But now – here atop the moor, with the window down and the summer evening breeze soothing his mind – he could start to think again. He drank in the stillness, even as he started to recognize its separate components: a blackbird somewhere close by, the swish of the long grass and the dry rattle of gorse; the ebb and flow of the air itself against his ear – a coded whisper in breathy Morse.
Jonas sat and allowed the moor to clear his head.
He didn’t want to think about the day just gone, but the broken windows nagged him.
He was sure a couple of cars at Tarr Steps, where Pete Knox was taken, had also been vandalized. He would have to ask Reynolds about Dunkery Beacon. If windows had been broken there too, the connection with the kidnapper would be undeniable.
But it still begged the question: why?
The answer stayed in the shadows like a wolf skirting a campfire.
17
THREE CHILDREN GONE in the space of a fortnight.
The Sun called him the Pied Piper, this man who was spiriting the children of Exmoor away, right under the noses of their guardians, and the other tabloids fell on the name with glee. Even the broadsheets picked up on it, although they sniffily referred to it as ‘the case some are calling the Pied Piper’, which meant they could use the name while somehow maintaining a dignified distance from it.
Either way, Reynolds found it unhelpful. The name conjured up a damning image of the police stupidly failing to spot an endless crocodile of children being danced away across the moor by a man in a jester’s outfit playing a tin whistle.
The tabloids also seemed to imply that the kidnapper of three children must be an awful lot easier to catch than the kidnapper of one, and with the national media spotlight turned so brightly on the case, he was now at risk of failing far more publicly.
Reynolds could only hope that his hair would stand the strain.
He was assigned three more officers and held a press conference where he announced – teeth slightly on edge – that the Sun had offered a £10,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of the missing children or the identification of their abductor. When he watched it on the news, he was relieved to see that his plugs looked pretty damned good, even under the harsh TV lights.
Everyone was talking about it.
Not his hair – the reward.
That evening, Kate Gulliver called DI Reynolds to ask how Jonas Holly was doing.
She got Elizabeth Rice instead.
‘Oh hi, this is DC Rice. DI Reynolds isn’t here right now.’
‘Can you ask him to call me?’
‘Sure,’ said Rice. ‘What’s it about?’
Kate prickled. She didn’t know Rice, but Rice must know she was a force-approved psychologist. For all she knew, Kate could be calling to speak to Reynolds about his own personal issues. It was rude of her to ask. Bloody rude.
But Rice was a woman, and Kate hated to be rude to any woman in a man’s world, from tea ladies up. There was always a sense that they were in this together, like sisters, and to be rude to a sister would only get one a reputation as a bitch.
So instead of telling Rice that it was confidential, she told her she was calling about Jonas Holly.
‘Just wondered how he was coping being back at work, that’s all.’
It wasn’t all, of course. If Kate Gulliver had been confident that Jonas was equipped to be doing just fine, she’d never have called.
‘OK, I think,’ said Rice, sounding a little surprised. ‘He seems OK.’
Kate said ‘Good,’ and cursed the sisterhood that meant that now she’d had an answer from Rice, she could no longer ask to speak to Reynolds. She trusted Reynolds’s judgement, whereas she didn’t know Rice from a bar of soap. But sisterly manners now dictated that she had to accept the opinion of some underling, thank her, and say goodbye.
Which she did.
Rice hung up and frowned into the middle distance of the Red Lion bar. She did not share Reynolds’s erudition, it was true. But she had more common sense in her little finger than any man she’d ever known, and something told her that Kate Gulliver was unusually concerned about Jonas Holly.
It wasn’t intuition, it was just logical.
Jonas had been through a horrendous, life-altering experience. Rice herself had suffered nightmares for months after their last trip to Shipcott. The memory of Jonas holding the still-warm body of his dead wife at the foot of the bloodied stairs would be with her for ever. Even now – here in the bonhomie of the Red Lion bar – Elizabeth Rice shivered as she remembered the slide of warm blood against her lips as she’d tried to keep Lucy Holly alive; the smell of iron and – somehow – burning rubber; Jonas’s eyes never leaving his wife’s face, but growing darker and darker as his own blood drained away through the deep wounds in his stomach.
Some time later that day, she’d showered and cried as the water turned pink around her ankles. She’d had to scrub the dried blood off her knees. Only her fear of being seen as a weak woman had kept her from going to see one of the force shrinks herself.
So Gulliver’s call might have been routine, but Rice’s logic said it was not.
For a start, it was after 6pm. That implied that Gulliver had wanted to have a proper chat with Reynolds, not just a quick check on a former patient as part of the working day. Then Rice had noticed the irritation in Gulliver’s voice when she’d answered Reynolds’s phone. Fleetingly, she considered that they might have a more-than-professional relationship, but quickly discounted that. Reynolds was not a man she could imagine having sex with anyone – not even himself. So Gulliver was irritated because her enquiry was more than casual; it was important; she really wanted to know how Jonas Holly was doing. And that must mean she was not 100 per cent sure he’d be doing OK – even though making sure was her job.
Reynolds approached with a half of Thatchers for her, and a white wine.
Rice quickly took the decision to tell him to call Gulliver and leave it at that. If there was something wrong with Jonas Holly, Reynolds would pick it up. He already seemed to dislike Holly for some reason Rice couldn’t quite fathom, but which she felt instinctively wasn’t quite fair. She had no desire to feed her boss’s irrational dislike of a man who was a victim and deserved only sympathy.
But if Jonas’s own psychologist – the person who’d signed him off to return to work – was worried about Jonas, then Rice decided there and then that she’d better be worried about him too.
18
IT WAS ALMOST strange – how Exmoor could remain as hot and sunny as it did, with such a black cloud hanging over it. An uneasy feeling hung there with it, and the children suffered most. Those who had considered the moor their personal playground were suddenly confined to tiny back gardens. Despite the brilliant summer, parents did an unprecedented one-eighty and actively encouraged the playing of video games in darkened rooms.
There was an upturn in sightings of toddlers on old-fashioned reins, and people whose offspring were too old to fit into reins eyed the contraptions wistfully. Tourists who couldn’t cancel their bookings without losing their deposits stocked up on jigsaws and Swingballs, and when they were forced by the superb weather into hiking, were seen in lay-bys and car parks across the moor giving stern briefings to unimpressed-looking youngsters about the dangers of wandering off alone.