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So when he saw Mason Dingle all alone, scratching something no doubt filthy into the seat of a red plastic swing in the battered Lapwing playground, Avery pulled over in his white van, got himself ready, and whistled to get the boy’s attention—confident in the inabilities of the Devon & Cornwall, or any other police force.

Mason looked up and Avery’s heart lifted to see his sweet face. He waved the boy over and Mason sauntered towards the van.

“Gimme directions?”

Mason Dingle lifted his eyebrows in assent. Everything about him, Avery saw now, was like a small man. Here was a boy with older brothers, if he’d ever seen one. The way he slouched, his manly undereagerness to help, the cigarette tucked behind his tender little ear beside the shaven temples. But oh, his face! The face of an angel!

Mason bent down to the window of the van, looking off into the distance as if he barely had time in his busy schedule for this.

“Right, mate?”

“Yeah,” said Avery, “can you show me on this map where the business park is?”

“Just down there and take a left, mate.”

“Can you show me on this map?”

Mason sighed, then poked his head inside the van to look down at the map spread across Avery’s lap.

“Can you point at it for me?”

For a second Mason Dingle couldn’t take in what he was seeing, then he jerked slightly, bumping his head on the door frame. Avery had seen this reaction before. Now one of two things would happen: either the boy would start to redden and stammer and back rapidly away, or he would start to redden and stammer and feel compelled—because Avery was an adult who had asked him a question—to point at the area on the map, so that his hand was mere inches from it. When that happened, things could go anywhere—and sometimes had. Avery preferred the second reaction because it prolonged the encounter, but the first was good too—to see the fear and confusion—and the guilt—on their faces because, at the end of the day, they all wanted it. He himself was just more honest about it.

But Mason Dingle took a third path; as he pulled backwards through the van window, he twisted the keys from the ignition. “You dirty old bastard!” he said, grinning, and held the keys up.

Avery was instantly furious. “Give those back, you little shit!” He got out of the van, zipping himself up with some difficulty.

Mason danced away from him, laughing. “Fuck you!” he yelled—and ran.

Arnold Avery reevaluated Mason Dingle. Appearances had been deceptive. He had the face of an angel but obviously he was a tough kid. Therefore Avery expected the boy to reappear shortly with his keys and either a demand for money, or at least one older male relative or the police.

The thought didn’t scare Avery. Mason Dingle’s street smarts had worked for him so far, but Avery guessed that they could also be used against him. Nobody believed nice children about things like this—let alone troublesome brats. Especially when the man being accused of such filth and perversion just sat around and waited for the police to arrive instead of behaving as if he had something to hide. So Avery lit a cigarette and waited in the playground—where he could not be surprised—for Mason Dingle to return.

At first the police were disinclined to take Mason Dingle seriously. But he knew his rights and he was insistent, so two policemen finally put him in a squad car—with much warning about wasting police time—and drove him back to the playground, where they found the white van. They were checking that the keys Mason had produced did indeed fit the van when Arnold Avery approached angrily, and told them that the boy had stolen his keys and tried to hold them to ransom.

“He said if I didn’t pay him he’d tell the police I tried to fiddle with him!”

The police focus switched back to Mason and, while the boy told the truth in remarkable detail, Avery could see that the police believed his own version of events only too eagerly.

And so everything was going Avery’s way until, with a sinking feeling, he saw a small boy approaching with a man who looked like a father on the warpath.

While he maintained his composure with the two police officers, inside Avery was cursing his own stupidity. All he’d had to do was wait! Everything would have been okay if he’d only waited! But it was a playground, and playgrounds attracted children, and even though the stocky eight-year-old now bawling his way towards him wasn’t really his type, the first boy had taken so long to come back! What was he supposed to do?

So, in the final analysis, it was all Mason Dingle’s fault. Although when Arnold Avery ventured this opinion to a homicide officer almost a year later—after half a dozen small bodies had been discovered in shallow graves on a rainswept Exmoor—the officer broke his nose with a single backhander, and his own solicitor merely shrugged.

It all fell apart.