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It made no difference. This was full-force, no-holds-barred fury, fuelled by madness. The blows landed everywhere – his hands, his head, his face, his back and ribs. Sometimes with the heavy stock of the whip, sometimes the stinging hide lash, sometimes with the huntsman’s boots. The noise was overwhelming – the sound of the assault on his flesh, the rattle of the fence, grunts of pain and of effort, and the shouting and crying of the children.

Bob Coffin hit Jonas so hard and for so long that Jonas knew the man was going to kill him.

Why?

He didn’t know if he had asked, or how, but the huntsman told him anyway – in short exhalations as his arm rose and fell.

‘He’s dead. He died. You said to let him go and now he’s DEAD!’

The words went through Jonas’s numbed mind like a railway spike.

Charlie was dead?

The huntsman kicked him in the stomach and he curled around the pain.

Charlie was dead? That couldn’t be possible.

Fingers in his hair. Not Charlie’s careful hands, but a gnarled fist, dragging him off the cement and to his knees. Something hard and cold dug so brutally into his temple that it pushed his head round to look at Steven. The boy was screaming and beating the fence, like a crazed zoo-ape. Jonas couldn’t make out the words, just the shape of his mouth and the fear in his eyes. He couldn’t hear anything. Couldn’t feel anything. He watched Steven shouting and thought about Lucy in the water.

I promise.

Something hit the back of his head and the cement rushed towards him.

Bob Coffin’s boots passed by his face; the whip was picked off the floor. Jonas’s breath whined loudly in his head. His eyes followed the boots as they left the kennel. It was only when the huntsman locked the gate behind him that Jonas saw the small black gun in his hand.

Steven was talking at Jonas and looking urgent, but Jonas couldn’t hear him and didn’t care. He never knew what Steven had said to keep Bob Coffin from shooting him.

It wasn’t important.

Charlie was dead.

He rolled to his side and vomited.

Then he lay, heaving for breath, with his cheek in the thin, warm puddle while his stomach creaked, and mourned the loss.

57

KIDNAP HAD BECOME murder.

It was a turning point and, despite the tragedy of Charlie’s death, Reynolds couldn’t help being energized by it. Until now they’d all been expecting to find the bodies of children who had been killed within hours or days of their abductions. It was the way things usually went. But Charlie Peach had been kept alive for almost two months – and that meant the other children could have been kept alive too, and suddenly they might all be Superman, swooping to the rescue. It was the first break they’d had in the case since … well, it was the first break they’d had, and the mobile incident room literally rocked with activity.

The children had not vanished into the side of a mountain in the wake of a pennywhistle tune. Charlie been taken from that very field, and returned there. Reynolds dispatched officers immediately to check on the other kidnap sites. It was unbearably tantalizing to think that all of the children could be alive and well, and within a half-hour drive of the Red Lion car park where this very trailer was parked.

Reynolds had to fight the urge to get in the Peugeot and race about the moor with the windows down, shouting their names, they seemed so close.

At the same time, he knew the clock was ticking. No longer just a normal clock that marked time on the wall, this new clock was bound to a bundle of dynamite in Reynolds’s head, and ticked far more urgently. Kidnap had become murder – and that irreversibility increased the threat to the other captives a thousand-fold. Whether it had been cruel intention or bungled release, Charlie Peach had died – and that put all seven remaining captives in serious danger.

He didn’t need Kate Gulliver to tell him the truth of that.

Having killed one, the kidnapper could kill them all. He might do it in a panic to cover up his crimes or he might do it out of rage or horror at a plan gone wrong. Or he might do it because he’d meant to all along, and now that he’d summoned up the courage to take the first life, things would get easier.

Or maybe he was killing them in order, and Jess Took and Pete Knox were already out there somewhere, rotting at the end of a rope.

Reynolds felt his good energy turn on him like a sly wolf, making him suddenly panicky.

‘Time’s running out.’

Reynolds jumped, then turned to Elizabeth Rice. ‘What?’ he snapped.

‘Time’s running out,’ she said again.

He understood. The white plastic tape on the broken windows, the notes. The things they’d been holding back to trap a future suspect.

A suspect they didn’t have.