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Nineteen years ago this eleven-year-old boy—probably much like himself—had tired of his fantasy space game and gone outside to play on a warm summer evening, apparently—infuriatingly—unaware that he would never return to put his toys away or to wave his Man City scarf at the TV on a Sunday afternoon, or even to make his bed, which his mother—Steven’s nan—had done much later.

Sometime after 7:15 P.M., when Mr. Jacoby from the newsagent sold him a bag of Maltesers, Uncle Billy had moved out of the realm of childhood make-believe and into the realm of living nightmare. In the two hundred yards between the newsagent’s and this very house—a two hundred yards Steven walked every morning and every night to and from school—Uncle Billy had simply disappeared.

Steven’s nan had waited until 8:30 before sending Lettie out to look for her brother, and until 9:30, when darkness was falling, to go outside herself. In the light summer evenings children played long past their winter bedtimes. But it was not until Ted Randall next door said perhaps they should call the police that Steven’s nan changed forever from Billy’s mum into Poor Mrs. Peters.

Poor Mrs. Peters—whose husband had been stupidly killed wobbling off his bicycle into the path of the Barnstaple bus six years before—had waited for Billy to come home.

At first she waited at the door. She stood there all day, every day for a month, barely noticing fouteen-year-old Lettie brushing past her to go to school, and returning promptly at 3:50 to save her mother worrying even more—if such a thing were possible.

When the weather broke, Poor Mrs. Peters waited in the window from where she could see up and down the road. She grew the look of a dog in a thunderstorm—alert, wide-eyed, and nervous. Any movement in the street made her heart leap so hard in her chest that she flinched. Then would come the slump, as Mr. Jacoby or Sally Blunkett or the Tithecott twins grew so distinct that no desperate stretch of her imagination could keep them looking like a ruddy-cheeked eleven-year-old boy with a blond crew cut, new Nike trainers, and a half-eaten bag of Maltesers in his hand.

Lettie learned to cook and to clean and to stay in her room so she didn’t have to watch her mother flinching at the road. She had always suspected that Billy was the favorite and now, in his absence, her mother no longer had the strength to hide this fact.

So Lettie worked on a shell of anger and rebellion to protect the soft center of herself which was fourteen and scared and missed her brother and her mother in equal measure, as if both had been snatched from her on that warm July evening.

How could Uncle Billy not know? Once more Steven felt that flicker of anger as he looked about the clueless, lifeless room. How could anyone not know that something like that was about to happen to them?

Blacklands

Chapter 2

A YEAR AFTER BlLLY DISAPPEARED A DELIVERY DRIVER FROM Exeter was arrested for something else, somewhere else.

At first, police merely questioned Arnold Avery after a boy called Mason Dingle accused him of flashing at him.

It was not the first time Arnold Avery had exposed himself to a child—although, of course, this was not what he told police initially—but, in luring fifteen-year-old Mason Dingle to his van for directions, Avery had unwittingly met his nemesis.

Mason Dingle was himself not unknown to the police. His small size and choirboy features were merely a lucky lie, which hid the true face of the terror of Plymouth’s Lapwing estate. Graffiti, demanding money with menaces, breaking and entering were all in Mason Dingle’s blood, and the police knew it was only a matter of time before young Master Dingle followed his brothers in the family tradition—a life of some sort of ongoing detention.

But before he got there (which he absolutely did) Mason Dingle helped to catch the man the tabloids later dubbed the Van Strangler.

Naturally, the police did not even know that such a child killer was on the loose. Children disappeared all the time, and a few turned up dead. But this happened all over the country and police forces in the 1980s did not have the resources to compare notes in any but the most high-profile murder cases. For all the government’s Orwellian bleating about improvements and manpower and databases, the police detection rates remained at roughly the level that they would have achieved by periodically sticking a pin in a list of the usual suspects.

And anyway—until Mason Dingle took a hand in the proceedings—none of Arnold Avery’s victims had been found and Avery himself had never been arrested or even speed-ticketed, so all the databases in the world would not have thrown his name across the desks of investigating officers.