If Sorcha was chewing hers there must have been a serious problem.
She straightened up quickly when she saw me and dropped her hand, as though she’d read my thoughts.
‘Sorcha – what can I do for you?’ I peered at her around my bulky burden.
She darted a quick glance at me, before turning her face to the floor. ‘Can I talk to you, Miss?’
‘Yeah, sure, of course.’ I had a sinking feeling. This must be about her own role in the debacle with Amber and her Facebook meltdown. To be truthful, I had been expecting Sorcha to turn up at some point. ‘Let’s go to my office. Take some of these.’
I handed her half of my enormous pile of books, in case any of her friends, or others, should see her. This way she would appear to have been drafted in to help me, rather than seeking my advice. She received them gratefully. Appearances are of vital importance when you’re that age – my personal conviction is that this is something we are all supposed to grow out of, and yet so few of us do.
We joined the general melee in the corridor, all in genial chaos now that it was lunchtime. I led, aware of her shuffling behind me, taking her up the stairs and towards the Classics office, a tiny room little better than a converted broom cupboard, with a single small circular window, like a porthole. The office makes me claustrophobic so I try to spend as little time as possible here, but it’s the one place I can be guaranteed a degree of privacy when I chat to the students.
‘Just set them here on the desk,’ I said, and her pile of books joined my own. Silently, I closed the door behind her.
Sorcha actually has an assigned pastoral care teacher, but for some reason they all come to me. I would love to tell you that there is some deep-seated reason for this, that it’s to do with the fact that I am so cool and approachable and down with the kids and all, but to be honest, while I have no idea why it is, I am pretty sure it is none of the above.
‘Sit,’ I said.
She did so, almost hesitantly. She was in two minds about being here, I could tell.
‘Is this about Amber and the others?’
She nodded. ‘Yeah.’
I waited, letting her collect her thoughts.
‘I’m not speaking to Amber right now,’ she said.
‘I see.’
‘You knew?’
‘Well,’ I said, shrugging – Amber’s carpeting in Ben’s office was not really any of Sorcha’s business – ‘it was pretty obvious that there was trouble in paradise in my English lesson last week.’
Her face was heating up, becoming redder, and she wiped at her wet pink eyes with her sleeve. I offered her a tissue from the box I keep on the desk for this purpose.
‘We fell out over Katie Browne,’ she said, and as she said it, she let out a little sob.
‘Yes. Amber got into a little trouble over that,’ I concede.
‘I mean, she’s really nice sometimes – I mean Amber – and to be honest, I didn’t have that much to do with Katie, she was kind of on her own a lot, you know? I mean, other than the swimming, she didn’t really hang out with the rest of us.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘But me and Amber,’ she said, and her loneliness was so poignant I wanted to hug her, ‘we . . . we’re best friends, and we have a great laugh, and everything would be fine if it weren’t for Laura egging her on all the time.’
I sighed and crossed my legs. Laura had not been in evidence during Amber’s Facebook fiasco – she’d managed that all on her own. Girls like Amber play the Lauras and Sorchas of this world off against each other, to bring out their worst selves.
What I really wanted to say was this: ‘Sorcha, you may not believe this now, but as much as Amber feels like your best friend and you can’t imagine life without her, I promise you faithfully that the minute you leave for university you will not exchange more than a hundred words with her for the rest of your life. And what’s more, this will be a source of enormous relief to you.’
But of course I can’t say that. One of the more glorious aspects of the column is that I can be a little more forthright.
‘I know Amber said those terrible things,’ said Sorcha, her hair twisting in her hand, ‘but she didn’t mean them.’
‘Why would she say them, then?’ I asked.
Sorcha twitched out a little distressed shrug. ‘It’s just showing off that she’s not scared – but it is scary, you know?’
Her gaze sought my own.
‘Yes. It’s scary.’
‘I mean, everyone’s been saying Katie ran away, but what if . . . what if she didn’t? What if something has happened to her and nobody is looking for her?’
‘Who told you no one’s looking for her?’ I asked, trying to sound calm, but my spine chilled with a frisson of alarm. Only Ben and I had been in the office when the policeman had arrived to say that they were investigating the possibility that Katie had left willingly due to trouble at home and that we could scale down the security measures the governors had put into place.
Sorcha shrugged. ‘Isn’t it obvious? They stopped coming around asking questions. She’s not in the news any more.’ She swiped at her face. ‘It just . . . terrifies me that she could be out there and nobody is looking for her.’ She glanced up at me, her eyes filled with the heartbreaking seriousness that only children can possess.
‘Yes,’ I said, and with real feeling. ‘It terrifies me, too.’
I was writing a reply to an email from a girl who was convinced she was pregnant as a consequence of wearing her boyfriend’s underwear. It was quite amazing, the number of letters I received in this vein. It’s like the Internet never happened, though it may be that my correspondents are clever enough in their own way: Internet searches can be traced. Can I get pregnant from a toilet seat, a dirty towel, if I don’t have an orgasm, if it’s my first time? Am I safe if I drink a bottle of gin and sit in a scalding hot bath afterwards? If I take a contraceptive pill beforehand?
Am I safe?
These letters depress me immeasurably for all the obvious reasons.
All of these prepubescents and their endless terror of pregnancy. But I suppose I can see it. Social stigma, tearful parents, fleeing boyfriends, finally being shunted into a council rat trap with a screaming incomprehensible little monster, their frustration aggravated as opposed to palliated by the odd benefit payment.
Maybe if we all, men too, looked after everyone’s kids then I wouldn’t feel like I do, and they wouldn’t feel like they do – an idealistic thought, I acknowledge, but it keeps recurring.
‘The whole reason you want kids,’ I said out loud to myself, in the mistaken belief that this will make me take what I am saying more seriously, ‘is so you can make it up to yourself for having such a lousy childhood. And that’s selfish.’ Maybe so. Maybe. Well, no maybe about it, really. It’s not some deep-seated instinct. Just a psychological gratification, sharpened by the fact that I can’t have children.
I looked at the clock. It was already 3 a.m. I hit Send on the email, CCing in my private work account. Then I encrypted the work file, turned the light off and headed upstairs to bed.
I fell asleep straight away.
I dreamed of Bethan Avery.
In my dream I was lost in a maze, a dread-haunted Demeter searching for her Persephone.
There were corridors everywhere – a hospital that looked exactly like Addenbrooke’s – vast, sprawling, a lino-floored labyrinth. There is a monster in the centre, I understand in my own dream logic, a minotaur that is always searching for me.
The place was full of bustling faceless figures. None of them seemed to pay me the slightest attention as I drifted along, my quest offering no real impetus, instead just a woolly sense of foreboding. If I glanced from side to side I could see strange things through the windows to the wards – doctors and nurses slithered in and out of their uniforms as though shedding skins, and open doors breathed, slow and deep, as if nameless things slept behind them.
‘I don’t know wh
ere we are,’ I told a young woman who confronted me in the corridor, arms folded.
‘I know.’
‘I’m looking for Bethan Avery.’
She glared back at me, dark eyes bright in their surrounding thicket of clumpy mascara, her peroxide blonde hair a messy halo around her head, and for a nightmare instant I thought she would hiss at me like a serpent.
‘The world passeth away and the lust thereof,’ she answered. And then she let out a single mirthless bark of a laugh, and there was something familiar about it.
There was something familiar about her.
‘Please,’ I said.
She frowned. ‘I don’t know where she is,’ she said, tapping her sharp teeth with her pen. I thought this terribly unhygienic, even by dream standards, but held my peace, tantalized by the possibility of a forthcoming clue. ‘Why are you asking me about Bethan Avery anyway?’ she snapped, her mood changing, brittle with malice, with fear. ‘Who are you?’
And though I had been offered no violence, when I awoke I was shaking, like a leaf in a storm.
I lay there on my back in my lonely bed for a long time, meaninglessly following the twitching shadows of the tree branches that the streetlights cast on to my ceiling.
Now I was awake I understood that I had indeed known that girl, but had not thought of her for years and years.
Angelique.
After that, sleep was a lost cause.
9
Katie thinks that somewhere in the house above she can hear the doorbell ring. It’s a deep sonorous chiming, and it plays in several rooms at once, through some kind of intercom system. She presses her throbbing, bruised ear against the drainage pipe, where it stands proud from the cool stone, and listens. Her walls are lined with decaying soundproofing material, but the exposed pipes carry vibrations and voices down to her, here in her prison.
As she recognizes the doorbell, tinny and faint, for what it is, alarm, confusion and a dart of incredulous hope pass through her, each in quick succession.
In all the time she has been here, she has never heard anybody come to the door before.
She listens intently. He must answer it, surely; she knows he is up there, as she heard him walking over the trapdoor just a few minutes earlier, his heavy tread smothered by the covering rug.
Within her breast she feels a tightening dread, a profound nausea. She faces a choice, one with possibly terrible consequences. She has to take a risk. Who knows if she’ll live long enough for another such opportunity?
The chimes sound out again, and the cold rusty metal scratches at her sore ear.
But there is only a perfect silence in reply, like a held breath.
Perhaps about sixty seconds later, the phone rings. It’s the house phone, as it is louder than any mobile would be and, like the doorbell, it carries through several rooms and down the pipes, down to her – it’s the ghost of a phone call.
She has only ever seen a couple of rooms in the house other than the big living room, and those in snatches, when she was first brought here, kicking and biting against her gag, her leggings soaked where she had wet herself in terror, the hood over her head having fallen askew. He had stunk of stale cooking and sweat, the house of mould and dust. The rooms were big, wood-panelled, with gigantic stone fireplaces and antique ornaments. This and the intercom make her think that it’s a big house, the sort of place that should have servants, but for all of his talk of gangs, she has only ever seen him here.
The phone rings and rings, and then stops. Then it rings again.
Katie has been trying, not very successfully, to manage her hope. You need hope to survive – she knows this, instinctively, but she also knows that to allow yourself hope is to invite her twin, despair. For instance, she could believe, if she let herself, that this determined assault by the outside world on the house after so many weeks of silence was a sign that they had tracked her down, thought to look for her here. Police and scientists and clever, driven detectives in long coats had been pounding beats, questioning suspects and viewing CCTV until they found something that had led them to the door of this house.
Her freedom could be minutes away.
Or maybe it is nothing and she is going nowhere. It is unbearable to contemplate.
The phone ceases, leaving a ringing stillness in its wake.
There is nothing more, but she cannot bear to stop listening.
But now it’s the doorbell again, and because she is tuned in, focused, it seems much louder than earlier. And someone is banging on the door at the same time, with their fist. They must have been calling on a mobile, from outside.
They really want to get in.
After an age, while the world and Katie hold their breath, she hears his clumpy tread, the creak of heavy wood opening, murmured voices. She can’t hear words, not at first, but after a few moments of pressing her ears against the pipes, she realizes that whoever they are, they are coming inside, into the living room with its blue rug and square stone fireplace.
‘Yes,’ says the stranger’s voice. ‘You’ve been quite difficult to get hold of.’ The newcomer is male, and his accent has a cross, posh edge. Not a local.
‘If you had made an appointment—’
‘I don’t have to make appointments to see you.’ The newcomer sounds annoyed. ‘You report to me now, as I explained. I told you I was coming up from London today. As a courtesy you were offered the chance to set a date and time at your convenience, and you’ve done nothing but put me off.’
Katie holds her breath. Is this another member of the gang he keeps talking about?
‘I’ve been busy here,’ snaps back her kidnapper.
‘I’m sure you have,’ says the newcomer, and she senses a mixture of impatience and pity in his tone. The floor creaks beneath his feet. ‘But I’m afraid that now Mr Broeder has died there will have to be changes. The family feel that his assets aren’t being managed as proactively as they would like. As their management company, we agree with them. It’s absurd that this huge house should sit empty in the current financial climate, as I’m sure you realize.’
‘I don’t—’
‘The surveyors are coming a week on Friday, sometime in the morning. If you could be on hand to let them in, please.’
‘But I have work to do on the garden . . .’
‘I wouldn’t worry about it, Mr Meeks. We expect the structural work to start very soon.’ There is a closing briskness in his tone. ‘In terms of your role, of course, there should be news later this week. Now, would you mind showing me round?’
With a little blast of shock, Katie realizes that whoever this person is, they are not part of what has happened to her.
Before the decision is consciously made, the handcuff tightens around her right wrist and she bangs it against the pipe, again and again, helplessly, and though she is gagged she screams anyway, through the wet sweaty barrier of the duct tape. She doesn’t stop; she doesn’t dare stop and listen to see if it’s having any effect, or think what will become of her if this attempt fails. She bangs on the pipes until her bruised wrist is cut and bleeding against the ring of steel, but it becomes apparent that nobody is coming, and when she finally lets her head rest against the pipes again, she hears the muffled sound of the giant front door closing.
Her exhaustion and despair are almost instantly replaced by freezing terror. What if Chris (‘Mr Meeks’) had heard her making this noise? His rage was terrible to contemplate.
She waits, in the darkness, but he does not come. She crushes down her disappointment and fear and allows herself to relax a little and think on what she has learned. Surveyors a week on Friday, whenever that was. She cannot tell the days apart, except that there is one day a week when the house is awash with classical music, and he sometimes lets her out, into the room above. She thinks this might be a Sunday. A day like that happened . . . Oh God, she can’t remember. It wasn’t yesterday, or the day before . . .
He seems to take a long time to turn up w
ith her daily offering of food. Tonight it is soup, tomato, and microwaved to a blistering, volcanic heat.
He comes down the steps, carrying the bowl carefully in his hands, and her mouth waters at the smell despite herself. He switches the light on, and she blinks helplessly under the glare of the single light bulb swinging from the ceiling.
‘Hungry, are we?’
She nods.
He smiles, and then, just as carefully as he carried it down, pours the soup into the drain near the door, it leaving a sad little plume of steam as it vanishes.
‘Do you think I didn’t hear that racket you made earlier?’
Within moments her hair is gathered into his fist, yanking her forward, and the first blow lands.
10
I picked nervously at the lapels of the olive green suit I’d bought the night before from a tiny but very expensive boutique on Rose Crescent. My eyes had watered as I’d handed over my card – with Eddy gone, such purchases were on an emergency-only basis from now on.
And yet there was a tiny part of me that was almost, I don’t know, relieved. I would be my own mistress again. I would see a way through to becoming Margot once more, Margot before she was abandoned, before she was humiliated. Margot might not have the money for many suits, but what she did have was at least all hers.
I’d dressed for this meeting, and Martin gave me a sideways glance and raised eyebrow as he jumped down from his brown Range Rover and opened the door for me. A hank of his long dark hair had fallen out of the band at the back, brushing his face, and I wondered for a long moment what it would feel like to reach out and tuck it back behind his ear.
‘You look well, Margot,’ he said, and treated me to a vast, wolfish grin while I climbed up into the leather seat. I felt a variety of competing and co-mingling emotions – nervousness, pleasure and, in the midst of these, a vague, hot little flicker of desire, out of place and inappropriate but not unwelcome. Martin himself wore a Ted Baker T-shirt and jeans, and I could surreptitiously admire his fine, well-muscled arms while he drove off.
Dear Amy Page 9