Belinda Bauer - Blacklands

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.”