Blacklands

He grunted and started again, his voice still cracked and whispery.

“I think I know where Uncle Billy is.”

Her hand on his head twitched minutely, and Steven flinched under it in sudden fearful memory, but he didn’t pull away. He forced himself carefully back to calmness and let her hand stay there, not hurting him, warm and cozy on his head.

He could feel her thinking, as if through the very flesh that connected them.

Nan didn’t say anything for the longest time and, when she did, she smoothed his hair gently as she spoke.

“You get better,” she said. “That’s the important thing.”

Author’s Note

BLACKLANDS WAS NEVER INTENDED TO BE A CRIME NOVEL. I thought it was going to be a very small story about a boy and his grandmother.

The spark for it came when I saw the mother of a long-murdered child on TV and started to wonder about the impact of crimes such as Avery’s, how they affect people for years, lifetimes—maybe even generations.

I thought: If I were the grandson of a woman whose son had been murdered, how would that affect me? What would my life be like? Immediately I got an overwhelming sense of the sad fragmentation of a family, which went beyond all my preconceptions of forgiveness and noble suffering. Already thinking as a twelve-year-old boy, my only question then was: How can I change this?

As Steven, writing to Avery for help seemed entirely logical. As Avery, manipulating this seeker of truth for my own gratification was a cruel pleasure. From there, the feeling that this could all spiral out of control drove Blacklands into unexpectedly dark territory.

This is a work of the imagination. My characters are not based on any real person, living or dead, and any similarity to actual persons is entirely coincidental. However, Avery’s escape over the Longmoor wall is inspired by an actual prison break which took place in 2003.

Acknowledgments

BLACKLANDS WAS WRITTEN WITH THE WELCOME HELP OF A WRITers’ Bursary from Academi in Cardiff. Thanks to Christina Pomery for her help with prison research, and to Jack Cryer for being the hand of Steven. I am grateful to my agent, Jane Gregory, and the team at Simon & Schuster for taking a chance on a first timer. Also to Eve and Michael Williams-Jones for their generosity in instituting the Carl Foreman Award, without which I would never have been able to give up the day job and become a writer of any description. Last but not least, thank you to all my wonderful friends and family, who always had faith in me—even when I was sure they were wrong.

About the Author

BELINDA BAUER HAS LIVED IN ENGLAND, SOUTH AFRICA, CALIfornia, and Wales. She enjoys observing life and then reporting back.