Blacklands: A Novel

by Belinda Bauer

  “All right?” A long, stringy girl of about fifteen slid into the room and slumped in a kitchen chair behind the counter.

  “Hi,” Avery said. “Do you have any postcards of Exmoor?”

  “Postcards are outside.”

  “Yes, I know. I looked. Couldn’t see any of Exmoor, though.”

  The girl looked at him vacuously.

  “This is Dartmoor.”

  “I know. I want a postcard of Exmoor.”

  She stared at the door as if a postcard of Exmoor was expected any second.

  “Don’t we have one?”

  Avery breathed steadily. Control. Patience. Valuable lessons.

  “No.”

  The girl tutted and jerked to her feet. Avery saw she was wearing skin-tight jeans on the thinnest legs he’d ever seen. And stupid little ballet shoes. She slouched past him without a glance and went outside.

  He watched her as she turned the creaking carousel on its rusty spindle, her slightly bulging blue eyes frowning at the cards, chewing a ragged lock of her mousey hair.

  She was too old for him. Her innocence was lost, or well hidden behind boredom or stupidity. It made him hate her more as she stood, hand on hip, looking at the postcards he’d already looked at.

  “Can’t see one,” she said finally.

  “No,” he agreed.

  “Sorry.” She didn’t sound sorry. He’d like to make her sound sorry—it would be so easy—but he didn’t want to waste his time.

  He followed her back inside.

  “Can you see if you have any in stock?”

  “I don’t think we do.”

  “Can you check for me?”

  She tossed her hair by way of an answer. He mustered his reserves of self-control.

  “Please?”

  She made an irritable sound with her lips, and scuffed back through the interior door. He heard her ascending or descending some wooden steps, surprisingly heavily for such a thin girl. Letting him know she was put out.

  He smiled, then leaned over the counter and hit the OPEN key on the dirty old till that was more like a fancy money box. There was sixty pounds in tens; Avery took three of them and a handful of pound coins. When he’d last been in a shop there had still been grubby green pound notes.

  He noticed a pale green cardigan slung over the back of the chair and stuffed it into a plastic bag.

  He filled the rest of the bag with Mr. Kipling cakes, peanuts, a couple of prepacked cheese-and-tomato sandwiches, and more water, then leaned out of the door to leave it just out of sight on the pavement. Then he picked up a chewed Bic pen from the counter and wrote on one of the Exmoor postcards.

  He heard the girl stamping up or down the stairs again and slid the card of Exmoor back into his pocket as she reappeared.

  “We don’t have any.”

  “Oh well, I’ll take this one, then, please. And a first-class stamp.”

  The girl served him sullenly and he paid for the sheep card with a single pound coin, putting his change in the RNLI box.

  Outside, he tried licking the stamp, but found it was already sticky—an innovation he had to adjust to.

  As he dropped the Exmoor postcard into the letter box, he noticed that the collection time was a mere half hour away. Avery was not crazy; he knew it didn’t mean God was on his side. But he also knew it meant God really didn’t give a shit one way or the other.

  When he was a reasonable distance from the village he sat down on the sheep-shorn grass, ate three cherry Bakewell tarts, and drank a third of a liter of water. The sugar suffused his blood and made him feel strong and confident. The sun came out and warmed him and he lay back and stretched like a cat on a carport roof.

  He lifted one hip, took one of the remaining Exmoor postcards from his back pocket, and unbuttoned his jeans.

  Twenty minutes later, Avery stood up and focused on his surroundings once more.

  He took no formal bearings. He didn’t need to. He felt a strange, inevitable tugging in his chest and could do nothing but follow it.

  With the sun now warming his back, Arnold Avery, serial killer, quickened his pace and headed north.

  Chapter 30

  BECAUSE OF THE VEGETABLE PATCH, STEVEN WAS LATE FOR SCHOOL and so missed seeing Lewis before the bell rang. They were not in the same classes and then, at lunchtime, Lewis failed to appear at the gym door, which was where they always met.

  Steven huddled out of the wind and ate his cheese-and-Marmite alone, not knowing whether to wait for Lewis or to go looking for him. Both options seemed pathetic and neither gave him any clue as to how he should proceed once he and Lewis came face-to-face.

  His mother had put a Mars bar in his lunch box; a real Mars bar—not some inferior generic copy of a Mars bar—and on any other day it would have excited Steven. The Mars bar meant that his mother was happy. Of course, it was Uncle Jude who was making her happy, not him, but they would all benefit in trickle-down. Lewis was not there to admire the Mars bar, and that took some of the shine off it. Still, Steven ate it while appreciating the silver lining—if Lewis wasn’t there to admire the Mars bar, at least he wasn’t there to eat half of it.

  But once the thick, caramel sweetness had left his mouth, the bitterness of a friendship betrayed was still there.

  He saw Lewis at the end of the day, jostling other kids as he hurried through the throng at the school gates, glancing around nervously as if he might be pursued. Steven ducked behind the canteen bins and stood there, staring at his cheap new trainers, already scuffed and breaking apart from a combination of poor workmanship and overactive boy.

  He knew Lewis was looking out for him, hoping he wouldn’t catch him up on the way home. Steven still didn’t know what to say to Lewis, so he gave him a long head start and then walked home so slowly that Lettie tightened her mouth at him for the first time in days.

  “You’re late.”

  “I helped Mr. Edwards put the gym stuff away. The door was locked and he had to go to the office for the key.” Steven had thought of the lie during the interminable walk home. It sounded just fine coming out of his mouth, and Lettie’s lips loosened in acceptance, but Nan looked at him sharply and he felt himself grow warm about the ears.

  Still, she didn’t say anything, and Uncle Jude came downstairs, whistling “There Is a Green Hill Far Away,” which was her favorite, and so tea unfolded without further incident, until Uncle Jude said: “Did you see the patch?”

  Steven nodded noncommittally but didn’t look at him.

  “Any idea what happened?”

  He shook his head and put fake butter on a piece of bread, hoping his silence made the lie somehow less sinful.

  Uncle Jude shrugged and sighed. “We can put the beans up again but we’ll lose a lot of the carrots and potatoes.”

  Steven nodded.

  “Do it after tea, if you like.”

  He nodded more vigorously. The evening was calm and warm and the thought of repairing the damage was an attractive one. He’d been afraid Uncle Jude would lose interest; that the vegetable patch was a one-shot deal and it was over now.

  “Wondered if your friend would like to help.”

  “Who?” said Steven warily.

  “The one who’s all mouth and no trousers.”

  Steven flushed as he recognized Lewis, feeling laughter bubbling, but quickly tamped down with guilt and sudden nerves at ever seeing his best friend again.

  “Why don’t you go and ask him?” Uncle Jude was studying him now with a careful look in his eye. Steven saw him exchange a small glance with his mother.

  Uncle Jude knew. Somehow.

  Steven looked at his fish fingers.

  “I don’t think he’d like to. Digging’s not his thing.”

  He held his breath, waiting for Uncle Jude to make him, or argue with him, or expose Lewis. But he didn’t.

  “Just the two of us, then,” he said instead, and Steven met his eyes for the first time today, and smiled.

  Chapter 3
1

  ARNOLD AVERY WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE DIRECTION HE SHOULD take, but he was wrong about the ticking clock.

  Because the governor wanted to keep morale up.

  When Avery wasn’t recaptured by 5 P.M., the governor even got into his own two-year-old Mercedes Kompressor and cruised the drizzling moors, convinced that spotting Avery was just a matter of time and motivation.

  And he was getting very motivated.

  Every hour that Avery remained at large compounded his sin in not having called the police. And every hour that he didn’t call the police increased his desperation to get Avery back in custody without anyone knowing he’d ever been gone.

  When Avery wasn’t captured by nightfall, the governor’s discomfort at not having called the police earlier turned to twitchy foreboding and—shortly thereafter—blind panic.

  It was in that condition that he staked his entire future on Avery’s being in custody by morning.

  Which meant that when he wasn’t, the numb, soon-to-be-jobless governor didn’t call the police until 7:09 A.M.—almost twenty-four hours after Avery went over the wall.

  Chapter 32

  SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD PRIVATE GARY LUMSDEN DIDN’T LIKE THE army but—like his father before him—he did like guns.

  The difference, thought Lumsden, was that his father had never been in possession of a gun quite as menacing as the SA80A2, with its thirty-round magazine, an accurate range of four hundred yards, and a muzzle velocity of just a shade under a kilometer per second.

  Not that his father would have given a shit about any of the technical details, of course, thought Lumsden; Mason Dingle would only have wanted to know how cheap, and could it be traced.

  But Gary Lumsden loved the technical details. Certainly, he wished the SA80A2 had a more glamorous name, like Colt .45 or Uzi. But it was the technical details that had kept his mouth watered through thirteen weeks of sweaty basic training, and his fists at his sides as Second Lieutenant Brigstock—all shiny and new from Sandhurst—bossed him about like a hated older brother.

  The thought of the SA80 obsessed him. On drill his eyes swivelled illegally to watch other squaddies carrying their guns, and he felt rather than heard the dull metal-on-metal clicks and sharp slides of well-maintained weaponry. As he hung with screaming arms over a pit of mud on the assault course, his ears were attuned to the snappy cracks from the nearby range. At night, while the man in the bunk below his made them both shake to the rhythm of imaginary sex, Gary Lumsden’s skin thrilled instead to the thought of cradling his SA80 in his left hand, while his right forefinger twitched on a phantom trigger.

  And now he finally held the culmination of all those technical details cool and heavy in his hands, it was all Private Gary Lumsden could do not to stand up, spin on his heel, and spray his platoon-mates with high-caliber bullets at a rate of seven hundred rounds per minute—just to see what it would feel like. He yearned to feel the weapon heat up in his palms, spit fire from his fingers, ring in his ears, commit distant murder.

  Instead Private Lumsden breathed through his mouth as the moment of truth arrived.

  The SA80 fitted him like another limb. They’d been separated at birth and now it was part of him again. He’d cleaned it and dismantled it and cleaned it and reassembled it and cleaned it again. He could do it blindfolded. Be good to your gun and your gun will be good to you. By that reckoning, Private Lumsden’s gun should have gone down on him every morning and then cooked him bacon and eggs.

  But now—finally—it was his gun’s turn to pay him back.

  Controlling his excitement, Private Lumsden drew a bead on a card target that didn’t even have a human shape on it—it was just five bull’s-eyes on a page. Fucking crap.

  Still, he focused, relaxed, exhaled smoothly, and squeezed lovingly, and the single round kicked his shoulder and the card rippled briefly to let him know he’d hit it.

  “Well done, Lumsden!”

  Lumsden didn’t hear Brigstock. The shot had opened a gate of hot pleasure in him that made him wince. He had to bite his lip to keep from whimpering. Never in a million years had he imagined his gun would be that good to him.

  In a rush, he thought of his father.

  Lumsden’s father shared his DNA but not his name. Thank god. Life had been tough enough for the Lumsden boys without the added encumbrance of a name like Dingle. No wonder his old man had had a short fuse.

  That short fuse translated into quick fists for young Gary and his brother, Mark. The boys did not complain; they had never known anything else. In just the same way, they had never had clothes on their backs that were not shoplifted, food on their table that had been legally purchased, toys they had not bought with stolen lunch money.

  Even their mother did not really belong to their father—she was one of six on the Lapwing estate who had borne his children, the first offspring arriving just shy of Mason Dingle’s fifteenth birthday. Gary and Mark had a half sister they had nothing to do with, and knew who their half brothers were by their quick tempers as much as by the angelic blue eyes they all shared.

  The eight boys aged between six and seventeen prowled warily around one another on the estate—aware of the tenuous bond they all resented. There were long periods of uneasy quiet, punctured by flurries of sharp but generally minor violence. Their father flitted between families, staying only until everything wasn’t going his way, then he’d move on and start again. He had no favorites—barely seemed to acknowledge the boys—and made no contribution other than drawing regular late-night or early-morning visits from the police.

  Gary Lumsden was first taken into custody at the age of nine for stealing a tube of toothpaste from the corner shop. His mother had sent him for the toothpaste; she didn’t give him any money and Gary didn’t expect her to. The shopkeeper held his shirt so tight until the police came that Gary had red marks under his armpits for days.

  He knew shoplifting was wrong, but only in an abstract way. At school it was wrong and at home it was all he knew. The thought of going to work somewhere, earning money, and buying stuff with it was alien to him; he had no experience of anyone in his family doing such a thing—and would have thought them foolish to attempt it. Toothpaste was in the shop; all he had to do was transfer it to his mother’s bathroom with the minimum of fuss.

  The police came and took him home, instead of to the police station. The copper led him from the patrol car to the front door in a death grip that told Gary he’d like to do much more to him than this pointless exercise. Something inside the young Gary had understood that this wasn’t just about him; that the policeman’s rough handling had been primed by other, older experiences that Gary had no knowledge of. But for now he was at the sharp end.

  His mother had been unable to muster the required sobriety to appear even vaguely interested in a policeman at her door and—apart from her later bitching about no toothpaste—that had been that. Given that Gary had been relieving the corner shop of its shabby stock since the age of four, his first brush with the law seemed a ridiculously small price to pay.

  Mason Dingle occasionally “went away,” but he always came back and never seemed embarrassed, chastened, or changed by the experience, and Gary and Mark had no doubt that they would one day follow him into the family trade.

  Until they saw Band of Brothers on a pirated DVD. Then everything changed.

  Suddenly Gary and Mark Lumsden were the good guys—staunch, courageous, noble—if only in their own minds. They stopped being famous footballers and gangsters and started being soldiers.

  It wasn’t all good. At first, soldiers meant they moved from sneak-thieving and shoplifting to all-out noisy attacks, using threats, diversionary tactics, and confusion to cover their actions. Military strategy, they learned to call it.

  There was a hiccup in their game when they found a dull black pistol in a box in the shed. It had MADE IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA down one side with the letters CZ inside a circle at either end of that. It was dirty and scratched and was the mo
st beautiful thing either of them had ever encountered. For a heady six hours, Mark and Gary Lumsden held each other hostage, gunned each other down, pressed bruising rings into each other’s temples and backs with the muzzle of the pistol in a barely suppressed excitement of violence.

  Then their father caught them with it and beat them both black and blue.

  Mark had no ambition anyway and the beating laid to rest any daring he possessed regarding the CZ, but slowly—with the memory of the heavy pistol in his small hands always fresh—Gary started to aspire to a gun.