Blacklands

by Belinda Bauer

  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

  ARNOLD AVERY HAD NEVER CONSIDERED ESCAPING. NOT 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.

  And so when he found himself facing a minimum of twenty years inside, Avery did not whine and complain and appeal against his sentence citing previous good character and taxes paid. Instead he took the conscious decision to do his utmost to ensure that he was a prime candidate for release on licence as soon as he became eligible.

  When the three men raped him in the showers, Avery allowed the screws their pleasure at his humiliation and never complained or retaliated.

  When improving, rehabilitating lessons were offered, Avery signed up and exerted at least the modicum of effort it took to be top of every class.

  When Dr. Leaver ordered his view to be blocked, leaving him in permanent half darkness, Avery thanked him.

  And when the question of the other missing children came up, Avery swore blind he had not killed Paul Barrett, William Peters, or Mariel Oxenburg. They might be dead, but those three children had the power to extend his stay at Her Majesty’s pleasure, and he would never allow them to do that to him, however much it might ease the pain of still-grieving relatives.

  Avery knew it was far from a foregone conclusion that he would be paroled after twenty years, but he knew he’d given himself the best possible chance, and was therefore content to wait another couple of years to find out. Within twelve months he could be in a program at an open prison in Northumbria that claimed to prepare inmates for release. Everything was going just the way he’d planned it.

  Until he found out SL was just a boy.

  A boy he’d built trust with.

  A boy he shared secrets with.

  A boy who wanted something from him so badly that he might be inveigled upon to do … just about anything.

  And if he wouldn’t, then that wasn’t a problem either.

  But it had to be now. Not two years from now, when his parole might possibly be granted. By then the focus of a boy on a quest would have given way to the clumsy distractions of a teenager on another kind of mission entirely. And certainly not if he was released to some crappy halfway house up north, far away from his beloved Exmoor.

  Arnold Avery had spent eighteen years watching and waiting, knuckling down, doing his time … Eighteen years without fresh memories of just how exciting children could be and, hard though he’d tried to preserve his memories, the old ones had inevitably staled with overuse.

  The photo of SL had been a supernova illuminating the dusty recesses of his mind. It had pierced his logic and good intentions like a laser through a magnifying glass. Now his brain was constantly burned and tortured by want—by desperate want and possibilities. Just as Steven had put his eye to the crack in the door and seen a future of summers and skating, so Avery saw that his future—his immediate future—could be similarly filled with astonishing pleasures. Something chemical had been released in Avery’s brain—something that sharpened his lust and dulled his more sensible senses. The same chemical change had once seen him abuse one boy even while waiting for the police to arrive at the behest of another. All he could think about was SL. He knew where he lived. He had a rough idea of what he looked like. He could guide him, tease him, direct him.

  Misdirect him.

  At will.

  The prospect of control was delicious. The prize was precious. The boy was his for the taking.

  Suddenly all the time in the world seemed like too much slack to Avery.

  Anything could happen!

  SL could move; he could die; he could just lose interest. Avery had to write to him. Had to give him hope that the corpse he sought was a heartbeat away. He had to keep him on the hook.

  He resented the subtle shift that had made him needy and dented his newfound power. But he knew a surefire way of regaining it. If he had to relinquish a little more power now to achieve complete control and sublime enjoyment later, then that was a bargain he was prepared to strike.

  So it was with a brief acknowledgement—and immediate dismissal—of regret that Arnold Avery concluded that he had to escape from prison.

  And he had to do it very soon.

  This sudden sense of urgency could have made another man careless, reckless, stupid.

  It made Avery Superman.

  He had woken from hibernation, rejuvenated and cocky and with all his senses heightened.

  He knew he was clever, and he hadn’t used his cleverness for a very long time. SL’s letters had prodded his slumbering IQ but now that he was properly awake he could feel his neurons firing like buzzy outboard motors, and intelligence coursing through him like brandy on a cold night.

  Every day now was an opportunity he didn’t want to miss. He understood the need for caution and planning but he also recognized that unexpected openings had to be exploited. It was a two-pronged attack of intellect and he felt alive with the challenge.

  Once he started to care, Avery noticed things in a never-ending stream of information that flowed through his mind. Every bit of it was assessed, catalogued, and stored away for future reference.

  He had always known that Officer Ryan Finlay was a fucking idiot, but now his calm, pale eyes saw that Finlay was a fucking idiot with a big bunch of keys of which he took very little care.

  The keys were attached to Finlay’s belt and were also supposed to be tucked safely out of sight in the little black leather pouch on said belt. Prison authorities knew that even the glimpse of a key could make an indelible impression on the criminal mind in a way that honesty and morals never had. Within hours a prisoner could fashion a key from the covers to
rn from paperbacks, or the ends of cereal packets; it wouldn’t be durable, but it would only have to work once.

  For this reason, officers were supposed to keep their keys concealed at all times. In reality, unlocking a door, putting the keys in the pouch, walking ten feet, and having to take them out again to unlock a second door was not conducive to following the rules.

  Officer Finlay didn’t follow the rules. Arnold supposed that in his small, fat way, Finlay considered himself above petty rules, just like he did. Except, of course, when Finlay broke the rules it meant playing fast and loose with a bunch of keys. When he broke the rules, it meant choking the life out of a helpless child.

  Everything was relative.

  Arnold noticed now that Officer Finlay did not even like his keys banging against his not inconsiderable hip. Instead he liked to un-clip them from his belt entirely and twirl them on his fingers as he jingled up and down the echoing hallways. As Officer Finlay was the antithesis of athleticism and hand-eye coordination, sometimes he dropped them and, when he did, he took a shuffling age to pick them up—sighing and creaking down to the floor and back up again. Once upright, he’d blink dizzily for a few seconds as if the effort of bending double had knocked all the orientation out of him.

  Avery watched him. Watched him come onto the block; watched him go out; watched the keys that he chose from the bulky ring to do those things with. The key onto the block was long and old-fashioned. Simplistic, almost. The keys he used to unlock the cells were Yales. That was harder. Apart from the Yales and the block key, Avery counted seven other keys on Finlay’s ring. He didn’t know what they opened but he had the feeling that seven keys would be more than enough to get an enterprising man out to the wall, or very close to it.

  Avery was not fool enough to think he could just pick up the keys and let himself out of the prison, but it was something he mulled over; it was information catalogued.

  The walls of Longmoor prison—at a mere twelve feet—were the lowest in the country. However, any man who managed to get through the fence, scale the wall, and avoid breaking both ankles on the other side was faced with a far tougher obstacle: Dartmoor itself.

  For over a century, the prison authorities had relied on the spacious confines of the moor to keep prisoners inside. On the few occasions escapes had been made, prison officers only bothered patrolling the roads, confident that they offered the sole realistic route to freedom. Prisoners who struck out across Dartmoor were doomed to suffer the vagaries of the moor’s own brand of captivity—a malicious and unpredictable microclimate. Even in midyear, if the heatstroke didn’t exhaust absconders on the treeless landscape, the weather could perform a spectacular U-turn and send a blanket of damp, cold mist down on them within minutes, chilling their bones as they stumbled blindly off house-sized granite boulders, through slippery rills, and into sudden, gripping bogs that tempted the unwary with mirages of wiry grass growing almost hydroponically across their surfaces.

  The moor was almost always the winner in the game of escape.

  Now, with prisoner numbers rocketing and a nosey public’s demand for efficiency, a sturdy chain-link fence had been erected fifteen feet inside the perimeter stone wall. This was still only twelve feet high, but had the added deterrent of rolls of razor wire on top. There were four locked gates in the chain-link fence, as if there was a need to pop through and retrieve an errant football or something.

  The wall alone would have been enticing. The wall and the chain-link and the razor wire were a daunting prospect.

  Even so, Avery softened a bar of soap in warm water and kept it in his pocket at all times, suffering the scummy residue it left in his jeans by repeatedly telling himself that soap could not be dirty; it was the antithesis of dirty—the embodiment of clean—and that therefore he could and should and must bear the constant greasy weight of it on his person. What he would do if he ever managed to press a key into the soap, he wasn’t quite sure. He would cross that bridge if he came to it and felt something useful lay on the other side.

  Avery also considered the walls of his cell. They were made of blocks but the mortar between the blocks was naturally vulnerable. The enemy of escape through the walls was time, of which he had too little, and light, of which he had too much. Although his cell was gloomier than most because of the board at the window, the electric lights went on at 6:30 A.M. and stayed on until 10:30 P.M. Avery started scraping at the mortar around a stone under his bunk at about 11 P.M., using the handle of his toothbrush.

  Three hours later he had made a vague indentation in the mortar and a very sharp toothbrush. He gave up on the wall, but kept the toothbrush under his pillow. This was prison and nothing was to be wasted.

  Two nights later he used his sharp toothbrush to prize the board away from his window. The mortar around the bars was softer than that in the walls and, by the time the sky started to lighten, he had exposed two inches at the base of one of the bars. It was tampering that would have been spotted almost immediately in any cell in the prison. Any cell, that is, that had not had its window boarded up on the express orders of Dr. Leaver. In two years nobody had ever removed the board and Avery saw no reason why they would start now.

  Avery did not place any great faith in his own plans. He understood that disappointment was proportionate to the gulf between expectation and realization. He didn’t like to hope—didn’t even like the word, which implied some sort of helpless kowtowing to the vagaries of fate. He preferred to call what he had “options” and, as his desire for escape grew into a burning need, he took pains to leave no option unexplored.

  Always one to stay in his cell when he was not required to shower or eat, Avery now started to lean on the railing opposite his door, like the scum did, to observe prison life. Of course, the scum smoked while they did this and Avery didn’t. Filthy habit. He saw their yellow-stained fingers and shuddered. God knows what their toilet habits were like.

  Avery wished he hadn’t thought of that. It made the bile rise in his throat. The thought of being dirty made him shiver, but actual bodily functions and fluids had the power to make him clammy and nauseous, and the feeling of nausea—with its implicit threat of vomiting—could force him into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  He breathed deeply and focused on the man nearest to him, who happened to be Sean Ellis—he of the hot wife and the stolen photos.

  Avery glanced at Ellis’s fingers and found them a healthy pink, so—more to allay his own nausea than anything else—he nodded briefly at the man and raised his eyebrows in a neutral greeting.

  “All right,” Ellis returned, indicating to Avery that he was new enough to Longmoor not to know what he had done, or bad enough not to care. Avery hoped it was the latter; he was mightily sick of having stupid, common criminals look at him as if he was shit on their shoes. He didn’t want or need their friendship but—even after eighteen years—he was still genuinely uncertain as to why some killers got respect in prison while he was vilified. It fed his feeling of having been cheated out of what should have been his due—awe in deference to his crimes at the very least.

  Ellis was certainly new to the Vulnerable Prisoners Unit. Avery wondered idly what he had done which required that he be protected but he also knew that information would seep out eventually—however hard a nonce or a snitch tried to keep it to themselves.

  “Smoke?” offered Avery.

  “Nah, don’t smoke. Thanks.”

  Avery appraised Ellis quickly. He was a tall, powerfully built man with the squashed nose of a gangster but careful brown eyes with incongruously lush lashes. Avery did not know or care that they were the last eyes two bank tellers had ever looked into. He only knew that his first attempt for several years to speak to a fellow con as an equal had started rather well.

  “Dirty habit.” He shrugged. “Only keep them to be sociable.” It was the truth. Three days after seeing SL’s photograph, Avery had bought half a pack of Bensons from Andy Ralph, just in case he needed a way into the kind o
f conversation he was now embarking on with Sean Ellis.

  Ellis nodded, then turned his idle attention back to the game of Ping-Pong clattering on three floors below them, watched through a crisscross of safety netting designed to thwart the long drop of murder or suicide.

  Under normal circumstances, Avery would have been happy to end the interaction right there. He didn’t crave company or conversation. But now he had a purpose, he knew he needed to make more effort.

  And suddenly it was an effort. For what seemed like forever, Avery scoured his brain for an opening gambit that would not seem forced. Or suspicious. Or queer. Finally Arnold Avery—serial killer, outsider, freak of nature, observer of no rules but his own—turned his face to the dirty skylights that let grudging daylight into the wing and observed like a commuter: “Fucking awful weather.”

  Ellis cocked an eyebrow at him and then glanced upwards, bemused by the observation. “To be out in,” quipped Avery, breaking into a smile.

  Ellis got it, thank god, and snorted a small laugh. “Lucky we’re in here, then,” he said, and Avery grinned some more to let Ellis take ownership of the joke. The great ox.

  Ellis was new on the block. He might know what to do with the impression of a key made in soap. He might not. But he might.

  “Arnold,” he offered, extending his right hand like a lawyer at a conference.

  “Sean,” said Ellis, his big, rough hand squeezing Avery’s smaller one. Avery didn’t like that—being made to feel small and weak—but he smiled through it.

  “Food here is shite,” said Ellis, giving Avery free information. That information was that Ellis hadn’t been here long (which explained why Ellis was speaking to him in the first place) and that Ellis hadn’t been anywhere for too long, because prison food was shite wherever you were and that was just a fact. Arnold Avery had stopped mentally whining about prison food so long ago that it was a surprise to him that anyone didn’t have this knowledge knitted into the very fiber of their being like the autopilot of breathing, or of their own sexual preference.