Blacklands: A Novel Read online

  Mason looked up and Avery’s heart lifted to see his sweet face. He waved the boy over and Mason sauntered towards the van.

  “Gimme directions?”

  Mason Dingle lifted his eyebrows in assent. Everything about him, Avery saw now, was like a small man. Here was a boy with older brothers, if he’d ever seen one. The way he slouched, his manly undereagerness to help, the cigarette tucked behind his tender little ear beside the shaven temples. But oh, his face! The face of an angel!

  Mason bent down to the window of the van, looking off into the distance as if he barely had time in his busy schedule for this.

  “Right, mate?”

  “Yeah,” said Avery, “can you show me on this map where the business park is?”

  “Just down there and take a left, mate.”

  “Can you show me on this map?”

  Mason sighed, then poked his head inside the van to look down at the map spread across Avery’s lap.

  “Can you point at it for me?”

  For a second Mason Dingle couldn’t take in what he was seeing, then he jerked slightly, bumping his head on the door frame. Avery had seen this reaction before. Now one of two things would happen: either the boy would start to redden and stammer and back rapidly away, or he would start to redden and stammer and feel compelled—because Avery was an adult who had asked him a question—to point at the area on the map, so that his hand was mere inches from it. When that happened, things could go anywhere—and sometimes had. Avery preferred the second reaction because it prolonged the encounter, but the first was good too—to see the fear and confusion—and the guilt—on their faces because, at the end of the day, they all wanted it. He himself was just more honest about it.

  But Mason Dingle took a third path; as he pulled backwards through the van window, he twisted the keys from the ignition. “You dirty old bastard!” he said, grinning, and held the keys up.

  Avery was instantly furious. “Give those back, you little shit!” He got out of the van, zipping himself up with some difficulty.

  Mason danced away from him, laughing. “Fuck you!” he yelled—and ran.

  Arnold Avery reevaluated Mason Dingle. Appearances had been deceptive. He had the face of an angel but obviously he was a tough kid. Therefore Avery expected the boy to reappear shortly with his keys and either a demand for money, or at least one older male relative or the police.

  The thought didn’t scare Avery. Mason Dingle’s street smarts had worked for him so far, but Avery guessed that they could also be used against him. Nobody believed nice children about things like this—let alone troublesome brats. Especially when the man being accused of such filth and perversion just sat around and waited for the police to arrive instead of behaving as if he had something to hide. So Avery lit a cigarette and waited in the playground—where he could not be surprised—for Mason Dingle to return.

  At first the police were disinclined to take Mason Dingle seriously. But he knew his rights and he was insistent, so two policemen finally put him in a squad car—with much warning about wasting police time—and drove him back to the playground, where they found the white van. They were checking that the keys Mason had produced did indeed fit the van when Arnold Avery approached angrily, and told them that the boy had stolen his keys and tried to hold them to ransom.

  “He said if I didn’t pay him he’d tell the police I tried to fiddle with him!”

  The police focus switched back to Mason and, while the boy told the truth in remarkable detail, Avery could see that the police believed his own version of events only too eagerly.

  And so everything was going Avery’s way until, with a sinking feeling, he saw a small boy approaching with a man who looked like a father on the warpath.

  While he maintained his composure with the two police officers, inside Avery was cursing his own stupidity. All he’d had to do was wait! Everything would have been okay if he’d only waited! But it was a playground, and playgrounds attracted children, and even though the stocky eight-year-old now bawling his way towards him wasn’t really his type, the first boy had taken so long to come back! What was he supposed to do?

  So, in the final analysis, it was all Mason Dingle’s fault. Although when Arnold Avery ventured this opinion to a homicide officer almost a year later—after half a dozen small bodies had been discovered in shallow graves on a rainswept Exmoor—the officer broke his nose with a single backhander, and his own solicitor merely shrugged.

  It all fell apart.

  Slowly but inexorably, connections were made, dots were joined, and Arnold Avery was charged with six counts of murder and three more of child abduction. The murder charges were limited to the number of bodies they could find on the moor, and the abduction charges limited by the items found in Avery’s home and car which could be positively linked to missing children—although Avery never admitted taking any of them. A one-armed Barbie doll belonged to ten-year-old Mariel Oxenburg of Winchester; a maroon blazer with a unicorn crest on the pocket had once warmed Paul Barrett of Westward Ho!, and a pair of nearly new Nike trainers found under the front passenger seat of the white van were proudly marked in felt tip under the tongues: Billy Peters.

  Chapter 3

  MRS. O’LEARY SAID THAT “SINCERELY” WAS THE WRONG WORD. In business, one wrote “yours faithfully.” Steven changed it but thought she must be wrong. He would rather be faithful to people he knew and loved than to the manager of the local supermarket whose fish had fallen so far below the advertised standards as to kill his grandmother.

  When he wrote his personal letter, “sincerely” sounded so stiff and formal. But, he thought pragmatically, it was Mrs. O’Leary doing the marking, so he’d better stick to her versions.

  Mrs. O’Leary pointed out his spelling error too, but didn’t fuss too much. She said his letter was very good; very authentic—and read it to the class.

  Steven wished she hadn’t. He felt the eyes of other boys branding him like laser tattoos. We’ll get you later for this, you arse creeper, is what they burned on the back of his neck. To be singled out so in class was to be doomed in the playground and he sighed at the thought of the next few days of dodging and hiding and sticking close to the teacher—“What’s wrong with you, Lamb? Go and play!”

  Luckily it didn’t happen often that he was so marked. Steven was only an average student, a quiet boy who rarely gave cause for concern, or even attention. When Mrs. O’Leary wrote the end-of-term reports, it took a second or two to recall the skinny dark-haired boy who matched the name on her register. Along with Chantelle Cox, Taylor Laughlan, and Vivienne Khan, Steven Lamb was a child only truly visible by his absence, when a cross next to his name gave him fleeting statistical interest.

  Steven spent lunchtime near the gym doors with Lewis, as usual. Lewis had cheese-and-pickle sandwiches and a Mars bar and Steven had fish paste and a two-fingered Kit Kat. Lewis refused to swap anything, and Steven couldn’t blame him.

  The three hooded boys played footie on the tarmac netball court, and only occasionally had the time to leer threateningly at Steven or to call him a wanker as the ball came down the left. One of them did pretend to throw it in his face, making Steven blink comically, and the boy cackled joylessly at him, but it was all bearable.

  “You want me to beat him up for you?” Lewis inquired through chocolate lips.

  “Nah, it’s all right.” Steven shrugged. “Thanks, though.”

  “Anytime. You just let me know.”

  Lewis was a little shorter than Steven, but outweighed him by twenty pounds of pure ego. Steven had never actually seen Lewis fight but it was generally accepted by both of them that Lewis was a match for anybody right up to—but not including—Year 8. Michael Cox, brother of semivisible Chantelle, was in Year 8 and he was over six feet tall and was black, to boot. Everyone knew the black kids were tougher and that Michael Cox was the toughest of them all.

  Other than Michael Cox, Steven reckoned Lewis was a match for anybody. But even Lewis coul
dn’t fight all three hoodies, and that was surely what he’d get if he decided to fight one. They both knew it, so they changed the subject by unspoken agreement.

  “The old man’s taking me to the match tomorrow. Want to come?”

  The match, Steven knew, involved the local team, the Blacklanders. In the absence of a nearby top-class league soccer team, Lewis and his father had plunged headlong into pragmatic support for the Blacklanders—a motley collection of local half-talent—and Lewis followed their fortunes with the same fervor that his classmates did Liverpool or Manchester United.

  Going to the football was the only thing Lewis and his dad ever did together.

  His dad was a short, ginger, bespectacled man who rarely spoke. He wore slacks beyond his years and did something in an office in Minehead but Lewis had never cared enough to find out exactly what. “Something in the law,” he’d shrugged when Steven asked. At home Lewis’s dad did the Telegraph crossword and researched his family tree online. Once a week in the winter, he and Lewis’s mother went to the village hall to play badminton—a risible game made even worse by the occasional glimpse Steven had had of them in their kit, his pale curly leg hairs and her maxi thighs in a miniskirt.

  In all the years Steven and Lewis had been friends, Lewis’s dad had only ever said three different things directly to him: “Hello, Steven,” on many occasions, “You boys having fun?” whenever he accidentally stumbled on them engaged in spying, and once—embarrassingly—“Who traipsed dog shit through the bloody kitchen?”

  In common with his much larger, more vibrant mother, Lewis generally ignored his dad. In Steven’s company he greeted everything his dad said with an eye-rolling tut or truculent silence.

  Once Steven had gone to Minehead with Lewis’s family to see a sand-castle competition. By the time they got there a summer downpour had reduced the magnificent creations to vague, melting mounds, so that the fairytale castle looked like the Titanic, and the life-sized orca looked like a rugby ball. Lewis’s dad had nevertheless wandered from lump to lump in his Berghaus waterproofs, photographing each from several angles and trying to enthuse Lewis by repeating variations on the theme of “You can see how it would have looked!” All the while Lewis and his mother shivered under a flapping umbrella, rolling their eyes and whining loudly about getting inside for a cream tea.

  While he hadn’t quite had the guts to abandon Lewis and show support for the sand castles, Steven had stood a little way away from his friend, his mother, and the umbrella. He preferred to get wet than to be associated with their scornful dismissal of such sad enthusiasm.

  He thought it was a waste of a father.

  Lewis brought him back to the here and now by adding temptingly: “Batten’s off the injury list.”

  Steven shook his head. “Can’t.”

  “But it’s Saturday.”

  Steven shrugged. Lewis shook his head pityingly. “Your loss, mate.”

  Steven doubted that; he’d seen the Blacklanders play.

  Saturday was dry and, if not warm, at least not particularly cold for January. Steven dug two complete holes by lunchtime and ate a strawberry jam sandwich. He always made his own Saturday sandwiches, so never had to suffer the indignity of fish paste. He’d taken the crusts—nobody cared about crusts. One of them had a speck of mold on it and he picked it off with a grimy finger. It made him think of Uncle Jude.

  Of all the uncles Steven had had, Uncle Jude was his favorite. Uncle Jude was tall—really tall, and had thick, lowering eyebrows and a deep, Hammer Horror voice.

  Uncle Jude was a gardener and he had a four-year-old truck and employed three men, but his fingernails were always dirty, which Nan hated. Steven’s mum always said it was good clean dirt—not what she called gutter grime. Of course, that was before they broke up. After that, his mum’s only answer to Nan’s criticism of Uncle Jude was a slight tightening around the lips and a shorter fuse with Steven and Davey.

  It was Uncle Jude who had given Steven his spade. Steven had told him he wanted to dig a vegetable patch in the backyard. Of course he never had but Uncle Jude was cool about it. He’d come into the kitchen and peer through the rain at the bramble-choked jungle and say: “How are the tomatoes, Steve?” Or “I see the beans are really taking off.” And he and Steven would exchange wry smiles that made Steven’s heart expand a little in his chest.

  Sometimes after tea, Uncle Jude played Frankenstein, which meant he would chase Steven and Davey around the house, lurching slowly from room to room with his arms outspread to catch the boys, booming menacingly, “Ho ho ho! Run and hide but Frankenstein will find you!”

  Steven was nearly ten at the time and old enough to know better, but Uncle Jude’s huge size, and three-year-old Davey’s hysterical shrieks, would inject genuine fear into him. He’d pretend to be playing for Davey’s sake, but—hidden behind the sofa or wrapped in the front-room curtain with his hair twisted up into the thick green cloth, waiting for Uncle Jude to find them—he knew that his shallow, fluttering breath and hammering heart could not lie.

  Unable to bear the tension, Davey invariably cracked, and would bounce up from their hiding place and rush imploringly at Uncle Jude’s legs, crying: “I’m Frankenstein’s friend!” Steven would grab the opportunity to stand up too, rolling his eyes at Davey for spoiling the game; secretly relieved it was over.

  The watery winter sun warmed his back a little as he thought of Uncle Jude. He was three uncles back. After him had been Uncle Neil, who had only lasted about two weeks before disappearing with his mother’s purse and half a chicken dinner, and most recently there was Uncle Brett, who sat and watched TV with religious fervor until his nan and his mum had a blazing row over his head during Countdown. When Uncle Brett told them to shut up for the conundrum, they both turned on him. After that he didn’t come back.

  His mother was between uncles now. Steven didn’t always like his uncles but he was always sorry when they left. His was a small, lonely family and any swelling of the ranks was to be welcomed, even if it always turned out to be temporary.

  His spade bit into the ground and hit something hard. Steven bent and picked the soil aside with his hands. Usually what he hit was a rock or a root, but this sounded different.

  Steven’s stomach flipped as he saw the pale bone smoothness exposed in the rich dark earth. He knelt and scratched at the thick, root-enmeshed dirt of the moor. He had no other tools, just the brute spade, and he felt the soil pressing up painfully under his nails.

  He could get his finger under it now, and tried to lever it out. It budged only millimeters, but enough to expose a tooth.

  A tooth.

  With his breath stuck somewhere hard in his chest, Steven leaned down and touched the tooth.

  It wobbled slightly within the jawbone.

  He sat back on his heels. The sky and the heather swirled around him. He looked to one side and retched into the gorse. Strings of mucus ran from his mouth and nose to the ground and, for a vivid second, he felt his own fluids tying him to the moor, tugging him downwards face-first into the soil, pulling him under so that his nose and mouth became clogged with dirt and roots and mulch and small biting insects.

  He jerked his head up and scrambled backwards to his feet.

  Steven wiped his nose and mouth on his bare arm, and spat several times to clear his throat. The acid taste of sick lingered in the back of his mouth.

  From a dozen feet away, he peered gingerly into the shallow hole. He had to take two steps forward before he could see the jawbone, then he stood still.

  He had done it.

  He had done what the police with their heat-seeking rays and their sniffer dogs and their fingertip searches could not do with all their manpower and technology.

  He had found Billy Peters.

  And he had touched his tooth.

  His stomach heaved again at the thought, but he swallowed it.

  Suddenly Steven felt weak. He sat down heavily on a cushion of heather and cotton grass.


  His sense of relief was palpable.

  He was better!

  And now his nan would see that and everything would change. She would stop standing at the window waiting for an impossible boy to come home; she would start to notice him and Davey, and not just in a mean, spiteful way, but in ways that a grandmother should notice them—with love, and secrets, and fifty pence for sweets.

  And if Nan loved him and Davey, maybe she and Mum would be nicer to each other; and if Nan and Mum were nicer to each other, they would all be happier, and be a normal family, and … well … just everything would be … better.

  And this was what it all came down to—this smooth, cream-colored curve of bone and the boy-tooth within it. Steven thought about Uncle Billy’s toothbrush sweeping over that yellowing molar and had to quickly push the image away.