I never watch horror movies. Well, hardly ever. The Wikipedia article said that one of the suspects in the Amanda Rouane missing persons case had been walking his dogs in the vicinity of a local beauty spot called Hatchmere Lake. If it was Hatchmere Lake in the photograph, there certainly wasn’t anything beautiful about it. Not that you could see from the photo, anyway.
Why would Amanda have written about such a place in her diary?
Met someone for a shag there, most likely. Could it have been the wrong person, someone who meant her harm?
It was hardly an original concept, not exactly Inspector Morse. I put the letter and the photo back in the envelope and resolved to put the lot in the post to Selena the following day. It was her business, not mine.
I wondered if Raymond Rouane was still alive. He wasn’t in the telephone directory, but who was to say he was still in Manchester. People do get away from here, sometimes. I glanced again at the return address on the back of the envelope. Raymond Rouane had been writing to Selena from a mental hospital. Nothing in any of the articles I’d read said anything about him being a doctor, or a nurse, even a ward orderly or kitchen staff. I could only assume he’d been a patient.
That explains it then, I can hear you saying. I have to tell you I don’t agree. There are people in mental hospitals who talk more sense than all the staff put together, more sense than anyone on the outside, either. Take it from one who knows.
The question was: if I rang her up, would she think I was crazy?
I was thinking about Selena, and of course she would. What would you think if someone telephoned you and said they’d been looking you up online, and by the way, they had an item of post for you which they just happened to have opened and read?
I knew that calling her was impossible, but I had to do something. It seemed that overnight I had become one of those freaks: people who develop a fixation with someone they’ve read about in the newspapers or seen on TV. I felt proprietorial about Selena’s story, her situation, her relationship with her father (be he alive or be he dead). I knew already that her sister was still missing – the Wikipedia article would have been updated if Amanda had been found – but I wanted to know how Selena had been coping, how she was now.
And we really did share a connection, through the letter, and because I was living in her flat. Or what used to be her flat – you know what I mean.
I didn’t phone her up, don’t worry. I wrote her a note instead:
Dear Selena,
This letter was accidentally forwarded to my address in Chorlton. It looked important, so I took the liberty of finding out your current address from the online directory. I hope this finds you well. I have been wondering if you might be the same Selena Rouane whose sister went missing in the 1990s. I remember the case well, because your sister and I were almost exactly the same age.
With best wishes,
Aileen McConahey
This was about the tenth version of the note I’d written and I’d given up trying to second guess how deranged it sounded. I was past caring, or at least that’s what I tried to tell myself. I stuck a new address label on to a new A5 envelope then slipped the letter inside, together with my note. I’d included both my landline and my mobile numbers as well as my email address. I assumed she’d remember the street address. I stuck down the flap with extra Sellotape then posted it in the pillar box just down from the bus stop. This took a little longer than it sounds – I don’t move at the speed of light, even on a good day – but my mission was accomplished. I leaned on the post box to catch my breath, wondering what my chances were of being able to fish the letter out again, with a piece of bamboo cane, for example, or a length of Matchbox car track (remember that?) which would at least be more flexible. I decided they were pretty remote. Not to mention that trying to inveigle a letter out of a post box with Matchbox car track would almost definitely be classed as an illegal act. Tampering with the Queen’s mail, it’s called. Even if it’s your own letter you’re trying to retrieve, fishing things out of post boxes is still a no-no.
* * *
I didn’t really expect to hear from Selena, but I couldn’t leave the subject alone, either. Two days after sending my note, I took the bus into town and went to the Manchester Media Archive. I reckoned on being there an hour, perhaps less. I ended up staying most of the day. They had a new facility installed, whereby you could transfer articles in the microfiche archive straight to a ‘print’ screen, which was a vast improvement over the old photocopy system and saved me no end of time and trouble. At no point during the exercise did I ask myself what I thought I was doing. My actions seemed to have passed beyond the realms of the rational and into compulsion.
There were photos, so many photos. Here at last was Amanda Rouane as I suspected she had really looked at the time: a straight-waisted, long-faced, rather awkward young woman an inch too tall for her own comfort. Would I have been friends with her at school? Probably not, probably I’d have recognised a fellow freak and avoided her accordingly.
Photographs of Selena – there were plenty of those, too – showed her as a prettier but less interesting-looking version of her sister, a prime example of that elusive creature, the normal teenage girl. That was how she seemed in the photos, anyway. I suspect the loss of Amanda and whatever came after soon changed all that.
Even in its inconclusiveness, the Wikipedia article had been about as bald a statement of finality as you could wish for: this is all we know, this is all we’re ever going to know. Following the events of that summer through the newspapers day by day gave them the texture and the tempo of a story not yet completed. I couldn’t help focussing particularly on the articles about Allison Gifford, the twenty-nine-year-old English teacher at Amanda’s sixth form college who was suspended from her job on account of an ‘intimate liaison’ she was supposed to have had with Amanda three months prior to her disappearance. In their coverage of the second suspect, Brendan Conway, the press were less avidly prurient but there was decidedly more in the way of conventional witch-hunting. Conway was a social security claimant with a learning disability and a skin disorder. He adored his dogs though, the two Irish wolfhounds he took care to exercise every day, and that gained him brownie points with the tabloids in the end, once it was established that he hadn’t abducted Amanda and that he wasn’t even a common-or-garden pervert either, just a poor idiot with a bad rash who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And everywhere, everywhere in the newspaper photographs, Hatchmere Lake, that anonymous expanse of greyish water I had pored over in the blurred snapshot, reproduced for me here on a larger scale and in focus, with an adornment of police tape, in colour, in double-page spreads three days running in the Warrington Guardian, with police dogs and without police dogs, above all and most incongruously with a blue July sky unravelled above it like a swathe of coloured cellophane. Amanda had apparently been sighted close to Hatchmere Lake once, twice, possibly three times on the day of her disappearance, hence the arrest of the dog-walker Brendan Conway as a suspect, hence the search of the perimeter, the dragging of the lake itself (twice), the carnival array of red-and-yellow ‘Keep Out’ notices.
Nothing was found, though. Nothing that related to Amanda, anyway. Six weeks from the date of Amanda’s disappearance, the newspaper coverage had dropped away almost to nothing.
There was no mention, anywhere that I could find, of Amanda’s diary.
* * *
I found myself thinking that I could, if I wanted to, take a taxi out to Lymm and walk along the high street, which was where the last definitive sighting of Amanda Rouane had taken place. (Leanne Beetham, who worked at the Spar shop in Lymm and who had been serving behind the counter that Saturday afternoon, confirmed that Amanda had been into the shop at around two-thirty, when she purchased a can of Coke and a Twix bar.) I could even walk past her house if I wanted to. Lymm was not a large place, and by any normal standards it was not so far from the high street to what had
once been the Rouane family home on Sandy Lane. But so far as I was concerned, we might as well have been talking about the distance from the Earth to the Moon. I would probably make it along the high street and back (on a good day) but getting from there to Sandy Lane would be an agony. I could always instruct the taxi to do a circuit, but how would I explain my movements? I couldn’t face the look in the driver’s eyes.
I made the trip on Street View instead. I could see at once that there had been changes. The Spar wasn’t there, for a start. Amanda probably wouldn’t recognise the place. The houses on Sandy Lane were a mix of Georgian and Victorian cottages with newer builds. The house that used to be the Rouanes’ is a 1970s semi with an integral garage, nondescript but clean-looking; what you’d expect from the newspaper coverage, really.
There’s something so dispiriting about houses like that. I bet Amanda hated it.
I think about her, and it’s as if we’re circling each other, casting each other sidelong looks. Can I trust you? When the chips are down, can I trust you with my story? Or are you just the same as everyone else?
I think about the dead letter, which is really a long-line communication between Amanda and me. Amanda hugs her father in 1994. Raymond Rouane picks up a pen in 1997, leaning the hand that touched his daughter’s hair upon the paper as he writes his note. I touch the ink, the paper, the hand, Amanda. A bridge that spans a distance of twenty years.
This is the point in the story where you’d expect me to start talking about being haunted, about being pursued by Amanda’s ghost, about losing the (already precarious) balance of my mind. But you can’t be haunted by someone who’s still alive. And Amanda is still alive, I can sense it.
* * *
“Is that Aileen?” said Selena. I knew it was Selena without her having to say. Her voice at the end of the phone: hesitant, embarrassed-sounding, a soft northern accent.
“Speaking,” I said. I felt hot, and a little breathless. I was living through a moment I had anticipated a hundred times, a thousand, in my imagination, without ever truly believing it would actually happen.
“This is Selena Rouane. You posted on a letter to me. I wanted to say thanks.”
There was something in the way her words came out that made me think she’d been rehearsing them, that she’d thought them up beforehand as an excuse for telephoning. We were on equal ground, it seemed. That knowledge should have made me feel less nervous, but it didn’t. I knew that a single wrong word from me – a word that sounded too knowing or too raw – would end the conversation on the spot.
“That’s no problem. I thought it might be important, so.” I paused. “You don’t see that many hand-written letters these days.”
“That’s true.” She laughed, just a little, which I took as a good sign, even though I knew I couldn’t count on her sharing my obsession with paper and envelopes. Amanda might, but not Selena. Selena would have learned to be more practical – she would have had to. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I was just wondering. Did you happen to notice the date on the postmark? From when the letter was mailed to you, I mean?”
“The beginning of last week, I think. I would check for you, only I threw the envelope away.” I hadn’t, but I thought it sounded more plausible that I would have done. “I’m sorry if it was important.”
“Oh, no, that’s all right.” She spoke in a rush. She seemed anxious to reassure me that I’d done nothing wrong. “I don’t need it. I just wondered, you know, how long the letter might have been in the system.”
The better part of two decades, give or take. Now we both knew.
“It just seemed strange,” she went on, “that the letter should turn up now, after so many years.”
“Not as strange as you might think,” I said. “I heard of one dead letter that resurfaced after eighty years, from a soldier in the First World War. He was killed at Ypres, I think it was. The letter was delivered around the year two thousand, to his great-granddaughter in Gravesend, with her morning mail. No one really knows what happened to it in between.”
“My God,” Selena said. “It must have been like seeing a ghost.” She fell silent for a moment. “How did you get to hear about it? Do you work for the post office?”
“It was in a book I read, that’s all. I’m interested.”
“In soldiers?”
“In letters.”
I pressed the phone tight to my ear. I heard a car go by, though I wasn’t sure if that was at my end or at hers. Her mention of soldiers had disconcerted me, then I remembered it was I, not her, who had brought up the subject. The story about the letter from the soldier at Ypres is perfectly true. It was forwarded fifteen times before it reached the great-granddaughter.
“The thing is, I haven’t had a letter from my dad in years,” Selena said. “He died in 1998.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, though I had suspected something of the sort, I don’t know why. “It must have been a shock for you. Seeing the letter, I mean.”
“Yes, it was.” I thought she would say more, tell me the reason for his death, or why he had been in a mental hospital, but she didn’t. “You asked if it was me who lost my sister,” she said instead.
“That was rude of me,” I said. “I apologise.”
“No, it’s fine. I am that Selena. I was surprised, that’s all. Most people have forgotten. It was a long time ago.”
“It was your name that made me remember. Rouane, I mean. It’s quite unusual.”
“My grandfather’s family were from Normandy, a town called Lion-sur-Mer. He died before I was born but Dad used to spend holidays there when he was a kid. I think that’s why Amanda got so interested in France.”
“People always want to know where they’re from, don’t they? Did she ever go there?”
“She wanted to. She started collecting all these old postcards. And she was doing a Linguaphone course. She borrowed it from the library.”
“You don’t think…”
“Dad did. He tried to get the police interested, to get the French police involved and everything, but there wasn’t any evidence, so they refused. Dad went to France on his own in the end. I don’t think he found out anything. Mainly he just drove around. Driving was the one thing that settled his mind. At least it did for a while.”
There was so much I wanted to ask her. About her father and Amanda’s diary, about Amanda herself. I forced myself to keep silent. I knew if I sounded too interested, too eager, Selena would probably clam up. She would put down the phone and never speak to me again. The important thing was that contact had been established. She wouldn’t find it so strange now if I contacted her again. I couldn’t, at that moment, think of an adequate reason for doing so, but I felt sure I could come up with something, given time.
“I’m sorry about your dad,” I said again. I thought it would be better to make it seem as if it was I who wanted to end the conversation.
“Thanks. And thanks again for posting on the letter.” There was a catch in her voice, as if she was searching for an excuse to prolong the call. I don’t know. Perhaps I imagined it.
“No problem. Take care, then.”
“Goodbye.”
I waited until I heard the click at her end, then lowered the receiver into the cradle.
* * *
I looked up Lion-sur-Mer online. A small, picturesque town on the Normandy coast: sandy beaches, historic castle, cobbled streets and pavement cafés. Not exactly a typical setting for adolescent rebellion. Whichever scenario you cared to imagine – religious cult, serial killer, dodgy boyfriend (or girlfriend) – you would have imagined it playing out in Manchester, rather than a sleepy resort town like Lion-sur-Mer. Who gets themselves murdered on the Normandy coast, outside of a low-budget horror movie, that is? How would Amanda even have got there in the first place? She was seventeen, so it was unlikely she would have had an independent passport. There was also the question of money. According to Raymond Rouane, Amanda didn’t even have a bank accoun
t.
There was a theory going around at the time, that Amanda had hitched a ride with the murderer and sexual predator Steven Jimson, who was nicknamed the Barbershop Butcher on account of the logo – Barbershop Plumbing – on the side of his van. Jimson ran a tin-pot illegal courier operation, ferrying packages of cannabis and knocked-off stereos and occasionally exotic reptiles all over Europe. He also used his van as a mobile murder venue. Jimson was from Stockport originally, but he had friends in Warrington and was often in the area. He was apprehended in the November of 1994, initially for a stolen passport, although as the team investigating soon discovered, that was just the beginning. For the first two months of 1995, media interest in the Amanda Rouane case spiked again as speculation mounted and the newspapers vied with each other for a lead on the news they all now saw as inevitable: that Amanda had been the Butcher’s final victim.
That news never came, though. Steven Jimson contended that he’d never spoken to Amanda, never so much as laid eyes on her, and there was no evidence to prove otherwise. The Barbershop Butcher was sentenced to life imprisonment for three counts of murder and five counts of aggravated sexual assault, but Amanda Rouane was still missing and no one was any the wiser about what had happened to her.
I googled ‘Lion-sur-Mer murder’ and then ‘Lion-sur-Mer Rouane’, scrolled rapidly through a large number of articles without really finding anything. There had been a murder in Lion-sur-Mer in 2009, when a man shot his brother with a hunting rifle in the car park of a local brasserie, the culmination of a dispute over property that had been smouldering intermittently for twenty years. There were also Rouanes in Lion-sur-Mer, though none of them seemed to be connected with the property murder. Berenice Rouane was some sort of local government official. Marcel Rouane ran a computer consultancy business. Jeanne Rouane was a freelance photographer. Her website had a page listing her more recent exhibitions, as well as a gallery of photographs, which seemed to be mainly of derelict buildings and abandoned construction sites. The photograph on the ‘About’ page showed a woman whose appearance struck me initially as being so similar to Amanda’s I almost closed the window by mistake. As I examined the image more closely I saw I’d been wrong about that; Jeanne Rouane bore a surface likeness to Amanda but that was all it was: surface, a family resemblance maybe, but nothing more.
Dead Letters Anthology Page 19