It’s not the same man.
I couldn’t tell you exactly how I realized this, but I did. The shape of his face, his build, the way he held himself – it wasn’t the man who’d parked outside my house. I would have sworn on my life.
I started to breathe again.
It struck me then that he didn’t want to approach me, just to follow me. He must have been a store detective, who thought I was a shoplifter. I wanted to laugh suddenly with embarrassment and relief. On the other hand I felt strangely guilty – I don’t know why. I suspect there is a secret shoplifter in me who reacts the same way when confronted by authority. I pulled my bag up on my shoulder as the colour rose in my cheeks.
The cool night air was soft after the air conditioned heat of the shop. I paused outside the door, at something of a loss.
I hadn’t had a very good week so far, and this evening was proving no exception.
I would treat myself, I thought, heading off down Market Street. I would go into Heffers and buy myself a new novel. I would choose one packed with incident, erudition and sex, in a shiny dust jacket. It would be pleasantly heavy in my bag as I walked back to my car, and when I got home I would cuddle up on the sofa with it, with a packet of biscuits and a bottle of wine, and read it right through. It would be a sensual pleasure. The anticipation of it was already erasing my embarrassment.
I walked on past the brightly lit shop fronts, the coyly illuminated pubs and cafes, the stony grandeur of the colleges – Emmanuel, Pembroke, Peterhouse, St Catherine’s, Corpus, King’s, with gargoyles growling at me from their cornices, each splendidly overdressed in fluted railings and manicured lawns. I love this place – opulent, medieval and alien as it is, it nevertheless stretches out its arms and includes me. It was here that I first learned to breathe freely, to express my thoughts with confidence. Cambridge is my alma mater in truth, and I do tend to cling to her skirts, despite Eddy’s disgust. ‘It’s just a bloody school,’ he would say, as gown-clad academics hurried off to some Formal Hall at Christ’s and confused foreign students practically cycled under his front wheels on Downing Street and King’s Parade, only their lack of speed saving them. ‘A school with pretensions.’
‘Yes and no. It’s a world within the world.’
He would merely sigh impatiently. ‘You should try working in it. Your romantic memories of it would last two minutes.’
I didn’t reply. Mother Cecilia had been so happy when I’d told her I’d got in. The memory still made me smile.
It’s ironic that Eddy should be so cynical, as he is the one that never left. He is still a senior member of his college and we would turn up for Formal Halls together in their vast vaulted dining hall about three times a year. He was desperately angling to be elected a Fellow, though the disaster with Ara wasn’t likely to help his chances.
I spent an hour browsing through the bookshop, poring over covers full of blurb, hearing the books creak as I opened them, smelling fresh ink and cut paper. I forgot about my embarrassment with the store detective. It had been something and nothing, one of the momentary weirdnesses that life is full of.
When the staff at Heffers eventually threw me out at closing time, I had a bulky novel nestled in my bag and a small smile on my face. On the other side of the tiny cobbled street was Trinity College, dark but for the homely glow of the entrance. Porters moved within, sporting their trademark bowler hats, nodding acknowledgement at a lone student hurrying through the gateway into the inner quad. I looked up into the night sky. A few stars poked spikily out of the clear, sharp air. What a bizarre night. I felt disorientated, but it was not unpleasant. In fact, I actually felt carefree . . . as though a great weight had lifted from my shoulders. When I got back to the underground car park beneath the Grand Arcade I practically bounded down the steps.
My car was on the second sub level of the multi-storeyed edifice, and as I approached it I became dishearteningly aware that it had been a stupid place to park. The light was dim, the place was utterly deserted – the other shoppers had all gone home – and I was a long way from help or hope of it.
I gripped my car keys firmly and marched up to the Audi, attempting to look less intimidated than I felt. What a stupid, stupid, prizewinningly stupid place to park . . .
Then I was angry. Why couldn’t I park where I liked? I’d paid, hadn’t I? Was I expected to be under some kind of curfew after dusk, just because I was female?
I was at the car, and quickly opened it, after having a peep into the back seat. There was no one lurking in there. Once in the car, with the reassuring smell of upholstery and air freshener, I felt secure. I’d just have to remember to be more careful next time. I gunned the engine, its roaring alarmingly loud in the echoing concrete surroundings. Time to go home.
I glanced in the rear-view mirror.
The man from the department store was crossing the deserted concrete towards me. I craned around to stare at him.
He saw me looking and smiled at me, a big toothy grin, then waved a friendly hand, as though asking me to wait. His other hand was in his pocket, and his shadow, grotesquely elongated, was approaching the back of my car.
He wanted to tell me something.
I knew, with utter, iron certainty that I was in deadly danger.
I let out the handbrake and raked the gears into reverse. The tiny reflection of the man in my rear-view mirror started to run towards me, the smile dropping a few degrees. I squealed into reverse and he stepped back, mouthing something I didn’t hear but presumed was an obscenity.
Then I revved forward, shooting towards the exit ramp. In my mirror, I could see the man scurrying away, becoming smaller and smaller before vanishing down a stairwell, his coat trailing after him.
The whole incident had lasted perhaps three seconds.
I drew up to the road, my fingers trembling around the wheel. I checked my mirror again. The mirror reflected the car park, empty and harshly lit, framed in concrete. He was gone.
I swerved violently into the road and drove to the police station.
‘So what did they say?’ asked Lily.
The kids were in bed, and her mournful mother had retired upstairs with a low-voiced goodnight.
My hands shook around the mug of tea she’d made me.
‘They just asked me if I knew either of these men. I said no, and they said that unless they’d actually spoken to me, that was it. They said he sounded like a mugger.’
‘So it was definitely two different guys?’
‘Yep. I’d swear to it. This one was . . . more personable, if that makes any sense in the context of a weirdo that follows you into an underground car park. And I . . . I wouldn’t swear to it, but I think he was younger, too.’
Lily folded her arms and sighed furiously, making the little tendril of hair hanging down from the crown of her head blow upwards. I smiled weakly at her from the sofa and shrugged.
‘So you have to be raped or murdered before they can shift themselves to do anything?’
‘That’s it,’ I said, ‘in a nutshell.’ I leaned back into the soft cushions and closed my eyes.
She drummed her fingers on the armrest, regarding me thoughtfully, and as she did the rapid little tattoo she was beating out slowed, moved into something more speculative. ‘Fancy something stronger than tea?’
‘I’ve brought the car with me,’ I muttered dolefully.
‘That’s what taxis are for,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘Red or white?’
She moved off into her kitchen and I rubbed my face with my hand. It was still trembling.
‘But here’s the thing, Margot,’ she called back from the kitchen. ‘Why would anyone follow you?’
I started, a little surprised. She knew all about the business with Bethan Avery, of course. ‘It must be something to do with the letters,’ I said. ‘I can’t imagine why else I’d be so interesting.’
‘And you told the police this?’
‘Well, yes.’
She reap
peared at the kitchen door with a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, which she was uncorking while she talked.
‘Margot, can I ask a question? Without you getting mad?’
Half of her mouth was screwed up in a tight little grimace.
I shrugged, or I might have shivered. ‘Sure.’
‘When was the last time you went to the doctor’s?’
I blinked. ‘About a fortnight ago. I don’t know. What’s that got to do with anything?’ But I saw, with horrible sureness, what she was getting at.
‘Don’t you think you should make another appointment?’
I licked my lips. No, I thought, I don’t.
‘I don’t see how it’s relevant,’ I said, trying to sound calm, measured and reasonable.
She nodded, as though a personal theory of hers was being proved.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘it’s not just me. There’s all sorts of . . . take Martin Forrester for instance, he doesn’t—’
‘I’m not being funny, Margot – really I’m not. It’s just that sometimes . . .’ She sighed, as though considering an unpleasant task. ‘Something can feel very right when you’re in it, and then . . .’ she trailed off, as though searching, ‘But it can turn out that the things driving your interest are not what you thought they were.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said, a little coldly, even though I think I did. ‘There are other people who . . .’ I was about to add, ‘believe me’, but hearing the pining, apologetic slant in the words, I stopped myself.
She sighed.
‘But this Martin Forrester doesn’t know all about you, does he?’
You bitch, I thought, with something like wonder. This, I had not foreseen.
‘He doesn’t have to know about me,’ I said angrily. ‘This isn’t about me.’
‘I don’t know if you realize you’re doing it,’ said Lily, raising a silencing hand, ‘but the fact is that you keep doing the same thing. You start feeling better, feel better enough to stop the pills, and then once you do, things start to fall apart for you.’
‘They’re only sleeping pills . . .’
‘They’re not only sleeping pills. They’re anti-depressants. You were given them to help you sleep, true, and they’re a lower dose, but you’ve talked yourself into believing that they’re simply sleeping pills.’ She bit her lip. ‘You do this a lot, Margot. You minimize. You ignore the obvious and hope that sending your problems to Coventry will somehow make them evaporate.’
‘Maybe my problems would evaporate,’ I said with chilly preciseness, ‘if people would stop reminding me of them whenever I feel I am starting to outgrow them.’
‘That’s not fair.’ She was making an effort to keep her voice even, but the high spots of colour were starting to bloom in her cheeks, and her eyes were narrowing. The wine bottle had stilled in her hands. ‘I am merely suggesting that you have been off your pills for three weeks, and now you are being written letters by dead girls and followed by masked gunmen. You write for an advice column, for fuck’s sake – of course you’re going to get crank letters. It doesn’t mean you have to make it all about you.’
I was speechless, though my mouth opened, moving helplessly.
‘You think I’m making this up?’
Her lips thinned, and inside her head I could see that determination warred with diplomacy.
‘Margot, I’m not saying you are imagining these things, or at least imagining all of them. I am just asking you to consider the possibility that you being off your meds and these things suddenly happening to you might, conceivably, have a correlation.’ She held out her palms, as if to demonstrate she had no more concealed weapons. ‘That’s all.’
But she didn’t need any more concealed weapons. She’d already stuck me, hard enough for blood. I was recoiling, and all I could think was, I need to get out of this house right now.
‘Margot, no, don’t, don’t leave like this—’
I’d already snatched up my bag and pushed past her, through the door and back out into the night; with its freight of sinister and perhaps delusionary predators, its memories and its acid cold.
17
I drove home. My phone rang. I switched it off. I remember almost nothing about the journey – the next thing I recall is being sat at my own kitchen table, with the desk lamp on, wiping the tracks of tears from my face with a furious energy that burned the skin beneath my fingers.
I’m a crazy person.
And so we’re back here again.
I don’t know who I am. I’ve never known, it seems, but the world is full of opinions on the subject. I had a breakdown. Well, one and a half, if we’re heading towards full disclosure. A few people know about it, because it is good to have friends, good to confide, is it not?
But telling people things about yourself is always, always a mistake – like a drug, in a way – the euphoria of communication and trust is always followed up by the regret of paranoia and suspicion. You describe yourself shrieking and being dragged backwards into rooms with gurneys and hypodermic needles – horrible, horrible needles – and there is a part of the other person that will always see you that way.
Things, once known, can never be unknown.
No matter how hard you try, I add to myself, perhaps nonsensically.
I considered the possibility of opening a bottle of wine, but dismissed it.
I leaned back in the chair, stretching out my shoulders. I was shaking with shock, and for a long moment I actually considered going out and buying a pack of cigarettes, before recalling, We had this discussion, Margot, remember? You quit. A big part of being a non-smoker is not smoking.
Yeah, I told myself, I remember. I don’t smoke.
I tried to calm down and think about Lily, painful as it was, and then I realized that while her words smarted and burned me, I wasn’t actually angry with her. Not angry like I had been at that, yes, let’s say it again Margot, bitch Arabella.
I may not have liked what Lily had to say, but she wasn’t trying to hurt me. Which only made it worse, in a way.
I didn’t know what to do. I would apologize to her in the morning, I decided, but before that, I would briefly entertain the notion that there might be something in what she said.
I thought about the letters. I thought about Martin Forrester and that ghastly police psychologist. The letters are real, I told myself. Other people think the letters are real. You are not imagining the letters.
But was I imagining my pursuit?
I made myself think back, to the man in the dark Megane, and the man in the car park who I’d encountered that night, and I had a clean sharp memory, of Mr Megane pulling away from the kerb the instant I did, even though he hadn’t answered a phone, or collected anybody, and once again its strangeness was compelling – his upright posture, his cap and dark glasses.
No, I did not imagine that. I did not imagine Mr Car Park either, but now that I am sat here in my own house, I realize that the man in the car park was a different type of threat. He wasn’t wearing an obvious disguise.
That does not, however, mean he wasn’t following me.
Oh no, there was something here, all right.
I didn’t want wine any more, and certainly not cigarettes. I wanted good black coffee, and lots of it. I stood up, filled the kettle, and the rushing tap was shockingly loud in my silent kitchen. My brain was whirring. I was being shown something, something important, and Lily and my self-doubt were suddenly beside the point.
Bethan Avery was out there, and she was as real as her letters. This, being true, meant something else. It meant that whoever had seized Bethan was somebody who could exact nearly twenty years of silence from a fourteen-year-old girl, a silence so absolute and heavy that it was sacred even now.
The pale net curtain stirred over the kitchen window, motivated by some draught in the house. I frowned. There should be no windows open in here. I peered into the garden. Absolute darkness. It did not mean the garden was empty.
As I did
so, I suddenly understood what was happening.
We had broadcast an appeal to Bethan Avery, Martin Forrester and I, but she was not the only person that had seen it. Whoever had taken Bethan had seen it, too.
She had warned me, after all, in her letters that there was a gang. That this might happen.
Bethan’s kidnapper thought I knew Bethan. And not through anything as impersonal as letters, but that I knew her now, that I’d spoken to her, that I knew where she might be . . .
That was what this shadowy following wanted – the man parked outside the school who’d followed me home, the smiling man in the concrete car park – they wanted me to lead them to Bethan.
The woman herself had eluded them, but it would be easy enough to trace me from my column in the Examiner. All that remained was for them to find Bethan through me and renew her twenty-year silence . . .
And perhaps they could find Bethan through me.
My growing suspicions refused to be silenced, crowding into my thoughts, driving all else out, till it seemed there was nothing left but a kind of screaming behind my skull.
You could have met Bethan Avery in that hostel years ago. You could. And she’s reached out to you now.
Because she knows you.
I covered my mouth with my hands in a sudden thrill of dread.
I had to tell someone! I had to tell them everything, all about Angelique, the hostel, the drugs, that old life I had tried to bury and forget for ever. Furthermore, I had to make them believe me while I did it. This was fast becoming a matter of life or death.
Martin Forrester.
I realized that I wanted to talk to Martin Forrester right now more than anyone else in the world.
I glanced at the kitchen clock. Would he mind me phoning this late? I doubted it, not with what I had to tell him. I could ask him whether we should go to the police. I could talk to another human soul about this, and hear him speak back to me.
I stood up. My shoulders ached and my back was stiff. I must have been sat there for hours.
I walked over to the phone, and picked it up.
Something was wrong. It took me a second or so to realize what it was, as I hunted for the Post-It note containing Martin’s number. The phone was utterly silent – there was no dialling tone. It was dead.
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