He was surprised and a little disappointed by SL’s weakness. He had thought of SL as an intellectual equal, but now he realized he was less than that—far less. To recklessly show his impatience like this was the mark of someone who had not thought things through properly.
Avery got a pang as he remembered the day he’d waited for Mason Dingle to return with his car keys. If only he’d been patient. If only the second child had not skipped into the playground and clambered onto a swing right next to him. If only he could have mustered the control …
Of all the thoughts he held about his career, these thoughts of Mason Dingle were the ones that plagued him like chicken pox scabs. They came unbidden and unwanted once, twice a week, and made him feel stupid and feeble.
He was a different man now. Stuck in this echoing stone-andiron tomb he understood the meaning of patience. Polite conversation with Officer Finlay could only be achieved through the utmost patience. Standing in the line for food for almost an hour, just for a smirking ape to tell him that the only lasagne left was the burnt bits from the bottom of the pan, took patience and control.
But it was all too late. The dagger twisting in his guts was that now, finally, when he had mastered patience and control, he had nothing over which to exercise his mastery.
That was why this petulant, demanding letter gave him more pleasure than anything since SL’s first careful missive. It showed a chink in SL’s armor. A clumsy revelation of desire that gave Avery something he had not felt in a very long time.
It gave him power.
Chapter 16
ARNOLD AVERY HADN’T WRITTEN BACK AND STEVEN FELT THE absence of a letter like something physical. Sometimes he got an itch in his ear—or in his throat. Between his ear and his throat. And it didn’t matter how far he stuck his finger in his ear, or how many times he made a coarse, rasping sound in his throat, neither could reach that point that made him want to cry with frustration. No reply from Avery was like that—an itch so deep inside him that he wanted to throw himself to the ground and roll and squirm like a fleabag dog in a senseless bid to scratch it.
It had been more than four weeks, and the heather on the moor had already started to bud.
Steven was a wiry boy, but those weeks had seen his features sharpen further, and little bruised hollows of insomnia darken under his tired brown eyes. The vertical frown-crease that had no place on the face of a child deepened on his forehead.
He had stopped digging.
The thought made him feel sick and weak every time he looked out of the bathroom window at the moor rising behind the houses. It crowded him, nudged him, stood over him in judgement at his puny efforts—and frowned at their cessation.
He had felt close—so close—to finding out the truth from Arnold Avery that his own random scratchings on the moor seemed increasingly laughable.
There was a man who knew where Uncle Billy was buried. Steven had made contact with that man.
That man had understood the rules Steven had created for them to play by and had joined the game.
And so Steven had given up his other game—a game that had no other players, no rules, and no realistic prospect of being won.
His admission that, alone, his was a hopeless task was the most shocking and painful moment he could remember in his young life. It left him reeling and apathetic to the point where even Lettie had noticed.
“Not off with Lewis today?” she’d finally asked, and he’d just shaken his head mournfully. Lettie didn’t ask any more. She hoped his newly pinched features were because he’d fought with Lewis, and not because he’d got her hypothetical slag up the duff. Thank you for your great letter. The words swirled uneasily about in Lettie’s mind—too disturbing to mention, too disturbing to forget.
She hoped it was Lewis. Anything else, she didn’t have the time to care about.
Now, while the rest of the class took turns to read a page each from The Silver Sword, Steven frowned into the middle distance of the whiteboard and wondered what would happen if Arnold Avery never wrote back. Could he accept it and go on as he had before? In his head, Steven insisted yes, but immediately blushed at the lie he was telling himself. The truth was, he’d come to rely on Avery. He’d hung every hope he had on the hook of the cat-and-mouse game they were playing.
For only about the millionth time in his short life, Steven wished he had someone to confide in. Not Lewis, but someone older and wiser, who could tell him where and how he’d gone wrong and how to put it right.
He cursed himself silently, hesitantly using the worst word he knew, which was “fuck.” He was a fucking idiot. Somehow his last letter had pissed Avery off to the point where he’d picked up his ball and gone home—and Steven was sharply reminded that it was Avery’s ball. With a sinking feeling he realized that if he—Steven—wanted to continue to play, he’d have to be the one to make the effort to be friends again, even if he didn’t mean it. The stubborn streak, which had kept him at his gruelling task through three long years, made him bristle at the idea of making overtures of peace to the killer who’d very likely murdered his uncle Billy.
But—like a rat trained to behave by the application of electric shocks—the stubbornness was instantly curtailed by the horror of possibly never knowing. The jolt was so intense that his whole body spasmed and his wrist jerked against his desk with a loud, painful bang, propelling him back into the classroom with dizzying speed.
“Lamb, you bloody spazmoid!”
Everyone laughed except Mrs. O’Leary, who admonished the hoodie weakly—too afraid of failing to eject him from her class to even attempt it. Instead she demanded that he read the next page and the boy glowered and started to stumble painfully through the text.
Steven sighed, and wiped a sheen of sweat from his forehead. He knew he couldn’t go on alone anymore. As with the Sheepsjaw Incident, he’d glimpsed the pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel and without the help that only Avery could give him he knew he was lost in the darkness. This was not a momentary fantasy sparked by a false hope; this was real progress he’d made over months of careful planning and execution. Avery was a one-shot deal. Steven knew that if he blew this, he’d never get another chance. Either he would permanently have to stop the search that gave his life meaning, or he’d go on ad nauseam, possibly until he was old, like the tattered old man who dug about in other people’s rubbish—but with Uncle Jude’s rusty spade his companion instead of a stolen Tesco trolley.
Steven sighed as he realized he had no choice.
He was not a boy who had ever had much to take pride in, so swallowing a bit of pride now would be sour, but not impossible.
Just like Uncle Jude, he’d worked out what he wanted and the only way he knew how to get it.
Now—just like Davey—he’d have to be Frankenstein’s friend.
Chapter 17
ARNOLD AVERY LIKED TO THINK OF THE BENCHES HE MADE AS HIS tickets to freedom.
From the first day of his incarceration, Avery had had a single goal in mind, and that was to be released as soon as was legally possible.
Life did not mean life anymore. The petulant cry of Daily Mail readers everywhere was sweet music to Arnold Avery. He’d known life did not mean life when he was arrested and he reminded himself of it again in Cardiff. Still, he’d been surprised at the sick sucker-punched feeling in his gut when the judge actually said the word.
But by the time he’d reached Heavitree, he had already determined to be a model prisoner so that he could get out while he still had hair and teeth to speak of. While he was still young enough to enjoy himself.
In whatever way he saw fit.
Anyway …
Model prisoners wanted to be rehabilitated, so Avery had signed up for countless classes, workshops, and courses over the years. He now had assorted diplomas, a GCSE in maths, A-levels in English, art, and biology, a bluffer’s knowledge of psychiatry, and a certificate of competence in first aid.
And it was all paying off. Two ye
ars earlier his first parole review had approved his transfer from the high-security Heavitree to Longmoor Prison on Dartmoor. Even Avery had been surprised. He had hoped but never really expected that his apparent devotion to rehabilitation would achieve the desired aims. It was shocking really, thought Avery at the time. If he’d been anyone but himself, he’d have been up in arms about it. Of course, a recommendation that he could be trusted not to escape from a lower-security prison was not the same as the parole board actually approving his release after his twenty-year tariff had been served. But it was a very good start.
Compared to Heavitree, Longmoor was a holiday camp. The Segregation Unit was freshly painted, the guards noticeably less oppressive, and the opportunities for reintegration activities were even better, so he’d done a course in plumbing too.
He’d really surprised himself, though, with a natural aptitude for carpentry.
Avery found he loved everything about wood. The dry smell of sawdust, the soft warmth of the grain, the near-alchemic transformation from plank to table, plank to chair, plank to bench. Most of all, he loved the hours he could spend sanding and shaping with relatively little input from his brain, which therefore left him free to think, even while he earned kudos for working his way to rehabilitation, parole, and nirvana.
In the two years that Arnold Avery had been taking carpentry, he’d made six benches. His first was an uninspiring two-seater with ugly dowel joints; his most recent was a handsome six-foot three-seater with bevelled struts, curved, figure-hugging backrest, and almost invisible dovetails.
Now, as he worked on his seventh bench, sanding patiently, Avery let his mind drift gently off to Exmoor.
Avery could almost smell the moor. The rich, damp soil and the fragrant heather, combined with the faint odor of manure from the deer and ponies and sheep.
He thought first of Dunkery Beacon, where all his fantasies centered, before spreading like bony tendrils across the rounded hills. From there he would almost be able to identify the individual gravesites—not from prurient newsprint graphics but from actual memory, the memory that had sustained him throughout his imprisonment and which still held the power to feed his nighttime fantasies. The thought alone brought saliva to his mouth, and he swallowed audibly.
Dartmoor was very different. This moor was grey—made hard and unyielding by the granite which bulged under its surface and frequently broke through the Earth’s thin skin to poke bleakly up at the lowering sky.
The prison itself was an extension of the stone—grey, blank, ugly.
There was little heather on Dartmoor, just prickled gorse and sheep-shorn yellow grass. There was no gentle beauty and purple haze.
Dartmoor was not Exmoor, but Avery would still have liked to watch the seasons change from his narrow window.
But his window had been blocked on the orders of his prison psychiatrist, Dr. Leaver, who theorized that even visual contact with the moors would be counterproductive to his attempts to purify Arnold Avery’s psyche.
Avery’s bile rose in his throat along with the hatred and fury he now reserved exclusively for Dr. Leaver and Officer Finlay.
It amazed him that Leaver couldn’t understand that this was Dartmoor, and so held nothing but a passing aesthetic interest for him. The fact that both were moors was apparently sufficient reason for Leaver—a cadaverous man in his fifties—to decree the blocking of the window, which left Avery depressed and mopey, even in the summer months.
The terrible catch-22 he faced was that Leaver was half right. While he was mistaken in thinking that Avery gave inordinate weight to the moor he might have seen from his window, Avery would only have been able to convince him of that fact by revealing the truly awesome weight he gave any idea, sight, or mention of Dartmoor’s smaller, prettier, more gentle cousin on the north coast of the peninsula.
If Leaver—or anyone else—had had any idea that merely hearing someone say the word “Exmoor” could give him a daylong erection, his paltry privileges would have been suspended faster than Guy Fawkes from a rope.
Avery had never killed an adult but he knew he could kill Dr. Leaver. The man’s monstrous ego was fed by the power he held over the inmates he counselled. Avery was not empathetic, but he recognized his own sense of superiority in Leaver within five minutes of settling in for their first session together. It was like glimpsing his own reflection in a mirror.
He knew that Leaver was clever. He knew that Leaver liked to show off how clever he was—especially in an environment where he had every right to feel that way. After all, any con who was smarter than Leaver had, at the very least, to concede that they’d fucked up badly enough to get caught.
Avery had no problem with Leaver flaunting his intellect. A man who had a talent should use it; a footballer played football, a juggler juggled, a clever man outwitted others. It was Darwinian.
In Leaver’s presence, Avery was a bright man who had flashes of intellectual connection that made him a cut above the run-of-the-mill burglar cum barroom brawler. Clever enough to interest Leaver but never clever enough to alert him or threaten his ego.
He asked Leaver’s advice and always deferred to Leaver’s decisions, even if they had an adverse effect on him. The boarding up of his window was a case in point. When Leaver had suggested it might help, Avery had suppressed the urge to tear the man’s throat out with his teeth and had instead pursed his lips and nodded slowly, as if he were examining the idea from every conceivable angle, but with the best of intentions. Then he’d sighed to show that it was a regrettable necessity—but a necessity nonetheless.
Leaver had smiled and made a note that Arnold Avery knew would bring him closer to the real life waiting for him outside these walls.
The benches were another step on the freedom ladder. But the benches were enjoyable to make. And had the immense added attraction of the nameplates …
Avery stroked the wood under his dry hands and reached for a shiny brass plate with a screw hole in each corner.
“Can I have a screwdriver please, Officer?”
Andy Ralph eyed him suspiciously—like he hadn’t used a screwdriver a thousand times before without running amok—then handed Avery the Phillips-head screwdriver.
“Flathead please, Mr. Ralph.”
Ralph took back the Phillips and gave him the flathead, even more suspiciously.
Avery ignored him. Idiot.
He looked down at the plate in his hand and smiled as he remembered the scene of what had been—until SL’s letters—the greatest power trip since his incarceration …
“I hear you’re building benches, Arnold.”
“Yes, Dr. Leaver.”
“How do you enjoy that?”
“Good. I like it. It’s very satisfying.”
“Good. Good.” Leaver nodded sagely as if he were personally responsible for Avery’s upped satisfaction quotient.
“Thing is …, ” started Avery, then stopped and licked his lips nervously.
“What?” said Leaver, suddenly interested.
“I was thinking.”
“Yes?”
Avery shifted in his seat and cracked his knuckles—the picture of a man struggling with a great dilemma. Leaver gazed at him calmly. He had all the time in the world.
“I was thinking …” Now Avery dropped his voice so it was almost a whisper, and looked down at his own scuffed black shoes as he continued haltingly. “I was thinking maybe I could put a little brass plaque on my benches. Not the shitty one I made first, but some of the other ones. The good ones.”
“Yes?”
Avery scraped a match under his fingernails, even though they were already clean.
“With names on.”
His voice disappeared in the whisper and he dared not look at Leaver, who now leaned forward in his seat (to give the illusion that he was part of a conspiracy—Avery knew the moves).
“Names?”
“The … names …”
Avery could only nod mutely, staring at his
lap—and hope that Leaver was even now imagining that tears filled the killer’s eyes—and that he had cottoned on to what he was trying to say.
Leaver slowly straightened up again, clicking the top of his Parker pen.
Avery wiped his sleeve across his bowed face, knowing it would add to the illusion of a man in personal hell, and Leaver fell for it, hook, line, and psycho-sinker.
The fucking moron.
Avery screwed the brass plate to his best bench yet and stood back to admire his work.
Blacklands: A Novel Page 9