Dear Amy

13

Today must be Sunday, because Katie has been allowed out of the cellar room and up into the lounge for the evening, with its patterned blue rug covering the wooden floor, and the old-fashioned fireside chairs, built of black studded wood on a monumental scale, and the low couch with its deep cushions. The news is on, and an earnest man in a suit is on television talking about some company that has either lost millions of pounds or lied about having it in the first place. Her hands are clasped around a chipped mug of thin hot chocolate. She’s enjoying its heat far more than its taste.

She’s sitting next to him on the couch, and the sense of stuffing and cushions is strange after days of incarceration. The patterned silk is slippery against the backs of her legs.

Outside brisk autumnal winds thump against the windows, making low moans as they rattle through the rotting frames, the draft raising the light hairs on her arms into goose pimples, stirring the brown leaves on the trees shading the house into a crackly susurrus.

He is watching the television but she can sense his boredom, and his hand reaches out and casually begins to stroke the back of her neck. She stiffens, as she always does.

‘Is something wrong?’

‘No,’ she says, biting the end of the syllable off. Her bare thighs are still dappled with the bruises he gave her the day before yesterday, when the man had called by and she had tried to alert him – huge blossoms of brown and green and violet-blue.

‘You know, this is supposed to be a treat,’ he says, his tone clipped and offended. ‘If you’d rather go back downstairs…’

‘Sorry,’ she says quickly. As the word slips out, she realizes that she isn’t and that, more importantly, she doesn’t sound it. What’s more, she needs to do something about it: it’s tiny incidents like these that set off the runaway train of his rage. What starts with hurt looks, curt speech, agonizing stretched silences and a purply-pale colour marbling his cheeks, has ended before now in him grabbing her hair and smashing her head into solid objects while he shrieks like a crazy person, white spittle gathering at the sides of his mouth.

Now is the time to say No, I’m really sorry, and perhaps lean into his hated touch, and even elaborate on how grateful she is that he has saved her from the others. Then his hand will return to the back of her neck before moving down her spine or on to her lap, and dreadful though the sequel will be, it is better than when he is violent. Everything leads to the same outcome anyway. There is nothing she can do to avoid it. She tries and tries, but every response just serves his ends.

Today, however, the honeyed words will not come. They stick in her throat, in the place just under the collarbone.

His attention has turned back to the television, which is now showing the weather – bright but getting colder, with snow expected before too long – and she can sense his growing displeasure. She drinks the cheap chocolate quickly, as who knows when it will be taken away from her. The mug is patterned with Wedgwood-blue flowers, and chimes faintly when her ragged fingernails strike against it. It’s a twin of the one she smashed over his head.

On the stone mantelpiece, two silver candlesticks glint back at her. When she’s in this room, she thinks about those candlesticks and what she could do with them to a person whose back was turned. She thinks about that a lot.

Now it’s the regional news. As a rule, she is forbidden to watch or read the news unless expressly invited to, usually as he shows her the paper and its lack of any mention of her as evidence that his ‘associates’ have hushed up her disappearance.

But she realizes that she has caught him at a crossroads – he can’t decide whether he wants to get angry and fight with her – if you can call it a fight since he always wins – or whether he wants to give her a little longer to submit and play along, and while he thinks it over the local news keeps going, and something extraordinary happens.

‘Yesterday filming completed on a reconstruction of a decades-old mystery, the disappearance of fourteen-year-old Cambridge schoolgirl Bethan Avery, who vanished without trace in 1998. Colette Samson gives us this report.’

‘Thanks Tim, and here at Addenbrooke’s, early on Saturday morning, the hospital is replaying one of the darker scenes of its recent history.’

There is a long shot of a dark girl in an old-fashioned school uniform walking along a hospital corridor, a man shadowing her, his face vague, his hair blond.

Next to Katie, her captor has gone very still.

There is a cloying hit of stunned panic and swarming hope in Katie, and she moves her eyes away to the rug, wondering for a single mad instant whether she has let her face or body betray any of this.

Bethan Avery. That’s the name scratched on the cellar stones beneath their feet.

She waits, for one beat, two, for the blow, or for hard fingers pinching into the hollows of her shoulder; for him to become aware that she is watching this, too, and that he absolutely should not be allowing that to happen, but there is nothing.

There continues to be nothing.

‘On January fifth, 1998, the town was turned upside down by a terrible, seemingly motiveless assault on sixty-one-year-old Peggy Avery and the unexplained disappearance of Bethan Avery, her young granddaughter, who, it is believed, was lured away from her grandmother’s bedside and abducted, then presumed murdered when bloodied clothing was found on the Fens near her home.

‘However, Cambridgeshire Constabulary have confirmed they are reopening the case in light of new evidence, and are commissioning a brand-new reconstruction of the tragic events of early January 1998.’

It’s a film of the same girl from the hospital, only this time she and another girl are walking along a street of new, cheap houses, talking and laughing. They are replaced suddenly by a picture of a policeman in uniform, wearing a peaked cap that betrays him as quite high-ranking.

‘We have never given up hope of finding out what happened to Bethan, and of finding and prosecuting Peggy Avery’s murderer,’ he says. He has rheumy pale eyes and reddish skin, as though he’s been outdoors in the cold for a while. ‘And we now believe that someone out there has evidence that can help us.’

‘Is it true that there is potentially new information on this case?’

The policeman nods vigorously. ‘Yes indeed. We have been given the name Alex Penycote in connection with Bethan’s disappearance, in relation to a blond-haired, blue-eyed man. We suspect it might be an alias, but we’d be extremely interested in hearing from anyone who has met this person, or heard this name in any context, possibly from somebody representing themselves as working in health or social services. And of course, if you are Alex Penycote, we’d be delighted if you could get in touch with us so we can eliminate you from the enquiry as soon as possible.’ Katie steals a sideways glance at him through her lank, overhanging hair.

He has gone ghostly white. She does not think he is even breathing.

Now on TV it’s Mrs Lewis, who teaches English, and Classics to the posh kids who sign up for it; the one who’s got the agony column in the local paper.

What’s she doing on TV?

Katie is familiar with the column. Last year one of her exes, Joshua Barrett, and his best mate had tried writing their own stupid fake problems to the email address in the paper, but Miss had never published any of them. It was like she knew.

‘Yes, my name is Margot Lewis and I edit the advice column for the Cambridge Examiner. I’m just here to say to anyone out there watching who may know something about what happened to Bethan – you don’t have to be afraid.’

Katie thinks that if anyone looks afraid it’s Mrs Lewis – her hair is slightly skew-whiff and her eyes are huge.

‘I’m waiting to hear from you again. You can come forward and you will be protected from whoever it is you think is looking for you. If you don’t want to talk to the police, then you don’t have to, there’s a victim support number you can call, which is going out with this report, or, if you prefer, you can use the anonymous Crimestoppers number. Even though it was such a long time ago, we all desperately need to hear from you again, before anyone else gets hurt.’

‘Thanks, Margot, and that number is at the bottom of the screen. Back to you, Tim, in the studio…’

Katie has forgotten to breathe, forgotten all caution, and the next thing she knows his hands are around her throat and he’s shaking her like a rag doll as she yelps in terror.

‘Is this you? Did you talk to someone? Did you? Did you?’

His eyes are tiny blue marbles of madness. His face seems to be all yellowing gritted teeth. Her hands flutter like birds, trying helplessly to push him away, push him off as she gasps for air, as everything goes grey. It’s like someone is turning the sound down and it hurts, it hurts, then finally he releases her and she falls backwards on to the couch, and they’re both wheezing with effort into the silence.

She flinches again as he reaches down and pats her arm.

‘Sorry,’ he gasps, but it is with the same distracted air as her own reply earlier. He is not thinking about her at all. ‘Sorry.’

Katie does not dare move.

He has switched off the television with the remote and is staring ahead of himself, his bottom lip moving, trembling a little. She has no idea what it means, except that…

‘12/1/1998 BETHAN AVERY’

Jesus, she realizes, they think Bethan Avery is alive. She must have written to Mrs Lewis’s column, that’s why she was on TV.

But what did that mean for Katie?

‘Sorry,’ he mumbles again.

He is on his feet and hauling her up, barely looking at her, and though faint and fighting still to fill her lungs, she gets up quickly, keen not to provoke him. He is pushing back the rug with his foot, lifting up one corner, and the trapdoor is there.

There is a second, perhaps two, as he bends down to lift it up by its heavy ring and swing it open, during which the candlestick on the right edge of the mantelpiece seems almost to wink at her over his bowed, balding head. She is perhaps ten feet from it. She could never reach it in time, particularly while he has hold of her arm.

You couldn’t reach it this time, you mean.

Then the moment is past and she is being pushed ahead of him down the narrow steps that yawn before her and thrust through the open doorway of her cell. The stone is cold beneath her feet, the darkness absolute as the door shuts behind her, and yet she cannot be sorry.

He did not touch her – and he does not. It is the first time since her arrival that he has left her alone, and something within her tentatively resets, is allowed to breathe, to think, to cautiously inhabit her own skin.

Once again, she wrestles with the dangerous illusions of hope, while she lies wrapped in her blanket in the dark. Above she can hear his footfalls moving relentlessly up and down the ceiling. He is pacing, and it goes on for a long time.

He feeds her late, much later than usual, providing her with her usual Sunday ‘treat’ of a microwaved ready meal – some kind of meat and rice; it’s impossible in the dark to judge what it’s supposed to be – a can of fizzy drink and a small sweet pastry, but he does not speak to her.

When she falls asleep at last, her head buried against her arm, she is sure she can hear something from the rooms above that may be the wind, or may be him – a kind of low but rising howl, such as might come from a dangerous wounded animal.