Dear Amy

by Helen Callaghan

  I let myself out into the dark morning and allowed the breeze and the birdsong to blow away my doubts as I pounded down the drowsy roads. I was on a quest to save my cold and troubled soul, and tossing and turning through the dark night, I had realized how important it was that I succeed.

  6

  ‘You must be Margot.’ He got to his feet, extended his hand. ‘How d’you do?’

  I had cycled into work today, as the weather had held its bright, sharp sunshine. I feel a constant nagging guilt that I don’t do this more often, a sort of moral toothache. It would be good for the environment. It would be good for me. Cambridge, everybody will tell you, has cycling built into its very DNA.

  I cycled everywhere once – when I was a student here, naturally, as even those who could afford them were forbidden cars in college, and then for years afterwards I would keep cars I only ever drove when shopping for groceries or when the weather rendered the bicycle too purgatorial to consider.

  Then I married Eddy, who is much more a Porsche than a Raleigh man, and increasingly I found myself following suit as we dropped one another off and picked one another up – which was fine, as we were car-pooling, which made us less obviously ecological terrorists, but then before long I was driving in expecting to pick Eddy up, either from the Metallurgical Sciences department in West Cambridge or the Sensitall Labs out in the Science Park, and he was cancelling on me, leaving me to go home alone as he ‘worked through the night’.

  Worked through the night, indeed. I crushed down the fiery little prickle of anger and pain this consideration gave me. I am moving past this. Watch me move.

  That morning, after my sleepless night, I had decided that, all things considered, it was time for me to get back on my bike, as they say – to resume my old life, my old habits, to close the yawning space that was Eddy’s absence. It would be good for discipline.

  Though it did mean that when I appeared in the Copper Kettle after my brisk journey from St Hilda’s, I was windblown, shiny with sweat and sporting a bright red flush.

  I recognized Martin Forrester immediately – he had obtained a table near the window for us, and he was gazing through it, seemingly oblivious to me, lost in contemplation of the delicate stone arches of Kings College until he caught sight of me self-consciously hitching my bike up to the rack outside. He offered me a wave and made a gesture both welcoming and beckoning, though he didn’t smile.

  I felt as though I was being summoned to see a tutor.

  I came inside, wending my way past the busy tables full of gossiping students and laughing tourists, feeling nervous and flustered. He rose to meet me and offered me a firm, warm hand. His fastidious academic dress from the image on my computer had been replaced with a slightly stubbly chin, a pair of distressed skinny jeans and a neat dark blue shirt that skimmed over surprisingly defined musculature.

  And yet, despite this casual attire, there was something harder-edged about him in person, something a little dangerous. His most striking feature, one that didn’t appear in the photo, was his unsettling jade green stare, hooded under a strong forehead with thick black brows.

  He waited for me to settle opposite him, summoning a waitress with a friendly nod that she quickly returned – I had the feeling they knew him in here.

  ‘You recognized me,’ I said, trying to hide the fact that this had unnerved me.

  ‘There’s a picture of you on your school website.’ He shrugged, but those intense eyes didn’t leave me, and there was something deeply calculating in them. ‘Digital spying. It’s the new black. Ops, that is.’

  He smiled for the first time.

  Of course – he’d looked me up, I told myself, and tried to relax. It’s what professional people do. The fact that there’s a picture of me on the school website isn’t the same as him standing next to me while I called Arabella Morino a bitch on her doorstep.

  Nevertheless, paranoia lingered over me, making it hard to return his frank gaze. I shrugged myself out of my grey coat, trying to avoid it.

  The waitress, a little blonde whip-thin girl with black eyeliner and a Turkish accent, came over to take our orders. I chose a pot of tea, and while he discussed coffee with her, I took the opportunity to slyly study him out of the corner of my eye. He was taller and more rough-hewn than I’d expected. He wore a gold TAG Heuer watch that looked oddly ostentatious on his darkly haired wrist, as though he’d stolen it. I found myself unexpectedly and inappropriately interested in it. Someone had bought him that – it was not the kind of watch you buy for yourself. I scanned his broad hands, their backs lightly covered with hair, for a wedding ring, and came up blank.

  How intriguing.

  I bit my lip, refocused. I was here on a mission. Not to be sidetracked.

  ‘Did you come from nearby?’ I asked, as the girl withdrew and I pushed my coat over the back of my chair. The atmosphere in the cafe was warm and close, the ambient chatter and clash of crockery almost but not quite loud enough to require me to raise my voice. It was an excellent choice of venue, I realized – we were unlikely to be overheard.

  His reply was a crisp nod. ‘Very near. I’m at Corpus.’ He gestured down the street towards Corpus Christi, a pretty little college I had been inside a couple of times with an old boyfriend. ‘I’m in college on a Monday. I run a postgrad seminar in the afternoon.’

  ‘And where are you the rest of the time?’

  ‘At the Institute, near the Law Faculty on Sidgwick Avenue.’ He shrugged. ‘Unless I’m travelling, of course. I do that a lot.’

  I couldn’t place his accent – it was professional and precise, but with a broad Northern burr beneath it. Geordie? Yorkshire? No, Lancashire. North Manchester or Bolton, if I was any judge.

  ‘I know Sidgwick Avenue well,’ I said. ‘I did Classics.’

  He grinned suddenly, and his teeth were white, sharp. With that and his piercing eyes and hirsute hands I suddenly realized what he put me in mind of – a kind of civilized werewolf. ‘Ah! I pass that faculty every day,’ he said. ‘I often wonder what folk get up to in there.’

  I laughed, clutching my handbag and the precious letters contained therein on my lap. ‘Other than secret rituals and delirious bacchanals? Nothing much.’

  ‘You disappoint me.’ He raised an eyebrow at me. ‘But why Classics?’

  I shrugged, surprised at the question. I hadn’t anticipated that I would be talking about myself so much with a handsome man, and my blush burned deeper, spreading down my throat in a wave, making my ears tingle. Damn, damn and double damn. He can see you, you know. ‘It spoke to me the most. And I was lucky – I had a very good private teacher before I came up.’

  ‘A private teacher? Your parents must have been keen.’

  I shook my head. ‘No, it wasn’t like that. I was looked after by nuns. But one of them was very learned, and she gave me a head start. I took my A levels at night school.’

  Our drinks arrived, and there was a flurry of business involving spoons, sugar and milk, with the waitress making two trips to our table. We sat in patient silence, under a kind of unspoken agreement not to say anything about the letters until she was gone.

  ‘So,’ he began directly, the minute we were relatively alone (on the table behind him, an older woman in a green duffle coat attacked a slice of cheesecake with a fork, a copy of Camus’ L’Etranger in her free hand, and across the aisle three medical students from St Catherine’s, a girl and two boys, were chattering excitedly about a party they’d been to at Peterhouse the evening before, passing a mobile phone between them, each new picture making them burst into increasing laughter). ‘I wanted to meet you in person and explain exactly why I’m . . . why we are interested in your letters from Bethan Avery.’

  ‘I was wondering about that.’

  ‘Justly so.’ He raised the coffee to his lips and drank deeply, like a man who was in a constant hurry. ‘And I know you have limited time, so I’ll be brief.’

  I sipped my tea, waiting.

&
nbsp; ‘As you’ve probably guessed, what we do at MHAT – the Multi-Disciplinary Historical Analysis Team – is historical analysis of crime data.’ He replaced his mug of coffee on the table, gesturing with his broad hands for emphasis. ‘We have a statistician, three criminologists, two psychologists, lawyers, police and social services liaisons . . . the idea is that we pool our expertise and come up with something that is greater than the sum of our parts.’

  ‘Hence multi-disciplinary.’

  ‘Exactly so.’ He nodded. ‘Most of the analysis we do in our day jobs deals with general trends, rather than specific cases. It’s used to inform police investigative procedure, and every so often public policy. It’s big brushstrokes stuff, as a rule: poverty is an indicator in drug-related crime, or opportunistic robbery drops when you install street lighting.’ Again, the grin. ‘Common sense, if you like, only they have to pay us to look into it, since common sense – as I’m sure you’re aware – frequently turns out to be complete bollocks.’

  I stifled a little laugh. ‘Indeed.’

  ‘So we do the work, write a report, send it off, and governments and others use the report to justify spending money.’ He shrugged. ‘Or not spending money, as is more often the case.’

  I waited, perplexed. ‘I still don’t . . .’

  He cocked his head at me with taciturn sympathy, as though he understood my bemusement.

  ‘It’s like this. That’s what we normally do. But we don’t always work on big projects. Sometimes we’ll do a little project – for instance, what happens to a sample of secondary school-age girls known to social services in the East Anglia area between 2001 and 2007 – it’s literally a little project for a local care trust we hand off to a PhD student to work up for us – and then our student comes back with something interesting. For instance, she finds out a few of these girls have been misplaced over the years.’ He leaned back into his seat and his eyes flicked out towards the street again. ‘Misplaced in similar ways.’

  Suddenly I thought I was beginning to get it.

  ‘You discovered a pattern.’

  He gave the tiniest acknowledging nod. ‘Well, my student discovered an anomaly, in the first instance, so credit to her. The team worked up the pattern.’

  I pondered this. ‘2001, you say? But Bethan went missing in 1998 . . .’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Bethan Avery was not the girl we first became curious about.’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘Do you follow the news, Margot?’

  I shrugged, a little apologetically. ‘Not as much as I should, I daresay.’

  ‘I daresay not.’

  Something in his tone made me go still.

  ‘What? What is it?’

  ‘Believe it or not, you are not the first person to bring up the subject of Bethan Avery recently.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Well, here’s the thing. Nobody ever found who killed her. They found bloodstained clothes, but no body. There was an enormous manhunt and nothing ever turned up.’ He leaned forward. ‘But now this other girl has gone missing . . .’

  ‘You’re talking about Katie Browne,’ I breathed, realization dawning.

  ‘So you knew Katie?’

  ‘She was a student at my school.’ A beat, then I corrected myself. ‘Is, I hope.’

  ‘Most people think she just ran away,’ he said. ‘Problem child, and . . .’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But not you,’ he said, as though appraising me. ‘Why is that?’

  I felt there was something I wanted to say, but then I had the peculiar realization that I didn’t quite know what it was yet. There was something about Katie, something about the way she had disappeared, but . . .

  ‘You think it’s the same man.’ I thought hard. ‘That’s what this is about. But there’s nearly twenty years between them.’

  He winced a little. ‘We identified some similarities. And let’s just say, we know a lot more about this type of criminal than we did then. Once is never enough.’

  ‘But if it is the same man,’ I said urgently, ‘it would make more sense that Bethan is writing now. She must know that someone else has been kidnapped, perhaps to replace her. She . . .’

  ‘Then why doesn’t she say that in the letters?’ he asked. ‘If it is her at all?’

  ‘I don’t know, yet, but . . .’

  ‘You need to realize that we have a different sense of scale here, Margot. You think this might be the second time this has happened.’ He motioned at the waitress as she passed. ‘But there is a growing body of opinion that this has happened at least six times since 1998.’

  ‘What?’ I could feel the blood draining from my face.

  ‘At least six. That we know of.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I blinked. ‘And who is we?’

  ‘We . . .’ he said, casting a sideways glance at the woman reading Camus, who, though her eyes were still fixed on her open book, was clearly no longer reading. ‘You know what? Maybe we’d be better drinking up here and heading back to my office. Somewhere more private.’

  7

  Corpus Christi is literally a two-minute walk from the Copper Kettle. It’s a tiny but ancient college, its inner jewel-green sward of lawn penned in on all sides by a beautiful sandstone quadrangle that does what it can to keep the town out on the busiest tourist route in Cambridge. To pass through its gate is to go from King’s Parade with its fudge shops and whirring cameras and brash young men cheerfully touting for business for punt tours and to enter into a semi-monastic hush that has hung over that space for the best part of a thousand years.

  Except when the balls are on or the bar is open, of course. I have very happy memories of Corpus, if rather mixed memories of Hans, the Classics postgrad I was dating at the time and who finished with me on Christmas Eve and then wanted to get back together on New Year’s Day. I suspect there was another woman involved in that case, too, but I never got to the bottom of it, preferring instead to not return his phone calls or emails.

  Christmas Eve, I ask you.

  In any case, it wasn’t Hans on my mind as I drifted along after Martin Forrester into the college, too deeply shocked to think straight.

  The porters nodded polite greetings as he led me through the gate, and then across New Court and up the wooden staircase to his office, the steps creaking beneath our feet. The staircase itself was chill, the air still. From far away I could hear voices in the court below making arrangements to meet in Hall for lunch.

  As we crested the final flight, with its quartet of doors, the names of the dons inhabiting them painted neatly on the walls next to them, I saw that there was a pair of chairs on the landing and that one of them was occupied by a lanky, dark, curly-headed youth I recognized.

  ‘Daniel!’ I burst out, pleased and surprised.

  ‘Miss Bellamy!’ He stood up, grinning though nervous, and we went through that strange moment when one of your old pupils realizes they are now expected to greet you as an adult. I decided to make it easier for him, and swooped in to shake his hand, but instead I found myself, with surprise bordering on almost-alarm, clasped in a hug.

  It was proving to be a very strange day.

  ‘It’s awesome to see you!’ he said. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I . . .’ I stammered for a moment, lost for an easy way to explain my errand, and touched by his enthusiasm. ‘I’m taking some advice for a column I write.’

  ‘Wicked,’ he replied affably. With a start I realized I hadn’t seen him since he’d left St Hilda’s three years ago and that he was now at least five inches taller than me.

  ‘Enjoying uni?’ I asked.

  His gaze slipped uneasily from mine to Martin Forrester’s.

  ‘Yes,’ said Forrester drily. He did not smile. ‘Mr Collier is enjoying uni enormously, possibly a little too much. Are you here about your missing essay on penal theory, by any chance?’

  Daniel blushed. ‘I just need another day; it will
be in your inbox first thing tomorrow – I swear, Martin. I won’t let you down again.’

  Forrester frowned at him, his sharp dark brows contorting, his face like granite, and for a second I was worried for Daniel. ‘All right. Count yourself lucky I have more interesting visitors today. That essay needs to be in my inbox when I switch on my computer tomorrow or I won’t read it. Now bugger off.’

  ‘Thanks, Martin, you’re a star. Bye for now, Miss Bellamy!’ He bounded off down the stairs with a wave.

  I smiled after him, bemused but pleased, while Martin Forrester unlocked his office door. When I turned back to him, he was observing me with a hidden, calculating expression.

  ‘Is something the matter?’

  ‘Miss Bellamy, he said. You didn’t correct that boy.’

  I felt a hot blush stealing into my cheeks and up my throat. ‘Ah. Ah. No, I didn’t. Possibly because I’m expecting to be Miss Bellamy again before too long.’

  It was suddenly his turn to look embarrassed and flush redly. ‘I see. Of course. Sorry.’ He pushed the door open, and something on the other side seemed to be offering resistance of sorts. ‘Come in.’

  His office was light and airy after the darkness of the staircase, his window overlooking the roofs and gables of Old School Lane. Crows occasionally fluttered up out of the trees, like raised dust devils. The room itself smelled of furniture polish and leather. The resistance to opening the door had been provided by a huge tower of tottering books, piled on the floor against an overflowing bookcase that had no further room for them. Most of them looked brand new, as though they had never been opened, and many of them sported the legend ‘Ed. by Martin Forrester’. As I settled into the chair he offered me, I saw that they were all on roughly the same subject: Serial Sexual Abuse in Care; New Perspectives on Caring for the Disadvantaged Youth; Raised by Wolves – the State as Fosterer. On the walls were posters for conferences, a couple of blownup photocopies of XKCD cartoons, and a big print of the Horsehead Nebula. Postcards from all over the world peppered a noticeboard next to the tall, groaningly full bookcase.