With a feeling of uneasy voyeurism, he scanned the ground around him to see if he could spot any evidence, even after all these years, of the excavations that had been made during the search. The burial mounds—markers denoting respect and honor—became mere backdrop as his memory imposed three sets of red biro initials onto the windblown gorse and his killer’s eye made shallows in the turf, scars in the gorse. But his ordinary boy’s intellect reasserted itself. It had been a long time. Grass, gorse, and heather would have crept back by now, recolonizing the exposed soil, softening the harsh, gaping wounds of little families and the whole nation. He knew there would be nothing to see unless one knew exactly where to look, and even then imagination would have to play a part.
And so he imagined, and peered through the dirty little view-finder across a part of the moor that he thought had held one of the graves and clicked the shutter. It seemed to be over rather quickly and easily, considering his long walk up here, so he moved around a little and clicked the shutter again before trudging back down the Beacon.
As he crossed the car park, Steven peered idly into the cars. Sometimes people left dogs in their cars on hot days. Steven dreamed of finding a dog in a car on a hot day and being forced to smash the window to rescue it, then taking it home with him, secure in the knowledge he’d saved it from stupid, undeserving people.
But today wasn’t hot, and most people who brought dogs to Exmoor had brought them there with the express purpose of walking them, not leaving them in the car. Steven sighed and realized he’d have to live near a supermarket to have a decent chance of making his fantasy a reality, and there was no supermarket in Shipcott.
He turned and looked back at the Beacon, brown and ugly under the lowering sky.
The angle of the light made the ancient burial mounds stand out much better from down here. What had seemed flat from the summit was relief from the car park. It would make a better picture from this angle, he reasoned.
So, with fingers turning numb from the cold, Steven prized the camera out of his pocket once more, pointed it back up the rising ground, and clicked the shutter.
Then he turned and started the walk home.
He was at the fork in the track that would lead him down into Shipcott when he saw the hoodies coming towards him, their heads down as they made heavy weather of climbing the steep hillside from the village.
Steven stood stock-still. He looked round briefly as though a rock, a bush, a tree might suddenly emerge from the almost featureless moor and afford him somewhere to hide. He knew it was pointless. He knew he could drop out of sight right here in the deep heather beside the pathway. He and Lewis used to hide that way from Lewis’s dopey dog, Bunny, when Bunny was still alive. They would wait until Bunny loped off after a rabbit, then throw themselves into the heather and whistle. They would snigger and peer and whisper as they heard the Labrador-cross blundering about the moor around them—and always get a shock when he finally found them with his big wet nose, his lolling tongue, and his excited yaps.
But that was from a dog’s-eye point of view.
Steven knew that if he lay in the heather now, when the hoodies came to within ten feet they would see his frightened form flattened in full view against the flowers, like a stupid ostrich with its head in the sand, and then he would be humiliated as well as chased and roughed up.
For a moment he just stood there, waiting for one of the panting boys to glance up at the path ahead and see him, while he decided on the best way to run.
The camera.
The thought popped into his head. If they caught him, they would take the camera. Or break it.
Quickly he pulled it out of his pocket, chose a place, and dropped it into the heather. He tried to imprint the location on his brain. Two pale mauve heathers with a sprig of yellow gorse between them, next to that stone shaped like a jelly bean.
He looked back at the hoodies at the very moment one of them looked up and saw him, and realized that dumping the camera had lost him the distance he so badly needed to turn and run.
They were on him in a second.
“Lamb,” said one—the tallest one.
He said nothing and they seemed momentarily at a loss for what to do with him.
“Got any money?”
“No.”
Rough, careless hands tugged at his clothes anyway, pulling his pockets inside out, his water bottle dropping to the stony track with a hollow plastic slosh. They found thirty-four pence in his jeans, and Arnold Avery’s letter folded in his back pocket.
The smallest boy shoved him in the chest, making him take half a step backwards, even though it was uphill.
“You said you din’t have no money.”
Steven shrugged. The tall boy unfolded the letter.
“ ‘A photo would be nice.’ What’s that mean, then?”
“Nothing.”
