There was a pause. She could tell I was lying about the phone, I was sure, and she was hurt. Perhaps she thought we were still fighting.
‘And,’ I sighed, trying to put it into words, ‘I just wanted to say that I was sorry about last night.’
She didn’t reply for a minute. ‘But you were right,’ she said. ‘You were attacked . . . the police said . . .’
‘I know, I know – what I mean is, I’m sorry I stormed out like that. We’re good friends and we should have been able to talk about it, and if I had, well, maybe last night wouldn’t have happened.’ I rubbed my eye. ‘You know, you’ve been a good mate, and before . . . well, before things kick off properly, I just wanted you to know that.’
‘Margot, what are you talking about?’ Her voice was still, quiet. I had alarmed her.
‘I can’t say now. When I get back I’ll tell you everything.’
‘Are you in some kind of trouble?’
‘Yeah, maybe. But not as much trouble as some. I’ve got to go, Lils. Bye.’
I hit the button to end the call.
‘Recognize this?’
‘No.’
‘You mean you would drive miles and go to London and undertake all of this trouble and danger, but you were never tempted to visit the neighbourhood where it happened, even though it was only ten minutes away in the car?’
‘Apparently not,’ I said coldly.
He opened his mouth, about to take me to task, then stopped, his jaw clicking shut. There was something in him then, a glint of pity.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘I’m sorry, Margot. I keep forgetting. Of course you wouldn’t come here. You’re always running away from all this. You’re the Red Queen from “Through the Looking Glass”. You have to run with all your might, just to stand still.’
I didn’t know how to reply to this, so I said nothing.
We were west of Cambridge, further west than the sumptuous gardens and greens of Barton, with its multi-million-pound houses. This was a poor, lonely little pocket of council housing, forested in regular rows of planted trees, a desert island before the Fens begin again, spreading flat and green-grey as an ocean under a massive gunmetal sky, which was ramping up its threat of unseasonal snow.
Beneath these clouds the village itself huddled unprepossessingly, as though cold in a cheap coat too thin for the weather. There was a drab single-storey prefab community centre, a GP’s office, a late-night Co-Op whose outer bin was filled with empty bottles and crisp packets. The streets and drives wound in around themselves in mathematically correct curves, giving the impression the place had grown organically rather than been dreamed up whole by a council architect.
Greta had not called back yet.
The buildings themselves were mostly maisonettes – flats pretending to be houses, stacked in long terraces and made of pale brick and brown-painted timber. Brass numbers adorned some of the glass doors, but many had been replaced, or fallen off, leaving just the shadow numerals behind.
‘So, this is her street, is it?’
I was starting to get angry again. After my failure to recognize Flora Bellamy, I was now about to fail to recognize yet another putative childhood home. This was happening because this was not my childhood home. This Bethan Avery stuff was madness. Yes, writing the letters was clearly wrong, and likely to ruin me, even though I had no idea I was doing it. And Martin was no doubt on to something when he identified my personal blindness as being borne of a personal darkness. But this was just wasting time. More to the point, it was humiliating me.
I bit my lip.
I had promised him a leap of faith.
‘Yes,’ he said, determined to remain blithe and neutral. He pointed to a house on the corner, with a scrawny garden. ‘You lived there.’
‘Did I now?’
‘Yes,’ he said, unmoved by my obvious, restless anger. ‘You did.’
I had promised.
‘Do you want to get nearer?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Margot . . .’
‘Fine, let’s do it.’ I stalked off towards the house, with the rolling, determined gait of someone about to put a Molotov cocktail through the bay window at the front. What the hell was the matter with me? I’d agreed to this. I . . .
‘I’m not trying to be a bitch, you know,’ I told him.
‘I know.’
‘I’m . . . I’m frightened.’
‘I know.’
‘I mean, if it’s true, it turns out that everything I have told people about myself, everything I have told myself about myself, is a lie.’ I thought about this for a moment longer. ‘In fact, even if it isn’t true, it’s all lies anyway, isn’t it?’
He didn’t reply, but waited for me to speak as we mounted the pavement and paused before the shrivelled lawn.
‘I have no idea who I am any more.’
‘I know.’
‘It’s not a state of mind that encourages relaxed positivity.’
‘I can see how that would be.’
We stood there, side-by-side, like patient ghosts. There was no movement from within the house.
‘Do you want to try and get in?’ I asked.
‘What?’ He looked shocked.
‘I don’t mean break in. I meant knock, ask to look around. Perhaps it will help. If we’re going to do this . . .’
‘They won’t let us. When I started researching the case I called by and was given my marching orders. I think the same people live there.’
I frowned. ‘What people?’
‘The Gallaghers, they were called. They thought I was a ghoul. Fat angry man, skinny angry wife, three angry kids – mind you, the kids are probably old enough now for their own houses. They got this place after Peggy, Bethan’s grandmother, was killed here – well, attacked here. She died in hospital. Can’t blame the new family really. They had all sorts calling on them in the early days. Everyone wants to see the murder house.’
‘Peggy,’ I said, as though trying out the name. Nothing answers me from within.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s walk to the top of the road and back. At least we’ll get a chance to stretch our legs.’
I nodded. In silence we ambled up the winding street to the nearby sounds of traffic.
‘Are you cold?’ he asked me.
I shook my head.
‘You’re shivering.’
He was right, I was. ‘It won’t kill me.’
We reached the junction, and the pair of us gazed disconsolately around ourselves. I was tired, so I perched my bottom on the low road sign and crossed my legs.
When I glanced up, Martin had an odd expression on his face.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Do you often do that?’
‘Do what?’
‘Sit on a sign like that.’
I opened my mouth, closed it. Because I didn’t. It’s something kids do when they hang around after school.
‘When was the last time you did that?’ he asked me.
I didn’t know. And now I was self-conscious, confused. I could trust none of my feelings or memories.
But I had promised him a leap of faith.
I tried to recall when I had done this in the past and realized that I couldn’t. In fact, I now felt faintly ridiculous. At my age, it’s the sort of thing you would do if you were walking home drunk and needed a little rest.
Indeed, as I sat there, I could see a balding man in a dark blue car on the main road slowing down to stare at me. I glared back in challenge and he instantly sped off.
The edge of the sign was damp and probably crawling with mites, the old wood behind the plastic facing decaying and likely to leave dark stains on my trousers. If one of the kids from school were to see me, I would be an object of derision.
And yet . . .
And yet . . .
It felt right.
‘What are you thinking?’
I was thinking that the ancient Greeks believed madness
was sent to a person by the gods. Madness leads to prophecy. To be sane is merely human, says Plato in his ‘Phaedrus’, but to be mad is to be touched by the divine.
Martin had been wrong. He should be interested in Greek philosophers.
I will stop second-guessing myself. I will let my madness lead me.
‘I’ve been here before,’ I said.
‘You’re sure?’
I nodded, rose to my feet. ‘Yes. Very.’
Martin’s phone rang suddenly.
24
Chris can’t breathe.
He can’t breathe and he can’t think, and as he tears along the little country lane to the Grove he nearly hits an oncoming van, whose young driver honks furiously at him, his tattooed neck leaning out of the window to scream at him. The accompanying words, however, are ripped away by the wind.
On any other day, Chris would have turned around, followed him, bellowed his own insults, tailgated him – nobody treats me that way, no fucker! – but right now it’s like something that happened to somebody else, in a foreign country.
And besides, the wench is dead.
Where had he heard that before?
Well, it didn’t matter where he had heard it before, because the wench was not dead, despite his best efforts last night. She was still very much alive, thanks very fucking much, and walking around – those vast dark eyes; that abundant hair he’d seized in his fist so many times, now cut short around her shoulders; that full, cheeky fucking mouth.
Just sat there like the little girl she’d been, talking to some twat in a leather jacket. As if she knew he’d be passing. As if she knew . . .
Now calm down, Chris my old mate. If she is here to get you, then the place would be swarming with coppers by now, wouldn’t it? She’d have straight up handed them the cellar years ago, and Katie, and you’d be in the cells waiting to go to prison for practically fucking forever. She could have sent them round this morning.
But none of that’s happened.
She was supposed to have died. I thought she had died. Oh god, why isn’t she dead.
No. Stop panicking.
He massages his face with his shaking hand. Next to him, on the front seat, is the bag with Katie’s new nightgown in it. Poor Katie. She’s been such a good girl. Better than that insolent whore Bethan fucking Avery ever was.
And yet, there was always something about Bethan. Bee. The first one.
She’s come back.
His head rolls back hard against the driver’s seat.
‘What the fuck does she want?!’ he bellows at the roof of the car.
Chris never forgot the first day he met Bethan.
He hadn’t been living at the house then – nobody lived there – it was kept pristine waiting for whenever some scion of the owner’s family wanted to visit. There was a woman from Cherry Hinton that came in with her daughter to clean once a week, and they would chatter to each other in some alienating, nonsensical Eastern European language. Sometimes, in their sly glances and incomprehensible tittering, he caught the signage of their contempt.
He lived in the village full-time then, a mere half hour’s walk from the house. And walk he did, rain or shine, through the narrow streets and drowsy houses with their smattering of trees, until he reached the gravelled track to the Grove. The trees stopped there, and he joined the Fens – flat, bleak, washed with rain. In ditches on either side of the raised drive secret weeds grew, and overhead every so often flew fat black crows, or the large, streamlined shapes of swans. The wind howled here, knowing no impediment, all the way in from the North Sea. Its icy ruffling felt like a kiss against his face.
The house belonged to the Fen. Years ago the family that owned the Grove had farmed these lands, but no more. Now their patrimony was the house and the walled garden and the keeper’s cottage in amongst the outbuildings. What would have been an undulating landscape of walks was now under the industrial plough. The house was empty most of the time, an afterthought in the life of the family. It existed liminally, the vanishing relic of a lost way of life.
Chris could sympathize. He was also part of a lost world, where men like him had no place.
In his dusty backpack he carried his usual lunch – a cheddar cheese sandwich on thin sliced white bread, a Penguin bar and a bag of prawn cocktail crisps. It was what he had eaten for lunch every day, more or less, for the last fifteen years.
The backpack also contained two unopened letters, thrust into its bottom, to be read later. One was a thin envelope from the Avon and Bristol Police Force, and its smallness and slightness already told him to expect bad news. Another rejection.
The other was A4-sized, made of stout brown paper, and about a quarter of an inch thick. His hands had shaken slightly as he’d packed it. It was risky to take it out of the house, even though the odds were good that he wouldn’t see another soul today. That envelope could get him into a lot of trouble, should it fall into the wrong hands.
Its weight against his back made him sigh. It might not be strictly proper, but a man needed his pleasures. Chris did not have access to this new thing, the Internet, and what he heard of it did not fill him with confidence, but the magazines and newsletters of his earlier years were getting harder and harder to get hold of, and consequently the risk involved in getting them was growing. More and more of them were shutting down production, or featuring muck-brown foreign girls instead of the decent English ones he liked, or using older tarts to play young girls. None of it would do. English roses, that was what he wanted, barely more than budding. A man couldn’t help what he liked, after all.
‘Come on, Bee, we’ve got to get to school. We can look for it later.’
‘I know, I know, just give us a sec.’
He had been so lost in his reveries, thinking about what might be in that brown envelope, waiting for him, that he had utterly missed the real thing.
Two girls stood in the ditch on the side of the road; they’d been hidden from him by a bend in the track. One was short and plump and mousy blonde, though the way her school skirt skimmed over her generous bum was not without interest as she bent to inspect something in the thin ditch water. Had she been alone, he might have approached her, engaged her in conversation, manoeuvred himself into accidentally-on-purpose touching her through the taut grey serge, letting his fingers flicker over her. That was the trick, leaving them so they weren’t sure if it had been an accident or not.
And out here, on her own, what could she have done about it? Or said about it afterwards, to others?
Had she not been so near to the village, depending on her reaction, he might have ventured more.
But she was not alone. The other girl stood, her arms folded disconsolately around herself, her face hidden by her overhanging dark hair. She was tall, but not too tall, and slender, but not too slender, and her stooped posture and neglected unhappiness, something he’d taught himself to recognize, shone out like a dark sun.
He could feel something within him start to pulse, urgently, and when she raised her face and he saw her sad dark eyes, her full mouth, he could hardly breathe.
‘Can I help you?’ he asked suddenly, treating them to his most disarming grin, the one he practised in his mirror at home for exactly this kind of occasion.
The dark girl, Bee, shrugged silently, but the little blonde one offered him a sunny smile, full of repulsive pert confidence. He immediately realized that touching her would have been a bad idea, and swallowed down a little spurt of dislike.
‘It’s all right. Bee’s lost a necklace. A little silver cross. We was walking back this way last night and it must have broke.’
‘It was my mum’s,’ said the dark girl, this Bee. Her voice was low and sweet, and full of unspoken appeal. Those heavy brown eyes were upon him. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen it, Mister?’
‘No, no,’ he rapped out quickly, trying to control his hammering heart, his shortening breath. Her lips were a perfect deep rose. ‘But why do you think it’s in
this ditch? Surely you’d be better looking on the road.’
‘We thought we saw a kingfisher down here,’ said the blonde girl. ‘But it weren’t.’
He didn’t even look at her.
‘Yeah,’ said Bee. ‘I wanted to show Nat. She’s never seen one.’
‘And it was definitely around here, then?’
They nodded, though the dark girl did so a little hesitantly, as though not sure. The corners of her eyes were crinkled a little, the whites red with distress. How old was she? Fourteen, fifteen? He longed to slide his arms around her, to comfort her, to pull her close. He drank in the sight of her, trying to think of something to say, something that might detain her.
‘A little silver cross, you say?’
‘C’mon Bee,’ said the blonde girl quickly, her voice strained, flat, oddly neutral. ‘We’ll be late for school. We can come back later.’
He glanced at her, impatiently, and realized his error – her suspicion was writ large on her face, before being quickly hidden. She didn’t know what she suspected yet – she was a little too young – but she had picked up on his eagerness, his interest in her friend, and realized it was not quite . . . normal.
He cursed himself for a fool.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Bee, reluctant to leave and seemingly oblivious to her friend’s alarm. ‘We should go.’
It would be a mistake to try and keep them now; it would only compound his bungling.
‘Very true,’ he said, affecting the tones of a concerned adult, the-fun-and-games-are-over-now type. ‘You can’t be late for school, girls. But what should I do if I see your necklace?’
He grinned at the object of his desire, waiting for the gift of her address, her phone number.
The blonde girl’s gaze narrowed at him.
‘You could leave it at our school, St John’s. It’s only in the village.’ She took the dark girl’s arm, pulling her after her, towards the lane, leaving him behind in the ditch.
‘Leave it for Bethan Avery.’ She tugged. ‘C’mon, Bee. We’re late.’
Dear Amy Page 23