Dear Amy

by Helen Callaghan

  ‘Is the suit too much?’ I asked, with a stab of self-consciousness. Easy on the eye or no, his casual wear alarmed me.

  ‘No, not at all.’ He glanced into the rear-view mirror. ‘You look . . . it’s very nice.’

  ‘I felt I’d better make an effort to look respectable.’

  He shook his head, pulling away down Huntingdon Road, carefully avoiding the wobbling arcs of cyclists. ‘There’s nothing to worry about. But I need to warn you, there’s a change of plan. It’ll be the psychologist, Greta, and O’Neill might join us later. Greta is going to give you some copy for your column, and you just need to get the paper to publish it under your name.’

  Something about his speech felt a little stilted, as if there were something he wasn’t telling me.

  ‘Sounds like a plan,’ I said, settling into the seat.

  He turned down Storey’s Way, and we drove in silence past the newer colleges – Fitzwilliam, Murray Edwards (it was New Hall in my day) and Churchill, with their Sixties architecture and modern sculptures.

  ‘So Bethan Avery is writing the letters,’ I said after a few moments.

  There was a pause. ‘Yes,’ he said eventually. ‘She is.’

  ‘What does it mean?’ I asked.

  His intense green gaze flicked away from me, out of the window, through the trees shielding the lane to the Astronomy Institute. ‘I don’t know.’

  Silence fell between us again.

  ‘Gerry seemed a little freaked out,’ I ventured after a while. Gerry was the Examiner’s managing editor, a very grand title indeed considering only ten people worked there, including me. He had regarded me with polite amazement and just a hint of reproach as I explained what had been going on, as though I had been engaged in some unsavoury activity behind his back.

  Martin shook his head again. ‘Nope, all squared with O’Neill. Remember, if something comes of this, there will be an opportunity to sell on the exclusive. This could be a big deal for him.’

  My lips thinned. ‘Charming.’

  If he heard my own air of reproach, he shrugged it off. ‘If we find Bethan and can get her to help with the search for Katie, it’s going to be a win-win for everybody, including her.’

  I sighed, only slightly mollified. I don’t know why I was surprised, or even disappointed. Of course there were engines of self-interest and opportunism at work here. That’s just the way the world is. But it was a consideration that made Cambridge a little greyer, a little flatter. ‘I suppose.’

  He raised an eyebrow at me, but didn’t reply.

  Around us London honked and hissed and hammered. It had begun to rain – a faint sodden drizzle, and smart umbrellas were beginning to snap open on the pavements, hoods were drawn up, heels struck a little faster as they passed by. After the long drive, suddenly a wealth of secret energy seemed to surround me and buoy me up. There is something about London that always makes me feel more sharply alive. Every time I come here, I wonder why I don’t live here any more.

  And then, just as suddenly, I remember why not, and a little puff of coldness blows across my heart.

  We pulled into the underground car park beneath a squat grey block of offices, after a sceptical guard opened the barrier to let Martin drive through. Then there was a steel-grey staircase, then a steel-grey lift, and finally a steel-grey reception area with two bored middle-aged women in police uniforms. Their eyes flicked up and down Martin, and then up and down me.

  ‘I’ll tell her you’re here,’ said one; a lifetime of heavy smoking growled deep within her voice, like a lifting portcullis.

  We were left to mill in the lobby together.

  After what seemed like an age but was probably merely two minutes, while I fiddled with my bag and Martin stood, muscular arms crossed, a side door opened and a tiny woman with a tightly styled short red bob emerged, her heels making sharp little taps as she crossed the marble. She was dressed in a cool blue dress and pink cardigan, her identity pass dangling from a lanyard around her neck. Her face was smooth and youthful, her eyes hazel and twinkly behind ironically chunky horn-rimmed glasses.

  ‘Martin!’ she said, as though his presence was a delightful surprise, despite the fact that she must have been expecting us.

  ‘Greta,’ he said, leaning in to kiss her cheek decorously. ‘Good to see you.’

  ‘And you,’ she said. ‘Who’s this?’ she asked, turning to me.

  I don’t know why, but there was something disingenuous about both the question and the lilt in her voice as she asked it, and it rattled me. Of course she must have known who I was, and this was merely a simple way to guide Martin into introducing us. Even though I was little more than a messenger, I felt the subject of intense but cloaked interest, and I didn’t like it.

  ‘Margot,’ I said briskly, shaking the proffered hand. ‘Margot Lewis.’

  ‘Margot,’ she said, as though sounding my name out for falsehoods. ‘Of course. Follow me.’

  We were led up a dingy stairwell and through a series of corridors lined with offices, glass windows offering views inside them. Within the offices, towering piles of manila files balanced everywhere on desks and filing cabinets, and every so often I caught a glimpse of something intriguing – a map covered in pins, or an anatomically correct cloth doll.

  ‘Just in here,’ said Greta, pushing an already open door wider and letting us into a fusty-smelling room. Her office (it must be hers as there was a photo on the desk of her younger self with two small girls) was a little larger than the others I’d seen, and much tidier – though she still had to clear a chair free of books before Martin could sit in it. She wheeled her own chair out from behind the dark obstacle of her desk to face us, and I recognized a practical strategy meant to put me at my ease.

  Unaccountably, it seemed to have the opposite effect. I have had many dealings with people who work in mental health, and I’d wager I can recognize all of their strategies, at a pinch.

  ‘So,’ she said, and she had the bright chirruping accent of someone from the Home Counties, who had doubtless played a sport like lacrosse at some discreetly expensive private school. ‘I understand you’ve been receiving some distressing letters, Margot.’ She laced her plump little hands on her lap, and I realized that the thing I’d been dreading was this – that I was once more going to be given the third degree.

  I nodded.

  ‘How upsetting for you.’

  ‘It was a shock initially, but it doesn’t upset me,’ I answered, quickly and possibly somewhat impatiently. ‘Or at least it doesn’t upset me as much as it appears to upset the person sending them.’

  She peered at me, as though I had just said something very interesting. ‘I see.’

  The silence gathered, and I fought the urge to babble out something to fill it. Next to me, Martin shifted a little uncomfortably in his seat.

  ‘I suppose I’m wondering,’ she said, after a minute or so, ‘why you’re the one receiving these letters.’

  I shrugged. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve no idea.’ I gestured over at Martin. ‘I’ve gone over my notes from the Examiner—’

  ‘The Examiner?’ she asked sharply.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, aware that she must already know this, but deciding to make it easy on myself by volunteering everything up front. I explained about receiving the first letter, the steps I’d already taken to find the author, while Martin sat with his arms crossed, refusing to meet anybody’s gaze. Something was bothering him.

  As for Greta, she leaned forward, regarding me with bright, brittle attention as I finished. She wore a slight smile, as though she was waiting for me to inadvertently blurt out that I was the one holding Bethan Avery captive.

  ‘You checked in with the local psychiatric units, then?’ she asked. ‘Do you have contacts there?’

  I eyed her. ‘Yes, I do. They’ve been very forthcoming with advice and materials for the column.’

  ‘And how did you meet them?’

  I paused at this, a thin squirmy
stirring moving across the tiny hairs at the back of my neck. Martin was frowning at Greta, deep lines framing the corner of his mouth. ‘I think most of the staff would help someone out with information on request,’ I say carefully, evading her more obvious question. ‘Educating people about mental health issues is part of what they do there.’

  ‘But do you know them socially?’

  ‘No, not socially,’ I said, keen to get this show on the road and myself out of this dingy office and away from her scrutiny. ‘Anyway, my understanding of the plan is that I am to publish something in my section of the paper that might make this woman reveal more about herself, or possibly come forward. I think the officer in charge of the case spoke to my boss at the paper about this yesterday and squared everything away with him.’ I crossed my legs, which felt chilled in the unfamiliar short skirt. ‘So I suppose all that remains to do is find out what I put in the paper and how you want me to handle any response.’

  She watched me for another uncomfortable ten seconds and finally let out a little sigh. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ She opened a drawer, getting out a pen and paper. I was annoyed to see that the paper was blank. Martin had seemed very sure that the appeal I was to publish had already been written. I also realized that I had been expecting the supervising officer in charge of the case – O’Neill – to be here as well.

  Beside me, Martin’s brow furrowed more deeply but he said nothing.

  As for myself, I began to get a sinking feeling.

  ‘I just wanted, before we do this,’ said Greta, ‘to ask a few questions. We don’t want this to appear at all staged, and it would be far more convincing if we composed it together.’ She smiled again, as if sensing that I was becoming more and more uncomfortable with her.

  ‘By all means.’

  ‘So you live in Cambridge?’

  ‘Yes.’ I tugged down the hem of my skirt. ‘Well, Girton really. It’s a village just outside the centre.’

  ‘Are you local to Cambridge?’

  ‘After a fashion,’ I said. ‘Once I left the university I got work in London and then came back to live in the town itself. I went into teaching.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘A teaching job in Cambridge? You were very lucky.’

  I had achieved a double first in Classics from Cambridge University, and I am fluent in Latin and most flavours of Ancient Greek. Recalling the fraught hours of revision, the late-night reading and stammering my way through my viva voce, I was tempted to remark that there was a little more than luck or even talent involved. It had all been bloody hard work.

  For God’s sake, Margot, calm down. She’s just being polite.

  ‘Which of the colleges were you at?’ she asked now.

  ‘St Margaret’s.’

  A sharp little light came on in her eyes, as though she’d caught me in a lie. ‘Isn’t St Margaret’s a graduate college?’

  ‘Graduates and mature undergraduates. I was twenty-two when I came up. I studied my A levels at night school.’

  One of her dark red eyebrows lifted. ‘And from there to Oxbridge.’ She let out a little laugh. ‘Such an achievement! Though I imagine you felt a little out of place with the usual hothouse flowers at Cambridge. It must have been very alienating at times.’

  ‘I did all right,’ I said, trying to keep my voice even. ‘I got by.’

  I was treated to another maddening pause while she considered this, as though I had blurted out something incriminating. But this was all a Rubicon I needed to cross, so instead of giving my impatience its head, I did a little trick I’d been taught by Mother Cecilia years ago in another life, whenever things weren’t going my way: I concentrated on my breathing, letting it silently slow down, pausing just before the inhale. I should not always be the Fury.

  It would have done me good to have remembered it when talking to that trollop Ara, but hey-ho.

  ‘So you would have been in Cambridge, what, from around 2007?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And in all that time you’ve had no contact with anyone from the case? Anyone at all?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge.’

  She offered me a prim little smile. ‘And have you been contacted by missing persons before?’

  I blinked. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

  ‘Through your work on the paper?’

  I thought about this. ‘Well, yes. Sometimes I get letters from people who have run away from home. Certainly never from a potential kidnapping victim before.’

  ‘I did wonder,’ she said, clasping her little hands in front of her, ‘why you got into that line of work on the paper. Do you feel you empathize with people with problems?’

  I frowned at her. ‘Yes. Don’t most people?’

  ‘And you like to help them out? This satisfies you?’

  My frown deepened. ‘Is there any reason it shouldn’t?’

  Again that tiny smile.

  Oh, fuck this. Seriously, my inner Fury whispers to me. Take the fight to her.

  ‘Is this about the addiction? Or my breakdown?’ I asked, just a touch more loudly than I’d been speaking up until this point.

  ‘I . . .’ She was startled and glanced at Martin, tried to resume the smile, resume control of events.

  ‘Because it really, really, feels like it is,’ I continued. ‘And that’s fine, you know. I’m happy to tell you about it . . .’

  ‘I didn’t mean to imply—’

  ‘So basically I started a brand-new job writing copy at some wretched PR start-up in London where I was working up to eighteen hours a day, and before long I became a lot less fun to be around,’ I said, as though her answer had been, Please do. ‘Anyway, the business went under after the director decamped to the Caribbean owing me two months’ salary and bonuses, which I’d already spent. None of this was particularly good news, but it was all doable, or so I thought, until in the middle of it all Mother Cecilia, who got me off drugs when I was a teenager and was, to all intents and purposes, my only family, was stabbed to death three days before Christmas in the women’s refuge she managed.’

  ‘Margot, I—’

  ‘That effectively did for me for a little while, and I went to bed and didn’t get up, and then continued not to get up until someone broke in to find out what had happened to me and I attacked them.’ I inspected my dark red painted nails for an instant, then leaned back in the chair, meeting her gaze head on. ‘And so I found myself in the uncomfortable position of being sectioned under the Mental Health Act.’

  Greta had stopped smiling now, so that was a plus. I didn’t dare look at Martin.

  ‘I muddled along for a little while with drugs and therapy and it became clear that celebrities and copywriting and the bright lights weren’t for me. I wanted to be a teacher and work in Classics, like Mother Cecilia, because she was always a real person.’ I crossed my legs again. ‘She didn’t need a reason to help people. She just did it.’

  ‘Now, Margot—’ she began a little nervously.

  ‘The rest you know, as you have access to my social services files and have clearly not stinted from using it. The short answer to your original question, and the only relevant one, is no, I have no idea who is sending me the letters.’

  I shrugged into the resulting ringing silence.

  After all that, the rest was an anti-climax. Greta produced two lines of distant appeal – ‘Dear Bethan, please get in touch. I can’t help without more info’ – and it occurred to me, in a snarl of anger, that I had been summoned all the way down to London for this.

  I changed it to ‘Bethan A – don’t be afraid – to help I need to know more about you’ and there was some pointless toing and froing (‘Are you suggesting that she should be afraid?’ I snapped at Greta after she had resisted this minor point for a good ten minutes) but in the end the resulting text was something we could both live with.

  They also wanted to publish my picture, and as Greta talked, I realized that this was the one good idea that she was likely to have. A pict
ure would give Bethan someone she could connect with. They suggested using the one from the school website, which cast my rather bent nose into unattractive relief, but I had a better idea – Lily dabbled in amateur photography, and could take a black and white one especially for this purpose. I have always found my school photo a little corpse-like, and the death’s head grin I wore wasn’t likely to encourage confidence.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with that photo,’ observed Martin, with a gallantry that verged on the confrontational. ‘I like it.’

  My heart lifted its head fractionally from where it lay in the basement of my ribcage.

  But by the end of the interview, after my initial lively annoyance, I had sunk into a kind of low funk, and I wanted out; away from her, away from him. How foolish of me to think that I would ever escape the low looming shadow of my past, that in any case where it mattered I would ever be taken seriously. And yet, while I sulked as Greta fired off the email with the approved text and Martin stirred to stand up out of his cheap office chair, I could not repent embarking on this journey. Wherever Bethan Avery was, her own misery was greater than mine.

  After Greta’s fulsome and false goodbyes, I trudged after Martin back past the twin gorgons at the reception desk and into the lift to the car park. He was silent and thoughtful, and I could feel the mortified blush rising in my cheeks.

  You would think I was past shame by now, but you would be wrong.

  As I slid into the passenger seat beside him, I could bear it no longer. I turned to him and opened my mouth to speak.

  ‘Margot, I’m so, so sorry about that,’ he said, his arms crossed on the top of the steering wheel, his forehead resting against them. ‘I thought she might poke around you a little, but to be honest, I wasn’t expecting anything like . . . well, what we got.’

  I stared at him. ‘You knew? You knew about me?’

  He nodded wearily, not looking at me. ‘Yeah. I mean, I did tell you I’d checked you out before I met you . . .’

  ‘You said you’d looked at the school website.’