Blacklands: A Novel

by Belinda Bauer

  It was a bit flattering.

  But mostly it was just embarrassing.

  He stepped away from his mother, feeling the heat coming off his head in waves.

  He saw the worry in his mother’s eyes, though, and—because she’d held him—he eked out an answer of sorts:

  “Don’t worry, Mum.”

  “Don’t make me, okay?”

  He nodded and withdrew, although he could see from her face that Nan thought he’d got off lightly.

  He took the stairs two at a time. It was a stretch, but Lewis had tried it and failed, so Steven figured he might as well practice it if Lewis thought it was worthwhile. It left him breathless at the top.

  DB. DB. None of the children was called DB. Was Avery revealing another murder to him?

  Once in his room, he studied the letter carefully in the dull light of the window. There were no other marks on it that he could see. He got out the map of Exmoor he’d used for his correspondence with Avery, and pored over it. The letters were not positioned anywhere in particular on the piece of paper, so Steven didn’t bother trying to line them up with anything.

  A photo woulD Be nice.

  Avery wanted a photo of DB. But who was DB?

  Three nights later, Steven jerked awake with the answer.

  He could feel it in his gut.

  DB was not a “who” but a “what.”

  It was the highest point of the moor, and close to where all the bodies had been found.

  Arnold Avery wanted a photo of Dunkery Beacon.

  Chapter 19

  IT TOOK STEVEN WELL OVER AN HOUR TO WALK TO DUNKERY Beacon, even though his way was speeded by not having to carry the spade.

  The spade.

  Now that he’d stopped digging, just thinking the word “spade” made him squirm with the guilt of potential failure.

  Still, he was faster without it, allowing his arms to swing freely, working up a rhythm and a slight sweat as he trudged uphill—always uphill—onto the moor. He hadn’t even bothered with sandwiches, just a bottle of water and the camera making bulges in his old anorak.

  The camera was Davey’s; a cheap disposable—one of a pack of three he’d got for his birthday. He’d wasted the first photographing feet, ceilings, and blurred people. He’d dropped the second in the bath while photographing the epic sea battle between Action Man and a plague of off-worldly beings in the shape of colored beads of bath oil. Too late, Davey had realized the colorful capsules melted in the hot water, leaving just a white oily slick, a scrap of fruit-gum-like gel—and him open to the wrath of his luxury-rationed mother. In his panic he’d dropped the camera.

  The third camera had gathered dust on the bedroom window-sill until Arnold Avery’s letter arrived, then Steven stole it without compunction.

  He needed it, Davey didn’t.

  Dunkery Beacon was not only the highest point on Exmoor, it was also the coldest, thought Steven, as the wind whipped his cheap anorak around him, flicking his thighs painfully with the metal zip. He zipped it up to avoid further injury.

  Because it was pretty much the only thing to look at apart from the nonexistent view, Steven briefly considered the plaque that commemorated the gift of the Beacon, an area of outstanding natural beauty, to the nation in 1935. The names of the benefactors were carved in stone, and Steven couldn’t help snorting: they should see the natural beauty today, he thought.

  From Exmoor there was often a view of the Bristol Channel and sometimes of the Brecon Beacons, rising across the channel from the foreign land of Wales, but today the white sky with its relief of scudding grey clouds left the horizon fuzzy and foreign. He turned and looked back down the rough track that had brought him here, to the small level patch of gravel that constituted a car park. There were two cars there. It wasn’t unusual—people liked views but luckily people also liked walking, and nobody could enjoy both at the same time unless they got out of their cars.

  Steven glanced around but couldn’t see anyone. It was astonishing how quickly people could disappear on Exmoor’s seemingly featureless hills.

  Dunkery Beacon was not entirely featureless. Here and there were the stone humps of ancient burial mounds. He tugged the blue plastic camera from his pocket as he turned a slow circle, wondering which angle would be best.

  All too quickly, he knew, and felt sick for knowing.

  Avery would want the angle that showed the best view of that part of Dunkery Beacon where he’d buried the bodies.

  Steven hadn’t been thinking of the bodies when he walked up here, but now he realized he was standing within five hundred yards of three of the shallow gravesites.

  Yasmin Gregory.

  Louise Leverett.

  John Elliot.

  With a feeling of uneasy voyeurism, he scanned the ground around him to see if he could spot any evidence, even after all these years, of the excavations that had been made during the search. The burial mounds—markers denoting respect and honor—became mere backdrop as his memory imposed three sets of red biro initials onto the windblown gorse and his killer’s eye made shallows in the turf, scars in the gorse. But his ordinary boy’s intellect reasserted itself. It had been a long time. Grass, gorse, and heather would have crept back by now, recolonizing the exposed soil, softening the harsh, gaping wounds of little families and the whole nation. He knew there would be nothing to see unless one knew exactly where to look, and even then imagination would have to play a part.

  And so he imagined, and peered through the dirty little view-finder across a part of the moor that he thought had held one of the graves and clicked the shutter. It seemed to be over rather quickly and easily, considering his long walk up here, so he moved around a little and clicked the shutter again before trudging back down the Beacon.

  As he crossed the car park, Steven peered idly into the cars. Sometimes people left dogs in their cars on hot days. Steven dreamed of finding a dog in a car on a hot day and being forced to smash the window to rescue it, then taking it home with him, secure in the knowledge he’d saved it from stupid, undeserving people.

  But today wasn’t hot, and most people who brought dogs to Exmoor had brought them there with the express purpose of walking them, not leaving them in the car. Steven sighed and realized he’d have to live near a supermarket to have a decent chance of making his fantasy a reality, and there was no supermarket in Shipcott.

  He turned and looked back at the Beacon, brown and ugly under the lowering sky.

  The angle of the light made the ancient burial mounds stand out much better from down here. What had seemed flat from the summit was relief from the car park. It would make a better picture from this angle, he reasoned.

  So, with fingers turning numb from the cold, Steven prized the camera out of his pocket once more, pointed it back up the rising ground, and clicked the shutter.

  Then he turned and started the walk home.

  He was at the fork in the track that would lead him down into Shipcott when he saw the hoodies coming towards him, their heads down as they made heavy weather of climbing the steep hillside from the village.

  Steven stood stock-still. He looked round briefly as though a rock, a bush, a tree might suddenly emerge from the almost featureless moor and afford him somewhere to hide. He knew it was pointless. He knew he could drop out of sight right here in the deep heather beside the pathway. He and Lewis used to hide that way from Lewis’s dopey dog, Bunny, when Bunny was still alive. They would wait until Bunny loped off after a rabbit, then throw themselves into the heather and whistle. They would snigger and peer and whisper as they heard the Labrador-cross blundering about the moor around them—and always get a shock when he finally found them with his big wet nose, his lolling tongue, and his excited yaps.

  But that was from a dog’s-eye point of view.

  Steven knew that if he lay in the heather now, when the hoodies came to within ten feet they would see his frightened form flattened in full view against the flowers, like a stupid ostrich wi
th its head in the sand, and then he would be humiliated as well as chased and roughed up.

  For a moment he just stood there, waiting for one of the panting boys to glance up at the path ahead and see him, while he decided on the best way to run.

  The camera.

  The thought popped into his head. If they caught him, they would take the camera. Or break it.

  Quickly he pulled it out of his pocket, chose a place, and dropped it into the heather. He tried to imprint the location on his brain. Two pale mauve heathers with a sprig of yellow gorse between them, next to that stone shaped like a jelly bean.

  He looked back at the hoodies at the very moment one of them looked up and saw him, and realized that dumping the camera had lost him the distance he so badly needed to turn and run.

  They were on him in a second.

  “Lamb,” said one—the tallest one.

  He said nothing and they seemed momentarily at a loss for what to do with him.

  “Got any money?”

  “No.”

  Rough, careless hands tugged at his clothes anyway, pulling his pockets inside out, his water bottle dropping to the stony track with a hollow plastic slosh. They found thirty-four pence in his jeans, and Arnold Avery’s letter folded in his back pocket.

  The smallest boy shoved him in the chest, making him take half a step backwards, even though it was uphill.

  “You said you din’t have no money.”

  Steven shrugged. The tall boy unfolded the letter.

  “ ‘A photo would be nice.’ What’s that mean, then?”

  “Nothing.”

  The tall boy glared at Steven and the letter, wondering whether he gave a shit or not. Finally he just tore it into bits and sprinkled it across the heather. The smallest boy pushed Steven again, this time in the shoulder. He could feel them itching for him to push back—wanting the challenge so they could justify their own actions. When he didn’t react, the middle boy yanked his anorak off his shoulders. Now Steven did resist, bending his elbows to keep it on.

  “Gimme, you divvy.”

  Steven didn’t trust his voice. He didn’t want to tell them that if he went home without his anorak his mother would go nuts. It was old and not completely waterproof, but he knew it was nowhere near the end of its useful life as far as she was concerned. He wouldn’t be able to tell her it had been stolen, in case she tried to complain to the hoodies’ parents—and then his life might as well be over. But the thought of having to tell her that he’d left it on the moor or lost it at school made his eyes suddenly hot with tears as the middle boy jerked harder, pleased he was resisting.

  Steven bit his lip to stop himself begging, as the insistent pulling on his arms made him lose his balance and stumble sideways. Immediately the middle boy saw an opening and shoved him that way, sending him to his knees in the sharp gorse. His right wrist twisted as it was caught in the cuff of the anorak, momentarily taking his full weight as he fell, then wrenched free of the nylon, releasing him to tumble to his side.

  He felt the spiky prickles on his arm, the side of his face, and even through his jumper and jeans; he jerked his head up to save his face, and heard the hoodies laugh.

  “Get his trainers.”

  The anger that had started to rise in Steven when the boy grabbed his anorak now made him kick at them as they tried to take his shoes. New last Christmas. His mother had been angry they were muddy; she would kill him if they were gone.

  The boys gripped his flailing legs and he curled his foot up in an effort to hold the left trainer on, but it was wrenched from him.

  His tears now were furious helplessness. He wanted to kill them; he wanted to yank them by the ears and smash his knee into their grinning faces; he wanted to pick up the stone shaped like a jelly bean and beat their laughing mouths until their teeth were jagged, bloody stumps.

  Instead he cried while they took his right shoe too, and walked off laughing.

  He waited and cried, wincing at the pain of the gorse pricking into him, but too scared to follow too closely behind them.

  Finally he got up, flinching his way back onto the path. One of his socks had been pulled halfway off his foot. They were his favorite socks; his nan had knitted them for him for his birthday two years before and he kept them for special so as not to wear them out. Grey marl and ribbed, with a cleverly turned foot she called a French heel that made them hold their own shape, like cartoon socks. They’d been big for him when he got them, and they were small for him now, but he still wore them for special. Today had been special because of the photo of Dunkery Beacon. Now he’d remember today for other reasons too. He began to cry again, making it hard to find the jelly bean stone through the blurring, but he managed it eventually and then found the camera and started back down the path. It was slow going and painful and—by the time he reached the stile that led through the backs of the houses to the road—both his socks had holes in them.

  “What do you mean, lost?” Lettie was not furious yet, but she was well on the way and Steven knew she’d get there before long.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “How can you lose your anorak and your shoes? And not know where?”

  “And ruin his socks,” Nan chimed in. “Took me weeks to knit those with my arthritis. Doesn’t appreciate anything.”

  “I did appreciate them!” he said, angry that she could think otherwise. Hadn’t she seen how he’d kept them for special? The thought made him start to cry again and some part of his mind sighed wearily at that. He was so fed up with crying today; he could hardly believe he had more of it left in him.

  “Stevie’s crying, Mum!” Davey was intrigued.

  “Fuck off, Davey,” he snapped.

  “You dare use that word in this house!”

  Lettie slapped the back of his head—not hard, but stunning him anyway, and shocking them all into a horrible, ticking silence.

  His mother never slapped his head or face. She’d lash out at his arms or legs occasionally, but the head was off limits on the unspoken understanding that only drunks and council tenants slapped their children there.

  Steven wanted to apologize. He wanted it so badly. He wanted his mother to hold him again the way she had the other day. He wanted to lay his head on her shoulder and be a baby again and not have to worry about his socks or his shoes or his anorak or the hoodies or the spade or bodies or serial killers. He wanted to curl up in bed with hot milk and sugar and have someone sing him to sleep while they stroked his hair.

  He was so tired of his life.

  But she’d slapped his head.

  So, instead of apologizing, he yelled: “Fuck you too!” then pushed past his mother, ran upstairs, and slammed his bedroom door so hard that she came pounding up the stairs in a fury.

  He knew he’d gone too far.

  If she hadn’t been so angry Lettie would have seen how scared he was—standing by his bed, eyes wide, hands splayed before him in surrender, no longer sure she had any control.

  “Mum, I’m sorry!”

  But it was too late and she slapped his head again—and then again, and hit his arms and hands and ears and, finally, rained slaps and weak, side-fisted girl punches down on his back as he cowered over his bed with his head between his elbows.

  It was Davey’s hysterical screaming that brought Lettie back to her senses at last. She gathered her favorite son into her arms and shushed him gently.

  “You see how you’ve upset Davey!” she shouted at Steven, in a voice shrill with guilt. “Now come down for tea.”

  “I don’t want any tea.” His voice was muffled in the bedspread.

  “Fine,” said Lettie, hefting Davey higher onto her hip. “Don’t have any, then.”

  Steven heard them leave and go downstairs. He heard Lettie’s voice, low and gentle with Davey, and some part of him understood that she was trying to make up for what she’d done—even if she wasn’t making it up to him.

  He sniffled and hitched and started to feel the places
where his mother’s ring must have caught him—his left ear, his left wrist, a stinging on his shoulder blade. He put his finger to the ear and found a little spot of blood. His ears also rang a little and his right cheek burned from a slap. He crept onto the bed, turned to the wall, and curled more tightly into a ball. He hugged himself, suddenly cold but not wanting to move again to get under the covers.

  The touch of something soft on his shoulder startled him. Nan had picked up the bedspread behind him and folded it over him. He met her eyes briefly, but she straightened up and turned to leave.