Dear Amy

12

They had placed the line at the very bottom of my column, which I was now reading over in the staff room. My picture seemed huge, irrelevant and a little saccharine. I wondered if I might have scared Bethan off.

You’re being ridiculous, I told myself, which is something you are very good at. The thing only went in the paper on Saturday night. Give it a chance.

Through the staff room windows I could hear the distant yells and shouts of the children, and a quick breeze was swiping yellow-gold chestnut leaves off the trees, and they fluttered down in whirling drifts on to the lawn outside. I looked down at the message I’d put in the paper. I was trying, desperately, to keep a hold on my world – my job, my vanished husband and my column – but I was disconnecting. The ties to my ordinary life were loosening, snapping, and the dark world of Bethan Avery was becoming more real than my own. After all, what were my petty griefs against the irresistible pull of her stricken letters?

I dreamed of her regularly. Sometimes I saw her, but more often than not she was a presence, a person I knew was in the room but who was never quite in focus, shadowy and plaintive and wisp thin; a cloud, a vapour.

A ghost.

Once again, I reminded myself not to chew my nails.

I wasn’t well and I felt fine. I breathed easily but far too quickly, my eyes were bright – too bright; I’d dispensed with the pills that slowed down my thoughts, but now they raced away out of control.

I was living in strange days.

All I ever knew about drugs I learned from Angelique.

I met her while I was in St Felicity’s. She was in the bunk above me in the dorm – a slight teenage girl who dyed her dark hair white-blonde, and who was roughly the same age and height as me. Her skin was pale and spotty, her lips dry, and she perpetually dabbed at them with a tube of cherry Chapstik. She did not really sleep the first night she arrived, instead tossing and turning endlessly above me, making the old planks creak. I did not really sleep either, as a rule, so it didn’t trouble me, but I wondered at her pathological restlessness.

At eight the next morning in the shelter cafeteria, I was eating my frugal breakfast of roll, jam and butter. I was surprised this morning to find my upper neighbour had brought her tray over and was settling in next to me, straddling the bench and arranging her long, pathetically skinny legs under the trestle table. With her big eyes and narrow body she resembled a distressed gazelle, and her clothes were hanging off her.

I regarded her suspiciously.

‘Morning,’ I said.

She did not reply, but nodded, not meeting my gaze. We ate in silence, and after she had picked at her roll, tearing tiny holes out of it, like a bird might, and licked the jam out of the little packet and drained her tea, she got up and left without a word.

‘O’Neill wants to do a reconstruction,’ said Martin.

We were back on King’s Parade, only this time we had graduated from coffee to lunch in the Cambridge Chop House, somewhere I’d passed dozens of times but never eaten in. I wore a dark green jersey top and rust-coloured skirt and boots, all the while persuading myself that I had not dressed with any extra care for this meeting. My make-up was also an afterthought, I had explained to myself, while I carefully slicked my lips a muted dark pink.

I paused, my fork suspended over my cod and cheddar fishcakes. ‘What sort of reconstruction?’

‘A crime reconstruction,’ Martin replied, slicing into his calves’ liver with gusto. ‘Filmed, and broadcast on television.’

‘For Bethan?’ I asked in surprise.

‘Yep.’

‘After so long? I thought I read that there had been one already, in the nineties, why don’t they show that one again?’

He was chewing now, so shook his head silently. ‘No. They want a new one,’ he answered after a few seconds. ‘They want to include some details from the letters. Alex Penycote and his description, for one.’

I didn’t know what I felt about this. On the one hand, good, but on the other hand, Katie had been missing for nearly six weeks, during which time nobody had been looking for her, and now… this – this sudden escalation in the hunt for what could be the wrong girl.

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.’