Belinda Bauer - Blacklands

“Hurry now, the bell’s gone.”

“Yes, miss.”

She stood over him impatiently while he picked his books and papers off the dirty wet tarmac. He was pleased to see his sandwiches had all but disintegrated, saving him the embarrassment of picking them up. His apple, having blacked his eye, had rolled into the gutter, where he left it to rot.

It took him a couple of minutes to find the lid of his lunch box under a car. He stood up again, his knees muddied, to see Mrs. O’Leary holding the letter from Arnold Avery. He went cold.

“ Thank you for Your Great letter.”

Steven said nothing. What could he say? He watched her face scan the scrap of wet paper, a little frown line appearing between her eyes.

Mrs. O’Leary’s mind turned slowly like the barrels on a rusty combination lock, and finally clicked into place. She looked at him and Steven felt his stomach drop.

“So you write great letters in your spare time too?”

For a split second he thought he’d misheard. But he hadn’t. He felt the heat rising from his collar and creeping up his face.

“Yes, miss.”

She smiled, relieved to be able to muster some interest in the boy; she needed these little reminders that she had not wasted her life going into teaching. She held out the letter and he took it tentatively.

“Run now, Simon!”

“Yes, miss.”

Steven ran.

Geography.

Steven traced a map of South Africa. He transferred it to his exercise book and started to fill in the mineral wealth. Gold. Diamonds. Platinum. Such exotica. He snorted quietly as he thought of his home country’s mineral wealth: tin, clay, and coal were the only things that had ever been worth digging for on this tiny peak of sea-mountain called Britain.

Tin, clay, coal—and bodies. Bodies buried in the dirt, in the soil, in the turf. Bodies that had fallen asleep and quietly died, bodies of butchered Picts and Celts and Saxons and Romans; Royalists and Roundheads put to the sword in the sweet English grass. And as the coal and the tin and the clay industries died, so the industry of bodies had taken hold. Now the bones of Saxon peasants were pored over on prime-time TV as they emerged in careful relief from the earth. A rude awakening from centuries of hidden rest.

Bodies were as much a mineral wealth of Britain as gold was in Africa. The declined empire, shrunk to tiny pink pinpricks, had become withdrawn and introspective—tired and surrendered in conquest, now discovering itself like an old man who sits alone in a crumbling mansion and starts to call numbers in a tattered address book, his thoughts turning from a short future to a long and neglected past.

Britain was built on those bodies of the conquered and the conquerors. Steven could feel them right now in the earth beneath the foundations beneath the school beneath the classroom floor, beneath his chair legs and the rubber soles of his trainers.

So many bodies, and he only wanted one. It didn’t seem a lot to ask.

As he carefully pressed the graphite into the clean page, Steven wondered how many of those ancient bones were in the ground because of serial killers. When Channel 4’s Time Team prized femurs and broken skulls from the holding planet, were they contaminating a two-thousand-year-old crime scene? Was the Saxon boy or the Tudor girl a victim? One of many? Would archaeologists a hundred years from now be able to link six, eight, ten victims and say for sure that they were murdered? And murdered by one hand?

Arnold Avery had been convicted of six murders. Plus Uncle Billy. Plus… who knew how many? How many lay undiscovered in shallow graves? How many through the whole of history? Did he crush their bones underfoot as he walked home? Did their eyeless skulls peer down at him when he explored the old mines at Brendon Hills? Steven shivered and prodded the map out of alignment. As he carefully covered Johannesburg with Johannesburg again…

“Oh!”

Kids around him sniggered and Mrs. James looked up from marking papers.

“Something you want to share, Steven?”

But Steven had used the last of his breath to push out the exclamation, and had not yet been able to draw another.

The line Steven copied was even more crooked than it should have been. His hands shook; his whole body fluttered in a mixture of excitement and fear.

He pushed the AA Road Atlas away from him so hard that it slid off the old Formica kitchen table and broke its spine as it landed open on the floor. Steven didn’t even notice. This was not the first time he’d used the atlas. Then he’d copied the outline of Exmoor onto a sheet of artist’s paper to send to Arnold Avery. This time he’d captured it on tracing paper. The border was marked again, and Shipcott.

The TV was on in the front room but Steven still looked suspiciously down the hallway before unfolding Avery’s letter and smoothing it down on the table. He placed the tracing paper over the letter, with the “S” and “L” of “SincereLy” over the dot that was Shipcott. His heart thumped in his ears; “Your Great,” YG, and “TiDe,” TD, were both northeast of Shipcott towards Dunkery Beacon.

Avery was showing him the graves of Yasmin Gregory and Toby Dunstan.

He’d cracked the code.

LETTIE LAMB CLEANED THE BIG HOUSE AND THOUGHT ABOUT HER elder son for the first time in a long time.

Of course, she thought about him every day. Why wasn’t he up? Had he done his homework? Where was his tie? But it had been days, weeks—maybe even months, she thought with niggling shame—since she’d thought about him .

And almost as soon as she’d had the thought, she tried to wrestle it into submission. She couldn’t think of Steven without thinking of Davey, and she couldn’t think of Davey without the guilt of knowing that he was her favorite, and she could never feel that guilt without thinking of her mother—Poor Mrs. Peters—and of how she’d loved Billy best.

This was a well-worn path—a wormhole linking time and people—so that when she thought of Steven, she thought of Billy. The two were so closely connected by her practiced brain that they were almost the same person. Steven and Billy. Billy and Steven. The fact that Steven was so close to the age that Billy had been when he disappeared only served to compound his sins. And although she loved Steven, she had to remind herself of that fact constantly when her resentment and guilt over Billy was so symbiotically tied to her own son.

Lettie rubbed at a water ring on the hall table. She tutted as if it were her precious mahogany.

It wasn’t her fault. Everyone had a favorite, didn’t they? It was only natural. And Davey would be anyone’s favorite. He was so cute and chirpy and said funny things without meaning to. Why should she feel bad about that? How could she help it? Steven didn’t help himself, with his isolated nature and that permanent little frown marking the middle of his smooth forehead. He always looked worried. As if he had anything to worry about!

Lettie felt that familiar flicker of anger at Steven. He always looked as if he had the woes of the world on his shoulders—cheeky little shit! She was the one who had to keep them all together; she was the one who scrubbed other women’s floors so Steven could get batter bits at the Blue Dolphin; she was the one who’d been left to bring up two children alone, wasn’t she? Not him! These were the happiest days of his life, for god’s sake!

The ring wouldn’t come out. Honestly, the more people had, the less they cared. She went into the kitchen and opened the larder. It was packed with the kind of impossibly exotic food that was beyond Lettie. All from Marks & Spencer. She barely even recognized it as food—there was no connection in her mind between what the Harrisons kept in their larder and the cheap, monotonous meals that appeared on Lettie’s table.