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The darkness between the two of them became a slow vacuum that sucked the last of the bravado out of Steven, the tears from his eyes, the scream from his lips, the anger from his belly; he felt them all being extracted by the silent black shape before him, leaving him filled only with numb terror.

Right now, if Mr Holly had told him to stay there while he went to fetch a knife to kill him with, Steven would have sat down in the road and waited. Snivelling.

Instead Jonas let go of Steven’s arm.

He took a slow step backwards.

He tilted his head at the escape route down the hill.

‘You can run now,’ he said.

So Steven did.

31

ELIZABETH RICE HAD JUST got out of the shower when her phone rang. It was Reynolds.

‘There’s someone downstairs who wants to talk to the police. I’ve just got out of the shower, so would you mind, Elizabeth?’

Would you mind, Elizabeth?

Rice was getting pretty sick of those four words.

‘Sure,’ she said tightly.

Her hair was still dripping, so she wrapped it in a towel and piled it on her head, then pulled on a skirt, shirt and low, practical heels and was about to leave her room. Then she thought that there was an outside chance – about 0.5 per cent, but a chance none the less – that the person downstairs might be a handsome young farmer, so she quickly applied mascara and a swipe of lipstick. It was only on her way down the rickety staircase that she remembered the towel. She was about to take it off, but then wondered at her own optimism, when she’d long ago noticed that any phrase containing the words ‘handsome’, ‘young’ and ‘farmer’ was a kind of triple oxymoron, held together only by expectations nurtured by a Mills & Boon adolescence.

Her dimmed mood and wet towel were both vindicated when she saw that the visitor was not even a man but a schoolboy – a gangly, dark-eyed youth with jutting ears, a jagged haircut, and that crazily transient combination of fair, boyish complexion and shaving stubble.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Rice. How can I help you?’

The boy glanced at her makeshift turban, then looked away. ‘Um,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’

Rice sighed inwardly. Children were a mystery to her. She couldn’t really remember what it was like to be one, and the children of her friends and sisters always made her slightly uncomfortable. She would smile at them and they would stare solemnly back at her, as if they knew what she was thinking.

Babies cried on contact.

She didn’t dislike children, but they bored her. She even got impatient with cute children in Hollywood movies, with their curls and their adenoids and their smart-arse comebacks.

Before she could catch it, she sighed outwardly too, which made the boy in front of her blush. This made her feel bad enough to make an effort with him, even though she knew her hair was going to look like total shit for the rest of the day.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Steven,’ he said. ‘Lamb.’

The name rang a faint bell, but she didn’t waste time wondering why. She softened her tone consciously.

‘What did you want to tell me, Steven?’

Steven wished he hadn’t come. He hadn’t thought things through, and didn’t have the words ready to explain. He’d once played one of Fagin’s boys in a school production of Oliver! He’d only had one line – ‘Kill you as soon as look at you, he would’ – but had been astonished by the sheer number of ways he could get that line wrong. Either he forgot the words entirely, or remembered them but all in the wrong order. Even when he got the line right he sounded like Yoda.

That was how he felt now. As if saying the words he’d come to say would only complicate things that were already fuzzy and fleeting in his own head. Still, he couldn’t go without saying something. He didn’t know much about women, but he knew that they were always more grumpy when they had wet hair, so he’d better make an effort.

‘It’s about Mr Holly,’ he said.

The woman – DS Rice – looked slightly more interested than she had a second ago, but Steven was lost again. How could he tell her all the stuff that was in his head?

He killed his wife! I think he did; I saw him hit her. He grabbed my arm. He said something about hurting children. Maybe he took those children. He could do it. If he could kill his wife he could murder children, couldn’t he? People hurt children – that’s what he said. People hurt children. And he scared me. I thought he was going to kill me. His voice wasn’t his voice and his eyes were like nothing. He could kill children. He could kill anyone. I know he could.