deal. Steven knew that if he blew this, he’d never get another chance. Either he would permanently have to stop the search that gave his life meaning, or he’d go on ad nauseam, possibly until he was old, like the tattered old man who dug about in other people’s rubbish—but with Uncle Jude’s rusty spade his companion instead of a stolen Tesco trolley.
Steven sighed as he realized he had no choice.
He was not a boy who had ever had much to take pride in, so swallowing a bit of pride now would be sour, but not impossible.
Just like Uncle Jude, he’d worked out what he wanted and the only way he knew how to get it.
Now—just like Davey—he’d have to be Frankenstein’s friend.
Chapter 17
ARNOLD AVERY LIKED TO THINK OF THE BENCHES HE MADE AS HIS tickets to freedom.
From the first day of his incarceration, Avery had had a single goal in mind, and that was to be released as soon as was legally possible.
Life did not mean life anymore. The petulant cry of
But by the time he’d reached Heavitree, he had already determined to be a model prisoner so that he could get out while he still had hair and teeth to speak of. While he was still young enough to enjoy himself.
In whatever way he saw fit.
Anyway …
Model prisoners wanted to be rehabilitated, so Avery had signed up for countless classes, workshops, and courses over the years. He now had assorted diplomas, a GCSE in maths, A-levels in English, art, and biology, a bluffer’s knowledge of psychiatry, and a certificate of competence in first aid.
And it was all paying off. Two years earlier his first parole review had approved his transfer from the high- security Heavitree to Longmoor Prison on Dartmoor. Even Avery had been surprised. He had hoped but never really expected that his apparent devotion to rehabilitation would achieve the desired aims. It was shocking really, thought Avery at the time. If he’d been anyone but himself, he’d have been up in arms about it. Of course, a recommendation that he could be trusted not to escape from a lower-security prison was not the same as the parole board actually approving his release after his twenty-year tariff had been served. But it was a very good start.
Compared to Heavitree, Longmoor was a holiday camp. The Segregation Unit was freshly painted, the guards noticeably less oppressive, and the opportunities for reintegration activities were even better, so he’d done a course in plumbing too.
He’d really surprised himself, though, with a natural aptitude for carpentry.
Avery found he loved everything about wood. The dry smell of sawdust, the soft warmth of the grain, the near-alchemic transformation from plank to table, plank to chair, plank to bench. Most of all, he loved the hours he could spend sanding and shaping with relatively little input from his brain, which therefore left him free to think, even while he earned kudos for working his way to rehabilitation, parole, and nirvana.
In the two years that Arnold Avery had been taking carpentry, he’d made six benches. His first was an uninspiring two-seater with ugly dowel joints; his most recent was a handsome six-foot three-seater with bevelled struts, curved, figure-hugging backrest, and almost invisible dovetails.
Now, as he worked on his seventh bench, sanding patiently, Avery let his mind drift gently off to Exmoor.
Avery could almost smell the moor. The rich, damp soil and the fragrant heather, combined with the faint odor of manure from the deer and ponies and sheep.
He thought first of Dunkery Beacon, where all his fantasies centered, before spreading like bony tendrils across the rounded hills. From there he would almost be able to identify the individual gravesites—not from prurient newsprint graphics but from actual memory, the memory that had sustained him throughout his imprisonment and which still held the power to feed his nighttime fantasies. The thought alone brought saliva to his mouth, and he swallowed audibly.
Dartmoor was very different. This moor was grey—made hard and unyielding by the granite which bulged under its surface and frequently broke through the Earth’s thin skin to poke bleakly up at the lowering sky.
The prison itself was an extension of the stone—grey, blank, ugly.
There was little heather on Dartmoor, just prickled gorse and sheep-shorn yellow grass. There was no gentle beauty and purple haze.
Dartmoor was not Exmoor, but Avery would still have liked to watch the seasons change from his narrow window.
But his window had been blocked on the orders of his prison psychiatrist, Dr. Leaver, who theorized that even visual contact with the moors would be counterproductive to his attempts to purify Arnold Avery’s psyche.
Avery’s bile rose in his throat along with the hatred and fury he now reserved exclusively for Dr. Leaver and Officer Finlay.
It amazed him that Leaver couldn’t understand that this was Dartmoor, and so held nothing but a passing aesthetic interest for him. The fact that both were moors was apparently sufficient reason for Leaver—a cadaverous man in his fifties—to decree the blocking of the window, which left Avery depressed and mopey, even in the summer months.
The terrible catch-22 he faced was that Leaver was half right. While he was mistaken in thinking that Avery gave inordinate weight to the moor he might have seen from his window, Avery would only have been able to convince him of that fact by revealing the truly awesome weight he gave any idea, sight, or mention of Dartmoor’s smaller, prettier, more gentle cousin on the north coast of the peninsula.
If Leaver—or anyone else—had had any idea that merely hearing someone say the word “Exmoor” could give him a daylong erection, his paltry privileges would have been suspended faster than Guy Fawkes from a rope.
Avery had never killed an adult but he knew he could kill Dr. Leaver. The man’s monstrous ego was fed by the power he held over the inmates he counselled. Avery was not empathetic, but he recognized his own sense of superiority in Leaver within five minutes of settling in for their first session together. It was like glimpsing his own reflection in a mirror.
He knew that Leaver was clever. He knew that Leaver liked to show off how clever he was—especially in an environment where he had every right to feel that way. After all, any con who was smarter than Leaver had, at the very least, to concede that they’d fucked up badly enough to get caught.
Avery had no problem with Leaver flaunting his intellect. A man who had a talent should use it; a footballer played football, a juggler juggled, a clever man outwitted others. It was Darwinian.
In Leaver’s presence, Avery was a bright man who had flashes of intellectual connection that made him a cut above the run-of-the-mill burglar cum barroom brawler. Clever enough to interest Leaver but
He asked Leaver’s advice and always deferred to Leaver’s decisions, even if they had an adverse effect on him. The boarding up of his window was a case in point. When Leaver had suggested it might help, Avery had suppressed the urge to tear the man’s throat out with his teeth and had instead pursed his lips and nodded slowly, as if he were examining the idea from every conceivable angle, but with the best of intentions. Then he’d sighed to show that it was a regrettable necessity—but a necessity nonetheless.
Leaver had smiled and made a note that Arnold Avery knew would bring him closer to the real life waiting for him outside these walls.
