Blacklands

Chapter 11

WHEN 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 promises, the desperate entreaties, the tears. Avery had been thrilled as much by his own daring as by Timothy’s pathetic cries. He had let him out before it got dark and told him it was a test which he had passed. He and Timothy were now secret friends. The younger boy shook in terror as he agreed that Arnold was his secret friend and never to tell.

And he meant to keep that secret.

After a few weeks of wariness, Timothy Reed started to respond to Arnold’s friendly hellos. He could not help accepting the stolen Scuba Action Man or the pilfered sweets. Two months after the bunker incident, Timothy Reed watched as Arnold tortured a weedy nine-year-old bully to tears and a grovelling apology. The bully sent out word in the playground and Timothy was pathetically grateful to have an older, bigger boy as an ally and protector.

And once Timothy Reed looked on him as a hero, Arnold sensed the time was right to call in the kind of favor only a very close—very secret—friend might grant.

Arnold Avery abused Timothy Reed until the child’s reversals of behavior and plummeting schoolwork prompted serious inquiries from his parents and—quickly thereafter—the police.

So Arnold learned his first lesson—that the advantage of animals was that they could not tell.

At the age of fouteen Arnold Avery was sent to a young offenders institution where every night of his three-month sentence—and some days—were spent learning that real sexual power lay not in asking and getting, but in simply taking. The fact that he was initially on the painful end of that equation only heightened the value of this, his second lesson.

He went home, but he never went back.

It took him another seven years before he killed Paul Barrett (who bore a surprising resemblance to Timothy Reed) but it was worth waiting for. Avery kept Paul alive for sixteen hours, then buried him near Dunkery Beacon. Nobody suspected Avery. Nobody questioned him, nobody gave him a second glance as he drove his van round and round the West Country, reading local papers, calling local homes, chatting to local children.

And nobody found Paul Barrett’s body; when they searched, it was near the boy’s home in Westward Ho!

So Dunkery Beacon was a safe place to bury a body, thought Avery.

And he made good use of it.