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But such light relief was the exception.

Shopkeepers were grim-faced, and B&B owners sat and waited for the phone to ring. Publicans’ eyes rarely left the door, even as they served halves and the occasional ploughman’s lunch to locals. Prices were slashed; sales brought forward. Old Bob Moat drove his tractor all the way from Exford to Lynton and didn’t have to pull over for a single caravan. It was an anecdote worth repeating – as rare as heather flowers in April.

Basically, tourists stayed away from Exmoor in droves, and chose other areas of outstanding natural beauty in which to leave their children in cars.

* * *

Davey and Shane still hadn’t spent the money.

It was simply too much. If they’d found a fiver, they’d have blown it in a single trip to Mr Jacoby’s shop. If they’d found a tenner, they’d have asked Dougie Trewell to get them some cans so they could see what getting drunk was all about.

But a hundred pounds was serious money, and although there were many false starts, it stuck to their fingers like glue.

The simple solution, of course, would have been to split the cash, but having grown accustomed to thinking of the possession of an entire hundred pounds, it was too much of a comedown now to consider spending a mere fifty.

Davey volunteered to take care of the money, but Shane was immediately suspicious. Davey was offended by his suspicion, but then baulked at allowing Shane to keep it at his house. They came to an arrangement: one of them would take the cash home one night, then hand it over in a corner of the school playground the next day, so that the other could take his turn at keeping it safe.

It was during one of these increasingly casual playground handovers that Mark Trumbull solved the problem for them by relieving them of the lot in a single transaction.

‘Gimme your money,’ he said simply, and held out his hand.

‘Piss off,’ said Davey, even though Mark Trumbull was a foot taller, thirty pounds heavier and had previous form as a bully. The money in his pocket made Davey feisty.

‘Yeah, piss off,’ said Shane, taking a step backwards.

Mark Trumbull didn’t bother with any gangster threats or clever conversation. He simply punched Davey so hard in the chest that he knocked him flat and left him gasping, then rummaged in his pocket for the notes, while Shane shouted at him from a safe distance. Then he walked away.

‘I’ll tell Mr Peach on you!’ yelled Shane, and then remembered that Mr Peach was on leave ’cos of Charlie being kidnapped, and realized that the threat was therefore even emptier than it had sounded.

Shit.

19

STEVEN HAD NEVER had a girlfriend before, and now that he did, he wasn’t quite sure what to do with her.

‘Shag her, of course,’ Lewis advised, when Steven revealed his dilemma. ‘Absolute minimum, she owes you a blowjob.’

Steven rolled his eyes.

They were babysitting, which was what they often did on Friday nights when Chantelle Cox went to Cheeky’s in Minehead with her mother and her cousin.

Lewis had started the babysitting thing and roped Steven in with promises of a well-stocked fridge and porn on the TV. In fact, the Coxes’ fridge was as dull as his mother’s and the porn channel was a myth, even though Lewis insisted that he’d watched it ‘loads’ – and tried to maintain the lie by spending at least ten minutes of their regular Friday nights prodding the remote control and complaining about signals.

Plus, they didn’t even get paid. Steven had assumed that he’d get a cut of whatever Lewis earned – or at least benefit in trickledown. But when he’d finally raised the issue during a tantrum by the baby that had lasted right through Top Gear, Lewis had laughed and told him, ‘I don’t get paid, idiot!’

Only then had Steven realized that the baby they were sitting for was actually half Lewis’s. Once that penny dropped, Steven looked at little Jake with new – more wary – eyes. Steven had never had sex, and had never seen any upside to that situation until now. But the ghastly light-of-day connection between sex and babies was suddenly very real and immensely sobering. Especially as the half of the baby that belonged to Lewis always seemed to be the bottom half – and watching him gag while unwrapping a shit-filled nappy was better contraception than Durex.

So he didn’t shag Em.

Instead they just hung out together. Sometimes at the bus stop with the other kids, sometimes in the woods or up on the moor, where they once saw a kite take off with a snake in its grasp, knotting itself into a frenzy.