Lumsden admired his own self-control. He was still young, but the basic training had knocked the remaining child clean out of him, hardened him up, shaped him into a man. He knew he was already a better person than his father or brother or any of his half brothers would ever be.
Here in his hands he held the power of life and death. Gary Lumsden, the boy, would have fired; Private Gary Lumsden, the soldier, was tougher than that. He felt an unaccustomed swell of pride.
The man walked on, head down, through a patch of sunlight and Gary Lumsden held him in his sights, steady and careful. The tor was approaching, the kill shot would be lost, but it wasn’t about the kill shot, he told himself; it was about being in control, doing the right thing, growing up and being a man.
The walker clambered onto the first of the big grey rocks. Two more and he’d be lost from view behind the tor.
For less than two minutes, Private Gary Lumsden had been in possession of the power to inflict instant death, but had chosen instead to allow life to continue. It was godlike.
Lumsden’s angelic blue eyes stung with heat at the thought of how far he’d come as he watched the distant, stupid man reach to pull himself onto the next rock. So small, so vulnerable, so oblivious to how close it had been …
Private Lumsden’s entire being thrummed with the knowledge that this
And then—in a sudden, sneaky triumph of nature over nurture—he pulled the trigger anyway.
Arnold Avery opened his eyes to a blank white sky, a wet back, and a sharp ache in his left arm.
His first fuzzy thought was that a bird had flown into him. A big bird. All he remembered was clutching at the fresh Devonshire air as he fell off the rock he’d been standing on.
He turned his head creakily to one side, and sharp grass pricked his cheek. There was a disc of pure white something with two red dots in it beside his head; it took him several blinking seconds to work out it was a Mr. Kipling cherry Bakewell tart, spilled from his bag of stolen shopping. One red dot in the white icing was the cherry, the other was blood.
Avery groaned as he sat up and saw his left sleeve dark and red. He winced as he moved his arm. It hurt, but it wasn’t broken.
He looked around and could see nothing and nobody. But then, nothing and nobody could see him; he’d fallen into a shallow dip behind the tor. He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious for, or what had happened to him. His bird theory was shit, he already knew, but he had no others. The moor stretched around him for miles, looking yellow grey now under the lowering clouds.
He pulled his arm from his sleeve, wiping away blood with the tail of his shirt, and saw the gory crease through the top of his biceps, as though someone had dragged a forefinger through the flesh of his arm, removing the skin and leaving a bloody groove in its place.
It looked as though he’d been shot, although he knew that wasn’t possible. This was England, after all, and the screws they sent to hunt down escapees were likely to be armed with little more than expense vouchers for their petrol costs.
He shook his head to clear it, and slowly started to gather his stolen goods together. There was no point in hanging about trying to solve the mystery of what had happened to him. He doubted it was relevant anyway. If it had been an armed, overenthusiastic screw, then he’d be back in custody by now; if it had been a bird, there would be feathers. It didn’t matter. What mattered was keeping going. He tried to find the sun behind the clouds but couldn’t. It wasn’t getting dark yet, but that meant nothing; it was June, and would stay light until well after ten at night.
Although he didn’t know it, Arnold Avery had been unconscious only long enough to miss the very faint, outraged shouts of Private Gary Lumsden’s military career coming to an abrupt but almost inevitable end.
Chapter 33
STEVEN STARED AT THE BLACK CEILING HE COULDN’T SEE, AND listened to Uncle Jude and his mother arguing.
He couldn’t make out words, but the tones alone made him stiff with tension and his ears prickled with effort.
She was cross. Steven didn’t know what she had to be cross about. His mind raced, trying to assess the previous day, prodding it to shake loose the moment when things had changed. Something. Something. Something had happened. Must have! Because last night, he’d lain just like this, gazing into blackness, and heard them having sex. He recognized the sounds from a DVD he and Lewis had watched last school holidays. Something with Angelina Jolie in it. It had been under some sheets, so hadn’t shed any useful light on the mechanics of the whole sex thing. He and Lewis had stared, flame faced, at the screen, not daring to speak or look at each other while the scene played out. When it was over, Lewis had said, “I’d give her one,” in a triumph of redundancy.
