Blacklands

by Belinda Bauer

  No, only if and when it ultimately yielded up the body of William Peters did anyone have to know about the letter.

  Then Steven would admit what he had done, in the certain knowledge that Nan and Mum would agree—and be thankful for the fact—that the end had justified the means.

  Steven’s initial thrill at receiving Arnold Avery’s letter was supplanted by disappointment when he read it. At first.

  After a few days, however, the two neatly written sentences contained therein had begun to take on a deeper meaning in his mind. The very fact that—apart from Avery’s prison number along the top of the page—there were only two sentences required that they be pored over and analyzed in a way that a six-page rant never would have been.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” After a couple of days, Steven decided that this was just not true. Could not be true! Contrary to Lewis’s assertion, Steven had done his very best to think like a murderer when writing the letter, and he had more knowledge of how murderers thought than most twelve-year-olds.

  After the bedroom incident where he had pissed his pants (which, mercifully, neither he nor Lewis ever referred to), Mum had told him about what happened to Uncle Billy.

  At first Steven had been numbed with horror but, with Lewis’s excited encouragement, he slowly learned to be fascinated. His mother had told him Avery’s name, but would say little else about him. Instead, over the next year or so, Steven had read about serial killers. He’d thought it best to do this in secret, hiding library books in his kit bag and reading under the sheets by torchlight.

  With many nervous moments spent hearing footsteps creak towards him outside the protective duvet cocoon, he learned more about murder than any boy his age should ever know.

  He learned of organized killers and disorganized killers; of thrill seekers and trophy takers; of those who stalked their prey and those who just pounced as the mood seized them. He read of crushed puppies and skinned cats; of bullies and bullied; of Peeping Toms and fire starters; of frenzied hacking and clinical dissection.

  Steven’s manic reading had two major effects. First, in a single year his school-tested reading age leaped from seven years to twelve. Secondly, he learned that despite the seemingly crazy nature of their work, serial killers like Arnold Avery were in fact quite methodical. This told him that if he was true to type, Avery was likely to remember those he had killed quite vividly.

  For a start, each of his victims had been chosen deliberately and, if Avery hadn’t known their names when he killed them, he sure took the trouble to find out afterwards.

  In the fifteen minutes of free internet time he could devote to his search on any one day at the school library, Steven had found only a couple of online archived reports of Avery’s trial, but from them he discovered that Avery had picked Yasmin Gregory’s name from the Bracknell & District News. Yasmin had presented a bouquet of ugly orange lilies to Princess Anne. There was a photo of her curtseying. The cutting had later been found in the house Avery shared with his widowed mother, along with newspaper reports of her family’s appeal for her safe return. The cuttings were discovered by police in a shoe box along with Yasmin’s yellow knickers with TUESDAY in glitter-writing across the front. The knickers had been laundered; the report said Avery was “disgusted by bodily fluids.”

  The report also said Yasmin had been kept alive for at least two days. Steven searched again and found a photo of Yasmin in a cornflower blue dress—a gap-toothed blond child with a lazy eye. The photo had been cropped to show Yasmin alone, but Steven could tell she’d been hugging a dog when it was taken.

  Steven shivered, although the tiny school library was oppressively hot.

  Yasmin Gregory, who’d hugged a big yellow dog. Yasmin Gregory, who’d probably thought that being teased at school about her eye was as bad as it got. Yasmin Gregory, who’d left home in her Tuesday knickers but who hadn’t been killed until Thursday …

  Steven quickly switched off the computer.

  How long had Avery kept Uncle Billy alive?

  The librarian tutted behind him. “You’re supposed to log off, you know. If you can’t play with it properly, you won’t be allowed on it again.”

  “Sorry,” said Steven.

  He walked home slowly, his mind whirring.

  Slicing through every social norm, evading capture with supernatural ease, and preying on the small, the vulnerable, and the trusting, Avery had swept down like the angel of death and pulled a pin out of his family. Then he hadn’t even stuck around to watch it explode.

  Steven’s mind could only snatch fleetingly at Avery’s crimes. He could think the words, but shortly after thinking them, the concept of what Avery had done kept slipping away from him, too evil and illogical to stick in his head for long. Avery played by different rules—rules that few human beings were even aware of. Rules that seemed to have emanated from another world entirely.

  Once—unexpectedly—Steven caught sight of the world Arnold Avery inhabited, and it scared him cold.

  One day in geography Mrs. James showed them a photo of the Milky Way. When she pointed out their solar system within it, Steven felt a jolt run through him. How small! How tiny! How completely and utterly insignificant it was! And somewhere inside that speck of light was a dot of a planet and they were merely microbes on its surface.

  No wonder Arnold Avery did what he did! Why shouldn’t he? What did it matter in the whole scheme of things? Wasn’t it he, Steven Lamb, who was the fool for caring what had happened to a single one of those microbes on a dot inside a speck of light? What was everyone getting so hot under the microbial collar about? It was Avery who saw the bigger picture; Avery who knew that the true value of human life was precisely nothing. That taking it was the same as not taking it; that conscience was just a self-imposed bar to pleasure; that suffering was so transitory that a million children might be tortured and killed in the merest blink of a cosmic eye.

  The feeling passed and Steven’s cheeks and ears prickled with the horror of it. It was as if something quite alien had momentarily invaded his mind and tried to tug him clear of reality and set him adrift on a sea of black nothingness. He looked up to see Mrs. James and the rest of the class looking at him with a mixture of interest and contempt. He never knew what he’d missed, or what he’d done to draw their stares, and he never cared; he was just relieved to be back.

  Later, it was remembering this incident that made Steven realize why he was keeping his letter secret. This was much, much worse than writing to a footballer or a pop star. What he was doing was writing to the bogeyman; to Santa Claus; to E.T. the Extra-Terrest-rial—to someone who did not even exist on this plane of reality.

  Steven was writing to the Devil and asking for mercy.

  So, with his reading and his research and his epiphany in geography, by the time he wrote his letter Steven felt he knew plenty about Arnold Avery.

  That was why he was convinced that Avery knew only too well what he was talking about. And if he’d lied about that, then wasn’t “Have a nice day” equally suspect? Once he’d thought it, Steven was convinced he was right about that too, and started to work out what Avery might really have meant.

  Surely those four words had no place in any flat-out rejection of his request? Steven had not studied semantics or even heard the word, but Arnold Avery’s letter was a good introduction to the subject and Mrs. O’Leary would have been impressed by his deductions.

  Steven lived in Somerset, but he was no bumpkin. He had an Eminem CD and had seen any number of loud and bullet-riddled Hollywood gangsta movies. Drawing on the experiences of those strange people in a strange land, he figured that a flat-out rejection would have looked something like this: “Don’t write to me again, shitbag.” Or “Fuck you and your mother.” Steven didn’t know what irony was either, but he could feel something coming off the page at him. He knew the four words did not mean what they claimed to. By day three, “Have a nice day” had become a code in Steven’s mi
nd for “You’re a brave kid.” By day five it seemed to be saying: “I admire your attempt to get this information.”

  By day seven he was pretty convinced it meant: “Better luck next time...”

  Chapter 9

  SPRING HAD TAKEN THE DAY OFF AND BARNSTAPLE IN THE RAIN was something even the most enlightened town planner had no solution to.

  A blustery wind threw rain into faces, and raised a million ripples on the wide, mud brown surface of the Taw.

  Even the high-street chain stores looked besieged by the weather, huddled in the shelter of the battered Victorian buildings above them. Marks & Spencer was temporary home to this year’s strappy fashions and, in its doorway, an angry one-legged drunk shouting, “Fuck the Big Issue.”

  Hanging baskets dripped miserably onto wet shoppers—the petals of the primroses and winter pansies plastered against their own leaves, or drooping, heads heavy with water.

  Steven knew how they felt. Rain stuck his hair to his forehead and trickled under his collar. Nan didn’t agree with baseball caps and Steven declined to wear the laughable yellow sou’wester type of hat that Davey was too young to refuse. Now and then he tried to edge under Lettie’s umbrella without making it obvious.

  Nan wore a see-through plastic headscarf that tied under her chin. It was the kind of thing that most people would have worn a couple of times, then thrown away or lost; Nan had had hers for as long as Steven had been alive—at least. He knew that when they got home she would lay it over a radiator to dry, then fold it like a fan into a ruler-sized strip. Then she’d roll it up and put an elastic band around it to keep it neat in her bag.

  When Steven’s last trainers had been put out with the bins after two years of constant hard labor, she had been sour for a week because he hadn’t removed the “perfectly good” laces.

  Now Lettie rummaged through her purse and brought out a list which she frowned at as people jostled past them.

  “Right,” she said. “I’ve got to go to Butchers Row, the market, and Banburys.”

  Tiverton was easier and closer, but Barnstaple had Banburys.

  “What do you need in Banburys?” said Nan suspiciously.

  “Just some undies.” Steven heard the brittle tone in her voice—stretching it to keep it light.

  “What’s wrong with your old ones?”

  “I don’t really want to discuss it here, Mum!” She smiled with her mouth but not with her eyes. The lighter her voice got, the thinner it got; more likely to crack.

  Nan shrugged to show it was no concern of hers if Lettie wanted to waste money on underwear.

  Lettie put her shopping list away and turned to Steven. “You take Davey to spend his birthday money and we’ll all meet at twelve thirty.”

  Davey brightened. “In the cake place?”

  “Yes, in the cake place.”

  Behind Lettie, Nan decided to air her views after all and said quite loudly: “It’s not as if anyone’s going to see your knickers.”

  Lettie didn’t turn away from the boys, but Steven saw her lips tighten across her teeth. Davey’s excitement became anxiety in an instant as he looked from his mother to his grandmother, not understanding the words, only their effect.

  Lettie gripped Steven’s light jacket by the collar and yanked the zip up as far as it would go, knocking his chin.

  “I swear, Steven, you deserve to catch a cold!”

  He said nothing.

  “Now take Davey to spend his money. And don’t let him waste it, understand?”

  Steven knew he’d get stuck with Davey. Bloody Nan! If only she’d kept her mouth shut Mum would have been happy to let her have custody of Davey, and he could have gone to the library. Now he had Davey in tow.

  Davey had birthday money. Three pounds. Steven fidgeted impatiently while Davey picked every rubber dinosaur out of a box and looked at it and then didn’t even buy one. He moved on to the next box, which was full of small clear balls with even cheaper toys inside them. After long and careful deliberation he chose one filled with pink plastic jacks; it cost seventy-five pence.

  Steven took Davey’s hand and hurried him towards the library but Davey made himself heavy and awkward as they passed a sweetshop and once again Steven had to wait while Davey peered at every bar, every packet, and into every jar until finally he emerged with a quarter of jelly worms and a Curly Wurly. He tried to stop again at the shop on the corner selling radio-controlled cars, but Steven yanked him onwards.

  Without the sun to struggle through its high, dirty windows the library was gloomy and cold.

  The librarian—a young man with an earring, a zigzag shaved into the side of his head, and a name tag reading “Oliver”—led Steven to what he grandly called “the archives” with a suspicious air. “The archives” was an alcove behind the reference section—and out of sight of his desk.

  “What year?”

  “June ’90.”

  “1890 or 1990?”

  Steven pulled a puzzled face. It had never occurred to him that they would have newspapers going back to 1890.

  “1990.”

  Oliver sighed and peered up at the giant books on the top shelves. Then he turned on a pulsing fluorescent and looked again.

  Then he looked intently at Steven and Davey as if trying to find something wrong with them—something that would give him an excuse not to help them.

  “He can’t eat those in here.”

  “I know,” said Steven. “He won’t.”

  Oliver snorted and held out his hand for the sweets. Davey instinctively withdrew them.

  “I’m not having Curly Wurly all over my archives.”

  Davey looked at Steven for guidance.

  “Give them to him, Davey. He’ll keep them safe for you.”

  Reluctantly Davey handed them over.

  Oliver kicked a stool noisily across the floor and climbed onto it, dragging down a huge bound volume which he then dropped onto the desk with a petulant bang.

  “No eating, no cutting out, no folding or licking the pages.”

  Steven blinked; why would he lick the pages?

  “Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  Steven sat on the only chair and Davey sat on the floor and started to open his jacks. Oliver hovered in the doorway but Steven ignored him until he left, then opened the giant book.

  The Western Morning News used to be much much bigger. It was weird to see the same banner title on this huge newspaper. Steven felt like an elf reading a human book as he paged carefully through the tome. He giggled at the thought and Davey looked up at him.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Nothing.”

  The internet had been okay but patchy. Avery’s case predated the internet, and Steven had the frustrating feeling that there was lots it wasn’t telling him. At least the internet didn’t smell like old socks, though.

  Davey was struggling to open the plastic sphere, his tongue stuck out in concentration.

  “You want me to do that?”

  “I can do it.”

  The paper was yellowing and painfully thin. In places the ragged edges were torn. Steven stood up so he could handle the tome more efficiently.

  ABUSED, TORTURED, KILLED. The headline ended Steven’s search.

  There was a picture of Arnold Avery—the first Steven had seen. He instinctively drew closer to the page so as not to miss a single detail. The photo would have looked equally at home on the sports pages—a young man who’d scored twice against Exmoor Colts or taken three wickets for the Blacklanders.

  Steven was thrown. He had expected … well, what had he expected? His mental image of Avery up until now had been vague—maybe not even human. Avery had been a dark shape in an Exmoor fog, a collage of movement and muffled sound lingering on the edges of a nightmare.

  But here was the real Avery, staring into a policeman’s camera with a shameless directness, his dark fringe flopped fashionably over one eye, his slightly snubbed nose giving him an amiable look, hi
s wide mouth almost shut and almost smiling. Steven noted that Avery’s lips were very red. It was a black-and-white photo, but he could tell that much. As he studied it more closely, he could also see that the reason Avery’s mouth was only almost shut was that he had protruding teeth. A pixel of white suggested it.

  Steven tried to get disturbed by the picture but Avery looked more like a victim than the perpetrator of the crimes of which he’d been convicted.

  There were pictures of Avery’s victims although at this point in the proceedings the News called them “alleged” victims.

  Little Toby Dunstan was described in the caption as “youngest victim.” A laughing six-year-old with sticky-out ears and freckles even on his eyelids. Steven grinned: Toby looked like fun. Then he remembered—Toby was dead.

  There was a graphic on the front page too. It was a map of Exmoor. Steven unfolded a scrap of paper from his pocket and copied the shape—a rough, crinkled rugby ball. The graves of the six children who had been found were marked with Xs and arrows which pointed to six photos—one of each confirmed victim. The same picture of Toby Dunstan, a different one of Yasmin Gregory, then Milly Lewis-Crupp, Luke Dewberry, Louise Leverett, and John Elliot.

  Steven marked each child’s initials inside the rugby ball with a red pen. All of them were roughly clustered in the center of the moor. Shipcott was not marked but Steven could see the gravesites were between there and Dunkery Beacon. Three of them were on the west side of the Beacon itself.

  He had never seen the exact location of the graves marked before and was relieved that he’d been digging in the right general area all this time. Of course, what was a half-inch square on this map was several miles of open moorland in reality. But Steven felt new impetus seep through him just by dint of being reminded of his quest.

  He carefully folded up the scrap of paper, and started to read.