Dear Amy,
No one has come. I know it’s not your fault and that you are doing your best. It’s just that I didn’t tell you enough about how to find me. It’s hard, though, because I don’t know very much. Not only that but the things he told me might be wrong, or lies. I’m frightened that if I tell you something that’s wrong then you’ll never find me. That’s the thing that scares me most.
I don’t know much about where I am except that it is a cellar in a big old house. There is this kind of foam stuff attached to the walls so no one can hear me, but if I put my ear to the pipes I can hear things. Like, there are dogs that bark at night sometimes, though they sound far away.
I tried to peel a corner of the foam up, just a little, hoping he wouldn’t see, but he spotted it and went absolutely mental. He nailed it back down and said that if I did it again he’d hammer the nails into me next.
I believe him.
I can’t tell you anything else about which house I’m in, because he put a bag over my head while I was still in the car and I’ve never seen the outside of it. I don’t know anything else about it.
There are so many things I don’t know. I don’t even know what will happen to these letters, or if you are even reading them.
All I want is to get out of here and go home. Please, please tell the police or my nanna about this, because if they keep looking they are bound to find me.
Love,
Bethan Avery
P. S. Please help me soon.
I stood outside the offices, taking deep breaths. I felt cold and sick. I looked down at the smudged paper and the big, childish handwriting – so like the kind of handwriting I saw in class every day – and said, ‘This is a hoax, remember?’
It didn’t have the calming effect it was supposed to.
I examined the letter once more, minutely. It, like its predecessor, had been posted the day before I received it. It was written on plain white paper, which was certainly not seventeen years old.
It could not be from Bethan Avery.
And yet it was from someone.
I had an idea. I thrust the letter deep into my bulky bag and hefted it over my shoulder.
It was no use dwelling on these letters unless I had some grasp of who Bethan Avery was, and of what had happened to her – this dead girl who was now writing to me. I patted the bag paternally, feeling more in control.
I’d already done the Wikipedia Trail in search of information on Bethan Avery, and found only bits and pieces, hoarded in the corners of some very obscure websites. If I wanted to learn more, I’d need to up my game.
I walked to the Central Library in town, nestled in its sprawling complex of shops. I paused before the lifts for a moment, looking around for anyone who might know me, but I saw only strangers.
I couldn’t breathe, suddenly, and leaned my hand against the wall, trying to master myself.
No. I refuse to have another panic attack. I refuse.
As the lift inched down my heart was chilled and marble-heavy, and there was some sort of conspiracy afoot with my nerves, which didn’t want me to look into this any further. Determined to show them who was boss, I took a few deep breaths. I looked up, remembering what my therapist had told me – baby steps.
Just breathe.
The lift doors opened wide.
I balled my hands into fists, put one foot deliberately in front of the other, entered the lift and pressed the button.
These things will not conquer me.
The librarian, a tiny blonde twenty-something in a Riot grrrl T-shirt, looked up from her desk and smiled.
Don’t let anyone tell you that the gold standard of feeling old is when the police and doctors seem younger than you. It’s the librarians that will get you every time.
‘I’m looking for a book on Bethan Avery,’ I volunteered after a moment.
‘Who?’
‘She was a girl who went missing around here in the nineties. It was presumed she was murdered, but I don’t think they ever found a body. I had a look on the Internet, but couldn’t see any way to find out more.’
The girl frowned, a single line bisecting her white brow, and consulted her monitor, tapping the keyboard rapidly. ‘I’ve never heard of her. Hmm. She’s not coming up on the system. Would it be Local History, maybe?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so.’ This librarian would have been in primary school when it happened, no wonder she’d never heard of the affair. ‘I’d try True Crime.’
‘I’m not seeing anything,’ she said, ‘but we do have some true crime compendiums, maybe she’s mentioned in one of those . . . oh wait, I’ve got two copies of Snatched in Plain Sight: True Stories of Missing Children by Moore, Linda coming up here. And . . .’ She grinned in minor triumph. ‘You’re in luck. One of them’s in this branch and not on loan. You could try there.’
‘Thanks.’ I gazed about me. ‘Sorry, but where is True Crime? It’s not my usual sort of thing.’
‘Tucked away at the back on this floor. Follow me.’
She led me through the stacks towering over me on either side, redolent of paper and dust, but emptier than I remembered them being. From the opposite side of the shelf came the artificial cherry smell of cough sweets, and someone was murmuring into a mobile phone (‘tell him she’s just winding him up’).
‘I don’t want anything too sensational,’ I explained earnestly, my errand making me feel self-conscious and more than a little ghoulish. ‘I just want something with the facts.’
She made a rueful face, pulling out a large mouldy-looking hardback. ‘I think you might be out of luck there. This is it,’ she said. The book had a nasty, dated picture on the front, showing a doll leaking blood and a grainy black and white snapshot of a young dark-haired girl in a school uniform. Above this the title loomed threateningly, dripping Kensington Gore over the author’s name.
The librarian must have seen my scowl. ‘Yes, it’s a horrid cover, isn’t it?’
I thanked her and took the book with me to one of the study desks. My hands were trembling again. I had a doctor’s appointment on Monday night, where we would once again to-and-fro over blood tests and my paralysing fear of needles, and maybe when he made his ubiquitous offer of tranquillizers I’d take him up on it. He’d be thrilled.
I flicked through it, looking for an index. There wasn’t one, but there were plenty of badly reproduced photographs of smiling children, heartbreakingly oblivious to their coming fates; of the doors to red brick houses rendered sinister by their sheer innocuousness; of shifty men and gaunt women wearing the fashions of yesteryear; some in handcuffs and bracketed by policemen.
I opened the front of the book, thinking about abandoning the project, when suddenly something in the list of contents caught my eye: ‘Peggy’s Darling: the Tragic Case of Bethan Avery’.
The next time I looked up it was hours later and they were closing the library. I’d been reading, true, but mostly I’d been squinting, with increasing disbelief, at the photographs of Bethan’s diary included alongside the text.
4
I was still peering at some of those photographs during lunch on Monday, curled into one of the big leather armchairs in St Hilda’s wood-panelled staff room. I’d made photocopies of Bethan’s letters on Saturday – something I could write my own notes on – and these were tucked into Snatched in Plain Sight. A couple of the other teachers gave its cover curious glances.
‘Doesn’t look like your usual fare, Margot.’
I looked up from the last page and saw the headmaster, Ben, who’d stalked into the staff room without me noticing. He had paused to tower over my chair. His mouth, with its little grey square of surrounding beard, was a set grimace of disapproval; his pale eyes flicking down to the lurid cover and then back to me.
‘No,’ I stammered, realizing what I was doing. ‘It was recommended to me. By a friend.’
‘I see.’
I could feel my age slipping away. At that moment I
was about seven years old.
But then I had a sudden flash of Lily’s drawing, from Saturday – of me as a cowering little girl in pigtails when really I was a Fury.
I coolly let my eyes fall back to the book.
He was about to add something else when the bell saved me.
Ryan Sipley, the chief wag of Year Eight, was stuttering and sweating. He was engaged in a fierce war with the English language, and today’s battlefield was Jane Eyre.
‘“This is my wife,” said he.’ Ryan looked imploringly at me, begging me to pass the bitter cup of reading aloud to some other unfortunate.
‘Go on,’ I said.
I felt terrible. He hated it, I knew. On the other hand, there’s plenty of evidence that reading aloud is good for kids. They have to engage with the text; even what appears to be the most colourless and stammering rendition implies choices in what to emphasize and what to play down – what to show and what to hide. It requires you to structure your language, to be fluent, to wrestle with what you are saying, to face the crowd. I could only hope that at some point in the future, in some social situation that presumably didn’t involve reading aloud from Jane Eyre, this practice would bear fruit for Ryan.
It still made me feel like a heel.
Three girls in the last row were passing texts amongst themselves and giggling at the back of Sorcha Malone, who usually sat with them but must have offended them in some way, as she was now parked three rows in front. Her face was stony pale and her eyes pink with unshed tears.
The girls’ ringleader was Amber McGowan, known bully and scoundrel. I eyed her keenly, having now chosen the next candidate for this literary trial by ordeal.
‘“Such is the sole . . . co-juggle . . .”’
‘Conjugal,’ I supplied gently. ‘Take it to mean married.’
His face went scarlet. I decided to have mercy.
‘Thank you, Ryan. Amber, can you go on please?’
Ryan sighed audibly in relief. Amber McGowan’s head started guiltily at the mention of her name. It had been bent over her iPhone; her book lay under her arm, forgotten.
‘What, Miss?’
‘The book,’ I said coldly. ‘Do you know where we’re up to? And there are no phones in my class, Miss McGowan, as I believe you already know. If I see it again it’s going in my desk until the end of term, do you understand?’
She half-covered her smiling mouth with a mock embarrassed hand. ‘I don’t know where we are, Miss,’ she lisped self-consciously.
One of her toadies had been following the text on her behalf, and with the place pointed out to her, she adroitly picked it up.
‘“Looking collectedly at the gambols of a demon . . .”’ She pushed a lock of her long hair out of the way of the page.
Amber read on, by rote, imbibing none of the sense of the book, only repeating the words. What a waste of time. I glanced at my watch. Another twenty minutes to go . . .
If I didn’t do this, I reminded myself, there was a good chance that at least 50 per cent of them would never ever read Jane Eyre, picking up the answers to essay questions from friends and parents, or even just guessing. I’d asked Ben if I could show them a DVD of it, and he’d stuffily replied that we didn’t possess one. I’d asked if I could buy one out of school funds, and this proposal would now be hummed and haa’d over in every Tuesday lunchtime staff meeting until kingdom come. I could buy one out of my own money, but I’d probably have to fight to show it – the headmaster took a very dim view of the ‘pornographizing’ of modern popular culture, and would use the platform at the meeting to explain why he would not be ‘actioning’ this without more thought.
I would usually say something inadvisable in response, such as observing, in my capacity as an English and Classics teacher, that ‘pornographizing’, like ‘actioning’, is not and never has been a real word, and even if it was, it made no sense in the context of any recent film adaptation of Jane Eyre.
And then the others I work with would start to cough and look at their watches and make excuses to leave. And so everything stays the same; always the same.
I wondered if Bethan Avery had ever read Jane Eyre. I wondered whether she would just have repeated the words, or whether she would have understood the sense . . .
I ran a finger over the white pieces of paper I keep on my desk to make notes. The paper felt warmer than I did. The top of the book was visible from where I was sitting, poking out of my bag. I could see its bloodstained title.
It was a horrid story.
Bethan Avery was fourteen years old, the child of Melissa, a career drug addict, and fathered by some unknown quantity during a sojourn in the bright lights of the capital. Bethan slipped straight out of the womb and into care. Her mother fought intermittently to get her back, with frequent tragic bouts of determination to ‘turn her life around’, which could last as long as nine months; but her demons, though they could be persuaded to give her a long leash from time to time, never truly let her go. In the main the baby stayed with her grandmother, Peggy, a cheerful, gruff soul who did her best.
Eventually Melissa vanished – went abroad to pursue a ‘modelling contract’ in Amsterdam and was never heard from again. Meanwhile, life in the end cottage on Parkhurst Lane continued as normal. But one icy January in 1998, there was a terrified phone call from one of the neighbours – Peggy had slipped and smashed her skull on her frozen doorstep. Bethan was fetched from her first day back at school and brought to Peggy’s bedside. Peggy had been prepped for surgery and was wheeled in.
At some point somebody noticed that Bethan had gone missing.
I sharply recalled myself – I was once again in my class, watching the white scalp of Amber McGowan through her pale hair as she bent over the book. It might be her that had written the letters.
It might be anyone.
I gazed over the bowed heads of my class, silent while Amber read, restless and aware that she was being singled out, and increasingly bold about showing her displeasure. I knew the kids sometimes wrote fake letters to the column, trying to get one over on me. In fact, only a few months ago, two idiots in Year Twelve had attempted such a thing over email, but had forgotten that the school’s IP address was visible.
Nevertheless, they had not yet ever pretended to be a murdered schoolgirl – and considering how subdued, even shocked, they had all been since Katie’s disappearance, it seemed unlikely they’d try now.
The sad fact, though, was that as tasteless as such a fraud would be, especially considering Katie’s disappearance, it was still well within the bounds of possibility.
There are reasons children are not allowed to vote or be left unsupervised for long.
It took hours for anyone to realize that Bethan had not just nipped out for a moment alone – something had gone horribly wrong. She had vanished from the hospital, and nobody knew where to or how.
In the midst of this, within an hour of Bethan’s last sighting, Peggy died on the operating table. While she was under the knife, it became clear that there had been nothing accidental about her death – her skull bore clear, sharp little hammer marks, and bloodstains later confirmed that she’d been killed in her home and dragged to the doorstop after she had been seen waving Bethan off at the door.
The police visited the school, to nod sagely over tearful testimonies and the wringing hands of the headmistress. Flyers of Bethan’s face appeared in the local shops, were nailed to telephone poles and taped to streetlamps. The papers cried for public enquiries, for people to be sacked, for safer streets, for a return of the death penalty. The Fens and the river were all searched.
There was nothing.
But life continues for all the living, and Bethan was slowly forgotten. Two months after her disappearance, a stout middle-aged woman called Angie Holloway was walking her dog at nine in the morning along a public bridleway that tracks out west to the Fen edge. I know it well – Eddy and I had taken long summer walks along it in our early courtship, as it passed
a rather marvellous country pub called the Black Swan, which served an exemplary steak pie. The pub, like our marriage, changed hands and has closed down now.
The gravel track crossed a stream called Bin Brook, and it was there that Angie spotted a white rag, stained with maroon-brown, flying like a banner from one of the posts lining the bridge, caught up in the chicken-wire fencing. There was something about the stains that drew Angie’s attention; that and the fragile white fabric. It was a nylon nightdress with lacy edges, of the type not currently fashionable, and liberally drenched in blood.
Angie was able to testify that this garment had not been on the bridge post the previous day. The hunt began again in earnest, and the forests and hills were scoured once more, the locals questioned, and all the houses, great and small, searched to no effect. The inquiry had become, through a process of slow degrees, a murder investigation.
A team of frogmen arrived to dredge the brook. At the end of three weeks, they had found a vertebra, which later turned out to belong to a sheep. They never found anything else, ever, though they dug all around the surrounding parkland. The bloodstained nightdress was, to all intents and purposes, the entire estate of Bethan Avery. Little enough to have, and anyone could have disputed her possession of it.
For instance, me. I dispute it. I’ve read the letters sent to me from someone who says she’s Bethan Avery. What if she had escaped her captor in some way; injured, yes, but not killed? Who knows, or could dream, what terrors or pressures controlled her? What sort of woman would she be, seventeen years on? She would be utterly different from the girl who’d been lured away and seized. And she’d also be the same girl, trapped and terrified, living an ancient lie. Somewhere out there a child cried out within the woman for comfort, for rescue, for escape . . .
The thought chilled me.
Then again, conceivably some pervert, hunched over a Formica table long after his wife and children had gone to bed, with palms sweating and brow contorting, had penned these letters to me, dwelling lovingly on his fictional heroine’s helplessness.
Dear Amy Page 4