‘I . . . I could do with sitting down.’ I thought I was going to faint. I’ve never fainted before.
He was so obviously mortified, I pitied him. ‘I’m so sorry, Margot, I’m used to looking at these kinds of pictures, I forget that other people . . .’
‘No, it’s fine.’ I swallowed, let the mesh chair take my weight. I deliberately turned my eyes away from the gruesome photo of the dead girl, with her misshapen jaw and open, staring, bloodshot eye. ‘I’m fine.’
He peered at me, and there was concern, but also something else – that speculative tilt to his head, as though I was being tested for something. ‘If you’re sure.’
‘Yes. Go on.’
‘Well, Greta, who you met in London recently . . .’
I suspect my face spoke volumes.
‘Well, she thinks Sarah and then Becky, the next victim, made him angry somehow, so their remains are treated far less respectfully – they’re literally dumped at the side of the road near rubbish bins – and they die more violently. Sarah was pregnant when she was abducted – we think, perhaps, that this would have made him feel she was promiscuous and unworthy, and Becky, from all accounts, was a notorious firebrand. She would have fought him all the way down.’ He twitched his head sideways. ‘You may not have had much time for her, and with good reason, but Greta worked up a profile on our man and it’s very convincing if you are an aficionado of those sorts of things.’
‘Since I’m not, I’ll take your word for it.’ Believe it or not, I didn’t say this to be snippy. I don’t even like watching this sort of thing on the TV. I find it too disquieting.
He acknowledged this with a tiny nod and a twist of his mouth. ‘Regardless, Greta suspects he is someone that would appear very affectionate to his victims initially. He would believe he’s in a romantic relationship with them.’
I treated him to an incredulous raise of my eyebrow. ‘So he seduces them into coming with him?’
‘No, absolutely not. Or, rather, not ultimately. What happens, we think, is that he befriends these girls somehow, or passes himself off as something he is not, and through doing that he is able to get them to accompany him somewhere he can abduct them. Of the girls that are found, every single one of them has injuries that are consistent with some kind of forcible imprisonment, forcible assault – broken nails, restraint marks on the wrists and ankles, malnutrition. However crazy he is, he must know that all things considered, they don’t want to be with him. And the injuries we find are always as old as the girl’s disappearance – the incarceration happens straight away. Greta thinks the incarceration is the whole point. It’s all about control. He gets to have a person in his power that he can dominate totally, someone who is not in a position to reject or abandon him.’
I let out a disgusted sigh.
‘I know,’ he answered. ‘He’d also, however, have very poor anger management and next to no ability to brook any kind of defiance or resistance from them. There’s a reason he chooses girls so young.’
‘Heaven forefend,’ I said, in bitter irony, ‘my rape victim dared to be cheeky with me.’
‘He’s a psychopath, Margot. He’s incapable of seeing any point of view but his own. He thinks this is a romance, and so it is, to him. But the worst part is that the violence escalates every time he imprisons a girl, and with each girl it takes less time for him to become disillusioned with them.’ He sighed. ‘That’s bad news for Katie: she’ll be coming to her cut-off point.’
I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to this. My heart hammered against my ribs.
And beneath it all, my fury coiled and rustled, like a fanged serpent. How dare you, whoever you are. How dare you.
‘I won’t labour this; though there have been no more bodies, we think there were two others between Becky and Katie – Hannah Murphy went missing after a youth club disco in 2011, and Chloe Firth in 2013. No evidence, but they haven’t been heard from since and they fit the victim profile – dark-haired white girls, both from East Anglia.’ He shrugged. ‘And then, Katie Browne. Katie from Cambridge, where it all started.’ He rubbed his chin, regarded the girls on the board. ‘Started with Bethan Avery.’
‘Who is writing letters now,’ I said. I felt exhausted. The heating was now far too high. I let his coat drop off my shoulders and on to the chair back.
‘Yes.’ He came and sat down opposite me, on an old trunk pushed up against his office window. Next to us, his wall and its web of misery sprawled away on either side. ‘Bethan Avery, who is writing letters now. But why now, after all these years?’
I felt very sad all of a sudden. ‘You think that she’s an accomplice, don’t you? That’s what this all must mean.’ I let my gaze stray up the morass of photographs, the notes, the maps. I was close to tears; it was as though Bethan had betrayed me. ‘She’s been helping him in some ghastly way, and twenty years in she’s had an attack of conscience. She writes as a child to garner sympathy, perhaps, but can’t commit to finally giving him up.’
Because really, it was the only thing that made sense. I just hadn’t wanted to admit it. There was no way, in the situation that she described herself being trapped in, she could post letters to a newspaper. This could only mean one of two things. Either her captor was in on it, or she was lying about the situation.
‘No,’ said Martin briskly. His gaze was very direct, unnervingly so. ‘Nobody thinks she’s an accomplice.’
‘Then what?’ I growled wearily, rubbing my temples. One of my migraines was lurking around the back of my head, considering whether to strike or not.
‘Greta and I think,’ and he seemed to choose his words very carefully, ‘that in a very fundamental sense, she is exactly who she says she is. She is a frightened girl who lived through a terrible ordeal and has never recovered.’
‘Fine,’ I snarled. ‘But why can’t she just say what happened to her so we can catch the bastard?’
‘Whoa, calm down,’ said Martin, putting a hand on my trembling arm.
‘I’m sorry.’ I bit my lip. ‘But it’s such a fucking huge . . . mess, Martin. I didn’t think helping this girl out would have such a massive effect on my life. I thought I’d tell the police about the letter and someone would sort it out, and now everything I have is in jeopardy, it’s all in free-fall. My house is in pieces – my house, which I love – I was nearly killed, and my employer’s going to find out about my past – Jesus, if they haven’t already.’
‘No, not at all,’ he said, then winced. ‘Well, maybe.’
I threw myself back in the chair with a horrified sigh, and covered my eyes with my hands.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I seemed to be saying it a lot lately. ‘I must sound like a perfectly selfish creature to you.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘you really don’t. I don’t think for a moment that when this started you imagined the consequences would escalate as quickly as they have.’
I uncovered my eyes and let my head flop back against the chair. ‘I just can’t see my way through to the end, now, not at all. It’s a labyrinth.’
‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘But the thing about labyrinths is that you’re always at your most lost just before you get to the centre.’
In the quiet, I could hear a clock ticking, gently, somewhere in the house, and as always there was the background whisper of the wind; and the fine, lost strands of the croaking crows.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked. His gaze was not on me any more, it was on the map on the wall. He had a calculating squint.
‘One thing hasn’t changed,’ he said, as though I had not spoken. ‘He’s keeping them all in the same place, wherever that is.’
‘But where would that be?’
‘Well, Bethan Avery was the first – it will be near her. It’s a cellar or basement, certainly the walls are stone and there are particular kinds of mould found on the girls’ bodies that only exist in cold, humid conditions. They’ve nearly all got some kind of lung infection in autopsy, depending on
how long they’ve been down there. O’Neill thinks that after the initial abduction in winter the killer switched to summer for that very reason.’
‘But Katie went missing in October.’
‘Yes. And Katie wasn’t known to social services either, which makes her a little different. Something has changed. Maybe his supply dried up somehow. Or he had a brush with the law, or a conviction of some sort recently, which means he doesn’t have the same access to girls. Cambridgeshire Constabulary and MHAT have been running a mile a minute to analyse all the data we’ve got. There are a few good leads in there, too. And believe it or not, the reconstruction did turn up some interesting nuggets from the general public via the hotline number – the one they’re most excited about is an Irish hitchhiker.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah. She says she encountered someone very like our man outside a service station on the A12 near Ipswich in 2006. He offered her a lift.’
I stared at him. As far as I’d known, the reconstruction had been a bust.
‘A hitchhiker?’
Martin nodded. ‘Yes. She accepted, but as he opened the car door, there was something about him she didn’t like, so at the last minute she declined his kind assistance and he went for her, tried to drag her into his car. She saw the reconstruction in Belfast, of all places, and gave the hotline a call.’ Martin rubbed his head. ‘She describes him as very friendly at first, as he talked her out of the service station and over to his car door, but then he changed to “absolutely raging crazy angry” once he realized she was going back into the service station and he was going to lose her. She’d never seen anyone react like that before, and out of nowhere, from the second she turned him down. It fits our profile of him – he’ll be able to hold it together to deceive someone for a short while, but no longer than that.’
‘This girl didn’t go to the police?’
He shrugged. ‘She meant to report it, but never got around to it. She was nervous talking about it on the telephone ten years after it happened, according to O’Neill. She was only fifteen at the time.’
‘He wouldn’t need special access of the kind you’re talking about if he’s grabbing hitchhikers,’ I mused.
‘No, but we think he just liked the look of Miss Belfast, so acted on impulse. From what we can tell about her, she would have been exactly his type.’
I spared a glance at the wall. ‘So, clearly, the rest of the time, he’s choosing them somehow. They’re mainly vulnerable girls in the social services system, and they share a certain physical type. Somehow he has access to a pool of these kinds of girls . . .’
‘Absolutely.’
‘So, a social worker perhaps, or a policeman.’
‘No. The police looked into this, but there is nobody that had official contact with all the girls during the time period. It’s far more likely he’s an ancillary worker who moves around and works on short contracts, possibly a driver, because the girls are in different council catchment areas. He almost certainly has more than one identity.’
‘It doesn’t necessarily follow that he’s a driver,’ I said. ‘He could be a locum of some sort.’
‘He could, but probably isn’t,’ replied Martin, with the sure conviction of someone who has had this conversation before. ‘Greta and I think he’s bright but not educated past secondary school. He’ll be fundamentally incapable of taking any kind of orders, or tolerating criticism, so he probably works alone and for himself, possibly as a taxi or bus driver, or in catering, or as a janitor. Or maybe he just volunteers for a charity. Any of those could expose him to these girls.’
I shivered, imagining it. You never know who is in the background, watching you as you go through your daily life. ‘Surely people are vetted if they’re going to be working with vulnerable children?’
‘They are now, yes – this is a post-Soham world – but they weren’t always.’ He let his head rest forward. ‘And remember, vetting only works if you’ve been caught before, or your offences are still on file.’
I managed a weak chuckle. ‘That I can vouch for.’
We exchanged wan smiles.
‘So you’ve found Bethan Avery?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes,’ he said, and he didn’t look away. ‘I think so, most definitely. Margot, I’ve got something to tell you. It may bother you.’
I shivered in expectant silence. Then I said, ‘Go on.’
21
This was impossible.
This was madness, true madness, something my adolescent peccadilloes merely hinted at. I sat very still in his ergonomic office chair while Martin Forrester attempted to reason with me.
‘Margot, don’t you see? It explains everything.’
He might have been speaking in a foreign language. He was telling me that once I understood it all, I would feel better than I’d ever felt. It explained all the things that had ever troubled me.
‘You’re mad,’ I said. I could think of nothing else to say. I was stuck out here in the middle of nowhere with a crazy person.
He explained it again, while I sat there, incapable of speech or movement, as though I was made wholly of wood. The sensation of being a spring wound down had never been stronger, and I was going to explode.
‘All right,’ said Martin. ‘It does sound mad. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.’ He handed me the piece of paper, the piece of paper with ‘Farrell’s Distribution’ on the letterhead.
I took the paper and read it again.
Then I read it once more, observing every character, every loop, every nuance.
‘Margot,’ said Martin, ‘speak to me.’
He suddenly appeared genuinely frightened for me. I suspected that for some reason I struck that indefinable chord in him. I don’t know why. We never know why.
All I knew was that after thirty-five years of being alive, thirty-five years of a varied and, I now realized, extensive existence, I had known him for two weeks and he was all I had in the whole wide world.
But that wasn’t any help now.
‘So,’ I said to him, ‘when did you work all this out?’ I must have sounded cold and unfriendly. That’s how I felt.
He sighed, then gave me a long look. ‘I suspected it from the first moment I Googled your picture on the school website.’ His head turned back towards the wall, with its freight of woe. ‘I wasn’t lying when I said I live with these pictures all day. Your nose was badly broken at some point and healed without being reset, and it changed your appearance, but the rest . . .’ He gave me a little smile, and a shrug. ‘I wasn’t that surprised when the analysis on the handwriting came back.’
I examined the piece of paper again without speaking.
‘When did I write this?’ I asked, not looking up from it.
‘You were writing it when they came to pick you up at that place, that warehouse,’ he said softly. ‘You were delirious . . . you don’t remember. I found it in your jacket pocket when I put you to bed . . .’ He tailed off.
I stared at the cold sunshine beyond the window. It was hard to see. My eyes were blurred. I managed a vague, cynical smile at Martin. Something was ticking urgently and precisely in my head, like a bomb. I handed him back the piece of paper, so I didn’t have to see the horror of it again.
The horror. I could not even deny it.
I shut my eyes.
It wasn’t Martin that was crazy, it was me.
It’s always been me.
The paper was in front of me again behind my closed lids, the one I’d written on in my fevered delirium, while my shoulder ached and the world warped and I waited for rescue, but I’d forgotten that. I’d forgotten Margot, I was writing the fourth letter to Dear Amy, in the childish, fussy script I knew so very well.
The words stood out like knives.
Dear Amy,
I am so frightened now, so very frightened and so sick, and I know he means to kill me very soon and there is nothing I can do. I know that no one knows where I am and that no one will rescue me,
and I am so scared and I don’t know what to do. Please help me,
Love,
Bethan Avery
Then the ticking in my head stopped, and the bomb went off.
‘Fine,’ I snapped, leaping to my feet, my hands balling into fists. I no longer felt the pain in my shoulder. ‘Fine. I’m a head case. I’ve wasted everybody’s time pretending to be Bethan Avery.’ I could hardly breathe with terror, with shame, and also with pure rage – the rage of Furies, the rage I can never quite let go of. ‘Was it really necessary to bring me all this way? To humiliate me like this? I had no idea I was writing these things, that I was this . . . this disturbed. This wasn’t just some shitty little plot for attention, you know. I genuinely thought . . .’
‘But you’re not pretending to be Bethan Avery.’ He was unmoved by my anger, his hands resting on his knees as he stared up at me. ‘That’s the whole point. You are Bethan Avery.’ His mouth twisted into a half smile, but his eyes were sympathetic. ‘That’s who you’ve always been. And your suicide attempts and your breakdowns and your pills are all down to one thing: you are pretending to be Margot Lewis.’
My mouth worked, soundlessly.
‘Stop this,’ I said, and the mortified tears sprung, unheeded, and gushed down my face, as if they were something utterly separate from me, entirely outside of my control. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry I led you on like this. But there’s no way in the world that I’m her. That’s just insanity.’
He stared at me for a long moment.
‘All right,’ he said briskly. ‘Come with me.’
He was standing now, and steering me towards the door. ‘Do you have everything in your bag?’
‘Um, yes, yes I do . . .’
I was being led out of the house, through the door, into the bright, brittle sunshine. His Range Rover was parked outside, a thin film of fallen leaves lying over the bonnet and roof. ‘Get in the car.’
‘What?’
‘Fine, you’re not Bethan Avery. Get in the car.’
‘But . . .’
‘I have something to show you.’
Dear Amy Page 20