Lettie moved swiftly to Davey’s side and picked up a soggy chip. “Eat it!”
Davey shook his head and his lower lip started to wobble.
With quiet spite, Nan murmured: “Leaving food. Kids nowadays don’t know they’re born.”
Lettie bent down and slapped Davey sharply on the bare thigh below his shorts. Steven watched the white handprint on his brother’s skin quickly turn red. He loved Davey, but seeing someone other than himself get into trouble always gave Steven a small thrill, and now—watching his mother hustling his brother out of the kitchen and up the stairs, bawling his head off—he felt as if he had somehow been accorded an honor: the honor of being spared the pent-up irritation of his mother. God knows, she’d taken her feelings for Nan out on him often enough. But this was further proof of what Steven had been hoping for some time—that Davey was finally old enough, having just turned five, to suffer his share of the discipline pool. It wasn’t a deep pool, or a dangerous one, but what the hell; his mother had a short fuse and a punishment shared was a punishment halved in Steven’s eyes. Maybe even a punishment escaped altogether.
His nan had not stopped eating throughout, although each mouthful was apparently a minefield.
Even though Davey’s sobs were now muffled, Steven sought eye contact with Nan and finally she glanced at him, giving him a chance to roll his eyes, as if the burden of the naughty child was shared and the sharing made them closer.
“You’re no better,” she said, and went back to her fish.
Steven reddened. He knew he was better! If only he could prove it to Nan, everything would be different—he just knew it.
Of course, it was all Billy’s fault—as usual.
Steven held his breath. He could hear his mother washing up—the underwater clunking of china—and his nan drying—the higher musical scraping of plates leaving the rack. Then he slowly opened the door of Billy’s room. It smelled old and sweet, like an orange left under the bed. Steven felt the door click gently behind him.
The curtains were drawn—always drawn. They matched the bedspread in pale and dark blue squares that clashed with the swirly brown carpet. A half-built Lego space station was on the floor and since Steven’s last visit a small spider had spun a web on what looked like a crude docking station. Now it sat there, waiting to capture satellite flies from the outer space of the dingy bedroom.
There was a drooping scarf pinned to the wall over the bed—sky blue and white, Manchester City—and Steven felt the familiar pang of pity and anger at Billy: still a loser even in death.
Steven crept in here sometimes, as if Billy might reach across the years and whisper secrets and solutions into the ear of this nephew who had already lived to see one more birthday than he himself had managed.
Steven had long ago given up the hope of finding real-life clues. At first he liked to imagine that Uncle Billy might have left some evidence of a precognition of his own death. A
But there was nothing. Just this smell of history and bitter sadness, and a school photo of a thin, fair child with pink cheeks and crooked teeth and dark blue eyes almost squeezed shut by the size of his smile. It had been a long time before Steven had realized that this photo must have been placed here later—that no boy worth his salt has a photo of himself on his bedside table unless it shows him holding a fish or a trophy.
Nineteen years ago this eleven-year-old boy—probably much like himself—had tired of his fantasy space game and gone outside to play on a warm summer evening, apparently—infuriatingly—unaware that he would never return to put his toys away or to wave his Man City scarf at the TV on a Sunday afternoon, or even to make his bed, which his mother—Steven’s nan—had done much later.
Sometime after 7:15 P.M., when Mr. Jacoby from the newsagent sold him a bag of Maltesers, Uncle Billy had moved out of the realm of childhood make-believe and into the realm of living nightmare. In the two hundred yards between the newsagent’s and this very house—a two hundred yards Steven walked every morning and every night to and from school—Uncle Billy had simply disappeared.
Steven’s nan had waited until 8:30 before sending Lettie out to look for her brother, and until 9:30, when darkness was falling, to go outside herself. In the light summer evenings children played long past their winter bedtimes. But it was not until Ted Randall next door said perhaps they should call the police that Steven’s nan changed forever from Billy’s mum into Poor Mrs. Peters.
Poor Mrs. Peters—whose husband had been stupidly killed wobbling off his bicycle into the path of the Barnstaple bus six years before—had waited for Billy to come home.
At first she waited at the door. She stood there all day, every day for a month, barely noticing fouteen-year- old Lettie brushing past her to go to school, and returning promptly at 3:50 to save her mother worrying even more—if such a thing were possible.
When the weather broke, Poor Mrs. Peters waited in the window from where she could see up and down the road. She grew the look of a dog in a thunderstorm—alert, wide-eyed, and nervous. Any movement in the street made her heart leap so hard in her chest that she flinched. Then would come the slump, as Mr. Jacoby or Sally Blunkett or the Tithecott twins grew so distinct that no desperate stretch of her imagination could keep them looking like a ruddy-cheeked eleven-year-old boy with a blond crew cut, new Nike trainers, and a half-eaten bag of Maltesers in his hand.
Lettie learned to cook and to clean and to stay in her room so she didn’t have to watch her mother flinching at the road. She had always suspected that Billy was the favorite and now, in his absence, her mother no longer had the strength to hide this fact.
So Lettie worked on a shell of anger and rebellion to protect the soft center of herself which was fourteen and scared and missed her brother and her mother in equal measure, as if both had been snatched from her on that warm July evening.
How could Uncle Billy not know? Once more Steven felt that flicker of anger as he looked about the clueless, lifeless room. How could anyone not know that something like that was about to happen to them?
Blacklands
Chapter 2
A YEAR AFTER BlLLY DISAPPEARED A DELIVERY DRIVER FROM Exeter was arrested for something else, somewhere else.
At first, police merely questioned Arnold Avery after a boy called Mason Dingle accused him of flashing at him.
It was not the first time Arnold Avery had exposed himself to a child—although, of course, this was not what he told police initially—but, in luring fifteen-year-old Mason Dingle to his van for directions, Avery had unwittingly met his nemesis.
Mason Dingle was himself not unknown to the police. His small size and choirboy features were merely a
