Free Finders Keepers by Belinda Bauer Page B

only Enid Blyton really seemed to have believed possible.
    During the night Jonas had thrown off the sheets, and now he looked down the landscape of his own naked body to the moors beyond the cottage window.
    They were spectacular. Under a sky that was already pale Wedgwood, Exmoor had burst into life. Heather that had made the hills look scorched and black through the winter had magically revived and now mottled them green. Grass that had been muddy just a month before had become like straw, while the yellow sprays of gorse and broom hid countless birds, betrayed only by their summer songs. Foals tripped along behind sleek mares, and lambs that imagined themselves lost bleated plaintively – a sound that carried for miles on a still day. Buzzards and kestrels looked down on it all – poised to bring sudden death without disturbing the peace. Jonas’s parents, who had lived in the house before him, had never bothered with pictures or paintings. These windows on to Exmoor were all they’d ever wanted by way of decoration, and on a morning like this, Jonas understood them better than he ever had when they’d been alive. Van Goghs and Gauguins would be drab by comparison.
    A starling darted up under the eaves outside the window and he heard the chicks clamouring like crickets, almost overhead. They were probably in the attic. When they’d flown he would go up there and block the holes and put up nesting boxes instead.
    Maybe he would. He hadn’t been up there since …
    Lucy died.
    Jonas sighed and looked down at the narrow plank of flesh that his body had become. His genitals seemed ridiculously large, jutting uselessly between his sharp hips, and thrown into relief by the early sun his ribs looked like ripples on a flat sea. On the plain between the two, even the scars on his belly seemed worse than usual – red and ridged and twisted and puckered.
    They’d told him they would fade to white with time.
    Time.
    He looked at his alarm clock – something he hadn’t done with any good reason in over a year. It was almost six thirty.
    Jonas swung his legs to the creaking floor and headed to the shower. One bathroom window framed a picture of the edge of Shipcott and the towering moor behind it. The thought of going back to the village he’d let down so badly made his gut ache, but he almost welcomed the feeling. He deserved it.
    The other window displayed the burned-out farmhouse on the closest hilltop, charred rafters piercing the sky. He stared at the remains of Springer Farm as if into a mirror, while he slid his soapy fingers over the slats of his own ribcage.
    He sat silently on the bed until he was dry, then he put on his uniform.
     
    *
     
    Reynolds mustered his troops in the car park of the Red Lion. They were due to start the search at 8am. Reynolds was in the empty car park by seven fifteen and nervous by seven thirty. The only other people there were the press and TV crews.
    Memories of his thirteenth birthday worried at the back of his mind. His primary-school classmates seemed to have taken the move to various secondary schools as an opportunity to abandon him as a friend. His mother told him it was because he was too clever for them and he was sure she was right. But he was also sure that many boys would still come to his party – if only for a magician called El Gran Supremo, complete with top hat, wand and rabbit.
    But they hadn’t come.
    At least, only two of them had, and they didn’t count: the wispy Digby Furnwild – who went everywhere with an asthma inhaler and a handkerchief impregnated with Olbas oil – and the giant Bruce Locksmith, who would have braved a pit of wolves for free cake, let alone a child’s party. Bruce had eaten almost all the cake, but only made it halfway through El Gran Supremo before announcing that it was shit and he was leaving. He’d taken several going-home bags with him. Reynolds and Digby had sat in moribund silence at either end of the day-bed until Digby’s