Belinda Bauer: Blacklands

Mason looked up and Avery’s heart lifted to see his sweet face. He waved the boy over and Mason sauntered towards the van.

“Gimme directions?”

Mason Dingle lifted his eyebrows in assent. Everything about him, Avery saw now, was like a small man. Here was a boy with older brothers, if he’d ever seen one. The way he slouched, his manly undereagerness to help, the cigarette tucked behind his tender little ear beside the shaven temples. But oh, his face! The face of an angel!

Mason bent down to the window of the van, looking off into the distance as if he barely had time in his busy schedule for this.

“Right, mate?”

“Yeah,” said Avery, “can you show me on this map where the business park is?”

“Just down there and take a left, mate.”

“Can you show me on this map?”

Mason sighed, then poked his head inside the van to look down at the map spread across Avery’s lap.

“Can you point at it for me?”

For a second Mason Dingle couldn’t take in what he was seeing, then he jerked slightly, bumping his head on the door frame. Avery had seen this reaction before. Now one of two things would happen: either the boy would start to redden and stammer and back rapidly away, or he would start to redden and stammer and feel compelled— because Avery was an adult who had asked him a question —to point at the area on the map, so that his hand was mere inches from it . When that happened, things could go anywhere—and sometimes had. Avery preferred the second reaction because it prolonged the encounter, but the first was good too—to see the fear and confusion—and the guilt—on their faces because, at the end of the day, they all wanted it. He himself was just more honest about it.

But Mason Dingle took a third path; as he pulled backwards through the van window, he twisted the keys from the ignition. “You dirty old bastard!” he said, grinning, and held the keys up.

Avery was instantly furious. “Give those back, you little shit!” He got out of the van, zipping himself up with some difficulty.

Mason danced away from him, laughing. “Fuck you!” he yelled—and ran.

Arnold Avery reevaluated Mason Dingle. Appearances had been deceptive. He had the face of an angel but obviously he was a tough kid. Therefore Avery expected the boy to reappear shortly with his keys and either a demand for money, or at least one older male relative or the police.

The thought didn’t scare Avery. Mason Dingle’s street smarts had worked for him so far, but Avery guessed that they could also be used against him. Nobody believed nice children about things like this—let alone troublesome brats. Especially when the man being accused of such filth and perversion just sat around and waited for the police to arrive instead of behaving as if he had something to hide. So Avery lit a cigarette and waited in the playground—where he could not be surprised—for Mason Dingle to return.

At first the police were disinclined to take Mason Dingle seriously. But he knew his rights and he was insistent, so two policemen finally put him in a squad car—with much warning about wasting police time—and drove him back to the playground, where they found the white van. They were checking that the keys Mason had produced did indeed fit the van when Arnold Avery approached angrily, and told them that the boy had stolen his keys and tried to hold them to ransom.

“He said if I didn’t pay him he’d tell the police I tried to fiddle with him!”

The police focus switched back to Mason and, while the boy told the truth in remarkable detail, Avery could see that the police believed his own version of events only too eagerly.

And so everything was going Avery’s way until, with a sinking feeling, he saw a small boy approaching with a man who looked like a father on the warpath.

While he maintained his composure with the two police officers, inside Avery was cursing his own stupidity. All he’d had to do was wait! Everything would have been okay if he’d only waited! But it was a playground, and playgrounds attracted children, and even though the stocky eight-year-old now bawling his way towards him wasn’t really his type, the first boy had taken so long to come back! What was he supposed to do?

So, in the final analysis, it was all Mason Dingle’s fault. Although when Arnold Avery ventured this opinion to a homicide officer almost a year later—after half a dozen small bodies had been discovered in shallow graves on a rainswept Exmoor—the officer broke his nose with a single backhander, and his own solicitor merely shrugged.

It all fell apart.

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.

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.