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Reynolds’s optimistic mood had gone. John Took might be besieged by arseholes, but the hopeful theory that one of those arseholes had kidnapped Jess Took out of personal revenge had just been blown straight out of the water.

The promise of the stag had become evil voodoo. He looked at the moor, which rose around them on all sides. The birdsong and dappled sunlight were an alluring veil. Underneath, something smelled rotten.

Reynolds sighed and stepped over Mrs Knox’s slack legs to peer into the Golf. It was filled with the usual detritus of a holiday – maps, water bottles, sandwich wrappers, coolbox, beach towels.

But once you knew it was also supposed to contain a nine-year-old boy, it seemed very empty.

* * *

Look at them.

Now they care. Now when it’s too late. Where were they when he needed them? Arsing about down on the steps, thinking nothing could go wrong with their lives. Not thinking of how much they got to lose. Not thinking of consequences. And now consequences is all they’ve got.

It’s funny really, in one way. And not in another. Not if you’re the mother down there bawling like a calf. She should cry. She’s a disgrace. They all are.

Ah well, reckon they’ll just have to get used to it. Amazing what a person can get used to. Or what they’ll do if they can’t …

Anyway. There it is. I need him more than they do.

And I’ll love him more, too.

7

TWO CHILDREN HAD disappeared in four days, and the press descended on Exmoor like gulls on a freshly ploughed field, screeching and flapping and pecking each other for the best bits.

Peckiest of them all was the formidable Marcie Meyrick.

Three things made Marcie formidable. First, she was thirty-nine – which was so far beyond thirty that it might as well be fifty. In terms of newsgathering, she was a dinosaur, a fossil, a dodo. A dodo who used her sharp little wings to prod rivals out of her way, and trampled them under her prehistoric dodo feet as she rushed headlong towards a story. Having rejected both her boyfriend and her biological clock for her work, Marcie Meyrick was not about to stand aside for the bouncy pre-teens who passed for journalists nowadays.

Second, Marcie was a freelance reporter, which meant she got paid by column inches, not because she’d signed some nambypamby employment contract that included four weeks’ holiday and a pension plan. Her whole aim in life was to sneak copy into newspapers past news desks that already had their own reporters, the Press Association and the might of Google at their fingertips. Pickings were increasingly thin, and so was Marcie Meyrick.

The third thing that made her formidable was that she was Australian – to which there was no defence. It made her bold enough to doorstep the most hostile of targets, thick-skinned enough to deflect the most brutal of insults, and so whiny that unfaithful politicians, lifelong criminals and hardened police press officers routinely crumbled before her – preferring exposure, censure and even jail to another minute of her nasal, mosquito-in-the-ear wheedling.

Two winters back she’d attended a press conference about the murders that had left Shipcott in tatters. The police had been insisting that they remained hopeful of an arrest.

‘This year, next year, some time, never?’ Marcie had drawled at that particular briefing – further endearing herself to one and all.

Now – with two children stolen in a week, every news outlet in the country wanted another bite of the Exmoor cherry. Pete Knox had disappeared on the Wednesday after Jess Took. By Thursday morning, more than fifty reporters, camera crews and photographers swarmed across Exmoor – each chasing the breakout story that would get them on to Newsnight.

Being ancient, Marcie Meyrick knew that only two things really mattered in a story involving both murders and children: scaremongering and a catchy headline. Scaremongering was simple in this case: children missing on a moor where a killer had been at large promised much in the way of repeat performances – and a ready-made climate of fear and suspicion. It was a climate that suited Marcie just fine.

She wrote the story fast, rather than well, and spent every additional second she could thinking of her headline. It was vital to capture the imagination of first the news desk, then the nation. Nothing was set in stone, of course, but she’d been around long enough to know that no sub-editor could resist a good pun-based headline, even if it did come from a lowly stringer.

She wasn’t thrilled with it, but she finally punched the Send button on ‘New Terror on Murder Moor’ and then – confirming her status as dinosaur – she reached for a cigarette.

8

FOR SOME REASON, the paperboy had stopped bringing Jonas’s copy of the Bugle. Instead he delivered it to Mrs Paddon next door, who sometimes took several days to push it through Jonas’s letterbox.