It took him a couple of minutes to find the lid of his lunch box under a car. He stood up again, his knees muddied, to see Mrs. O’Leary holding the letter from Arnold Avery. He went cold.
“
Steven said nothing. What could he say? He watched her face scan the scrap of wet paper, a little frown line appearing between her eyes.
Mrs. O’Leary’s mind turned slowly like the barrels on a rusty combination lock, and finally clicked into place. She looked at him and Steven felt his stomach drop.
“So you write great letters in your spare time too?”
For a split second he thought he’d misheard. But he hadn’t. He felt the heat rising from his collar and creeping up his face.
“Yes, miss.”
She smiled, relieved to be able to muster some interest in the boy; she needed these little reminders that she had not wasted her life going into teaching. She held out the letter and he took it tentatively.
“Run now, Simon!”
“Yes, miss.”
Steven ran.
Geography.
Steven traced a map of South Africa. He transferred it to his exercise book and started to fill in the mineral wealth. Gold. Diamonds. Platinum. Such exotica. He snorted quietly as he thought of his home country’s mineral wealth: tin, clay, and coal were the only things that had ever been worth digging for on this tiny peak of sea-mountain called Britain.
Tin, clay, coal—and bodies. Bodies buried in the dirt, in the soil, in the turf. Bodies that had fallen asleep and quietly died, bodies of butchered Picts and Celts and Saxons and Romans; Royalists and Roundheads put to the sword in the sweet English grass. And as the coal and the tin and the clay industries died, so the industry of bodies had taken hold. Now the bones of Saxon peasants were pored over on prime-time TV as they emerged in careful relief from the earth. A rude awakening from centuries of hidden rest.
Bodies were as much a mineral wealth of Britain as gold was in Africa. The declined empire, shrunk to tiny pink pinpricks, had become withdrawn and introspective—tired and surrendered in conquest, now discovering itself like an old man who sits alone in a crumbling mansion and starts to call numbers in a tattered address book, his thoughts turning from a short future to a long and neglected past.
Britain was built on those bodies of the conquered and the conquerors. Steven could feel them right now in the earth beneath the foundations beneath the school beneath the classroom floor, beneath his chair legs and the rubber soles of his trainers.
So many bodies, and he only wanted one. It didn’t seem a lot to ask.
As he carefully pressed the graphite into the clean page, Steven wondered how many of those ancient bones were in the ground because of serial killers. When Channel 4’s Time Team prized femurs and broken skulls from the holding planet, were they contaminating a two-thousand-year-old crime scene? Was the Saxon boy or the Tudor girl a victim? One of many? Would archaeologists a hundred years from now be able to link six, eight, ten victims and say for sure that they were murdered? And murdered by one hand?
Arnold Avery had been convicted of six murders. Plus Uncle Billy. Plus … who knew how many? How many lay undiscovered in shallow graves? How many through the whole of history? Did he crush their bones underfoot as he walked home? Did their eyeless skulls peer down at him when he explored the old mines at Brendon Hills? Steven shivered and prodded the map out of alignment. As he carefully covered Johannesburg with Johannesburg again …
“Oh!”
Kids around him sniggered and Mrs. James looked up from marking papers.
“Something you want to share, Steven?”
But Steven had used the last of his breath to push out the exclamation, and had not yet been able to draw another.
The line Steven copied was even more crooked than it should have been. His hands shook; his whole body fluttered in a mixture of excitement and fear.
He pushed the
The TV was on in the front room but Steven still looked suspiciously down the hallway before unfolding Avery’s letter and smoothing it down on the table. He placed the tracing paper over the letter, with the “S” and “L” of “SincereLy” over the dot that was Shipcott. His heart thumped in his ears; “Your Great,” YG, and “TiDe,” TD, were both northeast of Shipcott towards Dunkery Beacon.
Avery was showing him the graves of Yasmin Gregory and Toby Dunstan.
He’d cracked the code.
Chapter 14
LETTIE LAMB CLEANED THE BIG HOUSE AND THOUGHT ABOUT HER elder son for the first time in a long time.
