At the back of the shed was a stack of three cardboard boxes. The bottom one was collapsing due to being plundered for bedding by rats. The confetti-like results were spread all over the floor back here in the deep gloom. Rice had kept rats as a child, Roland and Ratty, and was not deterred.
The top box held paperwork: insurance for window repairs, old bank statements and endless warranties and manuals for fax machines, cameras, phones and electric sanders. The second box was filled with children’s drawings, exercise books and home-made cards inscribed in careful but haphazard hands.
Rice thought about Charlie Peach lying in the hay meadow and, for the first time, she thought she understood the kind of person who loved children, and who could elicit such love in return.
The third box was much older. At some stage it had been damp, which meant that all the photos inside it had stuck together or been damaged beyond repair. Solid sandwiches of photos, crimped and curled and covered in mildew. The rats had destroyed what was left. Rice could only make out a few faded and stained faces. From the 1980s, judging by the shoulder pads and poodle perms. There was a couple standing in the garden she had just walked through, with a little boy on a toy tractor – all in sunshine made even brighter for fading. She guessed it must be Jonas and his parents. She squinted at them, just as they squinted back at her across the years – all equally unaware of what their futures would bring.
It was sad. To hold these people in her hands. Their hopes, their dreams, their happiness.
All gone.
She re-stacked the boxes and went back inside.
‘Did you find anything?’ said Mrs Paddon.
‘Yes,’ said Rice, just to fuck with her.
She went into the living room.
In dusty daylight, she stared at the photo of Lucy Holly – also squinting into the sun; also ignorant. Rice wondered whether she or Jonas had planted the flowers that were blooming in the garden now, with neither of them here to see.
The clock was stopped at 7.39 as before; the blue vase was still empty of flowers.
The letter knife was gone.
Rice frowned and looked around the room. She went back into the kitchen and searched under the mail and the clothes. The jagged edges of the few open envelopes told her they had not been opened with a letter knife.
‘What are you looking for?’ said Mrs Paddon
‘There was a letter knife on the mantelpiece.’
‘Oh. I don’t know about that.’
Neither did Rice. But the fact that it was gone suddenly seemed significant.
She remembered the cold feel of it in her hand while Jonas sat there, not drinking, just watching her; watching the knife. The brownish flecks that had come off it with a scrape of her nail.
The way old blood might.
Elizabeth Rice felt panic spurt into her chest. Had she held vital evidence in her hands? Had she missed something she should have spotted because she had been thinking of fucking Jonas Holly?
It had been
She leaned in to get a close-up of the mantelpiece – certain that the flecks would still be here. Then she would know for sure.
There was nothing. She ran the pad of her forefinger slowly along the wooden mantel, then looked at it. Nothing. Here in the grey-tinged room, this shelf alone had been dusted.
A twinge of suspicion.
Rice went upstairs and made a methodical search, while Mrs Paddon watched silently from the door of each room.
The letter knife was nowhere to be found.
By six o’clock, the Pied Piper story was back at the top of every news bulletin. Every single news outlet rode roughshod over DI Reynolds’s careful words about being eliminated from the investigation, and was reporting that Police Constable Jonas Holly was the number-one suspect.
For the first time, Elizabeth Rice thought it might be true.
Em heard the news on the radio and burst into tears.
Mr Holly was the Piper.
The same Mr Holly Steven had been so wary of, and the same one
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