‘Still,’ he shrugged, ‘things happen.’
‘Only to other people,’ she laughed.
He hesitated, and then told her, ‘Then you’ll be there if someone tries to kidnap me.’
Her parents knew his name. Her mother offered him tea and cake. Not Spar-shop cakes, but real cake she’d made herself and which he was expected to eat off a plate with a fork. Em’s father was polite but wary. He’d shake Steven’s hand and ask him how he was, but when he was at home he always seemed to be lurking nearby, frowning and watchful.
Steven was slightly insulted, but couldn’t blame him.
They went to Steven’s house only once, for tea. His mother kept apologizing for serving white bread and Nan showed Em photos of Steven as a small boy.
In one of them he was naked.
So mostly they went to hers.
They studied together at the kitchen table, or listened to music in her room, or watched TV in her lounge, which was bigger than his whole downstairs. They patted foals on the moor; they caught the bus to Barnstaple and he helped her choose CDs or strappy tops that made his head swim.
His friends took the piss, of course.
‘She’s new,’ said Lalo Bryant. ‘She’ll learn.’ And they all laughed.
‘If you’re not having sex with her, she’s not really your girlfriend,’ said Dougie Trewell with absolute authority. Steven hadn’t said they weren’t having sex, but they’d all assumed as much, given he wasn’t boasting about it. They were always boasting about having sex. Everyone was doing it, apparently. All the boys, anyway. It made him nervous that if they didn’t have sex soon, Em would think he was an idiot and move on to someone who knew what he was doing.
But the killer blow came from Lewis, who sighed heavily and patted Steven’s back. ‘She’s too good for you, mate. No offence.’
Steven wanted to punch him.
Because he knew it was true.
Em was special. His friends all knew it and even the other girls in their school could see it. Some of them were already wearing velvet ribbons instead of letting their loose hair blow into their mouths.
Steven wasn’t special.
It had never bothered him before, but suddenly it was critical. It raised painful questions: Why was Em going out with him? What did she see in him? Was it a joke? Was she secretly laughing behind his back, just as his friends were laughing to his face? His chest hurt at the thought.
At night he spent ages staring at himself in the bathroom mirror, worrying at spots and wishing his ears didn’t stick out.
‘Mu-um! Stevie won’t get out the bathroom!’
‘Shut up.’
‘You shut up.’
‘Both of you shut up! Steven, get out of the bathroom!’
He stopped saving for a bike jacket, and bought Clearasil and a Gillette Mach 3, which he scraped across his chin and cheeks every morning to encourage stubble.
Nan came back from a trip to Barnstaple with a can of Lynx.
‘How’s your girlfriend?’ she said bluntly. The deodorant had given her asking rights.
Dougie’s pronouncement rang in Steven’s ears, and he hedged, ‘She’s not my girlfriend. Just a friend.’
Nan snorted and stared at him until he blushed.
‘I thought so!’ she said triumphantly, and marched downstairs.
He was half-happy to think his nan knew that he was now a boy who had a girlfriend, but the fact that it had been acknowledged made him fearful too; the more people who knew, the greater would be the humiliation if – when – Em fulfilled his friends’ cheerful predictions and dumped him.
While he waited for that to happen, he smelled of Lynx Instinct.
20
JONAS WAS BACK on his beat.
He was out by 8am every day and by 6.30pm, when he drove back to Shipcott, he was exhausted. He was no longer used to the physical exertion of a working day, and had eaten too little for too long to have any reserves of energy.
Now he parked outside the Red Lion and looked across at the Sunset Lodge retirement home.
He should go in; he always used to.
It used to be a regular part of his beat – sitting in that sauna of a garden room with a cup of tea balanced on one knee and a custard cream going soggy in his saucer.
Reassuring the old folk.
That had worked well, hadn’t it? Keeping the killer at bay armed with cheap biscuits and empty promises. But the killer had paid a visit anyway – forcing a knife against the window latch, and leaving a bloody trail of tragedy through the home before disappearing into the night. No, he didn’t have the barefaced cheek to go into Sunset Lodge again. The Reverend Chard may be bound by his faith to forgive, but Jonas expected no such thing from anyone else.
A few houses up he saw Steven Lamb watching him from the front window of his home – one in a long line of gaily painted terraced cottages that opened straight on to the narrow slate pavement. He raised a hand in greeting, but the boy merely stepped slowly back into the dark interior.
He sighed. It would take him years to rebuild the trust he’d once taken for granted in the village.
He got out of the Land Rover and locked it, and went into the pub.
Reynolds took a sip of white Merlot and scanned Jos Reeves’s lab report. Working in the Red Lion was so much more pleasant than being stuck in that glorified shoebox in the car park – especially after hours.
‘The white residue on the glass from the broken windows is PVC tape—’
‘Like insulation tape?’ Rice emptied a third of her glass of cider and sighed in enjoyment.
Reynolds nodded. ‘And the green threads are a poor-quality synthetic wool mix, dyed using Malachite green, most commonly used during manufacturing processes in China.’
‘So we’re looking for a Chinese electrician in cheap green mittens.’
Reynolds looked at her over his Merlot like a disapproving schoolmaster over half-moon spectacles.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘Could be gloves. Could be a blanket he throws over them. A scarf he was wearing…’ He shrugged, then continued, ‘Here’s the thing. The green fibres at the Pete Knox and Charlie Peach scenes were impregnated with butane while the fibres at the Jess Took scene were not.’
‘Weird,’ she said. ‘Maybe she put up more of a struggle than he liked. Forced him to change his tactics.’
‘Anything’s possible.’ Reynolds sighed.
It was true, thought Rice. They knew so little about anything connected with the kidnapper that right now anything was possible.
Jonas found Reynolds and Rice in the bar, poring over what looked like lab reports.
She smiled; he didn’t.
‘Hi Jonas, have a seat,’ said Rice, and Reynolds shifted a little way around the table to make space for him. Jonas perched uncomfortably on a low chair.
‘The cars that were vandalized at the show,’ he started hesitantly. ‘Nothing was reported stolen from them, right?’
‘No,’ said Reynolds.
‘Why?’ asked Rice.
But Jonas didn’t really have a theory to satisfy that question. Instead he asked another.
‘I think you said windows were also broken at Tarr Steps.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Was anything stolen there?’
‘Apart from Pete Knox?’ said Reynolds sarcastically.
‘Nothing was stolen,’ Rice supplied, giving Reynolds a slightly disapproving look.
Reynolds sighed. ‘We’re busy trying to find three missing children here. We’re not so big on petty vandalism right now.’
‘Yeah, sorry. Of course,’ said Jonas. ‘I just thought that maybe if nothing was taken, then the windows being broken were about something else. Some kind of message, maybe. I mean, who kidnaps a child and then hangs around to break windows? It must mean something. Maybe.’