Free Blacklands by Belinda Bauer

And—the ultimate—to receive a letter from someone connected in some way with the family of one of the children.

    SL’s first letter had opened for Arnold Avery a Pandora’s box of memory and excitement. He had started with WP and examined that memory from every aspect; it had taken him days—and those were days when he was no longer held at Her Majesty’s pleasure, but in the grip of his own; days when Officer Finlay’s blue-veined nose lost the power to provoke him; days when being handed a small paper tub of snot instead of mustard with his hamburger was water off a duck’s back. They were days when he was free.

    Then he had gone back to the beginning and savored each of the children anew, and prolonged the ecstasy to almost a month’s duration.

    And now this letter.

    SL had promised to be a serious correspondent but he was a tease. Like a woman! Like a child! In fact, he wouldn’t be surprised if SL was a woman after all! How dare SL start a correspondence and then send him this nothing of a letter? SL could go fuck herself!

    Angrily he folded the single A5 sheet to tear it to pieces—then noticed something on the back of the paper.

    Avery frowned and held it up to the light but that made it disappear. He tilted the page until he could see what it was. His heart lurched in his chest.

    Arnold Avery hammered on his cell door and shouted for a pencil.

    The A5 paper SL had used was good quality. It was better than good quality—it was thick, almost cardlike. Avery had taken art at school and thought it was watercolor paper, with its slightly textured finish.

    Avery took a long careful time to rub over the back of the letter with the blunt pencil he’d had to sign for through the hatch.

    Drawing on a piece of paper laid over this one, SL (whom he now thought of as a man once more, for the cleverness of this communication) had impressed a single wavering, yet somehow deliberate line which travelled crookedly round from the top of the paper in a large loop. Inside the line were the initials LD and a short way below LD were the initials SL.

    The only other symbol impressed on the page was a question mark.

    Avery almost laughed. The message was childlike in its simplicity. With a line and four letters which would mean nothing to anyone but him, SL was showing him the outline of Exmoor; he was showing Avery he knew where Luke Dewberry’s body had been found and where he was in relation to that, and he was asking again—where is Billy Peters?

    Arnold Avery smiled happily. He had his correspondence.

Chapter 11

    W HEN HE WAS YOUNGER, GOOD THINGS SEEMED TO HAPPEN TOO fast for Arnold Avery. Things died too easily and too soon. Birds—which he lured to a seed table and caught in a net—were despicable in their surrender. A friend’s white mouse sat meek and trusting as he stamped on its head. The struggles of Lenny, his grandmother’s fat tabby, were explosive at first but faded quickly as he held it underwater in her bright white bathtub.

    None of them challenged him. None of them pleaded, begged, lied, or threatened him. Sure, Lenny had scratched him, but that was avoidable; the next cat he drowned—black and white Bibs—tore madly at the motorcycle gauntlets he’d stolen from a car boot sale.

    From an early age he read reports of children snatched from cars or playgrounds and found strangled just hours later, and was confused by the waste. If someone went to all the risk of stealing the ultimate prize—a child—why murder it so shortly after abduction? It made no sense to Avery.

    At the age of thirteen he locked a smaller boy in an old coal bunker and kept him there for almost a whole day—afraid to damage him but enjoying the control he had over him. Eight-year-old Timothy Reed had laughed at first, then asked, then demanded, then hammered on the doors, then threatened to tell, then threatened to kill, then had become very, very quiet. After that the pleading had started—the cajoling, the