and tried to take the letter from her hands. Lettie kept it from her.
“It’s all right, Mum, I’m dealing with it.”
Nan snorted. They all knew the snort. It meant she knew best.
While their attention was momentarily elsewhere, Steven glanced at the brown envelope. As before, there was nothing on it to indicate where it had come from. He knew the notepaper Avery used had no prison markings on it. It was cheap schoolbook paper. It could have come from anywhere. Avery always wrote his prison number along the top of the page but, without context, that meant nothing.
The fact that the envelope and the notepaper were anonymous gave Steven hope, and hope gave him courage.
“Can I read it?”
Lettie and Nan both looked at him as if he’d asked for new underpants made of pure gold.
“It is mine. Isn’t it?” He even managed to inject a very small note of anger into the words and suddenly Lettie was on the back foot. She’d opened a letter that didn’t belong to her. Whatever the circumstances, that was difficult to justify.
But she tried.
“It might be your letter, Steven, but if this is from some girl, then the business of it is mine too. I have a right to know if you’re about to knock some girl up and leave me holding the baby, understand?”
Steven’s mind raced to catch up along the path his mother’s had long since travelled. Finally, after an agony of mental confusion that made him want to slap some sense into himself, he got there. His mother thought the letter was from a girl. A secret girlfriend. A girlfriend he might actually have had sex with.
Steven almost laughed out loud. He was so far from having sex with a girl that he wasn’t even sure whether tongues was real or a sick joke. The closest he’d ever got to having sex with a girl was listening to Lewis’s fantasies about tits and stiffies.
If Steven Lamb had been the boy he was at the beginning of spring, he
He held out his hand firmly but casually. “I don’t know who it’s from until I read it, do I?”
His calm tone and her burgeoning guilt made Lettie hand him the letter even as Nan ground her teeth behind her.
Steven only needed a brief glance.
That was all there was. Not even Avery’s initials. Nothing incriminating. Nothing he even understood yet, but he would. He was sure now that he would understand it. The “D” and the “B” were capitalized, but the initials DB meant nothing to him off the top of his head. No victim’s name started with DB. No matter. He’d seen the letter; he understood the code. He’d work it out.
And—more importantly—his mother never would.
“Is it from that AA?”
With a coolness that made him question his own basic honesty, Steven shrugged.
“It’s just a girl, Mum.”
“A girl wanting a photo of you!” Lettie tried hard to recapture her suspicion and anger but Steven’s openness had taken the wind out of her sails.
He only shrugged again, at the same time as he slid the letter back into the envelope and shoved both into the back pocket of his black school trousers.
“Not my fault if I’m gorgeous.”
It could have gone either way but, for once, it went his way. Lettie’s face relaxed and she smiled at him, then slid her arms around his waist while he wriggled halfheartedly not to be kissed on the cheek.
She won that battle and they both laughed and Nan turned away to the sink, but not before Steven had seen her face relax at his joke and—for a single blissful moment—Steven remembered why he’d been digging.
For this.
For moments like this—when a reminder that they could one day be a real family suddenly burst through the crust of pain and resentment and poverty and left him feeling happy and achingly sad all at once.
He stopped wrestling and let his mother hold him in a way she hadn’t for many years, allowing himself to relax his head onto her shoulder while she stroked his back as she might a tired toddler.
“You will be careful, won’t you, Steven?”
“Of course, Mum.”
“I’m only worried you’ll get hurt.”
“I know. I’ll be careful.”
“Ask him about protection,” said Nan, who’d reverted to type faster than he’d ever have thought possible.
Lettie let him go and scowled up at her mother. The moment was gone, and Steven straightened up a little reluctantly.
“Don’t give me that look, my girl. I wish I’d done it for you and then you wouldn’t have got yourself …” She tailed off but jerked her head meaningfully at Steven.
He flushed—partly with anger at his nan—and his mother slipped her hand around his.
“You know about protection, don’t you, Steven?”
“Mum!” He flamed with embarrassment but a very small part of him felt rather smug that his mother and nan could entertain the possibility that he, Steven Lamb, could be desirable enough for somebody—at some indeterminate point in the future—to consider having sex with him.
It was a bit flattering.
But mostly it was just embarrassing.
He stepped away from his mother, feeling the heat coming off his head in waves.
He saw the worry in his mother’s eyes, though, and—because she’d held him—he eked out an answer of sorts:
“Don’t worry, Mum.”
“Don’t make me, okay?”
He nodded and withdrew, although he could see from her face that Nan thought he’d got off lightly.
He took the stairs two at a time. It was a stretch, but Lewis had tried it and failed, so Steven figured he might as well practice it if Lewis thought it was worthwhile. It left him breathless at the top.
DB. DB. None of the children was called DB. Was Avery revealing another murder to him?
Once in his room, he studied the letter carefully in the dull light of the window. There were no other marks on it that he could see. He got out the map of Exmoor he’d used for his correspondence with Avery, and pored over it. The letters were not positioned anywhere in particular on the piece of paper, so Steven didn’t bother trying to line them up with anything.
Avery wanted a photo of DB. But who was DB?
Three nights later, Steven jerked awake with the answer.
He could feel it in his gut.
DB was not a “who” but a “what.”
It was the highest point of the moor, and close to where all the bodies had been found.
Arnold Avery wanted a photo of Dunkery Beacon.
Chapter 19
