Blacklands Page 11

  “What do you mean, lost?” Lettie was not furious yet, but she was well on the way and Steven knew she’d get there before long.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “How can you lose your anorak and your shoes? And not know where?”

  “And ruin his socks,” Nan chimed in. “Took me weeks to knit those with my arthritis. Doesn’t appreciate anything.”

  “I did appreciate them!” he said, angry that she could think otherwise. Hadn’t she seen how he’d kept them for special? The thought made him start to cry again and some part of his mind sighed wearily at that. He was so fed up with crying today; he could hardly believe he had more of it left in him.

  “Stevie’s crying, Mum!” Davey was intrigued.

  “Fuck off, Davey,” he snapped.

  “You dare use that word in this house!”

  Lettie slapped the back of his head—not hard, but stunning him anyway, and shocking them all into a horrible, ticking silence.

  His mother never slapped his head or face. She’d lash out at his arms or legs occasionally, but the head was off limits on the unspoken understanding that only drunks and council tenants slapped their children there.

  Steven wanted to apologize. He wanted it so badly. He wanted his mother to hold him again the way she had the other day. He wanted to lay his head on her shoulder and be a baby again and not have to worry about his socks or his shoes or his anorak or the hoodies or the spade or bodies or serial killers. He wanted to curl up in bed with hot milk and sugar and have someone sing him to sleep while they stroked his hair.

  He was so tired of his life.

  But she’d slapped his head.

  So, instead of apologizing, he yelled: “Fuck you too!” then pushed past his mother, ran upstairs, and slammed his bedroom door so hard that she came pounding up the stairs in a fury.

  He knew he’d gone too far.

  If she hadn’t been so angry Lettie would have seen how scared he was—standing by his bed, eyes wide, hands splayed before him in surrender, no longer sure she had any control.

  “Mum, I’m sorry!”

  But it was too late and she slapped his head again—and then again, and hit his arms and hands and ears and, finally, rained slaps and weak, side-fisted girl punches down on his back as he cowered over his bed with his head between his elbows.

  It was Davey’s hysterical screaming that brought Lettie back to her senses at last. She gathered her favorite son into her arms and shushed him gently.

  “You see how you’ve upset Davey!” she shouted at Steven, in a voice shrill with guilt. “Now come down for tea.”

  “I don’t want any tea.” His voice was muffled in the bedspread.

  “Fine,” said Lettie, hefting Davey higher onto her hip. “Don’t have any, then.”

  Steven heard them leave and go downstairs. He heard Lettie’s voice, low and gentle with Davey, and some part of him understood that she was trying to make up for what she’d done—even if she wasn’t making it up to him.

  He sniffled and hitched and started to feel the places where his mother’s ring must have caught him—his left ear, his left wrist, a stinging on his shoulder blade. He put his finger to the ear and found a little spot of blood. His ears also rang a little and his right cheek burned from a slap. He crept onto the bed, turned to the wall, and curled more tightly into a ball. He hugged himself, suddenly cold but not wanting to move again to get under the covers.

  The touch of something soft on his shoulder startled him. Nan had picked up the bedspread behind him and folded it over him. He met her eyes briefly, but she straightened up and turned to leave.

  “Nan?”

  He expected her to stop and look back at him, the way it happened in the movies, but she kept going, disappearing down the hallway.

  His voice was cracked with crying, but he spoke anyway, as if she were listening to him; as if she cared.

  “I did appreciate the socks. I kept them for special.”

  Steven thought he heard her pause at the top of the stairs, but he couldn’t be sure.

  Chapter 20

  THE PHOTOS WERE CRAP.

  The ones he’d taken from the top of Dunkery Beacon were blurred by wind shake and the one he’d taken from the car park had the front wing of a car encroaching into the left-hand side of the frame.

  But because he’d spent the last of his pocket money on getting the film developed—and because it was at least in focus—that was the one Steven sent to Arnold Avery.

  Chapter 21

  PRISON OFFICER RYAN FINLAY ENJOYED CONFISCATING PHOTOS sent to prisoners, and today was no exception.

  Usually the photos were blurred, scuzzy shots of prisoners’ wives and girlfriends lying on unmade beds wearing mismatched lingerie. Sometimes the pictures included some small, careless domestic detail that shattered whatever shaky fantasy was being offered. A tabby cat; a grubby child peering through the bars of a cot; Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes on the bedroom floor.

  Sometimes the prisoners got their photos and sometimes they didn’t. In this respect, Ryan Finlay was god.

  Total nudity meant immediate confiscation, as did any lewd act or simulation of the same. Those photos were supposed to be destroyed and, if the prisoner’s wife was a dog, they were—although not before much passing round and disparaging remarks in the staff canteen. The prisoner concerned would merely get a tag on his letter, if one had been enclosed, which said “Contents Confiscated.”

  Sean Ellis had never had a letter without a tag. His wife was so hot and so uninhibited that the photos she often enclosed formed the backbone of Officer Ryan Finlay’s personal collection, and the bank robber who’d shot two tellers in the face at a small branch of Barclays in Gloucestershire had probably forgotten what his wife looked like under the demure beige mac she always wore to visit him. Ellis never complained, and that made Finlay and the other men laugh. The poor bastard probably thought his missus was sending him pictures of the family mutt.

  Today Finlay and PO Andy Ralph sat at the Formica desk in the post room, carelessly ripping open envelopes addressed to prisoners.

  “What do you think?” Ralph held up a photo from a freshly torn envelope. It showed a small blond girl with no front teeth, dangling a docile cat down her chest.

  “Who’s it for?”

  Ralph glanced at the envelope. “Karim Abdullahai.”

  Finlay shook his head. “That pervert’s as black as the ace of spades. Doesn’t look like a relative to me.”

  Ralph—whose own skin tone was a shade away from coal—tossed the photo aside and put a tag on the letter without comment.

  Mrs. Ellis’s photo was relatively tame today—her face blank as she lifted up a pale blue tank top to expose her perfect breasts.

  “Jesus, would you look at the tits on that.”

  Ralph peered over and grinned.

  “Double fucking handful.” Finlay sighed. It had been years since he’d had a nice firm double handful. He’d have needed a cardboard box to cart his Rose’s stretched, wrinkled tits about in.

  The photo was hardly lewd and, if it had been any other wife or girlfriend, Finlay would have passed it on without hesitation, but he couldn’t have Ellis realizing that all those photos he’d never seen might look very much like this one and starting to make a fuss, so he slapped a tag on the accompanying letter and stuffed Mrs. Ellis in his pocket.

  They worked in silence for a few minutes, struggling to read barely legible letters, sorting photos and tiny gifts—six safety-razor blades, a dozen Trojans, Origami for Beginners.

  Ralph looked briefly at a photo of a tired-looking redhead holding a pizza box, and read from the accompanying letter: “ … at night I think about you fukking me up the arss…”

  He sighed. “Misspelled fucking and arse.”

  He took the censoring black felt-tip and corrected both spellings before putting it on the Go pile and picking up the next letter, which was addressed to Arnold Avery.

  There was no lett
er and the badly composed photograph barely warranted a glance. It certainly did not warrant seeking the permission of the senior screw. Andy Ralph was well able to discern what was lewd, what was inciting, and what was fetishistic. He didn’t need anyone to tell him that a photo of a car and a rainy hillside was none of the above. Least of all Ryan Finlay.

  The racist Paddy bastard.

  When Arnold Avery saw the photo he felt faint. He thought he might collapse with the sheer erotic charge of it. He immediately wanted to cry that it was not night, not dark, even though his cell was always gloomy because of the board across the window. Well, Leaver might have blocked the view of one moor through the bars, but he held the view of another in his hand that was even sweeter.

  His killer’s eye had found the spot immediately. Yasmin Gregory. There she was. Or there she had been until sometime after his arrest when the forensics teams had moved in and Exmoor had started to give up its grim secrets. They hadn’t allowed him back on the moor, even to point out the bodies. They knew too well it was what he wanted—one more chance to feel the holding soil between his fingers; one more peer into the filthy holes he’d dug out of the heather—and they cruelly denied him that even when they finally had to call off the search for more victims. But they couldn’t erase his memories. Couldn’t then, and couldn’t now, as they washed over him like a spicy balm.

  He had parked in this place. Close to where the car was in the picture SL had taken. He had carried YG up that narrow track towards the summit of the rounded hill. He could feel her now, light in his arms, and remember how she’d felt under him when she was still warm and hurting.

  He shook himself like a dog. Not now! Not now! This was too good, too intense a feeling to waste in daylight. He had to stop looking at the photo. He had to do something to distract himself until lights-out.

  He slid the photo under his pillow and opened the book he was reading. It was a good book—The Black Echo—and until SL’s photo had arrived, it had been gripping him. But no longer. Now the book held no interest, and a dozen times in the next hour Avery had to put it down and steal a hand under his pillow to touch the photo.

  Lunch was a small relief, although his leg bobbed nervously throughout.

  The afternoon dragged horribly; supper brought more brief respite. Lights-out was at 10 P.M. but at 8:30 P.M. Avery took the photo from under the pillow and studied it anew, storing up the image for when he was alone in the dark.

  Avery guessed SL had used a cheap camera. Everything seemed to be in focus; anyone even half competent with a better camera would have adjusted the focal length to blur the foreground and highlight Dunkery Beacon. Despite this his eyes were drawn inexorably to the patch of ground where YG had been—between two burial mounds that lumped the heather either side of it, about three-quarters of the way to the summit.

  Emotion and memory washed over Avery.

  The day had been clear, not grey like in this photo. The sky had been pure blue and there were many walkers around, so Avery had had to wait until after sunset before his car was alone on the gravel patch; before he could take her from the boot and carry her up to her final resting place.

  A bitter knife twisted in his guts as he thought of her taken from the place he had made for her and buried somewhere else—somewhere not of his choosing. Even worse, somewhere he didn’t know. He was sure the location of her new grave had been in the papers, but those papers had been kept from him. All he had left of Yasmin Gregory was the memories. And this photograph.

  And he might have been able to see the grave of John Elliot too, if only SL hadn’t blocked his view with that stupid car. John Elliot was not his favorite. The boy had pissed on him. Avery shuddered at the memory. John Elliot’s squeezed-shut eyes, his runny nose blowing desperate bubbles of snot because he couldn’t breathe through his mouth anymore. That had been bad enough but then, right before he killed him, John Elliot’s bladder surrendered in sheer terror, leaving urine on Avery’s good trousers. He’d made the boy pay, but he’d had to throw the trousers away; and the shoes. Hush Puppies, they’d been—not cheap—but the thought of the boy’s fluids on them made him sick. Even now that thought made his flesh crawl.

  Avery shook the memory from him; it was spoiling this moment. He turned his attention back to the photograph. Yes, the car was in the way. It was a pain. Another reason he knew SL was no photographer—poor framing.

  For the first time since receiving the photo, Avery turned his piercing gaze to the car, as if he might be able to see right through it to the moorland behind.

  All he could see of the car was the front wing, the wing mirror, and part of the door. It was dark blue and Avery couldn’t tell what kind of car it was, only that it was infuriatingly solid and in his way.

  It was in his nature to feel cheated, and cheated was exactly what he felt. He glared at the car angrily, projecting fury that could not be completely assuaged by his eyes straying inexorably to the gravesite of Yasmin Gregory.

  And then Avery’s eyes widened and he brought the photo up so that it almost touched his nose.

  A single sharp gasp escaped him and then his breathing stopped altogether.

  If he hadn’t been obsessing over the car he might—would—never have seen it! A river of ice ran down his back at the thought of what he’d have missed.

  Neatly caught in the wing mirror was the small but in-focus reflection of the photographer.

  And although the image was tiny, everything changed for Arnold Avery at that moment. The feelings that seeing Exmoor again had sparked in him shrank so small that they were swept away in an instant by a tsunami of stunned, choking, old-familiar excitement that sent blood rushing to his groin and saliva flooding his mouth.

  SL was a boy.

  The thought spun and careened crazily around his head like a firework in a small room.

  A boy.

  Just a boy.

  His eyes stung and his racing heart pounded in his ears as he stared breathlessly at the image.

  A boy. Maybe ten or eleven. Skinny. Dark hair tousled by the wind. Blue jeans, grubby white trainers. The image was tiny and the face obscured by the camera … but if there was one shape that Arnold Avery’s brain was hardwired to recognize, it was that of a child.

  Avery sucked in a new breath with a shuddering whimper of sharp desire.

  SL was a boy.

  A boy who’d shown him possibilities.

  A boy who’d handed him power.

  A boy who—by cleverly inserting his own image into the seemingly innocent photo of Dunkery Beacon—had issued to Arnold Avery the very clearest of invitations …

  Chapter 22

  UNCLE JUDE CAME BACK.

  One day they were just four and the next they were five.

  Steven was in his room struggling with 3x – 5y and all its mystifying variations, when he heard a creak in the passageway and Uncle Jude’s voice ask: “How’s the vegetable patch?”

  Steven looked round in surprise, which he quickly tried to conceal. It wasn’t cool to look too happy to see someone.

  “Tomatoes are rubbish,” he shrugged, “but the potatoes are great.”

  Uncle Jude grinned. “Well, any fool can grow potatoes. Look at the Irish.”

  “You’re Irish!”

  “That’s how I know.”

  He wandered into the bedroom, poking about at Davey’s things, the grin never leaving his face, and Steven realized that Uncle Jude wasn’t trying to hide how happy he was to see him, and that made him ashamed that he had. He swung his legs off the bed and threw his arms around Uncle Jude’s waist, feeling the big man’s hands on his back, patting him hello again after too long.

  The sudden urge to tell Uncle Jude everything rose in him like a madness.

  Let Uncle Jude take over the making of decisions; let Uncle Jude visit Arnold Avery in prison and beat a location out of him; let Uncle Jude dig up Billy and get all the glory—Steven didn’t care anymore, he just wanted it to be over.

 
He opened his mouth—

  “I see your nan’s trolley’s still going strong.”

  Steven nodded, suddenly unsure of his own voice.

  “See her out and about with it. Pleased as punch.”

  Steven hesitated, then nodded. He didn’t want to spoil this good subject. He knew Uncle Jude was not just being nice; Nan loved her trolley and took it out with her even when she wasn’t going shopping. Her hips played her up and the now-sturdy trolley was also a means of support for her odd, rolling gait.

  “Look how tall you got.”

  “Yeah. All my trousers are too short.”

  “I hear ankle whackers are the next big thing.”

  Steven snorted and they parted.

  “Where have you been?” He tried to keep the accusation out of his voice, but it still came out whiney.

  “About.”

  “Why didn’t you come to see us?” Once again, Steven could have kicked himself. Uncle Jude was not his father. Why should he come to see them if he was no longer going out with his mother?

  But Uncle Jude just spread his hands and sighed. “You know how it is, Steven. Relationships.”

  Steven felt a little swell of pride that Uncle Jude would say that to him—as if he knew how relationships worked. Coming hot on the heels of his mother assuming he knew how sex worked, it made him feel like both a grown-up and a fake.

  “I suppose so,” he said.

  The question he was desperate to ask stuck in his throat, and he was grateful for that.

  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?”