Where’s the money?’ he said again.

‘Shit! Here!’ hissed Mark Trumbull. ‘Here! Just don’t … Just come away from the bloody door! Here!’ He dug in his jeans pockets and shoved money at Steven – crumpled notes, and coins spilling on to the pavement.

‘It’s not all here,’ said Steven.

‘I spent some. That’s all there is. I swear. I fucking
swear
!’ Mark Trumbull was sweating and almost weeping with panic. Steven wasn’t moving away from the front door of his house. Why wasn’t he
moving away
?

Steven glanced at the magazine. ‘What else did you buy?’

‘Some cider. Another magazine. A skateboard.
Please
, mate …’

‘Bring the skateboard to school tomorrow and give it to Davey.’

‘OK! I will. I swear. Please …!’

The door opened and Mark Trumbull’s mother stood there, looking irritated.

‘Yes, what?’ she said to Steven, then noticed her son. ‘What’s going on, Mark?’

The bully looked pleadingly at Steven Lamb, who handed Mark Trumbull’s mother the curled copy of
Beaver Patrol
and walked away.

As he approached home, Davey and Shane were waiting on the doorstep.

‘Did you get it?’ Davey yelled from twenty houses away.

Davey asked three more times before Steven pushed past him and Shane, went inside and up to his bedroom, and shut the door.

‘He didn’t get it,’ said Shane flatly, and followed Davey inside.

Davey slapped the bedroom door with the flat of his hand. ‘Steven! Did you
get
it?’

‘What’s all the noise up there?’ said Nan from the front room. ‘I’m watching the War.’

After a brief pause, Steven opened the door. ‘I got what was left of it. About sixty quid.’

Davey and Shane exchanged shrugs.

‘That’s better than nothing,’ said Shane. ‘Thanks, Steven.’

‘You’re
awesome
, bro!’ said Davey. ‘Where is it then?’

‘It’s not yours.’

‘It
is
ours!’ Davey flared immediately.

‘You found it. That doesn’t mean it’s yours,’ said Steven. ‘Mark Trumbull owes you a skateboard. If he doesn’t give it to you tomorrow, let me know.’ He closed the door again and turned the key in the lock.

Shane was open-mouthed with injustice, while the anger rose higher and higher in Davey. He kicked the door.

‘Bastard!’ he yelled. ‘I don’t want a skateboard! I want my fucking
money
!’

He kicked the door three more times – hard enough to splinter the wood around the lock.

Davey was so angry with his brother that he never even heard Lettie coming up the stairs. Shane stepped swiftly aside, so she could get a clear run at her younger son.

ONLY TWO OF
the three people on the list Elizabeth Rice had given Jonas actually lived within the force area. The third, Stanley Cotton, lived in Cumbria. Jonas had been to the Lakes once as a boy and was mystified by the idea that anyone who lived there would bother coming all the way to Exmoor on holiday.

There wasn’t much to see at David Tedworthy’s immaculate Dunster home. He’d already had the broken window in his Mercedes repaired.

‘Got photos if you want to see, though,’ he said helpfully. He and his wife had been nothing
but
helpful since Jonas had arrived. Mary Tedworthy had made him have a cup of tea and a rock-hard home-baked scone before he’d even been allowed to view the car. He’d nibbled at the scone slowly, and managed to slip the last few bites to an ancient and smelly Golden Retriever that had been drooling on his trouser leg since he’d sat down. Then the gleaming three-month-old Merc had been ready and waiting for him, still dripping from a wash
–
as if he were a prospective purchaser, not a policeman.

He looked through the digital photos on their state-of-the-art Apple computer. They showed a single smallish hole in the rear passenger window.

‘Were these taken at the scene?’ he asked.

‘No – when we got home. For the insurance.’

Jonas nodded at the pictures. Through the windows he could see only that the car was neat and clean. There didn’t appear to be any marks or fingerprints on the surrounding glass, but it was hard to be sure from photos. The lab would have found any prints anyway.

‘Did you notice anything at all out of the ordinary that day?’

‘No,’ said Mr Tedworthy. ‘We only wish we had. That poor boy.’

Mrs Tedworthy nodded in agreement. ‘Our granddaughter’s the same age.’ She handed Jonas a photo of the ugliest child he had ever seen.

‘Chloe,’ she said, as if it mattered – or improved things.

‘Lovely,’ he managed.

‘If anything happened to her, well—’ She glanced at her husband and he put a reassuring hand on hers, as if he’d taken care of things so that they’d never have to suffer something so awful, so she should stop worrying her pretty little head about it.

You’re wrong
, thought Jonas sadly. No child was ever completely safe. To imagine that it was possible was a delusion. Lucy had wanted children, but Jonas had known better. Not that it gave him any satisfaction to have been proven right once again. Lucy just hadn’t understood how dangerous the world could be.

And never would now.

It was small comfort, but it was something.

He stood up to go.

‘There was one thing, though,’ said Mrs Tedworthy. ‘It struck us both as strange, didn’t it?’ she said, looking at her husband, who nodded.

‘What was that?’ said Jonas, suddenly alert.

‘Well, I had some embroidery supplies on the parcel shelf. Quite a lot, and they’re not cheap, you know. Right there in plain sight. And yet … they didn’t steal them.’

Jonas waited for a beat, in case she was joking.

‘Isn’t that strange, Mr Holly?’ she insisted.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Maybe the kidnapper wasn’t the needlework type.’

*

Tamzin Skinner sat on the metal steps of her mobile home, showing off her dirty toenails in pink flip-flops.

‘So though I’ve got insurance, it’s not worth claiming. They really screw you, these insurance companies, don’t they?’

‘They certainly do,’ Jonas said as he peered into the hole punched in the rear window of her rustbucket 1987 Nissan Sunny. Even though the hole was only the size of a ping-pong ball, Jonas guessed that the cost of repairing it would probably be more than the car was worth. Which was virtually nothing.

Skinner – a stick-thin forty-year-old with the dusty complexion and lip wrinkles of a lifelong smoker – was the only one of the three people on the list who had a police record. Low-level drugs and one caution for soliciting.

‘Not worth fixing then, is it?’ She shrugged, leaning further back than was necessary to get a tobacco pouch from the front pocket of her cut-off jeans – and treating Jonas to a view of her belly ring and very nearly her Brazilian.

‘Probably not,’ he agreed.

She snorted ‘Typical’ and rolled a fag.

‘Did you see anything or anyone strange or noteworthy around the car park that day, Miss Skinner?’

She sucked smoke deep into her lungs and held it there while she shook her head. ‘I already told the police everything I know,’ she said with smoke curling out of her nose and mouth.
‘Saw
nothing, heard nothing, noticed nothing. Nothing like
that
, anyway. You know.’

Jonas nodded. He had nothing else to ask, but given that he was unlikely to be able to go to Cumbria to interview Stanley Cotton or to see his car, he was reluctant to leave Tamzin Skinner’s meagre home with nothing to show for his day’s work.

There was a long silence between them, which became a little uncomfortable when it was plain that his visit should really be at an end. Mrs Tedworthy would have offered him another scone; Tamzin Skinner leaned backwards on her elbows and stuck out her tits.

Jonas turned away and did another circuit of the car. He seriously doubted that it was insured. She’d probably just said that to throw him off track. Certainly the tax was out of date by two months.

‘You need tax,’ he said – but not with any real intent to do anything about it.

She dropped her chest a little and said, ‘Yeah?’ as if it were a surprise.

He got back to the hole in the window and bent to look at it again.

‘You married?’ she said, out of the blue.

‘Yes,’ he told her.

‘All the good ones are.’

‘So they say,’ he said neutrally.

He didn’t want to look up and catch her eye, in case this conversation got awkward. Instead he pretended to be intensely interested in the hole with its surround of crazed glass, looking at it from every angle.

As he did, he saw something he hadn’t noticed before.

Halfway in and halfway out of the window – trapped by the broken glass – was a black hair about two inches long. Instantly he thought of Reynolds and his tufts, but this was darker than Reynolds’s hair.

He looked around at Tamzin Skinner, who was a bottle blonde, and whose parting was brown, not black.

A seed of excitement sprouted in Jonas’s belly. If this hair belonged to the kidnapper then they could have DNA within the week; mass testing across the moor; an arrest within the month. Maybe Jess and Pete and Charlie would still be alive in a month. Maybe they could be saved. Was that possible? The bumping of his heart was a response to the injection of pure hope – a sensation he hadn’t known for years. Literally years.

‘There’s a hair here,’ he said, and turned to point it out to the woman. She got up and came over with a little sway of the hips, and stood too close to him – her arm rubbing his as she peered at the hair.

She nodded. ‘That’ll be Jack’s.’

‘Who’s Jack?’ he said, feeling his hope teetering on the brink.

‘My dog.’

‘You have a dog,’ he said. Less a question than a statement.

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Lurcher.’

‘Oh,’ said Jonas, looking around. ‘Where is it, then?’

‘At the pub,’ she said. And then, when Jonas looked at her for more, she added defensively, ‘With my boyfriend.’

‘Oh,’ said Jonas again. He plucked the hair from the window and dropped it, wishing it were something heavy that he could throw hard into the scrub behind the caravan, to satisfy his disappointment. No hair from the kidnapper. No DNA and no arrest, and no found and rescued children.