Blacklands

And once Timothy Reed looked on him as a hero, Arnold sensed the time was right to call in the kind of favor only a very close—very secret—friend might grant.

Arnold Avery abused Timothy Reed until the child’s reversals of behavior and plummeting schoolwork prompted serious inquiries from his parents and—quickly thereafter—the police.

So Arnold learned his first lesson—that the advantage of animals was that they could not tell.

At the age of fouteen Arnold Avery was sent to a young offenders institution where every night of his three- month sentence—and some days—were spent learning that real sexual power lay not in asking and getting, but in simply taking. The fact that he was initially on the painful end of that equation only heightened the value of this, his second lesson.

He went home, but he never went back.

It took him another seven years before he killed Paul Barrett (who bore a surprising resemblance to Timothy Reed) but it was worth waiting for. Avery kept Paul alive for sixteen hours, then buried him near Dunkery Beacon. Nobody suspected Avery. Nobody questioned him, nobody gave him a second glance as he drove his van round and round the West Country, reading local papers, calling local homes, chatting to local children.

And nobody found Paul Barrett’s body; when they searched, it was near the boy’s home in Westward Ho!

So Dunkery Beacon was a safe place to bury a body, thought Avery.

And he made good use of it.

Chapter 12

 

THE HEATHER ON THE HILL HAD BEEN DRENCHED INTO SUBMIS sion by the rain, and now dripped eerily onto the wet turf as Steven dug.

He dug two holes then ate a cheese sandwich and dug one more.

Since what he’d come to think of as the Sheepsjaw Incident, the digging had lost some of its appeal. That intense high and the crashing low had thrown the hopelessness of his mission into sharp relief. Now every jar of his elbows, every ache in his back, every splinter in his palm somehow seemed more wearing.

At the root of his new bad mood was an itchy discontent that made him distant with Lewis and snappy with Davey. Even out here on the moor where sheer hard work usually drove everything from his mind but a kind of dim exhaustion, he was dissatisfied and grouchy—though there was no one to be grouchy with bar himself, his spade, and the endless moor beneath his feet.

He had not heard from Avery. It had been almost two weeks since he sent the letter with the symbols on the back. Was it possible that he had been too careful? So careful that Avery himself had failed to spot the secret message? Had the killer of Uncle Billy merely read the meaningless words on the front of the paper and tossed it into a bin? Or, if Avery had seen it, had he understood it? In Steven’s murderous mind, he had thought he’d given enough to tempt Avery into answering, but maybe Avery couldn’t crack the code. Or maybe he just didn’t want to. Maybe he didn’t want to play mouse to Steven’s teasing cat. As the days dragged by without an answer from Longmoor, Steven could not suppress a sick feeling of failure. He wished he could tell Lewis of his fears, but he knew this was something he had to keep to himself. Nobody else would understand what he’d done. In fact, Steven could see himself getting into some awkward conversations if he revealed anything about the correspondence.

He had already taken pains to make sure he was always there when the post came. Their post came early— around 7A.M.—and Steven had started setting his alarm for quarter to so as to ensure he was at the top of the stairs when Frank Tithecott walked up the path. The last thing he needed was his mum or nan picking up a letter addressed to him. Steven had never had anything personal come through the letter box—not even a Christmas card—and he imagined questions would be asked. But the anticipatory moments spent with cold toes at the top of the stairs were more than outweighed by mounting disappointment.

He started on another hole but had only made one stab at the fibrous ground before he flung the spade down, and himself disconsolately after it.

Almost instantly the wet started to seep through his cheap waterproof trousers. The chill earth gripped him below and the wet heather curled over him in a dripping shroud. The sweat he’d worked up dried all too fast and he started to shiver.

A sea mist crept silently over the land in a damp blanket smelling of rotten kelp.

Steven felt himself shrinking under its blind vastness. The image of the galaxy came back to him. He was an atom on a microbe on a speck on a mote on a pinprick in the middle of nowhere. Moments before he’d been upright and strong and emanating heat. Now, just seconds later, he was a corpse-in-waiting adrift in space. Avery was right. It all meant nothing.

Steven’s eyes became superheated and—with no further warning—he started to cry. At first it was just his eyes but his body soon followed and he started to sob and bawl like an abandoned baby stretched out in the heather, his chest heaving and hitching, his stomach muscles tensing with effort, his white-cold hands curled into loose, upturned fists of hopelessness.

For a few minutes he lay there weeping, not understanding what this feeling was or where it had come from; his only coherent emotion was a vague, detached concern about whether he had gone mad.

His crying slowed and stopped and his hot eyes were cooled by the mizzle swirling soundlessly from the nothing-white sky. He blinked and found the effort almost beyond him. Tiredness seeped from his heart and through every part of him like lead, pressing him down onto the moor, and then there was nothing left for his body to do but lie there and await instructions.

Inside his complete physical stillness, Steven’s mind came back to him from a long way off, a bit at a time. At first he felt very sorry for himself; he wished his mother would come and find him and wrap him in a fluffy white towel and carry him home and feed him stew and chocolate pudding. A little after-sob escaped him at the knowledge that this wasn’t going to happen—not just now, but ever again. And another, colder stab in his heart told him that this memory-wish had probably never happened. He had no real recollection of fluffy towels, or of stew, or of his mother enveloping him in safe, warm arms when he was wet and cold. He had plenty of memories of her roughly stripping wet socks off his feet, of shouting about the filth in the laundry basket, of drying his hair too roughly with one of their mismatched, thinning towels that were hung up at night but were always still damp in the morning. That made him think of the stained bathroom carpet, which played host to big reddish fungal growths behind the toilet in winter, as if the outside was slowly seeping inside their house, filling it with cold and creeping things. Davey cried when he first saw the fungus, and wet the bed rather than go near it. But now, like all of them, he ignored it. Sometimes they even joked about the mushrooms and the mildew, but more often, when Steven came back from Lewis’s spotless house, the smell of the damp hit him as he opened the front door. He could not smell it on his own clothes but—from the fresh, flowery aqua blue washing powder scents of his classmates—he had an uncomfortable feeling that he carried that stench of poverty around on him like a yellow star.

He never felt clean. Not when he came off the moors covered in mud, not when he climbed out of the tepid baths he shared with Davey, not when he first arose from the bed they shared and pulled on yesterday’s school shirt.

What had happened to him? Steven felt his mind whirl with confusion. How had it happened? Where had he gone? Somewhere, somehow, the little boy who used to be him had disappeared and been replaced by the new him. The new Steven did not watch Match of the Day or queue in the Blue Dolphin for fifty pence worth of batter bits. He did not want Steven Gerrard in his Soccer Stars sticker book more than life itself. The new Steven was out here every afternoon until nightfall, sweating in dirt, eating moldy sandwiches, prodding feebly at the ground with a rusty spade, and seeking death.

For three years this had been his life. Three years! He felt like a man who’s just heard a sentence passed down. The thought of three wasted years stretching out behind him was as shocking as if they were still to come.