Perhaps it was even someone who knew what had happened to Katie Browne.
I didn’t get around to mentioning any of this to anyone. I tried the police with the second letter, urging them to consider both in the light of Katie’s disappearance. They were polite and attentive, they offered me institution-grade instant coffee in a tiny paper cup while I talked, but they were absolutely not convinced. I was being indulged, and I knew it. It felt worse than the first time, when they had actually laughed at me. That at least had been an honest response.
I tried to get them to take the letters, which they reluctantly agreed to do, but there was something about their attitude that made me think they considered me a crazy person and that the letters were likely to go straight in the bin the minute I was out of the building. I suspect that I was being paranoid and that they would have done nothing so rankly unprofessional, but I couldn’t shake the idea once it had entered my head. In the end, they took the photocopies, and I left with the letters still in their brown paper envelope, tucked in my bag.
I had taken to calling by the Examiner every other day, though Bethan, or whoever it was, had fallen silent.
But on 14 November, I received an email.
Dear Mrs Lewis,
Forgive me for contacting you like this. I obtained your details from the Cambridgeshire police.
I understand that a couple of weeks ago you received some disturbing letters, and that copies of these were handed into the station in Cambridge. I am writing to tell you that after some tedious detours these copies have found their way to my office.
My name is Martin Forrester, and I am the senior criminologist in the Multi-Disciplinary Historical Analysis Team. At this point you’re probably wondering what we do, a question I frequently wrestle with myself. In simple terms, we work in partnership with various public bodies and police forces to analyse crime data.
I don’t know who is writing you these letters. I do know that we compared the handwriting in them to copies we have of Bethan Avery’s diaries – excerpts from these diaries are reproduced in Moore’s book. As you observed to the police yourself, the handwriting in the letters is similar.
However, there are other reasons why the letters are interesting. To that end, and with your permission, we want to show the original letters to the forensics expert that worked on the case at the time.
If you can assist us in this, please contact me at my email address – [email protected] – or call me at the Institute.
I look forward to discussing this with you in person soon.
Yours sincerely,
Martin
P. S. I’m a big fan of your column.
Dr Martin Forrester
Head of Multi-Disciplinary Historical Analysis Team
Institute of Criminology
Cambridge University
Cambridge
01223 335360 (ext. 9873)
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I wrote an answer to Martin Forrester that evening on my MacBook Air while I was meant to be writing my column. I had already Googled the Institute, and though I found the MHAT web page and his biography, there was maddeningly little information. I intended to dig a little further, perhaps find a picture of him, but within minutes of clicking Send, there was a reply.
‘You’re at St Hilda’s, right? Off Trumpington Road? M’
How had he known that? At the police station I had appeared in the character of Dear Amy, or rather the Margot Lewis who worked under that name. I hadn’t mentioned my day job.
How curious.
‘I am,’ I replied, since it was pointless denying it. ‘Well guessed.’
It was designed as an opening, one where he could volunteer how he’d learned this about me, but he wasn’t drawn. It was impossible to tell whether this was subtlety or social denseness at this point. He was a Cambridge academic, I thought ruefully, and after marrying one I knew it could be either.
‘Could you meet me for coffee on Monday or Wednesday, depending on your schedule? M’
He was keen, I’ll give him that, and clearly quite direct. I typed a quick answer: ‘I have a free period between 11 and 1 on Monday, if that works. I’ll bring the letters with me.’
Within thirty seconds, my email pinged in reply.
‘Excellent. I’m in college Monday morning, so how about 11:15 in the Copper Kettle. I’ll get us a table. Any problems, my mobile is 08978 345543. M’
I sent a cheery acknowledgement, but did not reciprocate with my own mobile number.
He had one last thing to add.
‘Oh, and our forensic expert says that from now on, please try not to touch the letters any more than you have to. Till then. M’
After that, I had no further interest in working on the Dear Amy column, or the essays, and certainly not the legal forms for the arbitration for the end of my marriage. Instead, I sat up and drank a bottle of wine in the growing darkness, wondering what I had got myself into, and whether I was prepared to cope with the places it would lead.
I missed Eddy hard, like a toothache.
At some point during the night I had researched Martin Forrester. A man with long dark wavy hair tied back out of his face, and sporting intense deep-set eyes, was gazing out of my computer at me when I woke.
I rubbed my eyes, squinting at him as he leaned forward, frozen in the moment he bent to shake hands and accept some manner of Perspex award from the University’s Vice-Chancellor. Forrester’s smile was unassuming though slightly practised, in the manner of men who did this sort of thing a lot. He had a rough-hewn, dark-complected look, like a turbulent druid, and could have been any age between thirty and fifty. He was in full gown and that most rare of male formal dress codes, white tie, which made his thick unruly hair appear even more arresting. Behind him I recognized the ornate wood panelling of St John’s College Hall.
I sat up, hung-over and flustered in the dark dawn, as I had no memory of ever seeing this image before that moment. I really needed to cut down on the drinking, though part of me secretly and rebelliously maintains that if a girl can’t drink through her divorce, then when can she?
I checked my phone – no drunken calls to Eddy’s number. Well, that was something. I tried to shrug it all off, but I was troubled nevertheless, and even more so when I shuffled down the stairs looking for strong coffee and toast and found a large white envelope lying on my doormat.
‘Hmm,’ I said to myself, considering it. It had come from Calwhit, Blank, Mettle LLC. It has been something of an abiding mystery to me why lawyers always seem to have such odd Dickensian last names, which they insist upon gathering into absurd lists. Perhaps they are obliged to change their names when they qualify for the Bar, like nuns taking their vows. Nothing of their old human frailty will remain. They will become dead to the world.
There was nothing Dickensian about the envelope – it sported a squat corporate font in embossed silver that meant business. I tore open the heavy paper envelope with a funny, sick feeling.
Inside was a single piece of paper – heavy, embossed like the envelope. They were acting under instructions from their client, Dr Edward Lewis, in the matter of his divorce and the subsequent financial settlement. Could all further correspondence with their client please be directed through them. They thanked me for my attention in this matter.
I read it through carefully, at least three times, while waves of hot and cold washed over me – a volcanic ocean.
You knew he would do this you knew you knew you knew . . .
I stood a long time, considering my response, which, since it involved running through the streets of Cambridge and banging on the door of his love nest like a deranged person, was probably not going to fly, strategically speaking.
He wants the house he wants your house . . .
It was not yet a declaration of war, but the ambassadors were being expelled and worried motions tabled at the UN. Preparations for battle were clearly underway.
Calm down, I thought to myself. It was somethi
ng I said to the children in class every day, and it seemed to work on them.
I needed to get a grip. Eddy had moved in with his boss now. He had a second property he rented out. No judge was going to give him my house, too, that was just madness. We were only married for three years. And he made a lot more money than me, anyway.
But they might make me sell the house. It’s worth more than the flat now – a lot more. If you were to split our assets down the middle . . . Oh God, he wants my house.
I wrapped my hands around my head, futilely trying to contain my racing thoughts.
Oh fuck fuck fuck . . .
One thing at least was clear. I would need to find myself a lawyer.
In the end I went with my first impulse, and drove round to Professor Arabella Morino’s Georgian terrace in its short, frilly skirt of garden in De Freville Avenue to find him. I had not gone the whole hog and turned up on her doorstep with tousled streaming dark hair in a wine-spotted nightshirt, like a furious hung-over Bacchante; instead opting for a wash and a cup of black coffee first.
Those were all the concessions I would be making today however.
When I rat-a-tatted on her imposing bronze knocker I expected to be kept waiting as the guilty lovers procrastinated on the other side, so when the door opened immediately I was thrown, my prepared, angry statement forgotten. In any case it would have been wasted on Evan, for it was he that answered my knock.
I reined myself in, and we regarded one another in silence with the wary respect borne of mutual sympathy. Evan, impeccably barbered and heavily jowled, rested one hand on the doorframe. I caught a glimpse of the pale skin of his wrist, with its light covering of black hair, as it poked out of the cuff of his dressing gown.
Oh curiouser and curiouser. Evan moved out of this house six weeks ago, in disgusted rage, and Eddy moved in. Evan is, or rather was, Ara’s partner. Her once and future partner, judging by his casual attire.
I’m too amazed to speak, so he has to.
‘Margot,’ he said, polite but formal. ‘This is early.’
It is, isn’t it? I thought. It must have been about eight fifteen. A mortified heat was rising in my cheeks. I was not being very well mannered, but then, this wasn’t a social call.
‘I know, I’m sorry. I wanted to call by before work. Is Eddy in?’ I asked this for form’s sake, I realized. There was no way on earth that Eddy was in at that moment.
Evan’s face did a funny little thing where it froze, and I suspected it was because he was being assailed by a variety of competing emotions, none of which were fit for public consumption. There was the memory of humiliation; the discomfort and alarm of being confronted by a spurned and potentially volatile woman; but also, most tellingly, there was a tiny gleam of triumph.
I knew all before he had opened his mouth.
‘Eddy doesn’t live here any more, Margot,’ he said. His glance flicked away over his burly shoulder to a shadowy form I could just make out in her own dressing gown, standing at the foot of the stairs. ‘He moved out.’
I resisted the temptation to follow his eyes with every nerve, every muscle, every twitching impulse in my being. In my belly, something was squirming, with a terrible kicking energy, like a wounded animal.
‘Oh,’ I said. I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do or say next, and Evan seemed to understand, waiting patiently for me to find my way. Within, I could see the shadowy figure move restlessly. She wanted me to bugger off, I’m sure. She’s trashed my marriage and now has buyer’s remorse, and my presence is damaging her rapprochement with her old favourite.
‘When did he move out?’
‘I don’t know,’ Evan looked over his shoulder, and she murmured something in the semi-darkness of her curtained hall. Her voice was husky, almost hoarse. Did Eddy find it part of her charm? ‘Last week sometime,’ he supplied.
Last week. He was at my house, unannounced, on Friday. Definitely Friday, for it was the day I’d come back late from the police station, the day I’d received the first letter from Bethan Avery. Dressed in his best. Come to talk about the settlement, tried to get me into bed and I’d blown him out. Why had I blown him out? I had often in my lonely hours wished him back again. Or thought I had.
Because I must have sensed something about him, I realized. Known that he wanted something.
‘Do you know where he’s gone?’ I asked.
Evan shook his head.
He couldn’t go back to the flat – he’d rented it out for less than its worth to some other chancer from Sensitall Labs, the extra-academic start-up business they were all involved in. Ah yes, of course, work was going to be very awkward for them all now, and as I seem to remember from Eddy’s departmental gossip, Ara has a longstanding reputation for elegant ruthlessness. I scrubbed at the back of my head with one hand while I thought.
I’m not proud of what happened next.
I distinctly heard that husky voice murmur that it was very early and Eddy wasn’t here, so could I please leave and let them get on with their day?
I glanced up, sharply, at the shadowy figure, caught the flash of the whites of her eyes.
‘Don’t you dare even speak to me, you filthy fucking bitch.’
Everybody froze. It would have been comical, but I was now some other Margot, and I think if Evan hadn’t been standing in the way, I would have launched at her and ripped her eyes from her face with my nails. The lines that define the normal and forbidden are tissue-paper thin, after all. She has torn through my life, casting out all of the contents, all of the work, all of the memories, like rubbish spilled out of the bin during a high gale, and now she has grown bored of it and wants me to leave.
Evan moved, and with a jolt I realized I had actually taken a step forward.
‘I think you need to go,’ he said. That trace of sympathy had vanished now, his jaw set.
I didn’t miss it, treating him to a contemptuous raise of my eyebrows. ‘Well, good luck with all this.’
He set like concrete.
‘Bloody mental,’ hissed Ara from the shadows. ‘I can see what he meant now.’
It was a cheap shot and aimed wide. I daresay Eddy said a lot of things about me to engage her sympathy. I wondered if he’d told her we didn’t sleep together any more? Part of me now really wanted to ask her. Isn’t that what married men always say?
I blew them a kiss as the door slammed shut, abandoning me in her fussy garden, which someone else was clearly paid to look after.
But by the time I got back to the car, my triumph was looking exactly like the sordid, mortifying encounter I’d promised myself from the very beginning that I would move heaven and earth to avoid. God, what did I say to her? Why was I like that? What did I hope to achieve? And anyway, selfish and heartless as she was, Arabella had never stood up in the pergola in an overpriced country hotel in a rented morning suit and promised to love me all the days of my life. I could call her all the names I wanted, but it changed nothing. Ultimately, this was Eddy’s fault. He was the traitor.
I curled up in the front seat of the Audi and wept, not with grief, but in a kind of bitter, gnashing rage and embarrassment. At first, when Eddy left, when I wept at all, it was mostly through shock, as though I was in some liminal state that it would be easy to reverse, a bizarre mistake. He was going to come home, obviously. This was something we were going to work out.
I applied the scrunched-up napkins stuffed into the driver’s door to my face, happy I had not made myself up that day. I needed to get to school, but I just wanted to howl and howl.
So this was love, apparently.
I would be better off teaching the kids about this, rather than To Kill a Mockingbird. It would be of much more use to them in the future.
The night before I was due to meet Martin Forrester, as I lay wide awake in bed, it struck me that I should cancel my appointment with him. Why did I want to talk to anyone about this? Why couldn’t I just post him the letters? In the cold hours before dawn it seemed an in
creasingly gloomy, ghoulish errand to run, and I did not want to talk about Bethan Avery’s suffering face to face with anyone.
Why did he want to meet me? How had he known about the school?
The prospect of engaging any further with this filled me with increasing unease. I should forget about Bethan Avery and make an attempt to save my marriage, to move past my humiliation and anger, to try to see things from Eddy’s point of view. The alarm clock by my head said it was three in the morning.
Where was Eddy now?
Where was Bethan Avery now?
Was I a victim of a hoax in a way that its perpetrator never dreamed of?
One picture of her stood out in my mind. It was in Moore’s book and it was the very first one. She is in it, sitting on a white pony at the seaside. Her grandmother, Peggy, is holding the reins, looking up at her, grinning with pride. She was a big, jovial-looking woman with stained teeth. Bethan glanced askance at the camera, smiling shyly, her head turned away a little. Her eyes are huge and very dark, and her long locks hang over her small face. Her hands are knitted tightly into the horse’s mane. Perhaps she was scared of falling off. But she wasn’t the most interesting thing in the photo. Peggy was. The unfeigned expression on her face lit the picture with joy.
And I, who can be eaten up with jealousy, could search out this picture again and again and look at it – and at her – I who can’t stand an even vaguely sentimental film, can take in all this, this feast of love, again and again.
Perhaps it’s because I know it will all end so badly for this lost girl. That’s rather in my character, I’m afraid to say. But maybe not this time.
Maybe . . . she wouldn’t be a girl any more, but she might be alive. That dark orphan, that dreamchild, that lost Persephone, might call to me across the decades yet, to be a mother to her, to be a mother to my own selfish self. And that’s why I had to see it through.
I lay there a couple of hours longer, turning it all over in my mind. When the alarm clock flicked to five I rose silently and dressed for a run. Sleep was impossible, so I might as well seize this quiet, cold, magic hour.
Dear Amy Page 5