Dear Amy

by Helen Callaghan

  I saw no photographs of women or children on his desk, then told myself off for looking for them. Bad, nosy girl.

  He settled into the chair opposite me and sighed. ‘Any tea? Coffee?’

  I shook my head. ‘No thank you.’ I let my handbag, with the letters inside, rest on the red rug beneath me. ‘So, what’s the next move? I give you the letters, I guess.’

  ‘Yes. The guy we’re planning on showing the letters to is called Mo Khan,’ he said. ‘He’s based in London. He’s agreed to see the letters tomorrow at ten.’

  I nodded.

  ‘You have the letters with you, right?’ asked Forrester.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said.

  I reached into my bag and handed the buff-coloured envelope containing Bethan’s letters over to him. He opened it and gently shook them out. I noticed he was careful not to touch them. In the muted sunlight slanting into his office they looked creased and pathetic.

  ‘Interesting,’ he remarked, more to himself than anybody else, and peered down at them, almost close enough to smell them. ‘Very interesting.’ Then he said, ‘These weren’t written in any cellar. These were written and posted recently.’

  ‘Yes. It’s very strange. It’s well over fifteen years later, why the present tense? She’d be in her thirties by now.’

  ‘Well, that presupposes she wrote them. I have to tell you, Mrs . . . Miss Bellamy.’

  ‘You know what? Call me Margot. Titles are a moral minefield right now.’

  ‘Margot,’ he said, raising an eyebrow, and there was a glitter of something beneath it that took me aback for a second, raised butterflies in my stomach. ‘Call me Martin. I suppose what I’m saying is that there are many more reasons to assume it’s the work of our killer rather than any of the victims.’ His lips twisted into something rueful, something compassionate. ‘I think you need to brace yourself for that possibility.’

  I didn’t reply. The thought was repugnant – but I saw his point.

  He perused the letters for a few moments longer and scratched his stubbled chin with a thoughtful unselfconsciousness. ‘Still, all of these new details . . . Hmm. I suppose it would be pointless to ask if you had any idea who’d written them?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Absolutely none.’

  ‘There is something you could do for us on that front, actually,’ said Martin, as though deep in thought.

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘I imagine,’ he said, ‘based on your column, that you have relationships with mental health professionals who provide you with feedback and advice.’

  ‘I do,’ I said warily.

  ‘You could take a copy of the letter around to the local psychiatric hospitals. See if any of the staff know anything about it.’

  I rubbed my tired eyes, careful not to smudge my mascara. ‘I suppose it’s worth a go,’ I said, ‘but I don’t know how successful that’ll be. There is such a thing in the world as medical confidentiality.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Martin, absorbing this, his piercing gaze falling upon me once more.

  ‘Though,’ I said, thinking, ‘what I could do, now you mention it, and probably should have done already, is go back through the files I keep of all the letters I get on the column, and see if the handwriting in any of them resembles these. I think that’ll be a dead end, too, but it would be stupid not to try. I mean, I think we can assume she’s a local woman, if it is a woman. The Examiner isn’t exactly the most obvious place to send a letter like this – if it has a circulation of more than twenty thousand I’d be amazed,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ murmured Martin. He seemed lost in thought, looking at the letters again. ‘I wonder what Mo will say,’ he muttered. ‘Lovely forgeries . . .’

  ‘Are you so sure they’re forgeries?’ I asked, then instantly regretted it. Of course they were probably forgeries. I was letting my imagination run away with me for the thousandth time – the notion of the captured girl, now a woman, trapped and trying to write her way out of her fate possessed me, made my heart thud dangerously in dread.

  But now I’d asked the question, I had no real desire to retract it.

  He raised a heavy eyebrow in surprise. ‘Well, I suppose I can understand that you want to believe . . .’

  I cut him short. ‘I understood that the assumption of death was never much more than that. An assumption.’

  I think I was giving him a fairly wild stare at this point.

  ‘Yeah, it’s an assumption.’ He waved a hand in dismissal. ‘And it’s true that there’s a lot we can’t assume – because we simply don’t know what happened to her. But the overwhelming preponderance of evidence suggests that she was held against her will somewhere, probably by whoever murdered Peggy, and that she received a serious injury, possibly while trying to escape. It all suggests that whoever attacked her finished the job and buried her somewhere. And then moved on to the next girl.’

  ‘But you can’t be absolutely sure,’ I said. ‘What if she is still being held somewhere? We know she was injured, agreed, but what if she was recaptured . . . What if whoever it was treated her for her wounds? There are tons of cases where kidnapped women and girls have been held for decades, in some instances. Maybe that’s what’s happening here . . .’

  ‘Then how is she sending these letters? Is her kidnapper providing her with stamps? And here’s the big question – why doesn’t she just write to the police? Mrs Lew— Margot, listen to me. I don’t know if these letters are forged or not, or whether Bethan Avery is alive or dead. That’s why we’re showing them to Mo. These letters interest me because they’re strange and very similar to Bethan’s journals, and I’ve never seen or heard of anything like them before. If this is a scam, it’s a very elaborate one.’ He held out his hands in appeal, inviting me to see reason. ‘But it doesn’t prove she’s alive. Far from it. So far, it only proves that someone wants us to think she is.’

  I sighed.

  ‘Or rather, for you to think she is.’ I was pinned down again by that green stare. ‘These letters could have been sent to any paper, local or national, and got a response. And yet somehow they’ve ended up with you.’

  I thought about this for a long moment and shrugged. ‘I have absolutely no idea why.’

  He leaned back in his chair, then let out a sigh, lightly misted with compassion and barely hidden exasperation.

  ‘You know’ – his gaze rolled up to the plain plaster ceiling – ‘it would be fun to imagine that this girl had somehow managed to survive for seventeen years. It’s not that I’m . . .’ he was choosing his words carefully, ‘immune to the imaginative appeal the idea has,’ he said. ‘But until someone can prove it . . .’ He shrugged.

  I sighed. ‘Of course you’re right.’

  He regarded me with a thin sliver of suspicion for a long moment, as though he was trying to work out whether I was humouring him.

  Suddenly he was on his feet. ‘Come on, you’ll be late. I’ll walk you out.’

  We strolled back across the courtyard, which was starting to fill up as students and staff wheeled back into college for lunch.

  ‘Margot, I wouldn’t build too much upon these letters. Even if we do find out they’re real, what good does it do us if this woman won’t tell us what she calls herself now? Or where she lives?’

  I felt a pain in my chest, and realized it was my heart beating against my ribs. Martin was talking to me as though I were an overexcited child. He sounded momentarily like one of the counsellors at the clinic. I shuddered. Maybe life really is as simple as the people at the clinic suggest. I always have trouble believing it. I expect that’s because I know it’s not true.

  ‘Perhaps she doesn’t know where she lives, if she’s being held captive in this place. She doesn’t know she’s been forgotten. I’m sorry,’ I said as we reached the heavy darkness of the gatehouse. ‘But somehow I believe in the letters.’ I gave a tiny, apologetic twitch. ‘I just do.’

  We faced each other. The cool air b
lew between us and I could feel myself anchored to the ground by the stony weight of my conviction. ‘This woman, Bethan Avery, could still be alive. I’m not even saying she’s being held prisoner. She believes she is, though. She’s still the girl kidnapped twenty years ago. She wants to be set free.’

  Martin rubbed his chin once more, seemed about to speak, then fell silent, with a sharp shake of his head, a policy decision in action. ‘I’ll take the letters to Mo tomorrow. There’s no point discussing anything until then.’

  We had reached the gate, and with an old-world courtesy he reached out and shook my hand. Again that warm, firm grip, surprisingly gentle from such a burly man.

  ‘It was genuinely lovely to meet you, Margot. And I’ll let you know the minute we hear anything,’ he said. ‘In the meantime, if there are any more letters, don’t hesitate to call.’

  ‘I will.’

  He turned away, but before he could leave . . .

  ‘Martin, wait.’

  He paused mid-step, regarding me.

  ‘You said that there was something else interesting about the letters. In your first email. I meant to ask you what it was.’

  His face set a little, smoothed into something almost defensive.

  ‘The handwriting . . . ?’ he mused out loud, and for the first time I had the sense that he was not being wholly honest – that he knew exactly what I meant.

  ‘No, you said something else. That there were “other reasons” the letters were of interest.’

  He froze, and then, as though considering, glanced quickly over both shoulders, then moved to rejoin me at the gate.

  He bent low, next to my ear, and there was a strange, ambiguous moment during which I wasn’t sure if he meant to kiss me or not. I was about to draw away when he whispered, ‘The second letter mentioned soundproofing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Soundproofing,’ he repeated. ‘They found fragments of insulation material on Bethan’s nightdress, they think it was used for soundproofing.’ He stepped back, with a little shrug. ‘It was never made public.’ He beetled his brows at me. ‘So please keep that to yourself.’

  It was over and I was back on King’s Parade, in the mob of tourists, hurrying academics and office and shop workers in search of some lunch. I wandered, in a kind of weird, anxious dream, back towards the Copper Kettle and my bicycle. A big tour group was coming towards me and I stepped out of their way. As my groping hand reached out to steady myself it touched glass, and I became aware of a loud ticking, sinister and yet familiar.

  I was in front of the Corpus Clock. I glanced at it, caught. Behind the glass a huge rippling gold disk, backlit in bluish-pink, the edges ratcheted with teeth, moved in fits and starts. Above it was a large gleaming metal locust – the Chromophage, the time-eater – who rode the teeth as they moved beneath its chrome body, each one issuing a harsh metallic click.

  I have stood here for up to a quarter of an hour at a time before now, entranced by its slightly irregular, sinister movement, which is only absolutely accurate every five minutes. On one of our first dates, Eddy taught me to read the markings on the gold-plated disk to translate the hour. I sighed and glanced down at the inscription in stone below it: ‘Mundus transit et concupiscentia eius.’

  ‘“The world passeth away, and the lust thereof,”’ I murmured.

  I considered Martin Forrester, his piercing eyes, his thick dark hair, before firmly shaking my head and trying to dismiss him from my thoughts.

  I had to go.

  Work passed in a dream, and then there was the Classics Club after school – we were doing the third of our Conversational Ancient Greek nights this year, which is normally hugely amusing, but somehow I felt a little distant, a little lost, and had to work hard to hide this from the kids. We were doing an improvisation with Demeter asking in various shops and public amenities whether anyone had seen her lost daughter Persephone – the goddess of the fields looks for her daughter, the goddess of spring growth, who has been abducted by Hades, Lord of the Dead and the Underworld.

  It was the sort of thing the children found funny and as a consequence their language skills raced ahead – in their version, Persephone has lied to her mother about where she’s gone and is instead hiding with her unsuitable boyfriend underground – but tonight everything about it, especially the ribald undercurrent, grated upon my nerves.

  It was late when I got back home, and there were no further letters from Eddy’s lawyers. The bedroom was slightly chilly, and I hurried into the bathroom, anxious to huddle myself into my bed as soon as possible. I pulled the cord dangling from the bathroom ceiling, and the light came on with a hum and a click.

  My face was thrown back at me from the fluorescently lit mirror. I looked dreadful. A light sheen of sweat covered all the visible surfaces of my skin. My nervous lines had returned – they never really go away – but right then they were pronounced. When they get worse, the muscles they bind start to jump. Then they are twitching cords running from my cheeks to my chin, framing my nose with its rumpled bent bridge, making me look like a gargoyle or a damned soul.

  I washed my face carefully, and then fumbled through my bag, finding the right bottle of pills. I was tired, so it took a few minutes. ‘ZORICLORONE – TAKE AS DIRECTED’, and then my name. I unscrewed the lid and shook one into my damp palm. It was snow white against my pink skin.

  I raised it to my mouth. The woman in the mirror mimicked my actions, my greedy haste. I suddenly stopped and so did she. What the hell was I taking it for? I looked terrible but I felt . . . I felt fine. I could take my quiet heart and clear mind to bed to a just sleep, as deep and refreshing as a baby’s. I couldn’t remember feeling so good for a very long time.

  The harried, nervous woman in the mirror raised a sardonic eyebrow at me, wondering what I would do next. She glanced down at the pill she held in her palm. Then she carefully tipped it back into the bottle, screwed the top back on and yanked decisively at the cord hanging from the ceiling, dismissing me with darkness.

  I left the bathroom and stumbled through the gloom to my bed, barking my shin against the bedside table in the process.

  But I slept like a baby.

  8

  LUISA MARTINEZ’S FACEBOOK FEED

  Luisa Martinez

  Crying all morning – really missing my bae Katie now whose been missing for nearly 5 weeks! I hope the angels in heaven are watching over you, my beautiful bae and wherever you are hope you’re OK.

  Charlotte Finley

  Sorry to hear you’re upset, I keep crying too! Hopefully there will be news soon. :(

  Amber McGowan

  You’re such a spaz Lu you hardly knew her and anyway everyone knows she’s obvs gone off with her gyppo boyfriend. You’re so thirsty for attention and its pathetic.

  Sorcha Malone

  Katie finished with Nathan before she went missing and he’s still around. Check yourself Amber cos her Mum can see this page.

  Amber McGowan

  It’s not me upsetting Katie’s mum but Katie the selfish bitch, and IDK what you’re so righteous about Sorcha cos you never liked her anyway.

  Sorcha Malone

  You lying cow! I NEVER said that! And Luisa is allowed to like her and miss her if she wants. What’s it to you anyway? Stop being such a bitch for once in your life.

  Luisa Martinez

  I can’t beleive how horrible your being to me. I was just being worried about my bae! I have been crying for weeks!!!

  Sorcha Malone

  Stop it Luisa you’re just embarrassing yourself. Amber is right you hardly knew her tbf.

  Amber McGowan

  It’s always about YOU isn’t it La-La Lulu, and you can stop being 2-faced Sorcha. We all know Katie Browne’s probably gone off to have an abortion or because that stepdad of hers has buried her under the patio, or whatever these social housing types do LOL!

  Brian Morris

  is that what they teach you to be like at that posh school you stuc
kup little madam how dare you talk like that about our katie where my wife can see it you heartless little sod!!! see you in school amber mcgowan i have took a pic of this scren bfore you dletee it and that posh school is goin to be hearing all abot you!!!!!!!

  And Brian, being as good as his virtual word, had done precisely that, and so here we all were.

  ‘My account was hacked,’ Amber said, tossing her blonde head, though the two burning patches of red on her cheeks betrayed her as a liar.

  Ben, our headmaster, had Luisa Martinez’s Facebook page open on the laptop on his desk. Though he’s quite content to bully Lily, Estella and me in meetings, the girls at the school, particularly the pretty ones, tend to reduce him to pusillanimous mumbling.

  Today he had a problem, however. Brian, Katie’s stepfather, had been in the office for over an hour, and Estella, who taught in the class below, had been hard pressed to stop her students from muttering and giggling at the low boom and roar of Mr Morris’s voice as he, in the parlance of the day, ‘Tore Ben a new one’.

  Accordingly, Ben solved this problem by calling me in. I must have appeared a suitable enforcer to him.

  ‘Clearly that’s you,’ I said coldly to Amber. I haven’t taught for years without picking up a few social media tricks. ‘I can tell it’s you. Once you’ve finished libelling Katie and her stepfather, you then go on to “like” Tabitha’s party photos and post the stats for your latest game of Bejewelled.’ That rage, that Stygian rage that bubbled up from within me on Arabella’s doorstep, was roaring at the gates of my ears. That man. That poor man, having to read that about Katie. And her mother. The thought of it smote me.

  It was all I could do to stay calm. ‘It was absolutely you.’

  Something of all this must have shown in my face, as within moments Amber paled and her defiant jaw unclenched.

  She took a step backwards.

  ‘ISN’T IT?’

  Ben stirred, as though I was frightening him too.

  But she nodded, once, and her eyes flicked to the ground.