Blacklands (25 page)

The man walked on, head down, through a patch of sunlight and Gary Lumsden held him in his sights, steady and careful. The tor was approaching, the kill shot would be lost, but it wasn’t about the kill shot, he told himself; it was about being in control, doing the right thing, growing up and being a man.

The walker clambered onto the first of the big grey rocks. Two more and he’d be lost from view behind the tor.

For less than two minutes, Private Gary Lumsden had been in possession of the power to inflict instant death, but had chosen instead to allow life to continue. It was godlike.

Lumsden’s angelic blue eyes stung with heat at the thought of how far he’d come as he watched the distant, stupid man reach to pull himself onto the next rock. So small, so vulnerable, so oblivious to how close it had been …

Private Lumsden’s entire being thrummed with the knowledge that this
meant
something; that this was pivotal; that he’d remember this moment forever.

And then—in a sudden, sneaky triumph of nature over nurture—he pulled the trigger anyway.

Arnold Avery opened his eyes to a blank white sky, a wet back, and a sharp ache in his left arm.

His first fuzzy thought was that a bird had flown into him. A big bird. All he remembered was clutching at the fresh Devonshire air as he fell off the rock he’d been standing on.

He turned his head creakily to one side, and sharp grass pricked his cheek. There was a disc of pure white something with two red dots in it beside his head; it took him several blinking seconds to work out it was a Mr. Kipling cherry Bakewell tart, spilled from his bag of stolen shopping. One red dot in the white icing was the cherry, the other was blood.

Avery groaned as he sat up and saw his left sleeve dark and red. He winced as he moved his arm. It hurt, but it wasn’t broken.

He looked around and could see nothing and nobody. But then, nothing and nobody could see him; he’d fallen into a shallow dip behind the tor. He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious for, or what had happened to him. His bird theory was shit, he already knew, but he had no others. The moor stretched around him for miles, looking yellow grey now under the lowering clouds.

He pulled his arm from his sleeve, wiping away blood with the tail of his shirt, and saw the gory crease through the top of his biceps, as though someone had dragged a forefinger through the flesh of his arm, removing the skin and leaving a bloody groove in its place.

It looked as though he’d been shot, although he knew that wasn’t possible. This was England, after all, and the screws they sent to hunt down escapees were likely to be armed with little more than expense vouchers for their petrol costs.

He shook his head to clear it, and slowly started to gather his stolen goods together. There was no point in hanging about trying to solve the mystery of what had happened to him. He doubted it was relevant anyway. If it had been an armed, overenthusiastic screw, then he’d be back in custody by now; if it had been a bird, there would be feathers. It didn’t matter. What mattered was keeping going. He tried to find the sun behind the clouds but couldn’t. It wasn’t getting dark yet, but that meant nothing; it was June, and would stay light until well after ten at night.

Although he didn’t know it, Arnold Avery had been unconscious only long enough to miss the very faint, outraged shouts of Private Gary Lumsden’s military career coming to an abrupt but almost inevitable end.

Chapter 33

S
TEVEN STARED AT THE BLACK CEILING HE COULDN’T SEE, AND
listened to Uncle Jude and his mother arguing.

He couldn’t make out words, but the tones alone made him stiff with tension and his ears prickled with effort.

She was cross. Steven didn’t know what she had to be cross about. His mind raced, trying to assess the previous day, prodding it to shake loose the moment when things had changed. Something. Something. Something had happened. Must have! Because last night, he’d lain just like this, gazing into blackness, and heard them having sex. He recognized the sounds from a DVD he and Lewis had watched last school holidays. Something with Angelina Jolie in it. It had been under some sheets, so hadn’t shed any useful light on the mechanics of the whole sex thing. He and Lewis had stared, flame faced, at the screen, not daring to speak or look at each other while the scene played out. When it was over, Lewis had said, “I’d give her one,” in a triumph of redundancy.

But the sex between Uncle Jude and his mother had been last night. Tonight was the row. Uncle Jude mostly silent, occasionally defensive; his mother sharp and cold. He felt a rush of pure fury at her; wanted to run next door and scream at her to stop. Stop fighting, stop hurting, stop being such a … such a …
fucking bitch
!

His fingers ached and he realized they were gripped too tightly around the top of his duvet, rigid and trembling—like the rest of him. He let his breath out and tried to relax.

“Is Uncle Jude leaving?”

Steven jumped. “Shut up, Davey.”

“You shut up!”

Steven did shut up, wanting to hear how the row ended, but there was no more.

“I don’t want Uncle Jude to go.” Davey’s voice was whiney and tight with snot but instead of making him angry it infected Steven with the same feeling, so he said nothing, biting his lip and squeezing his hot eyes closed until he opened them and found that it was morning.

And that sometime during the night, Uncle Jude had left.

Steven slouched downstairs on heavy legs and cold feet, despite the season.

Halfway down the stairs, he saw the purple oblong on the doormat.

By the bottom of the stairs his eyes realized it was a postcard and picking it up he confirmed it was a picture of purple heather.

When Steven turned it over, his heart jumped into his throat and started pumping there instead, making his whole neck throb.

Compared to their previous communications, there was a cornucopia of information on the six-by-four-inch postcard.

There was the edge of Exmoor, reduced by familiarity to a single dashed line. DB was where it should be. SL was where he’d shown Avery. Between them was a strange circle of short radiating lines, like an aerial view of Friar Tuck’s haircut, enclosing the initials WP, and the single word:

Steven couldn’t eat. He’d never have thought such a thing was possible. It wasn’t because he wasn’t hungry; it was because his head was so full of thinking that the thoughts overflowed and pounded into his mouth, down his throat, into his chest, and even as far as his guts—a raging river of swirling hopes and white-water fears that left no room for food.

His first thought on seeing Avery’s directions was how quickly his own quest had faded from his mind. Uncle Jude’s return, the vegetable patch, Lewis, the real Mars bar. These things—these normal things—had squeezed Uncle Billy out of his day-to-day consciousness and into a corner in the back of his mind.

But the postcard brought Uncle Billy bursting out again in a rush of old guilt and new anticipation.

In an instant, he was recharged, reinvigorated, focused.

He did not remember washing or dressing or doing his teeth, but they must have happened, because he arrived at the breakfast table without eyebrows being raised.

Davey was miserable; his mother cut their sandwiches with a hard hand and a tight mouth, and Nan was uncharacteristically quiet on the subject of her daughter’s love life. But Steven was only aware of these things in the most peripheral, hazy way.

I know where Uncle Billy is buried!

He almost thought he’d shouted it out loud when his nan fixed him with a neutral stare.

“Pass the butter to your brother.”

Steven passed the butter and was gripped with a sudden certainty that someone else would find Uncle Billy first.

Now that he had Avery’s map, it seemed so obvious! Blacklands! Of course! So close he could almost see it from his own bedroom window!

Even Lewis had worked it out.
Next time I come, I’m digging up at Blacklands…

What was to stop someone else working it out too?

Someone who didn’t have to go to school today?

Someone who would beat him to it?

Someone who would push open the door of opportunity and whose life would be transformed by the discovery instead of his, leaving him trapped forever between his nan and his mother and the dim, undersea room where his own piss still stained the carpet. Steven went cold and felt his middle empty as everything inside him pressured out towards his throat and his bowels.

He got up from the table with a loud scrape.

“Where are you going?”

“School.”

“You haven’t eaten.”

“I’m not hungry.”

Lettie looked as though she was going to make an issue of it, then bound his sandwiches viciously in clingfilm and banged them into his lunch box without even caring about a chocolate bar.

Steven didn’t care either. Chocolate bars were for children, and today he would become so much more than that. He might not know how sex or relationships worked, but by nightfall he hoped his family would be a whole thing, instead of this cracked, crumbling half-thing that left him nervous and sad.

Steven glanced round at his mother, Davey, and Nan—all of them unaware of how he was about to change their lives.

He turned to go, but only got two steps before his mother said sharply: “Wait for your brother.”

And so instead of digging up the body of a murdered boy, Steven had to wait for his brother and walk him to school and then go straight to double history, where Mr. Lovejoy made them draw cross sections of the pyramids, showing all the dark, secret ways the Egyptians employed to ensure that their ancestors remained undiscovered and undisturbed for thousands of years.

Steven had still not been taught the meaning of irony, but once more he could hardly fail to understand it when it reared up in front of him and smacked him in the face.

All day long, he felt like screaming.

Chapter 34

A
RNOLD
A
VERY’S ARM BLED ON AND OFF ALL DAY LONG ON
F
RIDAY
.

Now and then he felt dizzy, but wasn’t sure if it was because of the blood loss or the ebbing sugar rush of the cherry Bakewells.

He’d walked until it was dark on Thursday night, and then tried to sleep, but the cold was having none of it. After an hour of sitting hunched, teeth clattering, wrapped in the too-small green cardigan, Avery had got up and continued walking in the dark. It was slower going, but it was going, at least.

Could be worse, he thought. Could be raining.

He felt better for walking. He needed to get to Exmoor before his postcard did. The thought of SL finding WP without him made him feel sick and fluttery.

In the early hours of Friday morning—at about the same time as Uncle Jude had been picking up his truck keys and leaving quietly so as not to wake Steven and Davey—Arnold Avery had reached Tavistock and stolen a car.

It was surprisingly easy.

He’d found several parked cars with their doors unlocked in the driveways of various homes. That’s the countryside for you, he’d thought as he ran his hands around their interiors and inside their glove compartments.