Blacklands

Chapter 10

AVERY WAS SURPRISED. THE LETTER SAID NOTHING! IT DID NOT beg, it did not plead, did not offer to help him at his parole hearings—the first of which had already taken place without him, and had led to his transfer from Heavitree to the lower-category Longmoor.

He read the letter again and a slow anger started to smoulder inside him. His own letter had been offhand and cryptic; he knew, because he’d taken some days to work out the precise tone he wanted to convey—ignorant, to get past the censors, and yet with enough of a tease in it to tempt a smart and determined reader into an answer. Avery’s in-tray had been empty for eighteen long years and he barely dared admit even to himself the thrill it gave him to receive a letter. Even more, to receive a letter dealing with his favorite subject. 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.