Dear Amy

by Helen Callaghan

  Suddenly, I wasn’t so hungry.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  I shrugged, helplessly.

  He seemed to understand. ‘Remember, Margot, we still have absolutely no evidence that Katie was abducted by the same man.’

  I clucked my tongue sadly. ‘Same location. Same type of girl. Same social background. And now Bethan Avery is writing letters.’

  ‘All circumstantial.’

  I knew this. I tried not to sigh.

  Then, surprisingly, his hand was over mine, and he gave it a light squeeze.

  ‘Margot.’ His green gaze was hard to meet, but I made myself do it. ‘You’ve already made a huge difference. You’ve provided new evidence for the historical case, and this has lit a fire of new evidence under the investigation into Katie. Everything that’s happening is happening because of you.’

  I stared down at his hand, charmed by it.

  He let mine go quickly, as though he had surprised himself in some guilty act.

  There was a moment of silence. Then he picked up his glass of red, setting his shoulders, clearly determined to bluster his way through this odd, intimate transgression. ‘We will find her, you know.’

  I smiled wryly at him. ‘Which one?’

  ‘One, either, both,’ he said. He cocked his head at me. ‘Can you meet me Saturday morning, probably obscenely early?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That’s when they’re filming.’ He grinned. ‘I thought you might like to see it.’

  I shrugged, as though it meant nothing to me. ‘Yeah.’

  For a long moment, I considered mentioning what had occurred to me on the drive home from London in his car – that maybe, in that lost, hidden past of mine, I had crossed paths with Bethan Avery.

  But I didn’t, and the moment passed.

  ‘So, what happens in one of these things?’ I asked, rubbing my hands together in their mittens. Our breath steamed in the cold, still air.

  We stood outside Addenbrooke’s Hospital, surrounded on all sides by enormous buildings, a brisk modern city within a city, inhabited mostly by people in pale uniforms – though not many at this time of the morning, a little after seven. Dawn had only just departed. Thin, tremulous sunshine trickled down into the narrow lanes and pathways between the towering medical skyscrapers, far too weak to provide any warmth. I craned upwards, peering into the lemon sky, tracking the flight of faraway birds. Nearby, trendily dressed young people were carrying bulky black and chrome equipment into lifts, muttering amongst themselves about proper brass monkeys weather, this is too fucking early, careful – careful with that!

  ‘Have you seen the previous reconstruction? The one from 1998?’ asked Martin, seemingly untroubled by the weather and looking snug in a dark grey fleece and jeans.

  I nodded, my chin lost in my chunky knitted scarf. ‘Yeah. It was on YouTube.’ I did not add how disturbing I found this. Who went about loading old footage of obscure child abduction reconstructions on to the Internet?

  On the other hand, it had been there for me to watch, so I suppose I should be grateful. Bethan’s fate had not been wholly forgotten it seemed.

  ‘This will be a little more in-depth. We’re going to try to widen the search to include this Alex Penycote character.’ Martin steered me towards the lifts. ‘Come on.’

  We followed a worried middle-aged woman and her husband, who appeared to be nothing to do with the reconstruction, and three burly young men carrying cabling and cameras, into a large steel lift, and then followed them all out again a few seconds later on to a long, chilly skywalk.

  ‘They’re going to film in four locations – Peggy’s ward, the adjoining corridors where Bethan was last seen, the lobby where the tea and coffee used to be served, and just outside the grounds.’ Martin took my arm, noticed my shaking. ‘Margot, are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘It’s just a bit cold.’

  He contorted his brows, an unspoken question.

  ‘I’m not a big fan of hospitals, generally, if you’re after full disclosure.’

  ‘Who is?’ he replied. ‘But seriously, are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. I smiled at him. ‘I’m actually sort of excited. The smell of the greasepaint and all that. I have no idea how these things are done.’

  He smiled back, but there was something else in it, something speculative.

  ‘Good,’ he replied. ‘Come on, it’ll be warmer once we’re in the building proper. I’ll introduce you to the production team.’

  We passed through a warren of corridors, descending stairs into a lower, older level of the hospital, where the modern skywalks and steel gave way to more Victorian brick. The intense rasp of disinfectant and the bland wafts of institution cooking followed us throughout, the clatter of heels and squeaking of trolleys trailing us like curious ghosts.

  When we reached a crossroads, stairwells and wards spiralling off on either side, Martin came to a stop.

  ‘They’re too rammed for space, yeah?’ a brightly dressed girl with a long golden-brown ponytail was telling a small crowd gathered around her. ‘They won’t close off the corridor for us. So we can film, but we can’t show anybody’s faces. Anyone wants to come through here, we need to stop filming, yeah?’

  There was a collective groan. ‘Does that include nurses or patients or both?’ asked an older man, stood at the back, pushing a big light on a tripod.

  ‘We need to be out of here in an hour,’ she continued, as though she hadn’t heard this, ‘so jump to it.’ She tossed her long ponytail. ‘Where have Thea and Roddy got to? Are they ready? Ah, Dr Forrester, hiya! And you must be Margot, yeah?’

  She dropped the clipboard and came forward, shaking our hands with a brisk dispatch completely at odds with her querulous turn of speech, as though we were soldiers in the field come to report further intelligence to their commanding officer.

  ‘Hello Tara,’ said Martin. ‘Nice to meet you in the flesh at last.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, you too.’ She smiled and turned to me. ‘Now, Margot, you don’t mind doing an interview with us, do you?’

  ‘What?’ I asked, astonished, not quite sure I had heard right. ‘What could I know?’

  She shook her hands at me, as though to bat away the depths of my misunderstanding. ‘No, no, you’re not an expert or a witness, yeah? We’ll just ask you about the letters, and you can answer a couple of questions about how the person who wrote them isn’t in any trouble, yeah? You just need to talk, and then re-state the appeal from your column in the same words – Pete or Dr Forrester can brief you if you’ve forgotten them. We might not use the footage, depending on time, but since you’re here, it would be a shame to pass up the opportunity, yeah?’

  ‘Absolutely, if you think it will help,’ I said, though in truth I was more staggered than anything. I hadn’t harboured any ambitions to appear on television before now.

  ‘Great. I’ll get Sophie to you with a waiver to sign. Got to get back to it – need to find my director. Laters.’

  I nodded towards the blonde girl’s departing back. ‘Is she a policewoman?’ I asked, possibly with a touch of scepticism.

  Martin shook his head. ‘No. She’s the producer.’ He gestured to one of the group; a short, stocky young man with dark hair in a buzz cut and black eyes and a pale mouth, rubbing his small chin and gazing at an iPad. Next to him, a tall bearded man with tousled hair was pointing and poking at the screen. ‘The little guy is Pete Wilkins. He’s the police liaison; he’s here to oversee everything. But he won’t get involved unless things go really wrong. The full brief is written up beforehand and given to the production company – what shots are required, where they should be – it’s storyboarded in an office long before anyone arrives here.’

  I considered this while the lighting men started to set up, pushing us gently but firmly out of the way as the brightness of the floodlights filled the gloomy space, giving it the aura of a studio, or perhaps an operating room. We
moved back, by common consent, to rest against the cream-painted wall, which was a cold, unyielding presence against my shoulder blades.

  ‘I suppose it makes sense,’ I offered. ‘All that forward planning. Something like this needs to resemble reality, if it’s to work at all.’

  ‘Yes and no.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  He gestured towards the bright space in front of us. ‘There are multiple reasons to film a reconstruction.’

  I waited for him to elaborate on this.

  ‘Jogging memories is only part of the plan,’ he said. ‘After all this time, it’s unlikely anyone remembers anything new.’

  ‘Then why do it?’ I frowned, trying to understand. The crowd buzzed around me, busy as bees with their bulky, shiny equipment. ‘It looks expensive.’

  ‘Because there’s always the hope that someone who does know what happened – either the abductor themselves, or someone else who perhaps suspected them or even shielded them – will have their conscience pricked and come forward.’

  I thought about this for a second or two. ‘Could someone like that have a conscience?’

  ‘Probably not. But it’s worth a go. These things –’ he gestured towards the set, taking in the working men barking monosyllabic commands to one another, the lights, ‘these kinds of crimes – they invite you to be part of the story. Someone who is already part of the story might be tempted to get swept further into it.’ He nodded towards the police liaison, Pete. ‘This is why they do them. A re-enactment is very psychologically powerful – it puts incredible pressure on people who have information, and it motivates others to interrogate their own experiences.’

  I nodded, as though I understood.

  At the far end of the corridor, near the lintels of a set of fire doors, a nurse accompanied a very sallow, very drained man curled into a small ball in a wheelchair. His hair was a smoke of thin grey, curled up in disordered shapes; from the neck down he was covered by a bright orange blanket. He was being pushed by an orderly, who was chatting to the nurse who giggled back, both appearing to be utterly unconscious of all the unusual activity around them, yet both betrayed themselves as utterly captivated by it. I heard the whispered words, ‘It’s a Crimewatch thing, for some old missing persons case,’ from the nurse.

  Martin was on to something, I realized.

  The crew stepped out of the way with bad grace as the small group approached, and as he passed me, on his way into the ward on the left, I heard the old man whisper in a small, mucus-cracked voice, ‘I’m ready for my close-up,’ and then, with a swift, surprising vitality, he offered me a bawdy wink and smile.

  I smiled back, amused and charmed.

  ‘Look at you. Already flirting,’ said Martin. There was warmth in his voice. ‘There’s someone I want you to meet.’

  He led me gingerly past the men setting up equipment to one of the stairwells, where one of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen was deep in conversation with a blond man. The girl had long dark hair and an exquisitely fine complexion, which, now that I looked, I realized was the result of several layers of expertly applied make-up. She wore a school shirt and skirt, purple V-necked pullover with a grey stripe trim, black tights and ugly shoes. Her plain brown mascara had been lightly oiled, as though to suggest tears.

  ‘This is Thea, who’s playing Bethan,’ Martin said as we drew near. ‘And this gentleman is Roddy, who’s going to be Alex.’

  Roddy was in nondescript jeans and jacket. I realized that in her letters Bethan had never offered much information on how he dressed.

  The pair acknowledged us with distant little smiles, but did not pause in their urgent conversation, which appeared to be about regional accents.

  ‘So, Ian says go neutral,’ said Thea, in an achingly upper-middle-class actressy voice, ‘but I’m thinking that since her family was a bit Jeremy Kyle Show I should do something more Normal for Norfolk,’ then the pair of them burst into tinkling, affected laughter.

  A sharp little stab of dislike shot through me.

  Martin squeezed my shoulder. ‘Drama students, eh?’ he whispered to me. ‘Shall we find a seat and wait for the show?’

  The morning passed in a kind of constantly interrupted tedium, as nothing much happened, but it kept having to be halted while staff and patients moved through the corridor on their business. Again and again, the scene reset as extras dressed as nurses, doctors and visitors ambled up and down the corridor, while Thea and Roddy marched towards us, a rolling camera preceding them, Roddy walking swiftly about ten feet behind Thea, while she stumbled and wiped at her face in distress.

  Then there were a few takes of them talking while people passed them by. In a few they argued; in a few he appealed to her, one hand curled around her arm possessively; in one he grabbed her, holding her close, the implication clearly being that he had a weapon tucked against her belly or back and was frog-marching her discreetly out of the building.

  ‘I need to go to the loo,’ I murmured to Martin. ‘Be right back.’

  It took me about five minutes to find the ladies’, and I felt chilled, queasy that someone could just grab a girl like that. It could happen to anyone. Alone in the toilets, I fell prey to a slippery spurt of paranoia, and quickly splashed my face with cold water, keen to return to the safety of the herd. My heart pounded beneath my jacket.

  When I threw open the doors, Martin was waiting for me.

  I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  ‘Are you all right? You looked pale.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘It was just a little upsetting to watch. It felt so . . .’

  ‘Visceral,’ he supplied. ‘When you see it like that, it becomes so much less abstract. You see how it works. What happens to people.’

  I gazed back up at him. He was standing very close.

  ‘Yes. Exactly. Visceral.’

  For a moment I thought he was going to put his arms around me. I wanted him to, in the worst way – I wanted to be enfolded by him, to rest my head against that muscular chest, to set this burden down. I could feel myself starting to grow flexible, limp, waiting for his touch . . .

  But it didn’t come. I stole a quick glance at him, at the peculiar way he had frozen, as though stopping himself.

  We both cast our eyes down, pretending that each had not seen the other’s reaction, though my flush must have been apparent, as was his.

  Of course he shouldn’t be hugging me, or encouraging me, I reminded myself stiffly. He knew things about me. I was not a suitable girl.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, with a warm, only slightly stilted, tug of my arm. ‘It’s time for your close-up, Mrs Lewis.’

  13

  Today must be Sunday, because Katie has been allowed out of the cellar room and up into the lounge for the evening, with its patterned blue rug covering the wooden floor, and the old-fashioned fireside chairs, built of black studded wood on a monumental scale, and the low couch with its deep cushions. The news is on, and an earnest man in a suit is on television talking about some company that has either lost millions of pounds or lied about having it in the first place. Her hands are clasped around a chipped mug of thin hot chocolate. She’s enjoying its heat far more than its taste.

  She’s sitting next to him on the couch, and the sense of stuffing and cushions is strange after days of incarceration. The patterned silk is slippery against the backs of her legs.

  Outside brisk autumnal winds thump against the windows, making low moans as they rattle through the rotting frames, the draft raising the light hairs on her arms into goose pimples, stirring the brown leaves on the trees shading the house into a crackly susurrus.

  He is watching the television but she can sense his boredom, and his hand reaches out and casually begins to stroke the back of her neck. She stiffens, as she always does.

  ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘No,’ she says, biting the end of the syllable off. Her bare thighs are still dappled with the bruises he gave her the
day before yesterday, when the man had called by and she had tried to alert him – huge blossoms of brown and green and violet-blue.

  ‘You know, this is supposed to be a treat,’ he says, his tone clipped and offended. ‘If you’d rather go back downstairs . . .’

  ‘Sorry,’ she says quickly. As the word slips out, she realizes that she isn’t and that, more importantly, she doesn’t sound it. What’s more, she needs to do something about it: it’s tiny incidents like these that set off the runaway train of his rage. What starts with hurt looks, curt speech, agonizing stretched silences and a purply-pale colour marbling his cheeks, has ended before now in him grabbing her hair and smashing her head into solid objects while he shrieks like a crazy person, white spittle gathering at the sides of his mouth.

  Now is the time to say No, I’m really sorry, and perhaps lean into his hated touch, and even elaborate on how grateful she is that he has saved her from the others. Then his hand will return to the back of her neck before moving down her spine or on to her lap, and dreadful though the sequel will be, it is better than when he is violent. Everything leads to the same outcome anyway. There is nothing she can do to avoid it. She tries and tries, but every response just serves his ends.

  Today, however, the honeyed words will not come. They stick in her throat, in the place just under the collarbone.

  His attention has turned back to the television, which is now showing the weather – bright but getting colder, with snow expected before too long – and she can sense his growing displeasure. She drinks the cheap chocolate quickly, as who knows when it will be taken away from her. The mug is patterned with Wedgwood-blue flowers, and chimes faintly when her ragged fingernails strike against it. It’s a twin of the one she smashed over his head.

  On the stone mantelpiece, two silver candlesticks glint back at her. When she’s in this room, she thinks about those candlesticks and what she could do with them to a person whose back was turned. She thinks about that a lot.