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Their disgorged occupants, with assorted children and dogs, got more and more hungry, tired and fractious until finally Jonas offered to drive them all home himself, just for some peace and quiet. He took them in two shifts – first Alison Marks, the chatty owner of the Focus, along with her family, who lived in Exford. There was no conversation to be had with Barbara Moorcroft on their way to Loxhore. Her two hysterical Patterdales barked relentlessly and her three children sat in pained silence throughout the ride, apparently used to being yapped into submission.

On his way home, Jonas stopped at the highest point of the road that draped across Withypool Common. He cut the engine and listened to the silence swell around him like a balm.

He’d become so used to silence since Lucy had died that he’d forgotten how stressful noise could be. How stressful talking and people could be. The thought that he’d once talked to people every day seemed impossible to him now. And the idea that he would have to get used to it again was sobering.

He wasn’t sure he could.

Jonas expelled a long, shuddering breath that he felt he might have drawn in hours ago when Charlie Peach first went missing. Everything after that point was hazy to him – a fairground blur of panic and shouting and movement and guilt.

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.’