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Like a metaphysical plumber, no job was too small for Reynolds to worry about once he’d stepped under the flow.

He had called Kate Gulliver and they’d had an interesting chat, but even she’d had no answers for him for this one – at least none he hadn’t already postulated in his own mind with an increasing sense of helplessness.

The Pied Piper (God, even he was calling him that now!) must have stopped for a reason. He might be dead. The children might be dead. He might have moved house along with his adoring wife and tow-headed babies. He might simply have run out of storage or his car could have broken down; or perhaps he’d become a born-again Christian and was even now preparing to release his captives, citing divine intervention. The possibilities were endless.

All Reynolds knew was that something had changed.

Not knowing what was just another bitter pill to swallow. Something in DI Reynolds almost hoped for another abduction – anything that might add to his pool of knowledge and give them a fighting chance of catching the culprit.

Because if the Piper had stopped for good, they’d never catch him.

45

HUNGER WAS A funny thing. Sometimes it hurt like a blade in Jonas’s gut – and he should know. Other times it was almost wonderful.

When it hurt, the pain came in long spasms that rippled up his body like a tsunami, tearing and squeezing the beaches of his organs and leaving him breathless and flattened. When it was wonderful, it freed him from the confines of his wire-mesh prison and speeded up the tortuous process that turned each day into the next.

His mouth was dry or drooling by turn, his thoughts either repulsed by the idea of sustenance or filled with fruit and potatoes and – bizarrely – cupcakes. Cupcakes he’d seen on TV, with thick, soft, fairytale icing, sprinkled with chocolate and little silver balls.

Instead of sweet cakes, he was served stinking slabs of dead flesh. He told the huntsman every day that he couldn’t eat meat, and every day he was ignored, so the children had taken it upon themselves to keep him alive. Maisie and Kylie had started it and the others had quickly joined in. They returned from the meadow twice a day with handfuls of grass, dandelions and clover. They carefully pushed the increasingly mushy handfuls through the fences down the line to Steven, who dropped them into Jonas’s kennel.

At first the idea of eating such offerings seemed ridiculously over-dramatic to Jonas. Then he reminded himself that he was being held in a dog kennel by a crazy man – and eating grass didn’t seem like such an outlandish response after all.

The grass was bitter and hard to swallow. The dandelions were strangely creamy and tickled his throat like yellow feathers, while the clover was stiff and tasted only of green. Once Kylie found some wild strawberries – each the size of a pea, and so sweet it made everything else taste foul again, just as he’d been getting used to it. He noticed little improvement in his hunger pangs, but chewing was good and he imagined that the children’s offerings must contain some worthwhile calories, so he was grateful.

He noticed that Steven Lamb never brought anything back from the meadow for him. He collected the assembled green stuff from Jess and dutifully pushed it through the wire, but, while Jonas thanked him, Steven never said a word.

Jonas was confused. Steven used to be a friendly kid. Used to keep an eye on Lucy for him as her disease progressed. Jonas had tipped him a fiver a month, but he knew Steven would have done it for nothing, and he’d given far more than a fiver’s worth of time and effort to the task. And Lucy had adored Steven. She’d never had a bad thing to say about him. Jonas had always got on with him just fine. But that night when Jonas had tried to talk to him about the money, he’d acted like a boy who had something to hide – or something to fear.

He frowned at Steven through the mesh, and tried to work out what he could have done to upset him.

* * *

Now that he’d stopped being a mental patient, the Jonas Holly that Steven feared and hated was back.

Except he wasn’t. Not quite, anyway.

Seeing the scars that patterned Jonas’s stomach had shaken Steven. The scars could not lie, however much he wished they could. He was a fair-minded boy, and now had to consider that he might have been wrong about Jonas Holly killing his wife, just as he’d been wrong about him stealing the children.