But mostly it was just embarrassing.
He stepped away from his mother, feeling the heat coming off his head in waves.
He saw the worry in his mother’s eyes, though, and—because she’d held him—he eked out an answer of sorts:
“Don’t worry, Mum.”
“Don’t make me, okay?”
He nodded and withdrew, although he could see from her face that Nan thought he’d got off lightly.
He took the stairs two at a time. It was a stretch, but Lewis had tried it and failed, so Steven figured he might as well practice it if Lewis thought it was worthwhile. It left him breathless at the top.
DB. DB. None of the children was called DB. Was Avery revealing another murder to him?
Once in his room, he studied the letter carefully in the dull light of the window. There were no other marks on it that he could see. He got out the map of Exmoor he’d used for his correspondence with Avery, and pored over it. The letters were not positioned anywhere in particular on the piece of paper, so Steven didn’t bother trying to line them up with anything.
Avery wanted a photo of DB. But who was DB?
Three nights later, Steven jerked awake with the answer.
He could feel it in his gut.
DB was not a “who” but a “what.”
It was the highest point of the moor, and close to where all the bodies had been found.
Arnold Avery wanted a photo of Dunkery Beacon.
Chapter 19
IT TOOK STEVEN WELL OVER AN HOUR TO WALK TO DUNKERY Beacon, even though his way was speeded by not having to carry the spade.
The spade.
Now that he’d stopped digging, just thinking the word “spade” made him squirm with the guilt of potential failure.
Still, he was faster without it, allowing his arms to swing freely, working up a rhythm and a slight sweat as he trudged uphill—always uphill—onto the moor. He hadn’t even bothered with sandwiches, just a bottle of water and the camera making bulges in his old anorak.
The camera was Davey’s; a cheap disposable—one of a pack of three he’d got for his birthday. He’d wasted the first photographing feet, ceilings, and blurred people. He’d dropped the second in the bath while photographing the epic sea battle between Action Man and a plague of off-worldly beings in the shape of colored beads of bath oil. Too late, Davey had realized the colorful capsules melted in the hot water, leaving just a white oily slick, a scrap of fruit-gum-like gel—and him open to the wrath of his luxury-rationed mother. In his panic he’d dropped the camera.
The third camera had gathered dust on the bedroom window-sill until Arnold Avery’s letter arrived, then Steven stole it without compunction.
He needed it, Davey didn’t.
Dunkery Beacon was not only the highest point on Exmoor, it was also the coldest, thought Steven, as the wind whipped his cheap anorak around him, flicking his thighs painfully with the metal zip. He zipped it up to avoid further injury.
Because it was pretty much the only thing to look at apart from the nonexistent view, Steven briefly considered the plaque that commemorated the gift of the Beacon, an area of outstanding natural beauty, to the nation in 1935. The names of the benefactors were carved in stone, and Steven couldn’t help snorting: they should see the natural beauty today, he thought.
From Exmoor there was often a view of the Bristol Channel and sometimes of the Brecon Beacons, rising across the channel from the foreign land of Wales, but today the white sky with its relief of scudding grey clouds left the horizon fuzzy and foreign. He turned and looked back down the rough track that had brought him here, to the small level patch of gravel that constituted a car park. There were two cars there. It wasn’t unusual—people liked views but luckily people also liked walking, and nobody could enjoy both at the same time unless they got out of their cars.
Steven glanced around but couldn’t see anyone. It was astonishing how quickly people could disappear on Exmoor’s seemingly featureless hills.
Dunkery Beacon was not entirely featureless. Here and there were the stone humps of ancient burial mounds. He tugged the blue plastic camera from his pocket as he turned a slow circle, wondering which angle would be best.
All too quickly, he knew, and felt sick for knowing.
Avery would want the angle that showed the best view of that part of Dunkery Beacon where he’d buried the bodies.
Steven hadn’t been thinking of the bodies when he walked up here, but now he realized he was standing within five hundred yards of three of the shallow gravesites.
Yasmin Gregory.
Louise Leverett.
John Elliot.
