Blacklands

Slowly but inexorably, connections were made, dots were joined, and Arnold Avery was charged with six counts of murder and three more of child abduction. The murder charges were limited to the number of bodies they could find on the moor, and the abduction charges limited by the items found in Avery’s home and car which could be positively linked to missing children—although Avery never admitted taking any of them. A one-armed Barbie doll belonged to ten-year-old Mariel Oxenburg of Winchester; a maroon blazer with a unicorn crest on the pocket had once warmed Paul Barrett of Westward Ho!, and a pair of nearly new Nike trainers found under the front passenger seat of the white van were proudly marked in felt tip under the tongues: Billy Peters.

Chapter 3

 

MRS. O’LEARY SAID THAT “SINCERELY” WAS THE WRONG WORD. In business, one wrote “yours faithfully.” Steven changed it but thought she must be wrong. He would rather be faithful to people he knew and loved than to the manager of the local supermarket whose fish had fallen so far below the advertised standards as to kill his grandmother.

When he wrote his personal letter, “sincerely” sounded so stiff and formal. But, he thought pragmatically, it was Mrs. O’Leary doing the marking, so he’d better stick to her versions.

Mrs. O’Leary pointed out his spelling error too, but didn’t fuss too much. She said his letter was very good; very authentic—and read it to the class.

Steven wished she hadn’t. He felt the eyes of other boys branding him like laser tattoos. We’ll get you later for this, you arse creeper, is what they burned on the back of his neck. To be singled out so in class was to be doomed in the playground and he sighed at the thought of the next few days of dodging and hiding and sticking close to the teacher—“What’s wrong with you, Lamb? Go and play!”

Luckily it didn’t happen often that he was so marked. Steven was only an average student, a quiet boy who rarely gave cause for concern, or even attention. When Mrs. O’Leary wrote the end-of-term reports, it took a second or two to recall the skinny dark-haired boy who matched the name on her register. Along with Chantelle Cox, Taylor Laughlan, and Vivienne Khan, Steven Lamb was a child only truly visible by his absence, when a cross next to his name gave him fleeting statistical interest.

Steven spent lunchtime near the gym doors with Lewis, as usual. Lewis had cheese-and-pickle sandwiches and a Mars bar and Steven had fish paste and a two-fingered Kit Kat. Lewis refused to swap anything, and Steven couldn’t blame him.

The three hooded boys played footie on the tarmac netball court, and only occasionally had the time to leer threateningly at Steven or to call him a wanker as the ball came down the left. One of them did pretend to throw it in his face, making Steven blink comically, and the boy cackled joylessly at him, but it was all bearable.

“You want me to beat him up for you?” Lewis inquired through chocolate lips.

“Nah, it’s all right.” Steven shrugged. “Thanks, though.”

“Anytime. You just let me know.”

Lewis was a little shorter than Steven, but outweighed him by twenty pounds of pure ego. Steven had never actually seen Lewis fight but it was generally accepted by both of them that Lewis was a match for anybody right up to—but not including—Year 8. Michael Cox, brother of semivisible Chantelle, was in Year 8 and he was over six feet tall and was black, to boot. Everyone knew the black kids were tougher and that Michael Cox was the toughest of them all.

Other than Michael Cox, Steven reckoned Lewis was a match for anybody. But even Lewis couldn’t fight all three hoodies, and that was surely what he’d get if he decided to fight one. They both knew it, so they changed the subject by unspoken agreement.

“The old man’s taking me to the match tomorrow. Want to come?”

The match, Steven knew, involved the local team, the Blacklanders. In the absence of a nearby top-class league soccer team, Lewis and his father had plunged headlong into pragmatic support for the Blacklanders—a motley collection of local half-talent—and Lewis followed their fortunes with the same fervor that his classmates did Liverpool or Manchester United.

Going to the football was the only thing Lewis and his dad ever did together.

His dad was a short, ginger, bespectacled man who rarely spoke. He wore slacks beyond his years and did something in an office in Minehead but Lewis had never cared enough to find out exactly what. “Something in the law,” he’d shrugged when Steven asked. At home Lewis’s dad did the Telegraph crossword and researched his family tree online. Once a week in the winter, he and Lewis’s mother went to the village hall to play badminton—a risible game made even worse by the occasional glimpse Steven had had of them in their kit, his pale curly leg hairs and her maxi thighs in a miniskirt.