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A seed of excitement sprouted in Jonas’s belly. If this hair belonged to the kidnapper then they could have DNA within the week; mass testing across the moor; an arrest within the month. Maybe Jess and Pete and Charlie would still be alive in a month. Maybe they could be saved. Was that possible? The bumping of his heart was a response to the injection of pure hope – a sensation he hadn’t known for years. Literally years.

‘There’s a hair here,’ he said, and turned to point it out to the woman. She got up and came over with a little sway of the hips, and stood too close to him – her arm rubbing his as she peered at the hair.

She nodded. ‘That’ll be Jack’s.’

‘Who’s Jack?’ he said, feeling his hope teetering on the brink.

‘My dog.’

‘You have a dog,’ he said. Less a question than a statement.

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Lurcher.’

‘Oh,’ said Jonas, looking around. ‘Where is it, then?’

‘At the pub,’ she said. And then, when Jonas looked at her for more, she added defensively, ‘With my boyfriend.’

‘Oh,’ said Jonas again. He plucked the hair from the window and dropped it, wishing it were something heavy that he could throw hard into the scrub behind the caravan, to satisfy his disappointment. No hair from the kidnapper. No DNA and no arrest, and no found and rescued children.

Nothing.

He’d been so sure that the broken windows meant something.

But it was just a hair from a dog.

A dog.

It hit Jonas like something physical.

Dogs in the cars.

‘Did you have your dog with you that day at Tarr Steps?’

‘Yeah, we take Jack pretty much everywhere. If we leave him here he chews shit up.’

‘Was he in the car when the window was broken?’

‘Yeah. Why?’

‘Excuse me a minute.’ Jonas pulled his phone from his pocket and walked slightly away from the woman.

He asked David Tedworthy the same question.

They’d walked Gus down to Tarr Steps and back, then left him in the car while they did an hour-long hike. ‘He’s old and wobbly, you see. He can’t do long walks any more. He’s happier in the car.’

He called Directory Inquiries and had them connect him to Barbara Moorcroft. He asked whether she’d left her dogs in the car at any point while at the show.

‘Yes,’ she said, and Jonas could hear faint yapping in the background. ‘Just while I got the kids settled with the picnic and things. Then I went back and got them. That’s when I noticed the windows had been broken. Then the whole thing kicked off with the missing boy and I just grabbed the dogs and went back to make sure the kids were OK before seeing you near the cars. But by then you’d already seen it.’

Jonas hung up, his head spinning with new hope that made the old hope seem small and tawdry.

‘Is that important?’ said Skinner.

Jonas didn’t answer her. He barely heard her question. He mumbled something about having to go, and something else about getting new tax, and got back into the Land Rover.

At Tarr Steps Tamzin Skinner had left her dog in her car, and so had David Tedworthy. Both cars vandalized at the show had had dogs left in them. And here was the clincher: Barbara Moorcroft had left two dogs in the car – and there had been holes punched through two windows of her Renault Megane.

One for each dog.

With unsteady hands, he called Stanley Cotton. He misdialled three times and then, when he finally got it right, the phone rang endlessly and Jonas almost groaned with frustration in expectation of an answer machine. Instead a man finally answered impatiently. Jonas explained briefly who he was.

‘I spoke to the police already. They kept me there half the day. It wasn’t even a big hole. Big hole in my bloody pocket though.’

‘Did you have a dog in the car when the window was broken, Mr Cotton?’

‘Jesus! What kind of waste of time is this? Aren’t you supposed to be finding that little boy who was taken?’

‘Did you?’ said Jonas forcefully.

‘Yes. What of it?’

Jonas hung up, feeling dizzy. It was all about the dogs. He didn’t know why, or what the hell it meant, or how it was connected to the disappearance of three children, but he was sure that was why the kidnapper had made holes in the car windows.

And Dunkery Beacon, where Jess Took was taken? Reynolds had told him no windows had been broken there. That was the piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit.

Jonas frowned at his own hands trembling on the steering wheel until the answer hit him with blinding ease.

The only dogs at Dunkery Beacon that early in the day would have been connected to the hunt – taken there to work.

No dogs left in cars. No windows broken.

He’d cracked it.

He wasn’t quite sure what he’d cracked, but Jonas felt instinctively that this brought him closer to keeping his promise to Lucy to save Charlie Peach.

23

DI REYNOLDS DIDN’T THINK Jonas Holly had cracked it at all.

‘Dogs?’ he said, with a lemon-sucking face.

‘Maybe,’ said Jonas, not so sure himself now.