Finders Keepers (31 page)

‘Chicken.’

They ate in the hot car. He was halfway through his sandwich before he realized it was, in fact, ham. He grimaced and sighed loudly but Rice didn’t ask him what was wrong.

Reynolds hoped his new hair made her realize just how badly she’d blown it.

*

The big one’s not eating, but the youngster’s settling in. Didn’t want either of ’em, but what’s to be done? The big one come sneaking up on me just as I’m winkling the first bay out from under the car. Grabs me hard and so I hit him with the stick. I know him too – and he knows me – so I had to bring him with. And right when I’m getting
him
in the car, here come another one trying to steal the first! It were Piccadilly Circus
in
the middle of Landacre Wood. Lucky they’re both scrawny.

But it fills up the yard again. That’s the main thing. Bin empty too long; made me
itch
with the emptiness. Every one I filled made the others look even emptier. Now I look at the runs, all full of life, and it’s like a sigh of relief in my head.

They’re still searching, but I’m not bothered. Let ’em come. I got my hiding places. Serves all them folk right. Teach ’em to value what they got, be it children or traditions. You can’t get ’em back. Once they’re gone they’re gone for good.

Still, I don’t like the big one. Something not right with that one, I always thought. Reminds me of a hound I had once off the Beaufort – Bosun. Huge brute, he were. A demon in the field, Jim Wetherall said when he offloaded him, but the wily old bastard never mentioned him were mazed in the yard. Bit a horse once. Imagine that – a bloody foxhound biting a horse! Not a nip either – a right proper chunk out the belly and I had to whip him raw before him let go.

Only dog I were ever wary of, Bosun, and the only one I ever shot and was happy to do it. Mostly him was as waggy as the rest, and that’s what made him so dangerous, see – the way he’d turn, sudden like.

The big one’s like that, I reckon – pretending to be weak, not eating, not moving. But I never had a hound fool me twice and I won’t be starting now.

So the big one’s chained up. Because of Bosun.

The others are free in the runs, like the old ones. They get hungry when they hear the knife like the old ones too! Already come running to the gates, slavering – specially the smallest bay – he’s a hungry one! The maids are little charmers, too. Make daisy chains in the meadow! Like a storybook.

They’re not as noisy as the old ones, but maybe that’ll come with time. They can make all the noise they like up here and no one to hear ’em for miles.

I miss the noise. That quiet made me mazed.

Maybe I can walk ’em too, some time. At night maybe, and
coupled
up like pups to keep ’em from darting off all over. It would be good for ’em, and good for me. Watching ’em get fit and strong and biddable.

Don’t know if I were happy before. Never rightly thought of it. But this makes me feel something like happy again.

It’s good to get back in the old routine.

Good to have something to love.

THE INCINERATOR IGNITED
with a soft
whump
and made Steven’s mouth fill with saliva. It angered him, and he resisted the urge to rise and move to the front of the kennel to await feeding like the other children did. It made him think of the polar bears he’d once seen at Bristol Zoo – pacing tirelessly, staring up at the crowds, waiting for feeding time.

Instead he lay on the straw that was his bed and looked up through the yellowing corrugated plastic. Strips of dead flies and bird shit and little bits of grit. That had been his sky for six days now. His new horizons were close and diamond-meshed.

Steven wiped the drool off his lips and got to his knees.

The crumbling grey block wall at the back of the kennel had chinks that allowed him to see straight across the yard to the row of empty stables. If he leaned to one side, a chink showed him the ramp and partly inside the big shed – and the huntsman going about his work.

Today his work was a cow.

Steven watched the black-and-white beast walk cautiously off
the
trailer. It stopped at the bottom and gazed around with empty eyes. Steven had been to the new supermarket in Barnstaple once and seen old people doing the same thing, standing in the cheese aisle, looking for the tea.

‘Hup! Hup!’

The huntsman touched her hip and the cow moved down the rutted ramp into the big shed, skidding a little and leaning back to maintain her balance, her giant udders swinging.

The huntsman followed her down in his green overalls, boots and flat cap. He didn’t wear his stocking mask in the big shed and Steven could see the years of wrinkles and creases, the small blue eyes, the lipless mouth and the yellowing teeth.

‘He doesn’t know we can see him,’ whispered Jess beside him, and he nodded. It was a small thing, but it was worth noting. Maybe they could use it one day. He didn’t know how, but most things were useful, he’d always found.

The gunshot cracked loudly in the shed, and Steven jumped. Two cages away, Charlie sucked in a shocked breath and then started to howl like a child who’s fallen off a bicycle – with a wide mouth and uninhibited lungs.

Jess turned away and sat down on her raised straw bed. ‘It’s hot,’ she said dully.

Steven didn’t answer. They all knew it was hot. It hadn’t rained for ever.

He felt the collar around his neck. It was not uncomfortable, but it was annoying and confusing. The little padlock that held it shut lay in the hollow at the base of his throat like a cold pendant, but if he lay too long in the sun it grew hot enough to hurt. The collar itself was old leather, soft and tactile. There was a flat metal strip on it, perhaps two inches long; Steven imagined that it was where a dog’s name might be engraved. He ran his fingernail over it carefully but could feel nothing that might indicate that his own name – or another’s – had been marked there. He took some comfort in that; the collar had not been waiting for him. He was not chosen for this. Not special.

He thought of Em, who
was
.

Too special for him.

She probably would have realized it soon anyway, but now that he was gone, what was there to keep her true?

Was she already with someone else? Maybe even one of his friends? Lewis or Lalo Bryant. Lewis was definitely capable of turning comfort into copping a feel. The thought made Steven’s lips thin, and he thumped the wall with the side of his fist.

‘What’s up?’ said Jess Took.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Shut up.’

She stuck her tongue out at him but not with any great feeling.

Steven put his eye back to the best chink in the wall. He watched the huntsman sharpen his knife in a series of sibilant swipes, and swallowed the resulting saliva. His stomach rumbled. He turned away before the cuts were made but soon there was the clink of chains as the winch was attached, and then the rising
ssssssssss
that was the hide separating from the flesh it had protected since birth.

‘Sorry, Jess,’ said Steven.

She stuck her tongue out at him again – but this time she smiled.

Down the row, Maisie and Kylie and Pete were playing I Spy. The game had limited scope – I spy a fence; I spy a gate; I spy concrete – but the three youngest children often played it anyway. Sometimes they played ‘Shout for Help’, in which one of them counted down from three and they all screamed ‘Help.’ Charlie usually joined in, but Jess never did; when Steven asked why, she just shrugged and said, ‘They build kennels where people won’t be bothered by the dogs howling. Nobody’s going to hear us.’

‘Somebody might,’ said Steven, and shouted with the rest of them. But the huntsman never seemed perturbed by the game, so Steven guessed Jess was probably right.

Steven squinted through the wall again. The cow’s carcass
was
being winched through a dark doorway within the big shed now, giant, pink and stripped of skin. The hide lay in a black-and-white pile along with the feet and the tail and the head, with eyes gone milky and its rude blue tongue lapping at a little ooze of blood on the floor.

Soon the air would stink of hair and horn. Something in the incinerator always popped loudly; Steven didn’t know what it was, but imagined the eyes, and was relieved every time it was over.

‘What do you think he wants?’ he said.

Jess shrugged. ‘Money, I suppose.’

‘My mum doesn’t have any money,’ said Steven.

‘Nor does my dad,’ said Jess. ‘The horses take it all.’

DAVEY SAW THE
story in the paper on the rack outside Mr Jacoby’s shop as he walked to Shane’s house.

THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY

Davey stopped dead. He almost didn’t recognize the blurred photo of his own mother, one hand over her mouth, the other clutching the end of his hospital bed. There
he
was, propped against pillows and looking disappointingly eleven, and there was DI Reynolds, leaning back in his chair and frowning.

Davey picked up the
Sunday Mirror
. The story was labelled ‘Exclusive’ and had been written by someone called Marcie Meyrick. As he read it, Davey felt his whole body go hot and cold and squirmy.

The mother of kidnapped brothers weeps as her younger son reveals the gruelling details of their ordeal at the hands of the infamous Pied Piper
.

Speaking from his hospital bed, little Davey Lamb—

‘
Little Davey Lamb
’? Davey’s heart plummeted. Shit, they were going to have him for
breakfast
at school.

… little Davey Lamb told police he and Steven had managed a daring escape from the serial kidnapper
.

But, in a cruel twist of fate, Steven then got lost in the woods where they were both taken more than a week ago, and is presumed to have been recaptured
.

‘We ran away together,’ a sobbing Davey told his distraught mum, Lettie Lamb, 39, of Shipcott
.

Sobbing?! He hadn’t
sobbed
! Shit! Davey wanted to
punch
someone. Who the hell was Marcie Meyrick? What a fucking
liar
! He read on:

But the last little Davey heard of his big brother was Steven shouting at him to run home to his mother – and then they lost touch in the deep Landacre Woods in the middle of the moor
.

The child snatcher has terrorized Exmoor for weeks, stealing children from parked cars, and cunningly eluding police
.

Detectives leading the manhunt now presume that Steven Lamb is being held with six other captives – five children and police constable Jonas Holly, who was apparently abducted while trying to rescue young Davey
.

The kidnaps are only the latest in a horrific series of crimes visited on the moor over the past thirty years
.

Between 1980 and 1983, serial killer Arnold Avery buried six young victims on Exmoor, and two years ago another murderous spree left eight people dead in the small town of Shipcott. The killer has never been caught
.

‘Exmoor is cursed,’ said one elderly resident who didn’t want to be named …

Davey threw the paper down furiously.

‘Steady now,’ said Mr Jacoby, who’d appeared in the doorway.

‘They’re writing lies!’ shouted Davey.

‘That’s what newspapers do.’

‘It shouldn’t be allowed!’

‘It’s not,’ said Mr Jacoby. ‘If they’ve lied and you can prove it, you can sue them.’

‘I’m
going
to! It said I cried and I didn’t cry! Shit!’

‘How’s your mum doing, Davey?’ asked Mr Jacoby soothingly.

Davey looked confused, then shrugged. ‘Fine.’

Mr Jacoby sighed and withdrew, then reappeared a moment later and handed Davey a Mr Kipling Dundee cake and a Mars bar.

‘Here you are. For teatime. I hope they find your brother soon. You give my best to your mother and gran, all right?’

Davey had pilfered industriously from Mr Jacoby’s shop for years and now felt a bit embarrassed as he took the offerings and mumbled his thanks.

Life had been so simple and suddenly everything was just so
wrong
. How had it happened? Davey had no idea, but as he walked away with the Mars bar melting in his jeans pocket, images kept crowding into his head. Images of the money he and Shane had failed to spend, of the piece-of-shit cardboard bird he’d made for Nan – and of Steven’s skateboard nose-diving gently into the silt.

He never had any luck, however hard he tried.

He carried on to Shane’s, where they ate the Dundee cake with their fingers in the back garden and threw what was left into Shane’s neighbour’s pond.