Finders Keepers Read Free Page A

Serious Crime office seemed more paper
ful
by the week. It was an enigma, he thought, wrapped in endless reams of A4.
    He smiled inwardly and wished he could have said something that clever out loud and to an appreciative audience. Detective Sergeant Elizabeth Rice was far from dull, but she did not share his erudition.
    Rice
was
, however, a conscientious driver and Reynolds always handed her the keys. Then he could think, instead of being plagued by the
mirror, signal, manoeuvre
mantra that had been driven into his head so hard by his father that it had never found its way out again.
    The roads started twisting the moment they left the motorway. There was no transition: one minute they were in the twenty-first century, the next in what felt like the 1950s. Thorn trees and hedges squeezed narrow lanes between them like black toothpaste curling out across Exmoor, and Reynolds knew that in his pocket his mobile phone would already be casting about for a signal.
    ‘It feels weird to be back.’
    Rice could not have mirrored his feelings more accurately.
    Reynolds had not been back since a killer had cut a brutal swathe across the moor. Not since he’d driven Jonas Holly home from hospital just over a year ago and sworn to him that they’d catch the man who’d murdered his wife.
    That hadn’t happened.
    But he had phoned Jonas on three separate occasions – each time more suspicious than the last that the man was screening his calls, and guiltily relieved by it: he was never phoning with any positive news. The few skinny forensic leads they’d had had dwindled to nothing and, although the case was still officially open, Reynolds knew that it would take a huge stroke of luck or another murder to see it shuffle its way back to the top of Homicide’s must-do list.
    He remembered that as recently as this January – a year after her death – Jonas Holly’s answerphone still had his wife’s voice on it. ‘
Hi, you’ve reached Jonas and Lucy. Please leave a message and we’ll call you back, or you can ring Jonas on his mobile
…’
    The voice of a ghost.
    It gave Reynolds the creeps.
    ‘It does,’ he agreed with Rice. ‘Very weird.’
    It also felt strange to be in a grubby white van instead of an unmarked pool car. The van was a genuine one from RJ Holding & Sons Builders in Taunton. Roger Holding was a cousin of the desk sergeant, and had offered the loan of one of his vans so they could approach the Took family without revealing their identities. Kidnapping for ransom was virtually obsolete now outside some Eastern European communities, but it was best to follow procedure until they were sure. However, Reynolds thought Elizabeth Rice looked suspiciously attractive to be behind the wheel of a builder’s van, even in jeans and sweatshirt, and with her straight blonde hair tied into a utilitarian ponytail. He should have brought Tim Jones from drugs, who looked and smelled like a navvy.
    The van was littered with fast-food wrappers and underfoot was a dirty magazine, in every sense of the word. Reynolds had spotted it as he climbed into the cab, and had spent the whole journey trying to cover as much of it as possible with his feet, so that Rice would not be offended or – worse – make a joke about it.
    He put the note back in the folder on his lap labelled JESSICA TOOK , and stared at the photo of the girl.
    When it came to vanishing teenagers, the word ‘runaway’ was always above the word ‘abducted’ on the list of possibilities. Even an ostentatious liberal like Reynolds knew that if they treated every teenage disappearance like a kidnap, they’d spend their lives winkling sulky kids from under their best friends’ beds or throwing a big net over them in London bus stations. The truth was that most kids simply went home, and – unless there was clear evidence of abduction – there was an unofficial 24-hour period when it was assumed that that was exactly what would happen.
    It hadn’t happened in