Blacklands

Asking Uncle Jude how long he’d be staying would only be tempting fate.

Nan was tight-lipped at supper, shooting disapproving glances at Uncle Jude’s nails, but Lettie was girlish and had released her captive ponytail, and Davey prattled on and on and on, bombarding Uncle Jude with his questions, opinions, and statements of semi-fact that made them all smile.

“I’m going to grow a sausage tree, Uncle Jude!”

“Why haven’t I got a beard?”

“Uncle Jude? Did you know hedges are made by hedgehogs?”

Steven sighed to himself. No wonder his mother preferred Davey; he was so entertaining.

By staying silent, Steven gathered the information that his mother had bumped into Uncle Jude in Mr. Jacoby’s shop and that he’d been invited for tea—although there was some teasing dispute about exactly how he’d been invited, or whether he’d asked himself to tea.

It didn’t matter. Uncle Jude was back at the kitchen table and as he softened Nan up, chaffed Lettie, and indulged Davey, Steven felt an unaccustomed sense of optimism settle on his shoulders.

He asked to be excused as soon as he’d hurried his baked beans, and ran hell-for-leather in his cheap new trainers to where he’d left his spade six weeks before.

It was there. It was the same.

He jogged back with it held loosely in one pale hand, and went round the back of the house. Just like Uncle Jude, his spade had come home.

Steven surveyed the back garden and in his ordinary boy’s mind he saw where the tomatoes should go, and the lettuce. The lettuce could be planted in pots and placed up high to deter slugs. The potatoes would take most of the room but there was space for a few strawberries to make his mother feel all upper-class come Wimbledon. Mr. Randall had grown melons last year. He’d given them one and even though it was bland and cork dry, Steven had been stunned that something so exotic could come out of the staid English soil. Maybe he could grow melons—the ones with orange flesh.

He hefted the spade better into his hand and thought of it biting into the earth to give life, rather than to seek death.

Out of nowhere, he was glad his mother had bought new knickers in Banburys. He hoped with all his heart that this time they would be enough.

Steven leaned the rusty spade against the back wall and smiled to himself.

This was what normality felt like, and it was good.

Chapter 23

 

ARNOLD AVERY HAD NEVER CONSIDERED ESCAPING. NOT IN ANY realistic sense.

Sure, the first few months he was in prison he had lain awake and thought about things he would do once he was free again. But the concept of escape was not uppermost in his mind. He assumed that he would be paroled at some point and that that point would be no closer than the twenty-year tariff the judge at his trial had recommended.

It seemed fair. Apart from being a child killer, Avery was a law-abiding man who voted Conservative with a capital “C,” and who thought most prison sentences were woefully inadequate and that the early release of some prisoners was a disgrace.

And so when he found himself facing a minimum of twenty years inside, Avery did not whine and complain and appeal against his sentence citing previous good character and taxes paid. Instead he took the conscious decision to do his utmost to ensure that he was a prime candidate for release on licence as soon as he became eligible.

When the three men raped him in the showers, Avery allowed the screws their pleasure at his humiliation and never complained or retaliated.

When improving, rehabilitating lessons were offered, Avery signed up and exerted at least the modicum of effort it took to be top of every class.

When Dr. Leaver ordered his view to be blocked, leaving him in permanent half darkness, Avery thanked him.

And when the question of the other missing children came up, Avery swore blind he had not killed Paul Barrett, William Peters, or Mariel Oxenburg. They might be dead, but those three children had the power to extend his stay at Her Majesty’s pleasure, and he would never allow them to do that to him, however much it might ease the pain of still-grieving relatives.

Avery knew it was far from a foregone conclusion that he would be paroled after twenty years, but he knew he’d given himself the best possible chance, and was therefore content to wait another couple of years to find out. Within twelve months he could be in a program at an open prison in Northumbria that claimed to prepare inmates for release. Everything was going just the way he’d planned it.

Until he found out SL was just a boy.

A boy he’d built trust with.

A boy he shared secrets with.

A boy who wanted something from him so badly that he might be inveigled upon to do … just about anything.

And if he wouldn’t, then that wasn’t a problem either.

But it had to be now. Not two years from now, when his parole might possibly be granted. By then the focus of a boy on a quest would have given way to the clumsy distractions of a teenager on another kind of mission entirely. And certainly not if he was released to some crappy halfway house up north, far away from his beloved Exmoor.

Arnold Avery had spent eighteen years watching and waiting, knuckling down, doing his time … Eighteen years without fresh memories of just how exciting children could be and, hard though he’d tried to preserve his memories, the old ones had inevitably staled with overuse.

The photo of SL had been a supernova illuminating the dusty recesses of his mind. It had pierced his logic and good intentions like a laser through a magnifying glass. Now his brain was constantly burned and tortured by want —by desperate want and possibilities. Just as Steven had put his eye to the crack in the door and seen a future of summers and skating, so Avery saw that his future—his immediate future—could be similarly filled with astonishing pleasures. Something chemical had been released in Avery’s brain—something that sharpened his lust and dulled his more sensible senses. The same chemical change had once seen him abuse one boy even while waiting for the police to arrive at the behest of another. All he could think about was SL. He knew where he lived. He had a rough idea of what he looked like. He could guide him, tease him, direct him.

Misdirect him.

At will.

The prospect of control was delicious. The prize was precious. The boy was his for the taking.

Suddenly all the time in the world seemed like too much slack to Avery.

Anything could happen!

SL could move; he could die; he could just lose interest. Avery had to write to him. Had to give him hope that the corpse he sought was a heartbeat away. He had to keep him on the hook.

He resented the subtle shift that had made him needy and dented his newfound power. But he knew a surefire way of regaining it. If he had to relinquish a little more power now to achieve complete control and sublime enjoyment later, then that was a bargain he was prepared to strike.

So it was with a brief acknowledgement—and immediate dismissal—of regret that Arnold Avery concluded that he had to escape from prison.

And he had to do it very soon.