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This was like that, but without the fun. Sometimes Davey’s mind drifted off, even while his legs went on working. Then he would snap back and remember he was in great danger, and shout and flail and twist in the kidnapper’s grip.

It was pointless.

‘I’ll shoot you in the head,’ the voice said in his ear, and for a moment Davey believed him and sobered up and did his best to walk by himself. Then he forgot all about being shot in the head and stopped cooperating again.

He was pushed and pulled and bumped and dragged through the trees for several days. It felt like several days; it might have been seconds. At last they came to a picnic area and a car and Davey was leaned against the back door and told harshly to stay, so he didn’t, of course. As soon as the man walked away from him and opened the boot, he set off for the woods again.

The man caught him and Davey sat down and refused to move. The man grasped his wrists and dragged him across the clearing on his arse, back to the car. He was surprisingly strong.

The man dropped his arms and Davey simply rolled under the car, snatching his ankle away from the man’s hand just in the nick of time. The man swore loudly and got on his knees to reach for him. Davey giggled and moved, giggled and moved as the man probed and groped and grunted four-letter words.

‘Oh, fuck you too!’ Davey laughed, although each time he avoided the grasping fingers, some part of him felt like pissing his pants in terror.

The man stood up and moved away.

Now the fear had time to settle on Davey’s back like a stiff blanket left out in the frost, and his teeth started to chatter. He watched the man’s workboots walk to the back of the car; he could hear him moving things about in the boot.

Davey listened to the sound of his own breath pumping through his mouth; the sound of something being shifted and lifted. Not knowing what was the scariest thing of all.

The boots came back. This time, when the man’s silhouetted head dipped below the sill, it was not his hand that reached for Davey, but a white stick. And he did not attempt to pull Davey out – but started to jab and swipe at the boy, trying to drive him from his narrow hiding place.

The stick first hit Davey in the knee and he yelped and bumped his head on the exhaust. He put out his hands in self-defence and the stick rapped the fingers on his left hand as it arced past him. Then its point jabbed him hard in the ribs, and Davey thought he would pass out. He didn’t feel drunk any more. He felt sick and terrified. He couldn’t move. All he could do was lie there, drowning in tears, clutching his side and hoping that the pain would go away; that was what mattered. The pain and the helplessness.

He’d once seen Iestyn Lloyd, the terrier man, digging out a fox as his Jack Russells yipped and clawed and snapped at the earth around it. Now Davey knew how a fox must feel.

With his eyes tight shut and his ribs still burning, Davey felt the pull on the back of his shirt, the hand at the waistband of his jeans and the gravel sliding forwards under his hip as he was dragged from under the car.

He came out of the darkness and into the light, blinking through his tears. As he emerged, he was dimly aware that suddenly there were two shapes looming over him.

And one of them was Jonas Holly.

33

NOBODY BELIEVED EM. Not at first, anyway. They eyed her with suspicion and asked her questions she had no hope of answering. Frankly, she was embarrassed to repeat Steven’s accusations; even though she loved him, she found them hard to believe herself, and she relayed them almost apologetically to Detective Inspector Reynolds. Em was quick to notice the glances he exchanged with his colleague as she spoke, and she got the feeling that if Shane had not been both beside her and beside himself, DI Reynolds might have told her to run along and stop wasting his time. It seemed they were far more impressed by a blubbering, panic-stricken eleven-year-old than they were by her careful re-telling of events.

When she’d finished, Reynolds and Rice drove all three of them back to the woods and followed them first to the burned-out car and then to the little birch where the yellow note still lay.

‘Did you write this?’ said the Detective Inspector so sharply to Em that she flinched.

‘Of course not!’ she snapped back. ‘Steven thought it was his brother having a joke, but then the policeman said it wasn’t. Then he told us to stay here and he ran into the trees.’

Reynolds stared in the direction her finger indicated.

But he didn’t move. Didn’t run into the trees. Why wasn’t he running into the trees?

Em was a girl who respected authority. Why shouldn’t she? Authority had always respected her. Until now. Now she saw only suspicion in DI Reynolds’s sharp eyes – a suspicion that was making everything proceed too slowly. The little jet of anger that shot through her took her by surprise.

‘You think I’m lying!’

‘I didn’t—’