Something large and heavy had trampled and gouged the soft black earth, kicking up little seedlings that now lay scattered like bodies on a battlefield, their bright green uniforms failing to cover the naked, spindly limbs beneath that should never have been exposed.
Steven wanted it to be a fox. Or a cow. He even looked about the garden for an escaped cow. A cow would be bad, but not as bad as the bald fact that a person had done this. Person or people.
The hoodies. The hoodies would do this. In his mind Steven could imagine them stomping and laughing as they mashed the tender shoots underfoot, their shadowed faces twisted with stupid humor.
But even as he tried to convince himself of that, Steven knew that the hoodies didn’t care enough to do this—or know him well enough to think
In his plummeting heart, Steven knew it was Lewis.
Chapter 29
BECAUSE OF THE DISTURBANCE IN THE KITCHEN, BECAUSE RYAN Finlay had been rushed to hospital—and from there to the morgue—and because Avery had locked the gate in the chain-link behind him, it was almost an hour before he was found to be missing and not just banged up in the wrong cell or hiding somewhere for his own safety. And it was another twenty minutes before a screw spotted Toby and Yasmin and anyone realized that Arnold Avery had gone over the wall.
Since being promoted from his post as assistant governor at Newport Open Prison in South Wales, the governor of Longmoor had lost four prisoners. Four in four years. It was not a shockingly high number. Longmoor was a training prison; a few select prisoners were even sent to work outside the walls on cleaning details or farm duties as part of their rehabilitation. Understaffing meant that on two occasions a couple of men had simply ducked behind a bit of machinery or wandered off into a thick mist. All four had been recaptured on the roads before any driver would stop for them.
But four escapes in four years had the unfortunate ring of a pattern to it. As if it might be five escapes in five years, six in six years, and so on, and that gave the governor palpitations.
So, once Avery’s escape was detected, every available officer was immediately dispatched onto the roads, and roadblocks were established to search cars leaving the area. It was assumed that—like those before him—this particular escapee would head for the nearest road, then flag down or steal a car. To do anything else was stupid and dangerous, even in summer.
Having taken this view, the governor then took another: escapes reflected poorly on prison staff and that led to a lowering of staff morale.
The governor was a good man, and wanted to keep morale as high as possible.
If only Avery could be recaptured within the next few hours. If only the fact that a formerly notorious child killer had gone over the wall could be kept out of the press until he was safely back within those very walls …
The governor was a good man.
But he made a bad choice.
He didn’t call the police.
Arnold Avery’s first half hour of freedom after eighteen years in prison was the worst thirty minutes of his life.
As soon as he straightened up from the twelve-foot drop, he panicked.
The feeling grabbed him by the throat and squeezed, and he ran blindly onto the moor, his terror making him whine with every snatch of out-of-shape breath. His legs burned, there were daggers in his lungs; even his arms ached from running—all within four hundred yards of the wall. Years of sitting in his cell, thinking, had done nothing for his muscle tone.
He stumbled and panted and whimpered until his own self-loathing finally slapped the panic down and forced him to stop, regain control, and take stock.
His panic was groundless. However many times he looked back, he saw no sign of pursuit. The prison itself had melted away behind him like a bad dream.
Built in a large natural hollow, Longmoor Prison was a village-sized stone monstrosity that was barely visible to the thousands of walkers and tourists who roamed the moors each summer. One minute they would be striding out with only short yellow grass and pale granite outcrops for company; the next they’d be gazing down on the huge dark grey wheel inside a crater, often only the pitched roofs and chimneys jutting up through the fog, as if the whole prison was sinking into a lake of dirty milk.
Out here now, with the prison disappeared and only the sunny moor around him, Avery felt his panic shredded and scattered by the bracing breeze. In its place he felt the sudden, laughing excitement of being free.
He had an almost irrepressible urge to throw his arms out and spin dizzily across the slopes.
Contrary to his forerunners, he had no intention of flagging down a car or going anywhere near a road if he could help it.
He would have considered stealing a car but he was a serial killer, not a common car thief, and had no idea how to hot-wire a car—or even to break into one unless it was with a brick through a window.
