Blacklands Page 6

The eleventh of June had been the first day of the trial at Cardiff. What this meant, Steven quickly realized, was that the prosecution told the court the highlights. It was like Match of the Day or those slick American TV dramas that always started with “Previously on ER…”

  Previously on Arnold Avery—Serial Killer…

  The prosecution barrister, whose name had been (and likely still was) Mr. Pritchard-Quinn, QC, made it all sound as if Avery was undoubtedly, indisputably, irrevocably guilty. There was no room in his mouth for “perhaps” or “maybe” because it was so full of words like “callous,” “cold-blooded,” and “brutal.”

  Mr. Pritchard-Quinn told the court how Avery had approached children and asked them for directions. Then he would offer them a ride home. If they took it, they were dead. If they didn’t, they were quite often dead anyway, once he had tugged them headfirst through the driver’s window.

  Steven marvelled at the sheer cheek of it. The simplicity! No stalking, no hiding, no grabbing and running, just a child leaning over too far—a little off balance—and a shockingly strong and fast hand. Steven thought of Uncle Billy’s feet kicking through the open window and felt his stomach slowly roll over.

  “Make it work.”

  Steven looked up. Davey had brought the pink jacks to the table. Now he held two of them out to Steven, pressing them together.

  “What?”

  “Make it work!”

  “What do you mean?”

  Davey got his grizzly face on. “It won’t stick! Make it stick!” At the same time he tried to force the two jacks together as if willpower alone could meld matter.

  “They don’t go together. That’s not what they’re for.”

  Davey looked at the jacks with mounting discontent.

  “Look, I’ll show you.”

  Steven picked the jacks off the floor and found the small red rubber ball where it had rolled against the wall. He bounced the ball and picked up a jack, then bounced it again and picked up two.

  “See? That’s how it works.”

  The disgust on Davey’s face was plain.

  “You want to try?”

  Davey shook his head, slowly working out that he’d spent a large portion of his birthday money on something he had no interest in.

  “I don’t want them,” he said crossly. “I want my Curly Wurly.”

  “You can have it when we go,” said Steven.

  He knew the moment the words were out of his mouth that they were an invitation to Davey, and Davey seized it and RSVP’d in an instant …

  “I want to go.”

  “In a minute.”

  “I want to go now!”

  “In a minute, Davey.”

  Davey threw himself onto the dusty tiled floor and started to grizzle loudly, flailing his arms and legs about and scattering his jacks across the room.

  “Shut up!” Steven shushed but it was too late.

  Oliver appeared in the doorway, and they were out.

  The rain had stopped and the sun was trying its best but the cars still hissed past and sprayed unwary pedestrians.

  Steven knew he was walking too fast for Davey but he didn’t care; he yanked and tugged at his little brother to keep him going, ignoring the boy’s whines as he half jogged to keep up. It had been a wasted day; they only came to Barnstaple three times a year—Christmas, school clothes shopping in August, and for birthdays. Steven’s was in December, so his birthday trip was combined with the Christmas trip, but this was Davey’s birthday trip—1 March—so it would be months before Mum brought them back in to moan about the size of Steven’s feet and the rips in his school shirts.

  And what did he have to show for it? Nothing. A crude map and an enemy in the form of Oliver who would probably never let him back into the archives, or perhaps even the library. Stupid Davey with his stupid jacks.

  As they hurried, the faces of the throng of shoppers started to emerge at Steven as if he were noticing for the first time that a crowd was made up of individuals.

  Individual whats? Individual farmers? Chemists? Perverts? Killers?

  Steven felt a sudden eerie fascination with the shoppers of Barnstaple. Arnold Avery would have shopped. He would have appeared normal to his neighbors, wouldn’t he? The books Steven had read under his sheets were filled with quotes from friends—even family members—who were baffled when their “normal” neighbor, son, brother, cousin was exposed as a homicidal maniac. The thought of Arnold Avery or someone like him walking free on this street made Steven feel nervous. He looked around him warily and his grip tightened on Davey’s hand.

  A grey-haired man stared about as his wife cooed over something in Monsoon’s window, his eyes hooded and predatory.

  A girl in a dirty skirt played an old guitar badly and sang “A Whiter Shade of Pale” in a dull monotone while her lurcher shivered on a wet blanket, too dispirited to make a break for it.

  A young man walked towards them. Scruffy yellow hair like Kurt Cobain, a brown goatee, bike jacket. Alone. Was alone bad? Steven caught his eye and wished he hadn’t. The young man appeared uninterested, but maybe that was a ruse. Maybe he would walk past Steven and Davey to lull them into unwariness and then turn and slip his fingers around Davey’s right arm, starting a tug-of-war which a screaming, pleading Steven could never hope to win, as shoppers stepped politely around them, not wanting to get involved …

  “Ow, Stevie! You’re hurting!”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  They were almost at Banburys.

  “Where you going, Lamb?”

  The hoodies.

  Steven’s heart bumped hard, then sank; he was a good runner and fear made him a very good one. On a Saturday in Barnstaple he would have lost the hoodies easily. Without Davey, that is. His anger at his brother flared again.

  “Nowhere.” Steven didn’t look into their faces.

  “We’re going to meet Mummy,” said Davey. “We’re going to have cakes.”

  The hoodies laughed, and one made his voice squeaky and gay. “Going to meet Mummy. Going to have cakes.”

  Davey laughed too and Steven suddenly felt his anger swing from his brother and redirect itself at the leering hoodies. He couldn’t fight them, and if he stayed where he was he was going to get pounded. His only advantage was surprise—right now, while Davey was laughing …

  Emboldened by the crowds of shoppers, Steven lunged past the hoodies, almost pulling Davey off his feet. The three boys were momentarily stunned by his sheer nerve. Then they came after him.

  Davey was initially surprised by the speed of the move but one look at Steven’s face told him this was serious and he did his best to keep up. Elbows and hips banged his head as Steven towed him heedlessly through the crowds. The pair of them bounced off shoppers like two small, scared pinballs.

  If he’d been alone, Steven would have run as far and as fast as he could, but with Davey in tow he knew he had to make every step count, so he headed straight for Banburys’ glass doors a mere twenty yards away.

  The hoodies realized his destination and tried to cut Steven off. They weren’t as fast, but they were more brutal and less inclined to go around people. Davey screamed as the crowds parted to show the hoodies just feet away from him.

  A woman with a buggy wandered unsuspectingly into their path.

  “Fuck!”

  One of the hoodies crashed over the buggy and the other two were distracted long enough for Steven and Davey to burst through the glass doors of Banburys.

  A fat, middle-aged security guard immediately turned towards them, and Steven forced himself to stop running. Davey peered behind them, scared although he didn’t know why.

  Outside, the hoodies were hurling insults behind them at the angry mother, and barrelling towards the doors.

  “Stevie … ?”

  “Ssssh!” Steven jerked his hand to make him pay attention and led him at a sedate pace towards the racks of bags, beads, and belts. The security guard frowned—stymied in his readiness fo
r action now that the two boys had slowed right down and started to look like customers.

  The glass doors banged open and the hoodies ran straight into the guard.

  Steven looked back as he and Davey stepped onto the escalator. The hoodies were angrily yelling about their rights while the security guard hustled them out of the doors.

  “We’ll get you, Lamb!”

  Polite shoppers looked around, confused. Steven reddened and looked straight ahead; Davey gripped his hand as if he’d never let go.

  Chapter 10

  AVERY WAS SURPRISED. THE LETTER SAID NOTHING! IT DID NOT beg, it did not plead, did not offer to help him at his parole hearings—the first of which had already taken place without him, and had led to his transfer from Heavitree to the lower-category Longmoor.

  He read the letter again and a slow anger started to smoulder inside him. His own letter had been offhand and cryptic; he knew, because he’d taken some days to work out the precise tone he wanted to convey—ignorant, to get past the censors, and yet with enough of a tease in it to tempt a smart and determined reader into an answer. Avery’s in-tray had been empty for eighteen long years and he barely dared admit even to himself the thrill it gave him to receive a letter. Even more, to receive a letter dealing with his favorite subject. And—the ultimate—to receive a letter from someone connected in some way with the family of one of the children.

  SL’s first letter had opened for Arnold Avery a Pandora’s box of memory and excitement. He had started with WP and examined that memory from every aspect; it had taken him days—and those were days when he was no longer held at Her Majesty’s pleasure, but in the grip of his own; days when Officer Finlay’s blue-veined nose lost the power to provoke him; days when being handed a small paper tub of snot instead of mustard with his hamburger was water off a duck’s back. They were days when he was free.

  Then he had gone back to the beginning and savored each of the children anew, and prolonged the ecstasy to almost a month’s duration.

  And now this letter.

  SL had promised to be a serious correspondent but he was a tease. Like a woman! Like a child! In fact, he wouldn’t be surprised if SL was a woman after all! How dare SL start a correspondence and then send him this nothing of a letter? SL could go fuck herself!

  Angrily he folded the single A5 sheet to tear it to pieces—then noticed something on the back of the paper.

  Avery frowned and held it up to the light but that made it disappear. He tilted the page until he could see what it was. His heart lurched in his chest.

  Arnold Avery hammered on his cell door and shouted for a pencil.

  The A5 paper SL had used was good quality. It was better than good quality—it was thick, almost cardlike. Avery had taken art at school and thought it was watercolor paper, with its slightly textured finish.

  Avery took a long careful time to rub over the back of the letter with the blunt pencil he’d had to sign for through the hatch.

  Drawing on a piece of paper laid over this one, SL (whom he now thought of as a man once more, for the cleverness of this communication) had impressed a single wavering, yet somehow deliberate line which travelled crookedly round from the top of the paper in a large loop. Inside the line were the initials LD and a short way below LD were the initials SL.

  The only other symbol impressed on the page was a question mark.

  Avery almost laughed. The message was childlike in its simplicity. With a line and four letters which would mean nothing to anyone but him, SL was showing him the outline of Exmoor; he was showing Avery he knew where Luke Dewberry’s body had been found and where he was in relation to that, and he was asking again—where is Billy Peters?

  Arnold Avery smiled happily. He had his correspondence.

  Chapter 11

  WHEN HE WAS YOUNGER, GOOD THINGS SEEMED TO HAPPEN TOO fast for Arnold Avery. Things died too easily and too soon. Birds—which he lured to a seed table and caught in a net—were despicable in their surrender. A friend’s white mouse sat meek and trusting as he stamped on its head. The struggles of Lenny, his grandmother’s fat tabby, were explosive at first but faded quickly as he held it underwater in her bright white bathtub.

  None of them challenged him. None of them pleaded, begged, lied, or threatened him. Sure, Lenny had scratched him, but that was avoidable; the next cat he drowned—black and white Bibs—tore madly at the motorcycle gauntlets he’d stolen from a car boot sale.

  From an early age he read reports of children snatched from cars or playgrounds and found strangled just hours later, and was confused by the waste. If someone went to all the risk of stealing the ultimate prize—a child—why murder it so shortly after abduction? It made no sense to Avery.

  At the age of thirteen he locked a smaller boy in an old coal bunker and kept him there for almost a whole day—afraid to damage him but enjoying the control he had over him. Eight-year-old Timothy Reed had laughed at first, then asked, then demanded, then hammered on the doors, then threatened to tell, then threatened to kill, then had become very, very quiet. After that the pleading had started—the cajoling, the promises, the desperate entreaties, the tears. Avery had been thrilled as much by his own daring as by Timothy’s pathetic cries. He had let him out before it got dark and told him it was a test which he had passed. He and Timothy were now secret friends. The younger boy shook in terror as he agreed that Arnold was his secret friend and never to tell.

  And he meant to keep that secret.

  After a few weeks of wariness, Timothy Reed started to respond to Arnold’s friendly hellos. He could not help accepting the stolen Scuba Action Man or the pilfered sweets. Two months after the bunker incident, Timothy Reed watched as Arnold tortured a weedy nine-year-old bully to tears and a grovelling apology. The bully sent out word in the playground and Timothy was pathetically grateful to have an older, bigger boy as an ally and protector.

  And once Timothy Reed looked on him as a hero, Arnold sensed the time was right to call in the kind of favor only a very close—very secret—friend might grant.

  Arnold Avery abused Timothy Reed until the child’s reversals of behavior and plummeting schoolwork prompted serious inquiries from his parents and—quickly thereafter—the police.

  So Arnold learned his first lesson—that the advantage of animals was that they could not tell.

  At the age of fouteen Arnold Avery was sent to a young offenders institution where every night of his three-month sentence—and some days—were spent learning that real sexual power lay not in asking and getting, but in simply taking. The fact that he was initially on the painful end of that equation only heightened the value of this, his second lesson.

  He went home, but he never went back.

  It took him another seven years before he killed Paul Barrett (who bore a surprising resemblance to Timothy Reed) but it was worth waiting for. Avery kept Paul alive for sixteen hours, then buried him near Dunkery Beacon. Nobody suspected Avery. Nobody questioned him, nobody gave him a second glance as he drove his van round and round the West Country, reading local papers, calling local homes, chatting to local children.

  And nobody found Paul Barrett’s body; when they searched, it was near the boy’s home in Westward Ho!

  So Dunkery Beacon was a safe place to bury a body, thought Avery.

  And he made good use of it.

  Chapter 12

  THE HEATHER ON THE HILL HAD BEEN DRENCHED INTO SUBMIS sion by the rain, and now dripped eerily onto the wet turf as Steven dug.

  He dug two holes then ate a cheese sandwich and dug one more.

  Since what he’d come to think of as the Sheepsjaw Incident, the digging had lost some of its appeal. That intense high and the crashing low had thrown the hopelessness of his mission into sharp relief. Now every jar of his elbows, every ache in his back, every splinter in his palm somehow seemed more wearing.

  At the root of his new bad mood was an itchy discontent that made him distant with Lewis and snappy with Davey. Even out her
e on the moor where sheer hard work usually drove everything from his mind but a kind of dim exhaustion, he was dissatisfied and grouchy—though there was no one to be grouchy with bar himself, his spade, and the endless moor beneath his feet.

  He had not heard from Avery. It had been almost two weeks since he sent the letter with the symbols on the back. Was it possible that he had been too careful? So careful that Avery himself had failed to spot the secret message? Had the killer of Uncle Billy merely read the meaningless words on the front of the paper and tossed it into a bin? Or, if Avery had seen it, had he understood it? In Steven’s murderous mind, he had thought he’d given enough to tempt Avery into answering, but maybe Avery couldn’t crack the code. Or maybe he just didn’t want to. Maybe he didn’t want to play mouse to Steven’s teasing cat. As the days dragged by without an answer from Longmoor, Steven could not suppress a sick feeling of failure. He wished he could tell Lewis of his fears, but he knew this was something he had to keep to himself. Nobody else would understand what he’d done. In fact, Steven could see himself getting into some awkward conversations if he revealed anything about the correspondence.

  He had already taken pains to make sure he was always there when the post came. Their post came early—around 7A.M.—and Steven had started setting his alarm for quarter to so as to ensure he was at the top of the stairs when Frank Tithecott walked up the path. The last thing he needed was his mum or nan picking up a letter addressed to him. Steven had never had anything personal come through the letter box—not even a Christmas card—and he imagined questions would be asked. But the anticipatory moments spent with cold toes at the top of the stairs were more than outweighed by mounting disappointment.

  He started on another hole but had only made one stab at the fibrous ground before he flung the spade down, and himself disconsolately after it.

  Almost instantly the wet started to seep through his cheap waterproof trousers. The chill earth gripped him below and the wet heather curled over him in a dripping shroud. The sweat he’d worked up dried all too fast and he started to shiver.