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Why do I always get the retard? thought Davey. This guy was such a loser. Plus, there was something weird about DI Reynolds’s hair, although Davey couldn’t say quite what.

‘We ran away together,’ he provided for free.

‘After he helped you out of the car, did your brother say anything to you?’

Ssssssh!

‘I can’t remember.’

Davey’s mother bit her lip and blinked out of the window.

DI Reynolds didn’t sigh, but Davey could tell he wanted to. Maybe the policeman was as disappointed with the interview as he was.

‘Try,’ said DI Reynolds.

‘OK,’ Davey said, and put on a trying face, but all the time his mind squirmed with the dawning awfulness of it all. Steven had come to help him, but he hadn’t helped Steven back. Instead he’d punched him; he’d shouted when Steven had told him to shush; he’d given them both away and then only saved himself. This was not the kind of cop or bank robber he’d ever imagined being. The kind who abandoned a friend to his fate. A brother.

‘What’s wrong, Davey?’ said DI Reynolds.

Davey shook his head. His mother gazed at him with eyes like a cartoon puppy in a rainstorm, and Davey could barely look at her straight.

‘He did say something!’

The sudden hope in his mother’s eyes triggered a tumble of words. ‘He said … Steven said … “Run, Davey! I’m right behind you! Run home to Mum.” And so I did.’

At the foot of the bed, Lettie clutched her mouth and nodded hard as tears rolled down her cheeks.

DI Reynolds clicked his pen, but did not write it down.

37

THERE WAS A sharp hiss and the children got up as one and moved towards the gates of their kennels. The hiss came again, and again, a slow metallic scraping of the knife being sharpened.

They clung to the chain link, waiting expectantly. Finally there was the dull thump of something hitting metal, and the low rumble of an approach on wheels across the rutted concrete walkway.

A low flatbed trolley emerged from the back door of the big shed. The huntsman propelled it, his legs bowed but sturdy, his face smoothed and distorted by a stocking mask, like a bad fabric puppet.

Steven got a flash of the clearing in the woods, of Davey curled in the boot of the old blue saloon while the man with the smooth head held Jonas Holly’s legs; the slow stagger towards the trees; the grip on his arm; the kick to the backs of his knees. He remembered the hot chemical wool over his face and the way everything swam away from him like fish spiralling away through the tops of the trees …

Something heavy dropped into Pete’s kennel and Steven flinched.

The huntsman moved down the line.

It wasn’t until he got to Jess’s kennel that Steven could see clearly what he was throwing over the gates …

Bones.

As if they were dogs!

And Jess Took picked one up and started to chew on it as if no one had told her she wasn’t a dog.

‘All right, bay?’ the huntsman said to Steven without looking at him and not waiting for an answer.

‘Why am I here? What do you want?’

‘Good lad,’ said the huntsman, and leaned up to drop a couple of big bones over the fence. Steven looked down at the crude grey-pink chunks, with shiny white knobs protruding.

‘I’m not eating that,’ he said firmly.

The huntsman ignored him and moved on.

‘He doesn’t listen,’ said Jess sadly. ‘He only talks.’

The huntsman dropped bones into Jonas Holly’s kennel and then into Charlie’s.

Charlie picked up a rack of ribs and said, ‘Thank you.’

The huntsman turned his trolley and wheeled it back down the line. It made a different sound when it was empty.

As he passed her kennel, Jess Took bared her teeth at him and said, ‘Woof!’

* * *

Kate Gulliver also thought that it was ‘very interesting’ that Steven Lamb had implicated Jonas in the abductions – and then disappeared himself.

Reynolds was delighted. He’d rung Kate – who’d always encouraged him to call her that – and told her of Elizabeth Rice’s conversation with the boy.

Very interesting, she’d said – and Reynolds wished he could turn back time and put her call on speakerphone just so he could give Rice a triumphant look.

‘That’s what I said,’ he told Kate in Rice’s hearing instead, but Rice gave no indication she had heard anything – triumphant or otherwise. She was rummaging in a bag from the Spar shop they were parked outside.

Kate continued, ‘The trauma of Steven’s experiences at a formative age could have damaged him in countless ways. He might have paranoid tendencies which make him focus his suspicions on an innocent party.’

She sounded quite enthusiastic about the idea. ‘I can even see a scenario where he might visit similar experiences on other children. Abuse begets abuse; it’s not unusual.’

‘Exactly,’ Reynolds nodded, hoping Rice was getting this: that he’d been right and that Kate Gulliver said so.