Steven Lamb was twelve when he decided that finding bones could fix the people he loved. He lived in a sagging house at the edge of Exmoor with his mother, Lettie, his little brother, Davey, and his Nan, who had once been a mother to a boy who never came home. That boy—Billy Peters—had wandered out to the shop nearly two decades earlier and vanished somewhere between the newsagent’s door and the front path. People said a delivery driver named Arnold Avery had taken him, like the other children Avery had buried on the moor. Billy’s body was the one that never turned up. Because it never turned up, Nan stood at the window each day as if she were clocking in for a shift, waiting for the shape of her son to appear on the road. Lettie, worn down by old grief and newer disappointments, loved Davey too loudly and Steven not quite enough. In the cracks between them all, Steven decided that if he found Billy, the house might go quiet and warm again.
After school, while other boys swapped football stickers, Steven tramped onto Exmoor with a spade and an Ordnance Survey map. The moor stared back—brown heather, gorse that scratched like a warning, wind that blew straight through a jumper. He dug where his map told him there were humps and hollows and ancient mounds, and he filled a notebook with crosses where he had already tried. Sometimes he brought his friend Lewis, who could be loyal or cruel depending on the weather inside him. Often he went alone. Mostly he found nothing: the ribcage of a sheep, a bottle necked with dirt, the impression that the land itself wasn’t going to speak to a boy.
School didn’t help. Teachers missed him even when he sat right there; boys noticed him only when there was something to mock. Home was sharper. Nan guarded Billy’s room like a shrine, and Lettie snapped through evenings, moving around her mother and elder son as if they were heavy furniture. Steven felt like a draught in a house that wouldn’t warm. If he could turn up a skull, a shoe, any part of Billy that proved he had stopped somewhere, then maybe Nan would stop looking at the road and Lettie would stop looking away from him. He needed the moor to confess. The moor didn’t.
A lesson at school gave him another door to try. They were practicing letter-writing—how to lay out the address, how to make an opening, how to ask for what you wanted. Steven realized there was one person who could point to a place on a map and make the ground mean something. He wrote to the man in prison. He didn’t sign his name—just initials—and he tried to sound older than twelve. He asked about a boy whose body had never been found, and he drew a little bait in the margins: W.P., the year, the road from the shop, the outline of the moor. He posted the letter with his heart banging like a door in a high wind.
The reply took its time. When it came, the envelope felt wrong in his hands, heavier than paper. Inside was a careful hand, a chill voice without breath. Arnold Avery wrote back. He didn’t say Billy’s name. He didn’t admit anything at all. He parried. He asked questions that sounded like kindness and were nothing like it. Steven answered anyway, because every scrap of ink felt closer to the one thing he needed. He tried not to give away who he was or where he lived. He tried not to be a child on the page. He folded tiny maps into his envelopes, no landmarks labeled, only dots and numbers and the faintest suggestion of contours. Avery sent riddles back, stray details about the ground and how it keeps secrets. The letters turned into a line drawn between a boy on a bleak hillside and a man in a cell who could still walk in his mind to any place he had chosen on the moor.
The line tightened. Steven slipped once. A class project needed a photograph, and without thinking he tucked the same picture of himself into a letter, proud of how grown he looked with his spade over his shoulder. When he realized what he had done, it was too late. In a place where time crawled, Avery felt something stir. He had been the model prisoner long enough to hope for parole; the letters rewired that hope into hunger. He began to plot in ways that seemed like patience to the officers, like rehabilitation to any official who glanced at his file. He nudged men against each other, set a quarrel burning, waited for a door to open a fraction too far.
As winter lowed over Exmoor, Steven dug and wrote and lied at home about where he had been. He coaxed information out of Avery and learned that every answer was also a trap. Lewis noticed something and wanted in; Lewis wanted out. Lettie drifted between brittle truce and sudden anger, and Nan’s face at the window became a habit even dream couldn’t stop. Then the news came like a noise travelling fast over the ground: something had gone wrong in the routine of the prison, an accident or a fight or a convoy re-routed. The papers would call it an escape. The letters had become a trail.
The moor met fog the morning it mattered most. Steven went out because that was what he did when he was afraid. He followed the crosses on his own map to a place he had circled as “maybe,” keeping the hedge on his left, counting strides the way he had learned from the numbers Avery dropped into his sentences. The mist pressed close, touched his face with damp fingers. He almost didn’t see the figure come out of it. When he did, his mind went empty of letters, of cleverness, of the pretense that he had ever been anything other than a child.
Avery was smaller than the shape Steven had imagined and larger in the only way that mattered. His eyes were bright as coins in mud. He spoke as if this meeting were a treat long promised, as if he had walked a hundred miles to reach the exact breath of air Steven was using. He wanted the boy to come closer. He wanted a hand on a shoulder, a reason to guide, the old choreography. Steven didn’t move. The spade weighed something new in his palms. They circled in the fog with words first—Avery coaxing, Steven stalling—until words ran out and the moor itself seemed to hold its breath.
The struggle was clumsy and desperate, two bodies trying to turn fear into advantage. Steven stumbled in a rabbit hole and went to his knees; Avery’s fingers brushed his jacket and found nothing to grip. The spade clanged on a stone and bounced back into Steven’s wrist. He ducked, twisted, felt bracken rake his cheek, tasted iron. The thought that came to him was not about death; it was about Nan at the window and Lettie’s voice scolding the air, and Davey asleep with his thumb near his mouth. He drove forward with the kind of courage that is only the absence of alternatives.
The moor, which had offered him nothing for years, finally threw him a rope. Shouts came through the fog—one voice, then another—human sound cutting the blankness. Lewis’s name was in there somewhere, maybe Lewis’s father’s too; there might have been the rattle of a shopping trolley on the stony path, the old wheels Nan used when she went down to the shops and back like a metronome for waiting. The fog turned bodies into shapes and shapes into guesses. Hands grabbed, struck, missed, found. The final blow landed—whether from the boy who refused to be led away, from the man who had come running toward noise, or from the grandmother who had pushed her stubborn cart across that ground so many times she could do it blind. In the end, the figure that had stepped so surely out of the mist didn’t get up.
Silence settled like dew. Steven stood shaking, the spade hanging from his hand, his chest gulping the air of high places. The fog thinned enough to show faces he knew: Lewis with his mouth open and his eyes huge, a man he recognized from the village, and Nan, who had left the window at last, her hands on the trolley handle, her gaze not on the road but on him. Lettie arrived later—was it minutes, was it years—and folded him into a tight, graceless hug that hurt in a way he would remember kindly. The moor gave nothing else. It did not lift its skirt to reveal bones or a scrap of training shoe or the neat truth of a grave. The ground kept Billy.
In the days that followed, the house changed by degrees that felt like miles. There were police, questions, statements that turned messy fear into ink. The newspapers said a killer was dead on Exmoor, and for once the headlines had nothing to do with a child taken, only a child returned. Nan’s vigil faltered and then ended; she still found her way to the window, but not to watch the road so much as to notice weather again. Lettie looked at Steven straight on and learned the shape of his face. Davey wriggled against his brother’s side on the sofa and didn’t get pushed away. Lewis hovered and swaggered and was forgiven, the way boys forgive when they need one another.
Steven kept the map he had ruined with hopeful crosses and the spade that had made no difference to the earth and all the difference to a life. He walked sometimes to the edge of the moor and listened to the wind say the names it never says out loud. He understood, as well as any child could, that closure isn’t the same as finding bones, and that the living have to be buried, too—buried under a blanket, under a mother’s arm, under the ordinary weight of a day that arrives and leaves without demanding a sacrifice. He had set out to dig up a body and deliver a miracle. What he brought home was breath, and that was enough.