Blacklands

“Mr. Jacoby,” she said neutrally so that she could smile or frown as the ensuing occasion required.

To her surprise, Mr. Jacoby held up the paper in shaking, newsprint-blackened hands, opened his mouth as if to tell her something of great importance—and burst into tears.

Davey was surrounded by legs. It was nothing new; when you’re five, legs are your constant companions. When you’re five your whole experience of gatherings consists of pulled seams, rubbed crotches, bulging thighs, scuffed knees, trailing hems.

But this was extreme. He was on the pavement outside his house trying to stay at his mother’s side as people pressed all around them to see the Daily Mail. Legs nudged him, bumped him, propelled him this way and that.

Now and then a hand would reach out to steady him and apologize, but nobody spoke to him or looked at him—everything in this jungle of legs was going on in the canopy over his head. He gripped Lettie’s ratty blue towelling robe and felt her warm thigh under his knuckles.

His mother wasn’t crying but Mr. Jacoby was. Davey had never seen a man cry before—never imagined that such a thing was possible—and found it so disturbing that he tried not to see or hear it but couldn’t stop looking. Big Mr. Jacoby in his green Spar shirt and his wobbly chest and his hairy arms, crying. Davey laughed nervously, hoping it was a joke—but nobody joined in. He gripped more tightly onto his mother.

People were talking grown-up talk very forcefully but very secretly and Davey could only catch fragments. The fragment he heard most often was “It’ll kill her.”

Kill who? thought Davey desperately. What will kill who?

“Can’t keep it secret … has to know sometime … don’t show it … it’ll kill her …”

And through it all, Mr. Jacoby cried his strange, wheezing, blubbery cry, while Lewis’s dad patted his shoulder, looking cross, but not with Mr. Jacoby. To Davey it looked like Mr. Jacoby was a giant toddler that someone had bullied off the swings and Lewis’s dad was taking care of him while trying to spot the culprit to give him a good telling-off.

“Don’t tell who what?”

They all looked up guiltily at Nan. Davey couldn’t see her through the legs but knew it was her. No one said anything.

“Don’t tell who what?” she said again, a little more suspiciously.

Davey thought someone was clapping. A slow, sharp slapping sound getting closer and closer, and suddenly the sound skidded to a halt as the people around him surged and parted to reveal a red-faced, wild-eyed Lewis.

Lewis could barely speak. He saw his father.

“Dad!”

“Quiet, Lewis. We’re talking.”

“But Dad!”

“Lewis, go home!”

His father looked away from him and the gathering turned its back on the boy and reshaped itself, nudging him to its edge like an amoeba egesting waste.

Mr. Trewell, Skew Ronnie’s dad, was holding the Sun and Lewis saw the face on the front of it. It wasn’t right, but somehow he recognized it. Those red, red lips gave it away. Lewis sucked air into his depleted lungs and shouted “FUCK!” as loudly as he could.

The word skittered off the walls and everyone turned and looked at him angrily. He just jabbed the picture.

“That’s him! That’s the man who’s on the moor!”

There was a stunned silence while anger turned to confusion, so he took advantage to explain further.

“With Steven.”

Chapter 39

 

STEVEN FLINCHED WHEN AVERY PUT A HAND ON HIS SHOULDER but he turned it into a shrug and thought he got away with that.

He answered Avery’s question with “Nothing.” Then he turned away so he wouldn’t have to look into Avery’s strangely flickering eyes.

Instead Steven looked longingly back down the moor to where he knew Shipcott was hiding in the mist. Not being able to see even the church spire made him feel very alone.

As he stood with his prickling back to the killer, the jigsaw pieces in Steven’s mind whirled and spun. Bits he recognized: a slice of Uncle Billy’s wide grin; a shakily traced map; a dent made in the moor by the blade of a blunt spade; on the box it said it was a fillit. He wrote a good letter. The pieces floated and scattered; he didn’t know where to start with them. So, like all good jigsaw builders, he started by finding a corner.

And that corner—to his utter surprise—was anger.

He’d thought his fear was all-embracing, but the anger was good. It anchored him and trumped fear for a moment and made him feel stronger.

Lewis was gone. Safe. Steven felt a pang that the last words he’d said to his friend had been harsh but shoved the pang aside. He’d done what he had to. This was his mess and so he’d taken care of Lewis.

Now all he had to do was escape the clutches of the psychopath who had baited his own little trap and then—in some crazy, nightmarish way—magicked his way out of prison and come here to kill him.

Harry Potter with a chain saw.

Steven laughed and shuddered at the same time, and felt bile sour his throat.

He swallowed hard and felt weak. He knew that if escape was all he wanted, he’d have taken his chance by now. He’d started this thing; he’d set it in motion. Now it was moving too fast and out of control, but Steven still felt a burning, jealous need to keep hold of it. All the thinking, all the digging, all the planning, all the good letters he wrote. He was so close that the thought of letting go now was at once unconscionable and so alluring that it made him think of tongues and Chantelle Cox. It would be so easy to let go, feel his cramped fingers creak open and release the burden he’d picked up so casually and carried for so long without ever really having a good grip on it.

But the stubborn streak that had kept him soaked, sunburned, and callused on the moor for three long years elbowed its way to the fore, trampling the dizzy panic Steven felt at overriding every instinct he possessed.

Now that it was just him and the killer alone, one thread of thought separated itself and pulsated more urgently than any other: He’d tried so long. He’d come so far. He’d done so much. He was so tired and he wanted to know. He needed to know. He had to know.

Which meant that—instead of hitting him with the spade and running for his life—he smiled at Avery.

“Fuck him.” He shrugged. “You got any more sandwiches?”

Steven watched the mist creep up the heather towards them. It was only forty or fifty feet below them now, moving so sluggishly it was almost imperceptible. By ten, it would be summer.

Avery had put down a second plastic bag for him to sit on—so close that their hips and shoulders were touching and he could feel the warmth of the man through his jeans and bloody shirt. It made him itch to move away, but he didn’t.

Now Steven stared at the last bit of Avery’s sandwich and knew that if he didn’t speak soon, his chance would be gone.