this—the way she had been for as long as he had known her—and returning to somebody new and wonderful made him ache anew for it soon to be over.
Careful not to bang anything with his spade, Steven left the house and pulled the front door quietly shut behind him.
He was almost at the stile when Lewis caught up to him.
Lewis was out of breath, and Steven was at a loss for what to say to him, so for several seconds they just stood and faced each other silently, squirming a little at the awkwardness of it.
Then Lewis glanced at the spade and said: “Want a hand?”
Part of Steven wanted to shout “No!” very loudly and with feeling. But when he opened his mouth, he said: “I didn’t think digging was your thing.”
Lewis’s blush deepened and spread to the tips of his ears and down under the neck of his T-shirt. For Steven it was a confirmation and an apology, and he accepted both with a shrug. “You got something to eat?”
Lewis nodded eagerly and pulled a carrier bag from the pocket of his waterproof. It was folded around some squarish thing that was probably a sandwich. Steven didn’t ask what was in it and Lewis didn’t volunteer; they both understood they’d have to work their way up to that again.
“Okay, then.”
Steven climbed over the stile, which was slippery from the mist, and Lewis followed.
The promise of the dawn faltered as the boys trudged up the hill onto the moor. Fifty yards above the village they broke through the mist briefly, then were enveloped again as the little breeze dragged more off the sea and over the sun.
It wasn’t bad. Steven estimated they could see twenty or thirty feet ahead of them. He could tell that the air beyond the mist was warm. It had been an uncommonly clement season and heather and gorse were blooming early in slow drifts of mauve and yellow.
Lewis hadn’t bothered putting his sandwich away after showing it to Steven, and quickly ate the first, good half. He wrapped the bad half again carefully.
Two hundred yards farther up the track, he ate that too.
At the fork, Steven turned left behind the houses instead of his usual right, and Lewis spoke for the first time since the stile.
“Where you going?”
“Blacklands.”
“Why?”
“To dig.”
“I—”
Lewis bit his lip with a squeak, but the words “told you so” hung in the wet air. No matter. Steven appreciated the act of will it had taken for Lewis to swallow the jibe. They walked on in silence while the sky lightened and the tentative birds finally got the hang of the dawn chorus.
As they approached Blacklands, Steven saw the postcard again in his mind. He had it in his back pocket but he didn’t want to get it out in front of Lewis and have to explain things.
He knew from geography lessons what the Friar Tuck haircut symbol meant—it marked a rise in the ground. And he also knew exactly where that rise was. It looked very like the burial mounds on Dunkery Beacon—just closer to home. That thought made Steven stop and look back down towards Shipcott. It was invisible—still covered in mist below and behind them.
Another five minutes brought them to the mound at Blacklands and Steven turned again and looked down the moor to where he knew the village lay.
“Why d’ you keep stopping?”
Steven didn’t answer Lewis. He glanced above them at the mound, remembered the map, the positioning of those initials he’d been so desperate to see.
He started to skirt the rise, zigzagging a little through the heather. Lewis followed him. The dew was thick on the flowers and their jeans were soaked in seconds.
Lewis shivered. Steven stopped and took his bearings.
Here. About here.
Steven could barely believe that after years of random digging, he was about to bend to the task with real focus, based on inside information. Of course, there was still a big patch of ground to cover—probably half an acre —but compared to the whole of Exmoor, half an acre was a pinprick. This was the place. Somewhere here, Arnold Avery had buried the uncle he never knew and now he was going to start the task of finding him for real. Steven didn’t care how long it took him now. Nothing would keep him from returning Uncle Billy to his family.
Far from feeling excited and triumphant, the thought of succeeding suddenly made him overwhelmingly sad. Once more he looked down into the sea of mist and knew that—on a clear day—he’d be able to see his house. Uncle Billy had been buried within sight of his own backyard. His heartbroken mother, who had watched the searchers on TV prodding miles of heather and gorse, could have glanced out of the back bedroom window and seen her son’s shallow grave.
Steven shivered and turned away from Shipcott.
“Cold?” Lewis regarded him with sharp eyes.
“Nah.”
“Where we going to dig, then?”
“Here, I guess.”
Steven turned a slow circle to pick a spot—and stopped dead.
From a patch of white heather not twenty feet above them, a man was watching.
Steven flinched in surprise.
Then—before the flinch was even over—he felt his bowels loosen in shock as he recognized Arnold Avery.
Chapter 36
AVERY HAD ARRIVED IN SHIPCOTT JUST AFTER 5 A.M.
Unlike the towns of Bideford and Barnstaple and South Molton, Shipcott had barely changed. No new road layouts, no mini-roundabouts, no one-way systems. The one in Barnstaple had stolen damn near half the night from him as he looped and reversed and came at the town square what felt like a dozen times from different directions.
Finally he’d stopped at a newsagent’s shop, donned the green cardigan to hide the blood on his sleeve, bought a
Then he’d gone back to the car and stared at the face on the front page under the headline: CHILD KILLER ON THE RUN. The photo was a small fuzzy thing he’d been used to seeing clipped to Dr. Leaver’s file. Dr. Leaver himself had taken the picture at their first session, and Dr. Leaver had been wise to go into abnormal psychiatry because his photography skills left a lot to be desired.
Not for the first time, Arnold Avery thanked god for incompetence, but felt a pang. Had he missed his chance? If he was on the front pages today, then surely he must’ve been yesterday? Maybe SL knew he was out, or had been warned not to leave the house.
He suppressed the desperation that that thought sparked in him and checked out his face in the rearview mirror. He looked only vaguely like the photo on the front page of the
