Blacklands

by Belinda Bauer

  Steven grinned to himself. Christmas in June. He’d felt this way every day for the past week—sliding out of bed over Davey, who was spread out like a starfish caught in sheets, stepping over the creaky board outside Billy’s room, holding on to the banister to control the fall of his feet on the stairs. Then shivering a little—partly as the warmth of sleep gave way to the cool new day on his skin, partly with excitement—as he padded quickly into the kitchen where sunlight scattered shafts of golden dust through the window.

  And all because of the tiny green shoots that had started to appear like little emeralds sprinkled in the dark loam of the vegetable patch.

  The carrots had come first and Steven’s throat had closed up to see them. He almost cried! Over stupid carrots! He didn’t even much like carrots!

  He tried not to show his excitement when he told Uncle Jude about the carrots but Uncle Jude had been excited all by himself, and had immediately got up from his bacon to come and see. Steven had felt like a man showing off his new baby. He’d felt the need for a cigar. Instead Uncle Jude had put a hand on the back of his neck, which was even better.

  After the carrots, the beans made an appearance at the foot of the poles they’d tied into wigwams. Right now it seemed impossible that the helpless little specks of green could ever scale the heights of wigwam-land. Steven was filled with amazement that they would even try.

  He’d wondered what would be next.

  It was the potatoes.

  But before that—three days after the first carrots appeared—Steven had come in from school and Nan had not been in the window.

  Terror had clutched his heart but he tried not to run through the house shouting her name.

  “Nan?” he’d called up the stairs. No answer. He’d gone halfway up and seen the toilet door was half open. She wasn’t in there.

  Nobody was home.

  Steven hurried through to the kitchen and stood still in astonishment.

  Nan was in the vegetable patch. She was peering at the shoots and poking the earth now and then with her stick. Not in a mean way, Steven realized, but in the same way he’d seen her poke at the all-terrain wheel on her trolley.

  The same trolley that Nan now gripped for support as she rolled and swayed slowly back down the bumpy garden.

  I’ll make her a path, Steven had thought, a smooth path.

  Then he’d run, back through the house and out of the front door, grabbing his schoolbag on the way.

  A short while later he’d waved hello to his tight-lipped grandmother, motionless in the window, and let himself into the house for the second time in ten minutes.

  This memory made Steven sightless until he was halfway up the garden, and then he stopped suddenly.

  The beanpoles had fallen down.

  He hurried the rest of the way, tamping down the unease that had started in his stomach.

  The beanpoles hadn’t fallen down. They’d been pulled up and scattered across the rest of the vegetable patch.

  Or what was left of it.

  Something large and heavy had trampled and gouged the soft black earth, kicking up little seedlings that now lay scattered like bodies on a battlefield, their bright green uniforms failing to cover the naked, spindly limbs beneath that should never have been exposed.

  Steven wanted it to be a fox. Or a cow. He even looked about the garden for an escaped cow. A cow would be bad, but not as bad as the bald fact that a person had done this. Person or people.

  The hoodies. The hoodies would do this. In his mind Steven could imagine them stomping and laughing as they mashed the tender shoots underfoot, their shadowed faces twisted with stupid humor.

  But even as he tried to convince himself of that, Steven knew that the hoodies didn’t care enough to do this—or know him well enough to think he’d care.

  In his plummeting heart, Steven knew it was Lewis.

  Chapter 29

  BECAUSE OF THE DISTURBANCE IN THE KITCHEN, BECAUSE RYAN Finlay had been rushed to hospital—and from there to the morgue—and because Avery had locked the gate in the chain-link behind him, it was almost an hour before he was found to be missing and not just banged up in the wrong cell or hiding somewhere for his own safety. And it was another twenty minutes before a screw spotted Toby and Yasmin and anyone realized that Arnold Avery had gone over the wall.

  Since being promoted from his post as assistant governor at Newport Open Prison in South Wales, the governor of Longmoor had lost four prisoners. Four in four years. It was not a shockingly high number. Longmoor was a training prison; a few select prisoners were even sent to work outside the walls on cleaning details or farm duties as part of their rehabilitation. Understaffing meant that on two occasions a couple of men had simply ducked behind a bit of machinery or wandered off into a thick mist. All four had been recaptured on the roads before any driver would stop for them.

  But four escapes in four years had the unfortunate ring of a pattern to it. As if it might be five escapes in five years, six in six years, and so on, and that gave the governor palpitations.

  So, once Avery’s escape was detected, every available officer was immediately dispatched onto the roads, and roadblocks were established to search cars leaving the area. It was assumed that—like those before him—this particular escapee would head for the nearest road, then flag down or steal a car. To do anything else was stupid and dangerous, even in summer.

  Having taken this view, the governor then took another: escapes reflected poorly on prison staff and that led to a lowering of staff morale.

  The governor was a good man, and wanted to keep morale as high as possible.

  If only Avery could be recaptured within the next few hours. If only the fact that a formerly notorious child killer had gone over the wall could be kept out of the press until he was safely back within those very walls …

  The governor was a good man.

  But he made a bad choice.

  He didn’t call the police.

  Arnold Avery’s first half hour of freedom after eighteen years in prison was the worst thirty minutes of his life.

  As soon as he straightened up from the twelve-foot drop, he panicked.

  The feeling grabbed him by the throat and squeezed, and he ran blindly onto the moor, his terror making him whine with every snatch of out-of-shape breath. His legs burned, there were daggers in his lungs; even his arms ached from running—all within four hundred yards of the wall. Years of sitting in his cell, thinking, had done nothing for his muscle tone.

  He stumbled and panted and whimpered until his own self-loathing finally slapped the panic down and forced him to stop, regain control, and take stock.

  His panic was groundless. However many times he looked back, he saw no sign of pursuit. The prison itself had melted away behind him like a bad dream.

  Built in a large natural hollow, Longmoor Prison was a village-sized stone monstrosity that was barely visible to the thousands of walkers and tourists who roamed the moors each summer. One minute they would be striding out with only short yellow grass and pale granite outcrops for company; the next they’d be gazing down on the huge dark grey wheel inside a crater, often only the pitched roofs and chimneys jutting up through the fog, as if the whole prison was sinking into a lake of dirty milk.

  Out here now, with the prison disappeared and only the sunny moor around him, Avery felt his panic shredded and scattered by the bracing breeze. In its place he felt the sudden, laughing excitement of being free.

  He had an almost irrepressible urge to throw his arms out and spin dizzily across the slopes.

  Contrary to his forerunners, he had no intention of flagging down a car or going anywhere near a road if he could help it.

  He would have considered stealing a car but he was a serial killer, not a common car thief, and had no idea how to hot-wire a car—or even to break into one unless it was with a brick through a window.

  For the first time in eighteen years, Avery regretted his isolation from other prisoners
. He could have learned so much. Too late now …

  Avery wished he did not need a car at all. But he knew that the instant he’d started running, a clock had started ticking. Soon his face would be on TV screens. By tomorrow morning it would be on the front page of every tabloid.

  He was wearing his blue-and-white-striped prison-issue shirt and dark blue jeans. He wished he had kept his pullover because, although it was June, the sun had not yet warmed the air. He knew he would wish it even more fervently as night fell.

  He passed two sheep lipping the vast, immaculate lawn of the moor. Neither bothered looking at him.

  He walked calmly now, not noticing where, just regrouping as he moved forward.

  His throat relaxed and cooled enough for him to properly appreciate the bright, fresh air that did not smell of today’s dinner or yesterday’s socks. It was heady stuff and he swayed as he sucked it into his lungs, feeling it pressing to his very fingertips as it replaced the stagnant prison fumes.

  Having had no burning desire to escape until he received the photo SL had sent him, Avery had only the vaguest notion of what lay before him. He knew, for example, that the south and east of Dartmoor was dotted with tiny villages, some little more than a handful of houses around a pillar-box or a bus shelter. He also knew that the north and west of the moor was even less populated. More than that, he only knew that between him and the northern edge of Dartmoor were miles of desolate and difficult terrain, rocky and boggy by turn. Coupled with the unpredictable weather, it was no wonder most escapees took the easy option of the roads, despite the increased likelihood of being caught, because of the decreased likelihood of dying.

  But now that he had gone over the wall, Avery had nothing to lose and everything to gain by avoiding recapture.

  It had all changed. If he was caught now, he would lose eighteen years’ worth of Brownie points for having been a model prisoner. His chance of parole was now precisely zero, and he’d languish for twenty-five or thirty years maybe, back in somewhere like Heavitree, where he’d spent the first sixteen years of his sentence in fear and squalor.

  He would rather die than go back there.

  He realized with a little jolt that that was true, and then the jolt became a warm certainty. There was something steeling about having only one option left. It focused the mind.

  “Nice morning!”

  He turned to find a middle-aged man, and what Avery presumed to be his wife, just yards away. Both carried telescopic walking poles, day packs, and map cases. Both wore khaki shorts over sun-wrinkled legs—his lean and hairy, hers stubbornly chubby.

  Thank god he’d stopped that crazy headlong flight. They would have known for sure.

  “Yes,” he nodded, in complete agreement.

  “Going to be hot.”

  “Yes,” he said again, feeling that he should be making more of a contribution to the exchange, but at a loss to know how. “

  We’re on our way to Great Mis.”

  Avery noticed that now the man’s eyes were sweeping him from head to prison-issue-black-booted toe, looking for evidence that he was a walker, and starting to be suspicious that he wasn’t finding any. Avery was temporarily happy that he’d ditched his pullover; the dark grey with the distinctive blue strip through the ribbing would have given him away in an instant.

  “How about you?” the man continued pointedly.

  Avery’s newly exercised neurons fired gratifyingly fast.

  “Oh, I’m not walking!” he said in a tone that might make them feel stupid for thinking such a thing. “I’m just stretching my legs. On my way to a job in Tavistock and thought I’d take advantage of”—he swept out an arm—“all this. My car’s just over that rise.”

  They both glanced at the rise, then back at him, and he gave them his special smile. The man didn’t go so far as to smile back, although he nodded in acceptance, but his wife lost herself in his smile and beamed happily.

  “Oh yes, too nice to be stuck in a car or an office today.”

  They all nodded then, finally on common ground in every sense.

  The wife cheerfully poked her husband with her walking pole.

  “Get on, then, Father!”

  The man gave a small smile and raised his eyebrows at Avery before starting to move.

  “You have a nice walk,” he called after them and they turned to wave at him.

  He breathed a sigh of relief. That could have been awkward and—more importantly—time-consuming.

  He knew that time was of the essence. There were things he needed to do—things he wished he didn’t have to. He wished he could just head north and keep going, but despite his initial panic at being free, Avery had already devised a plan and now only had to stick to it.

  He had to give himself the best possible chance of success. He had to make the most of his time on the run.

  He had to send a postcard.

  Avery walked for three hours before he saw the village, and by the time he did, he was shivering. The sun that had greeted his freedom was now a sharp, pale disc in a white-smoky sky.

  It was not a proper village, and he never knew its name, because he didn’t approach from the road. He skirted the moor above the twenty-odd houses until he saw the shop and then dropped down between the houses to reach it.

  The shop was tiny—just the converted front room of a two-up-two-down cottage with bulging walls and liquid glass in the windows. A billboard for the Western Morning News made him feel suddenly as if he’d been sucked back in time. The headline read: CHARLES AND CAMILLA VISIT PLYMOUTH. Poor them, thought Avery.

  A rickety carousel outside the shop held yellowing postcards. Most were of Dartmoor, or sheep, or pretty, rose-covered cottages, but there was one compartment that held several of the same card, showing Exmoor blanketed by purple heather. Avery’s stomach thrilled at the sight. He took all six cards on the rack and stuffed them into his back pocket. Then he picked another card of a Dartmoor sheep and went inside.

  Although the day had turned dull, his eyes still had to adjust to the gloom of the interior. There was a newspaper rack on one wall, shelves of goods on the other, and an ice-cream freezer in between. Avery could see that the shelves were crammed with a startling array of goods—spray cleaner, toilet paper, dog food, chocolate bars, curry-in-a-can, nails, Band-Aids, Coca-Cola, scrubbing brushes …

  A glance into the ice-cream freezer showed him that most of it had been annexed for frozen peas and chicken portions. In the remaining corner he recognized a Zoom lolly but nothing else.

  There was a small counter and an archaic till, but nobody behind them, so he opened a plastic liter bottle of water and swigged down several gulps. There was a charity box on the counter—RNLI. Lifeboats. In the middle of Dartmoor? Who gave a shit? He shook it briefly and almost smiled: apparently, no one.

  “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.