Blacklands (17 page)

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

U
NCLE
J
UDE 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?”

Steven sighed to himself. No wonder his mother preferred Davey; he was so entertaining.

By staying silent, Steven gathered the information that his mother had bumped into Uncle Jude in Mr. Jacoby’s shop and that he’d been invited for tea—although there was some teasing dispute about exactly how he’d been invited, or whether he’d asked himself to tea.

It didn’t matter. Uncle Jude was back at the kitchen table and as he softened Nan up, chaffed Lettie, and indulged Davey, Steven felt an unaccustomed sense of optimism settle on his shoulders.

He asked to be excused as soon as he’d hurried his baked beans, and ran hell-for-leather in his cheap new trainers to where he’d left his spade six weeks before.

It was there. It was the same.

He jogged back with it held loosely in one pale hand, and went round the back of the house. Just like Uncle Jude, his spade had come home.

Steven surveyed the back garden and in his ordinary boy’s mind he saw where the tomatoes should go, and the lettuce. The lettuce could be planted in pots and placed up high to deter slugs. The potatoes would take most of the room but there was space for a few strawberries to make his mother feel all upper-class come Wimbledon. Mr. Randall had grown melons last year. He’d given them one and even though it was bland and cork dry, Steven had been stunned that something so exotic could come out of the staid English soil. Maybe he could grow melons—the ones with orange flesh.

He hefted the spade better into his hand and thought of it biting into the earth to give life, rather than to seek death.

Out of nowhere, he was glad his mother had bought new knickers in Banburys. He hoped with all his heart that this time they would be enough.

Steven leaned the rusty spade against the back wall and smiled to himself.

This was what normality felt like, and it was good.

Chapter 23

A
RNOLD
A
VERY HAD NEVER CONSIDERED ESCAPING.
N
OT IN ANY
realistic sense.

Sure, the first few months he was in prison he had lain awake and thought about things he would do once he was free again. But the concept of escape was not uppermost in his mind. He assumed that he would be paroled at some point and that that point would be no closer than the twenty-year tariff the judge at his trial had recommended.

It seemed fair. Apart from being a child killer, Avery was a law-abiding man who voted Conservative with a capital “C,” and who thought most prison sentences were woefully inadequate and that the early release of some prisoners was a disgrace.