Blacklands: A Novel

by Belinda Bauer

  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.

  One driveway held a scuffed BMW parked behind a small red Nissan hatchback. The hatchback had the keys under the sun visor. The car started on the first turn of the key and, with the BMW blocking his reverse exit, Avery had simply swung the hatchback in a juddering L-plated arc across the front lawn and through the token fence.

  In seconds he’d been driving north, hunched spiderlike over the wheel in a seat that was adjusted for a very small woman, his knees banging the dash, his heart racing in time to the engine, which—for some panicky reason—he couldn’t kick out of third gear.

  In a lay-by he’d levered the seat into a more comfortable position and searched the car. On the backseat was a child’s picture book—The Weird and Wonderful Wombat—and a box of tissues. There was a tool kit in the boot, along with a towrope and a plastic bag of women’s magazines. He took the magazines out of the bag and put the towrope in it, along with the wheel brace. He almost closed the boot, then leaned in and picked up a copy of Cosmopolitan. He might have a long wait.

  As he shut the boot, he was overcome by dizziness and fatigue. It took a huge effort to get back in the car and find the ignition with the keys, but he did it in the end. He turned the Nissan off the main road and drove jerkily down a series of haphazard lanes until he could pull into a field behind a hedge.

  Then he crawled into the backseat and slept.

  When he woke it was late afternoon and he felt a lot better. His arm still throbbed but had stopped bleeding entirely. His shirtsleeve was stuck to his arm but he decided to leave well alone.

  He drank more water, ate a cheese-and-tomato sandwich, and pissed with abandon into the hedge, enjoying the sensation of the gentle afternoon breeze caressing his penis. It felt like freedom.

  Reinvigorated, Arnold Avery set off again, this time triumphing over the vagaries of the Nissan Micra gearbox. Without the scream of the straining engine, his heart slowed to the point where he could think clearly once more.

  He tried not to think about what his immediate future held. It was just too distracting. Too exciting.

  Instead he tried to concentrate on relearning to drive; on the smell of the hedgerows that slapped against the passenger window now and then; on the smooth black ribbon of road that presented mostly forgotten sights around every corner.

  That was exciting enough.

  For now.

  Chapter 35

  SATURDAY DAWNED SO STILL AND SHROUDED IN MIST THAT IT deadened every sound.

  Steven was awake. Had been awake for hours.

  He felt sick. He felt happy. He felt butterflies in his stomach, and prickles in his knees that made his legs jump with wanting to run. To run up the track to Blacklands and stake his claim to the body of his dead boy-uncle Billy.

  He felt sick again—this time enough to go and bend over the toilet bowl and retch a little. Nothing. He spat into the bowl but didn’t flush in case it woke anyone.

  He dressed in his favorite clothes. His best socks were ruined—although he hadn’t been able to bring himself to throw them away—but everything else was his favorite. The Levi’s his mother had got in the charity shop, still dark blue with lack of wear, and the perfect weight on his hips; the red Liverpool shirt with the number 8 on his back and his own name in white over the top of that. It had been a birthday present two years ago. Nan had bought the shirt and Lettie had paid for it to be printed when they went to Barnstaple, ten pounds for the number, two pounds for each letter. She had joked it was lucky that they weren’t called Lambinovski and they’d all laughed—even Davey, who didn’t know what he was laughing at.

  As he dressed (clean underwear and everything), Steven was a little embarrassed to admit even to himself that these were the clothes he wanted his photo taken in for the newspapers when he revealed his find.

  This was how he wanted himself to be for posterity.

  He looked out of the window. The mist was down but he could tell that behind it the sun was shining. By midmorning it would have chased the gloom away. Probably. He tied the sleeves of his new boot-sale anorak around his waist anyway. It was the moor; you just never knew.

  Downstairs he made a raspberry jam sandwich, clearing up after himself with precision. He put the sandwich and his water bottle into his anorak pockets, feeling them swing against the backs of his thighs.

  Outside in the garden, the air was thick, white, and still. Steven could hear Mr. Randall’s shower and, seeming closer than he knew she was, Mrs. Hocking singing something soft and off-key—the sound dampened by the moisture in the air but still carried easily to him over the hedges, fences, and shrubberies of five gardens.

  Picking up his spade made a musical scrape against the concrete that seemed clangingly loud in the motionless air.

  Steven had planned to take his spade and go, but instead he went up to the vegetable patch. Walking up the garden made him sad as he thought of Uncle Jude being gone, but once he got there he felt better. Only a few days ago they had repaired the damage, and repaired it well. He could still see Uncle Jude’s footprints in the soil’s edges, still see the marks his fingers had made where he pressed the dark earth back down on the rescued seedlings. The evidence of Uncle Jude was still here, even if he himself was not.

  Steven realized the evidence of Lewis’s betrayal now lingered only in his heart. He glanced automatically towards the back of Lewis’s house—to Lewis’s bedroom window—and saw movement there, as if a face had been rapidly withdrawn beyond the dark reflection of the glass. Lewis? Maybe. The mist made everything doubtful. Steven watched but nothing reappeared. He shouldered his spade with the practiced ease of an old soldier and turned away from the vegetable patch.

  As he walked back through the house, he could hear his nan stirring upstairs—the little cough she tried to quell behind her old-lady fingers, the creak of boards under her pale, slippered feet. The thought of leaving her like this—the way she had been for as long as he had known her—and returning to somebody new and wonderful made him ache anew for it soon to be over.

  Careful not to bang anything with his spade, Steven left the house and pulled the front door quietly shut behind him.

  He was almost at the stile when Lewis caught up to him.

  Lewis was out of breath, and Steven was at a loss for what to say to him, so for several seconds they just stood and faced each other silently, squirming a little at the awkwardness of it.

  Then Lewis glanced at the spade and said: “Want a hand?”

  Part of Steven wanted to shout “No!” very loudly and with feeling. But when he opened his mouth, he said: “I didn’t think digging was your thing.”

  Lewis’s blush deepened and spread to the tips of his ears and down under the neck of his T-shirt. For Steven it was a confirmation and an apology, and he accepted both with a shrug. “You got something to eat?”

  Lewis nodded eagerly and pulled a carrier bag from the pocket of his waterproof. It was folded around some squarish thing that was probably a sandwich. Steven didn’t ask what was in it and Lewis didn’t volu
nteer; they both understood they’d have to work their way up to that again.

  “Okay, then.”

  Steven climbed over the stile, which was slippery from the mist, and Lewis followed.

  The promise of the dawn faltered as the boys trudged up the hill onto the moor. Fifty yards above the village they broke through the mist briefly, then were enveloped again as the little breeze dragged more off the sea and over the sun.

  It wasn’t bad. Steven estimated they could see twenty or thirty feet ahead of them. He could tell that the air beyond the mist was warm. It had been an uncommonly clement season and heather and gorse were blooming early in slow drifts of mauve and yellow.

  Lewis hadn’t bothered putting his sandwich away after showing it to Steven, and quickly ate the first, good half. He wrapped the bad half again carefully.

  Two hundred yards farther up the track, he ate that too.

  At the fork, Steven turned left behind the houses instead of his usual right, and Lewis spoke for the first time since the stile.

  “Where you going?”

  “Blacklands.”

  “Why?”

  “To dig.”

  “I—”

  Lewis bit his lip with a squeak, but the words “told you so” hung in the wet air. No matter. Steven appreciated the act of will it had taken for Lewis to swallow the jibe. They walked on in silence while the sky lightened and the tentative birds finally got the hang of the dawn chorus.

  As they approached Blacklands, Steven saw the postcard again in his mind. He had it in his back pocket but he didn’t want to get it out in front of Lewis and have to explain things.

  He knew from geography lessons what the Friar Tuck haircut symbol meant—it marked a rise in the ground. And he also knew exactly where that rise was. It looked very like the burial mounds on Dunkery Beacon—just closer to home. That thought made Steven stop and look back down towards Shipcott. It was invisible—still covered in mist below and behind them.

  Another five minutes brought them to the mound at Blacklands and Steven turned again and looked down the moor to where he knew the village lay.

  “Why d’ you keep stopping?”

  Steven didn’t answer Lewis. He glanced above them at the mound, remembered the map, the positioning of those initials he’d been so desperate to see.

  He started to skirt the rise, zigzagging a little through the heather. Lewis followed him. The dew was thick on the flowers and their jeans were soaked in seconds.

  Lewis shivered. Steven stopped and took his bearings.

  Here. About here.

  Steven could barely believe that after years of random digging, he was about to bend to the task with real focus, based on inside information. Of course, there was still a big patch of ground to cover—probably half an acre—but compared to the whole of Exmoor, half an acre was a pinprick. This was the place. Somewhere here, Arnold Avery had buried the uncle he never knew and now he was going to start the task of finding him for real. Steven didn’t care how long it took him now. Nothing would keep him from returning Uncle Billy to his family.

  Far from feeling excited and triumphant, the thought of succeeding suddenly made him overwhelmingly sad. Once more he looked down into the sea of mist and knew that—on a clear day—he’d be able to see his house. Uncle Billy had been buried within sight of his own backyard. His heartbroken mother, who had watched the searchers on TV prodding miles of heather and gorse, could have glanced out of the back bedroom window and seen her son’s shallow grave.

  Steven shivered and turned away from Shipcott.

  “Cold?” Lewis regarded him with sharp eyes.

  “Nah.”

  “Where we going to dig, then?”

  “Here, I guess.”

  Steven turned a slow circle to pick a spot—and stopped dead.

  From a patch of white heather not twenty feet above them, a man was watching.

  Steven flinched in surprise.

  Then—before the flinch was even over—he felt his bowels loosen in shock as he recognized Arnold Avery.

  Chapter 36

  AVERY HAD ARRIVED IN SHIPCOTT JUST AFTER 5 A.M.

  Unlike the towns of Bideford and Barnstaple and South Molton, Shipcott had barely changed. No new road layouts, no mini-roundabouts, no one-way systems. The one in Barnstaple had stolen damn near half the night from him as he looped and reversed and came at the town square what felt like a dozen times from different directions.

  Finally he’d stopped at a newsagent’s shop, donned the green cardigan to hide the blood on his sleeve, bought a Daily Mirror, and asked directions.

  Then he’d gone back to the car and stared at the face on the front page under the headline: CHILD KILLER ON THE RUN. The photo was a small fuzzy thing he’d been used to seeing clipped to Dr. Leaver’s file. Dr. Leaver himself had taken the picture at their first session, and Dr. Leaver had been wise to go into abnormal psychiatry because his photography skills left a lot to be desired.

  Not for the first time, Arnold Avery thanked god for incompetence, but felt a pang. Had he missed his chance? If he was on the front pages today, then surely he must’ve been yesterday? Maybe SL knew he was out, or had been warned not to leave the house.

  He suppressed the desperation that that thought sparked in him and checked out his face in the rearview mirror. He looked only vaguely like the photo on the front page of the Mirror and, even if it had been a dead ringer, most people were not observant. Avery remembered that from before—remembered all the times he could have been stopped, if only people had kept their eyes open, made connections, believed their guts.

  Nobody did. Sometimes he felt invisible.

  Circling North Devon in a confusion of new roads had run his petrol low and he pulled into a service station. As he wrestled increasingly stupidly with the buttons and hoses and multiple choices, he had prepared a cover story about being French. But the bleary-eyed boy at the pay window barely looked at him, saving Avery a smile, a lie, and a bad accent.

  Once he was in Shipcott he knew exactly where he was going.

  He drove past Mr. Jacoby’s shop and noticed that it was a Spar now. Globalization comes to Exmoor, he thought with a wry little smile. The shop wasn’t open yet, and piles of bound newspapers lay outside, waiting to be sorted and sold so that the residents of Shipcott could hold his fuzzy face in their hands and be guarded against him.

  He drove through the sleeping village. At the turning to a deadend street he noticed that he was on Barnstaple Road and his heart started to race even as he slowed to a crawl, peering at the houses, their colors distorted to variations on peach by the sodium glow of the streetlamps in the dull grey of dawn.

  Number 109 … 110 … 111.

  Avery stopped the car without bothering to pull into the curb, and stared at the house where SL lived.

  Many years ago he had played poker. He hadn’t known what he was doing really and was nervous of losing and making a fool of himself. But it was only when he picked up a pair of aces and saw another two drop onto the table that he’d started to shake. That was how he knew that the trembling that now coursed through his hands, over his shoulders, and across his cheeks to his lips was a good thing. He held an unbeatable hand.

  As the car ticked over, Avery stared at the black windows of the tatty little house and imagined SL asleep inside it; imagined creeping up the stairs and opening each bedroom door noiselessly so he could stare down at the occupants, until he found SL, lying unwary and weak and at his mercy …

  Avery whimpered and jerked his imagination back from the brink. He was too close to reality to waste effort on speculation. If the worst had come to the worst and he was too late, then maybe he would have to return to 111 Barnstaple Road and take his chances. But for now … The spectre of the carelessness that had ended his divine pastime loomed large over Avery and kept him behind the wheel when he might otherwise have ventured onto the curb, the narrow pavement, through an unfastened window …

  That loss of c
ontrol had haunted him for eighteen years. He wasn’t going to repeat that mistake.

  He left the village behind quickly and drove out to a farm-access track a few hundred yards beyond it. It was so overgrown that he passed it three times before recognizing the dark tunnel through the hedge and turning in. The Micra bumped and squeaked across the grass and potholes and the paintwork squealed in protest as it was ruined by brambles and blackthorn.

  When he could drive no farther, Avery got out with his bag of new supplies, popped a bottle of water and several cheese-and-tomato sandwiches into it, and walked up onto the moor.

  He was immediately hit by a sensory overload composed of sweet dew-sodden heather and the memory of the soft weight of a boy in his arms. The two-pronged assault left him momentarily faint with excitement and he had to stop and bend over with his hands on his knees until his breathing evened out.