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Lewis hadn’t bothered putting his sandwich away after showing it to Steven, and quickly ate the first, good half. He wrapped the bad half again carefully.

Two hundred yards farther up the track, he ate that too.

At the fork, Steven turned left behind the houses instead of his usual right, and Lewis spoke for the first time since the stile.

“Where you going?”

“Blacklands.”

“Why?”

“To dig.”

“I—”

Lewis bit his lip with a squeak, but the words “told you so” hung in the wet air. No matter. Steven appreciated the act of will it had taken for Lewis to swallow the jibe. They walked on in silence while the sky lightened and the tentative birds finally got the hang of the dawn chorus.

As they approached Blacklands, Steven saw the postcard again in his mind. He had it in his back pocket but he didn’t want to get it out in front of Lewis and have to explain things.

He knew from geography lessons what the Friar Tuck haircut symbol meant—it marked a rise in the ground. And he also knew exactly where that rise was. It looked very like the burial mounds on Dunkery Beacon—just closer to home. That thought made Steven stop and look back down towards Shipcott. It was invisible—still covered in mist below and behind them.

Another five minutes brought them to the mound at Blacklands and Steven turned again and looked down the moor to where he knew the village lay.

“Why d’ you keep stopping?”

Steven didn’t answer Lewis. He glanced above them at the mound, remembered the map, the positioning of those initials he’d been so desperate to see.

He started to skirt the rise, zigzagging a little through the heather. Lewis followed him. The dew was thick on the flowers and their jeans were soaked in seconds.

Lewis shivered. Steven stopped and took his bearings.

Here. About here.

Steven could barely believe that after years of random digging, he was about to bend to the task with real focus, based on inside information. Of course, there was still a big patch of ground to cover—probably half an acre—but compared to the whole of Exmoor, half an acre was a pinprick. This was the place. Somewhere here, Arnold Avery had buried the uncle he never knew and now he was going to start the task of finding him for real. Steven didn’t care how long it took him now. Nothing would keep him from returning Uncle Billy to his family.

Far from feeling excited and triumphant, the thought of succeeding suddenly made him overwhelmingly sad. Once more he looked down into the sea of mist and knew that—on a clear day—he’d be able to see his house. Uncle Billy had been buried within sight of his own backyard. His heartbroken mother, who had watched the searchers on TV prodding miles of heather and gorse, could have glanced out of the back bedroom window and seen her son’s shallow grave.

Steven shivered and turned away from Shipcott.

“Cold?” Lewis regarded him with sharp eyes.

“Nah.”

“Where we going to dig, then?”

“Here, I guess.”

Steven turned a slow circle to pick a spot—and stopped dead.

From a patch of white heather not twenty feet above them, a man was watching.

Steven flinched in surprise.

Then—before the flinch was even over—he felt his bowels loosen in shock as he recognized Arnold Avery.

Chapter 36

AVERY HAD ARRIVED IN SHIPCOTT JUST AFTER 5 A.M.

Unlike the towns of Bideford and Barnstaple and South Molton, Shipcott had barely changed. No new road layouts, no mini-roundabouts, no one-way systems. The one in Barnstaple had stolen damn near half the night from him as he looped and reversed and came at the town square what felt like a dozen times from different directions.

Finally he’d stopped at a newsagent’s shop, donned the green cardigan to hide the blood on his sleeve, bought a Daily Mirror, and asked directions.

Then he’d gone back to the car and stared at the face on the front page under the headline: CHILD KILLER ON THE RUN. The photo was a small fuzzy thing he’d been used to seeing clipped to Dr. Leaver’s file. Dr. Leaver himself had taken the picture at their first session, and Dr. Leaver had been wise to go into abnormal psychiatry because his photography skills left a lot to be desired.

Not for the first time, Arnold Avery thanked god for incompetence, but felt a pang. Had he missed his chance? If he was on the front pages today, then surely he must’ve been yesterday? Maybe SL knew he was out, or had been warned not to leave the house.

He suppressed the desperation that that thought sparked in him and checked out his face in the rearview mirror. He looked only vaguely like the photo on the front page of the Mirror and, even if it had been a dead ringer, most people were not observant. Avery remembered that from before—remembered all the times he could have been stopped, if only people had kept their eyes open, made connections, believed their guts.

Nobody did. Sometimes he felt invisible.