Blacklands (2 page)

His nan had not stopped eating throughout, although each mouthful was apparently a minefield.

Even though Davey’s sobs were now muffled, Steven sought eye contact with Nan and finally she glanced at him, giving him a chance to roll his eyes, as if the burden of the naughty child was shared and the sharing made them closer.

“You’re no better,” she said, and went back to her fish.

Steven reddened. He knew he was better! If only he could prove it to Nan, everything would be different—he just knew it.

Of course, it was all Billy’s fault—as usual.

Steven held his breath. He could hear his mother washing up—the underwater clunking of china—and his nan drying—the higher musical scraping of plates leaving the rack. Then he slowly opened the door of Billy’s room. It smelled old and sweet, like an orange left under the bed. Steven felt the door click gently behind him.

The curtains were drawn—always drawn. They matched the bedspread in pale and dark blue squares that clashed with the swirly brown carpet. A half-built Lego space station was on the floor and since Steven’s last visit a small spider had spun a web on what looked like a crude docking station. Now it sat there, waiting to capture satellite flies from the outer space of the dingy bedroom.

There was a drooping scarf pinned to the wall over the bed—sky blue and white, Manchester City—and Steven felt the familiar pang of pity and anger at Billy: still a loser even in death.

Steven crept in here sometimes, as if Billy might reach across the years and whisper secrets and solutions into the ear of this nephew who had already lived to see one more birthday than he himself had managed.

Steven had long ago given up the hope of finding real-life clues. At first he liked to imagine that Uncle Billy might have left some evidence of a precognition of his own death. A
Famous Five
book dogeared at a key page; the initials “AA” scratched into the wooden top of the bedside table; Lego scattered to show the points of the compass and X marks the spot. Something which—after the event—an observant boy might discover and decipher.

But there was nothing. Just this smell of history and bitter sadness, and a school photo of a thin, fair child with pink cheeks and crooked teeth and dark blue eyes almost squeezed shut by the size of his smile. It had been a long time before Steven had realized that this photo must have been placed here later—that no boy worth his salt has a photo of himself on his bedside table unless it shows him holding a fish or a trophy.

Nineteen years ago this eleven-year-old boy—probably much like himself—had tired of his fantasy space game and gone outside to play on a warm summer evening, apparently—infuriatingly—unaware that he would never return to put his toys away or to wave his Man City scarf at the TV on a Sunday afternoon, or even to make his bed, which his mother—Steven’s nan—had done much later.

Sometime after 7:15
P.M.
, when Mr. Jacoby from the newsagent sold him a bag of Maltesers, Uncle Billy had moved out of the realm of childhood make-believe and into the realm of living nightmare. In the two hundred yards between the newsagent’s and this very house—a two hundred yards Steven walked every morning and every night to and from school—Uncle Billy had simply disappeared.

Steven’s nan had waited until 8:30 before sending Lettie out to look for her brother, and until 9:30, when darkness was falling, to go outside herself. In the light summer evenings children played long past their winter bedtimes. But it was not until Ted Randall next door said perhaps they should call the police that Steven’s nan changed forever from Billy’s mum into Poor Mrs. Peters.

Poor Mrs. Peters—whose husband had been stupidly killed wobbling off his bicycle into the path of the Barnstaple bus six years before—had waited for Billy to come home.

At first she waited at the door. She stood there all day, every day for a month, barely noticing fouteen-year-old Lettie brushing past her to go to school, and returning promptly at 3:50 to save her mother worrying even more—if such a thing were possible.

When the weather broke, Poor Mrs. Peters waited in the window from where she could see up and down the road. She grew the look of a dog in a thunderstorm—alert, wide-eyed, and nervous. Any movement in the street made her heart leap so hard in her chest that she flinched. Then would come the slump, as Mr. Jacoby or Sally Blunkett or the Tithecott twins grew so distinct that no desperate stretch of her imagination could keep them looking like a ruddy-cheeked eleven-year-old boy with a blond crew cut, new Nike trainers, and a half-eaten bag of Maltesers in his hand.

Lettie learned to cook and to clean and to stay in her room so she didn’t have to watch her mother flinching at the road. She had always suspected that Billy was the favorite and now, in his absence, her mother no longer had the strength to hide this fact.

So Lettie worked on a shell of anger and rebellion to protect the soft center of herself which was fourteen and scared and missed her brother and her mother in equal measure, as if both had been snatched from her on that warm July evening.

How could Uncle Billy not know? Once more Steven felt that flicker of anger as he looked about the clueless, lifeless room. How could anyone not know that something like that was about to happen to them?

Chapter 2

A
YEAR AFTER BlLLY DISAPPEARED A DELIVERY DRIVER FROM
Exeter was arrested for something else, somewhere else.

At first, police merely questioned Arnold Avery after a boy called Mason Dingle accused him of flashing at him.

It was not the first time Arnold Avery had exposed himself to a child—although, of course, this was not what he told police initially—but, in luring fifteen-year-old Mason Dingle to his van for directions, Avery had unwittingly met his nemesis.

Mason Dingle was himself not unknown to the police. His small size and choirboy features were merely a lucky lie, which hid the true face of the terror of Plymouth’s Lapwing estate. Graffiti, demanding money with menaces, breaking and entering were all in Mason Dingle’s blood, and the police knew it was only a matter of time before young Master Dingle followed his brothers in the family tradition—a life of some sort of ongoing detention.

But before he got there (which he absolutely did) Mason Dingle helped to catch the man the tabloids later dubbed the Van Strangler.

Naturally, the police did not even know that such a child killer was on the loose. Children disappeared all the time, and a few turned up dead. But this happened all over the country and police forces in the 1980s did not have the resources to compare notes in any but the most high-profile murder cases. For all the government’s Orwellian bleating about improvements and manpower and databases, the police detection rates remained at roughly the level that they would have achieved by periodically sticking a pin in a list of the usual suspects.

And anyway—until Mason Dingle took a hand in the proceedings—none of Arnold Avery’s victims had been found and Avery himself had never been arrested or even speed-ticketed, so all the databases in the world would not have thrown his name across the desks of investigating officers.

So when he saw Mason Dingle all alone, scratching something no doubt filthy into the seat of a red plastic swing in the battered Lapwing playground, Avery pulled over in his white van, got himself ready, and whistled to get the boy’s attention—confident in the inabilities of the Devon & Cornwall, or any other police force.

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