Blacklands (13 page)

A
RNOLD
A
VERY LIKED TO THINK OF THE BENCHES HE MADE AS HIS
tickets to freedom.

From the first day of his incarceration, Avery had had a single goal in mind, and that was to be released as soon as was legally possible.

Life did not mean life anymore. The petulant cry of
Daily Mail
readers everywhere was sweet music to Arnold Avery. He’d known life did not mean life when he was arrested and he reminded himself of it again in Cardiff. Still, he’d been surprised at the sick sucker-punched feeling in his gut when the judge actually said the word.

But by the time he’d reached Heavitree, he had already determined to be a model prisoner so that he could get out while he still had hair and teeth to speak of. While he was still young enough to enjoy himself.

In whatever way he saw fit.

Anyway …

Model prisoners wanted to be rehabilitated, so Avery had signed up for countless classes, workshops, and courses over the years. He now had assorted diplomas, a GCSE in maths, A-levels in English, art, and biology, a bluffer’s knowledge of psychiatry, and a certificate of competence in first aid.

And it was all paying off. Two years earlier his first parole review had approved his transfer from the high-security Heavitree to Longmoor Prison on Dartmoor. Even Avery had been surprised. He had hoped but never really expected that his apparent devotion to rehabilitation would achieve the desired aims. It was shocking really, thought Avery at the time. If he’d been anyone but himself, he’d have been up in arms about it. Of course, a recommendation that he could be trusted not to escape from a lower-security prison was not the same as the parole board actually approving his release after his twenty-year tariff had been served. But it was a very good start.

Compared to Heavitree, Longmoor was a holiday camp. The Segregation Unit was freshly painted, the guards noticeably less oppressive, and the opportunities for reintegration activities were even better, so he’d done a course in plumbing too.

He’d really surprised himself, though, with a natural aptitude for carpentry.

Avery found he loved everything about wood. The dry smell of sawdust, the soft warmth of the grain, the near-alchemic transformation from plank to table, plank to chair, plank to bench. Most of all, he loved the hours he could spend sanding and shaping with relatively little input from his brain, which therefore left him free to think, even while he earned kudos for working his way to rehabilitation, parole, and nirvana.

In the two years that Arnold Avery had been taking carpentry, he’d made six benches. His first was an uninspiring two-seater with ugly dowel joints; his most recent was a handsome six-foot three-seater with bevelled struts, curved, figure-hugging backrest, and almost invisible dovetails.

Now, as he worked on his seventh bench, sanding patiently, Avery let his mind drift gently off to Exmoor.

Avery could almost smell the moor. The rich, damp soil and the fragrant heather, combined with the faint odor of manure from the deer and ponies and sheep.

He thought first of Dunkery Beacon, where all his fantasies centered, before spreading like bony tendrils across the rounded hills. From there he would almost be able to identify the individual gravesites—not from prurient newsprint graphics but from actual memory, the memory that had sustained him throughout his imprisonment and which still held the power to feed his nighttime fantasies. The thought alone brought saliva to his mouth, and he swallowed audibly.

Dartmoor was very different. This moor was grey—made hard and unyielding by the granite which bulged under its surface and frequently broke through the Earth’s thin skin to poke bleakly up at the lowering sky.

The prison itself was an extension of the stone—grey, blank, ugly.

There was little heather on Dartmoor, just prickled gorse and sheep-shorn yellow grass. There was no gentle beauty and purple haze.

Dartmoor was not Exmoor, but Avery would still have liked to watch the seasons change from his narrow window.

But his window had been blocked on the orders of his prison psychiatrist, Dr. Leaver, who theorized that even visual contact with the moors would be counterproductive to his attempts to purify Arnold Avery’s psyche.

Avery’s bile rose in his throat along with the hatred and fury he now reserved exclusively for Dr. Leaver and Officer Finlay.

It amazed him that Leaver couldn’t understand that this was Dartmoor, and so held nothing but a passing aesthetic interest for him. The fact that both were moors was apparently sufficient reason for Leaver—a cadaverous man in his fifties—to decree the blocking of the window, which left Avery depressed and mopey, even in the summer months.

The terrible catch-22 he faced was that Leaver was half right. While he was mistaken in thinking that Avery gave inordinate weight to the moor he might have seen from his window, Avery would only have been able to convince him of that fact by revealing the truly awesome weight he gave any idea, sight, or mention of Dartmoor’s smaller, prettier, more gentle cousin on the north coast of the peninsula.

If Leaver—or anyone else—had had any idea that merely hearing someone say the word “Exmoor” could give him a daylong erection, his paltry privileges would have been suspended faster than Guy Fawkes from a rope.

Avery had never killed an adult but he knew he could kill Dr. Leaver. The man’s monstrous ego was fed by the power he held over the inmates he counselled. Avery was not empathetic, but he recognized his own sense of superiority in Leaver within five minutes of settling in for their first session together. It was like glimpsing his own reflection in a mirror.

He knew that Leaver was clever. He knew that Leaver liked to show off how clever he was—especially in an environment where he had every right to feel that way. After all, any con who was smarter than Leaver had, at the very least, to concede that they’d fucked up badly enough to get caught.

Avery had no problem with Leaver flaunting his intellect. A man who had a talent should use it; a footballer played football, a juggler juggled, a clever man outwitted others. It was Darwinian.

In Leaver’s presence, Avery was a bright man who had flashes of intellectual connection that made him a cut above the run-of-the-mill burglar cum barroom brawler. Clever enough to interest Leaver but
never
clever enough to alert him or threaten his ego.

He asked Leaver’s advice and always deferred to Leaver’s decisions, even if they had an adverse effect on him. The boarding up of his window was a case in point. When Leaver had suggested it might help, Avery had suppressed the urge to tear the man’s throat out with his teeth and had instead pursed his lips and nodded slowly, as if he were examining the idea from every conceivable angle, but with the best of intentions. Then he’d sighed to show that it was a regrettable necessity—but a necessity nonetheless.

Leaver had smiled and made a note that Arnold Avery knew would bring him closer to the real life waiting for him outside these walls.

The benches were another step on the freedom ladder. But the benches were enjoyable to make. And had the immense added attraction of the nameplates …

Avery stroked the wood under his dry hands and reached for a shiny brass plate with a screw hole in each corner.

“Can I have a screwdriver please, Officer?”

Andy Ralph eyed him suspiciously—like he hadn’t used a screwdriver a thousand times before without running amok—then handed Avery the Phillips-head screwdriver.

“Flathead please, Mr. Ralph.”

Ralph took back the Phillips and gave him the flathead, even more suspiciously.

Avery ignored him. Idiot.

He looked down at the plate in his hand and smiled as he remembered the scene of what had been—until SL’s letters—the greatest power trip since his incarceration …

“I hear you’re building benches, Arnold.”

“Yes, Dr. Leaver.”

“How do you enjoy that?”

“Good. I like it. It’s very satisfying.”

“Good. Good.” Leaver nodded sagely as if he were personally responsible for Avery’s upped satisfaction quotient.

“Thing is …, ” started Avery, then stopped and licked his lips nervously.

“What?” said Leaver, suddenly interested.

“I was thinking.”

“Yes?”

Avery shifted in his seat and cracked his knuckles—the picture of a man struggling with a great dilemma. Leaver gazed at him calmly. He had all the time in the world.

“I was thinking …” Now Avery dropped his voice so it was almost a whisper, and looked down at his own scuffed black shoes as he continued haltingly. “I was thinking maybe I could put a little brass plaque on my benches. Not the shitty one I made first, but some of the other ones. The good ones.”

“Yes?”

Avery scraped a match under his fingernails, even though they were already clean.

“With names on.”

His voice disappeared in the whisper and he dared not look at Leaver, who now leaned forward in his seat (to give the illusion that he was part of a conspiracy—Avery knew the moves).

“Names?”

“The … names …”

Avery could only nod mutely, staring at his lap—and hope that Leaver was even now imagining that tears filled the killer’s eyes—and that he had cottoned on to what he was trying to say.

Leaver slowly straightened up again, clicking the top of his Parker pen.

Avery wiped his sleeve across his bowed face, knowing it would add to the illusion of a man in personal hell, and Leaver fell for it, hook, line, and psycho-sinker.

The fucking moron.

Avery screwed the brass plate to his best bench yet and stood back to admire his work.

IN MEMORY OF LUKE DEWBERRY, AGED 10
.

Oh, his benches were his ticket out of here all right. But they were also tickets to previously unimagined pleasure while he was still stuck in this grimy hellhole.

Now his benches graced the yard and walkways that already evidenced the work of other prisoners, with their foolproof flowerbeds and neat verges. And every time he was allowed out for exercise, Avery made a beeline for one of them.

Other prisoners made benches. Other prisoners now started to put little plaques on them, most with the names of their children or lovers or mothers.

But Avery had no interest in sitting on other benches. He luxuriated against the plaque
IN MEMORY OF MILLY LEWIS-CRUPP;
he pressed
JOHN ELLIOT, AGED 7
with a thumb he’d rubbed dirty just for the occasion; and, on one memorable afternoon, he rubbed himself discreetly against the back of a bench while staring at the brass words:

IN MEMORY OF LOUISE LEVERETT.

And while he did, a large part of him savoured the delicious irony. He was way too smart to show Leaver just how clever he really was.

Or how angry.

Or how desperate to hear from SL.

Despite his newfound control and patience, Avery could not help wondering whether he’d done the right thing in not replying to SL’s last demanding missive.

For the first two weeks after he’d received the bald “WP?” he’d enjoyed knowing that SL was waiting for something that he, Arnold Avery, wasn’t going to give him. That had been satisfying and empowering, and Avery had been energized by the experience.

The next two weeks had been more difficult. While his self-satisfaction continued to some degree, he also missed anticipating SL’s reply to any letter he might have sent. He had to keep reminding himself that he was doing the right thing. But his resolve was tested and he started to wonder if SL had given up. People had no staying power, he worried. Avery had staying power, but he was exceptional. SL had been impatient, so maybe he had also been angry or frustrated or just tired of the sport. The thought that SL might not realize that he was now required to make a concession to appease Avery scared him.

SL’s first communication had heralded the most interesting four months of Avery’s entire incarceration, and he was loath for it to end. Every missive had been a reminder of his heyday, and everyone likes to be reminded of their finest hour, he reasoned.

Week five of Avery’s unilateral moratorium brought despondency. SL was tough. Avery lay awake at nights and worried. He resented it bitterly; his nights had become oases of pleasure since SL’s first letter had allowed him to reexamine his memories in fresh detail in a way he’d thought was long gone. But now he lay awake, unable to recapture those baser feelings and fretting instead over practicalities like the unreliability of the postal system, or the thought that SL might have concocted the correspondence as a kind of sick hoax to bring about the very punishment he was now experiencing.

It was this last thought that finally raised the anger in Avery that kept him strong. Anger was an emotion he had rarely given in to since his arrest. Avery knew that anger was counterproductive to life inside, which required resignation above all else.

Resignation had been his constant companion for years, with his anger at Finlay or Leaver never being allowed to break the surface, although he could feel it boiling in his guts whenever he saw either of them.

Now, in the pitch-black cell which did not even shed the light of a half-full moon on his darkness, Avery mentally added SL to his short but heartfelt list of fury, and resolved that his erstwhile correspondent would get nothing from him—not a word, not a symbol, not a carefully folded piece of Avery’s shit-stained toilet paper—until he’d said sorry.

It was five weeks and four days since SL’s last letter before Avery received the next one.

There was no map, no initials, no question marks, just the single word: