Dear Amy

14

‘Ah, Margot.’

The deputy head, Jane, had bustled up to me and was giving me a strange look, as though she had caught me napping. ‘Are you all right?’

I smiled, a little confused. ‘Yes, I’m fine. Just distracted. Is something wrong?’

‘There’s been a call for you,’ she said. ‘Someone for a Margot Lewis.’

I offered her an apologetic look. I was buried in calls, mostly going to the Cambridge Examiner. There had been a constant stream of them, true, though nothing promising by way of leads, Martin had told me.

That said, it was still very early days, and the reconstruction hadn’t yet been broadcast.

‘I’m sorry, Jane.’

She let out a half-sympathetic, half-annoyed sigh. ‘Well, he didn’t mention Bethan Avery. He said he had something of yours that you’d lost.’

I frowned. ‘I don’t think I’ve lost anything. My mind, maybe. Did he leave a number?’

She shook her tight curls. ‘No. He said he’d just call back. He wanted your home phone number but I wouldn’t give it to him. I told him to talk to you.’

Curiouser and curiouser.

‘Did he say when he’d call back?’

She shrugged expressively. ‘No idea. Told him not to bother in class time.’

‘I see. Thanks, Jane.’

‘Probably a reporter,’ she said. ‘Trying to find out what this “new evidence” is.’ She threw me a speculative look.

I sighed. ‘Well, he’s on a hiding to nothing. Even if I knew what it was, the police say I’m not to talk to people about the letters.’

It was a delicate hint, but she took it regardless.

‘By the way, Margot, can you do Biology with Year Ten in the lab? Rob is going home at two; he’s got a hospital appointment.’

I nodded. I didn’t have a choice.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘See you later.’

‘Bye,’ I said, lost in thought. Whoever this mystery caller was, it wasn’t Martin. He had my home phone number already. Could it have been Mo Khan, or the police? Surely they’d contact Martin before me.

Something I’d lost? Like what?

I searched through my bag – my wallet, my keys, my phone, all present and correct. Whoever it was had known I was a schoolteacher, but not where I lived.

Not where I lived yet, I thought with a sick little start. And he’d been after my phone number.

I’d been very naïve, I realized. I had been worried that this business might follow me to the school. I hadn’t suspected that it might also follow me home.

Whoever they were, they still hadn’t phoned back when I left for the Examiner offices. I was back in the car again, idling my engine at the painted, wrought-iron gates of the school, as I had a supermarket run to do – I loathe supermarkets, so plan each trip as comprehensively and rarely as possible, as though they were expeditions to the summit of Everest. Lily is constantly telling me to have my shopping delivered, but something about this seems, I don’t know, decadent.

I was waiting for a cream-coloured station wagon to get out of my way so I could pull out. Also idling at the kerb was a scruffy dark Megane with a single man at the wheel. He was casually dressed, but something about his demeanour seemed to suggest that he would be more at home in a uniform. His back was straight, his shoulders squared, and he stared at nothing so intently that he distracted me. When I looked back at the road the station wagon was gone and had been replaced by another car. I thumped the wheel in annoyance.

Gaggles of children swarmed out of the gates, making it even more difficult to drive out of the school. I scratched my scalp, leaning on the wheel, as someone pulled up right in front of me, boxing me in, and swung wide their car door, inches away from my front bumper. Bloody madmen – their children had to run into the middle of the road in order to get in. One, Alice Wright, turned to wave at me. I smiled in a strained fashion.

As the idiot took off I pulled out right after him, managing to cut up the guy in the Megane, who pulled away from the kerb at the same moment I did. I waited for the expected honk of rage on his horn, but it never came. I glanced in my rear-view mirror, and saw him, his face implacably calm, hidden behind large sunglasses and a baseball cap, his thick knotty arms crossed on the wheel.

I supposed I had wished the traffic upon myself. Usually I wait around at school, marking a few essays, until it thins out. But I very badly wanted to go home after shopping. I was tired, nervous, and I wanted a long bath, and then afterwards to sit in my bathrobe, drinking tea and watching Sherlock. The gridlock improved after the bridge, as the road forked. My temples were sore and I rubbed them. I must have been frowning again without noticing it.

It wasn’t until I’d actually got to the Examiner, or it might have been a little before, that it occurred to me that there was something strange about the man in the Megane. He’d parked at the gate, running his motor, for all the world just another dad come to collect his children from school, but when he’d pulled out after me there’d been nobody in the car with him.

There were no letters from Bethan, though there were a dozen messages from helpful folk who had watched the news segment, and while having no inside knowledge they definitely had opinions, which they were keen to share. Some claimed Bethan had murdered Peggy for an inheritance. Or that Bethan had had a boyfriend who murdered Peggy. Or that she had been mixed up with Satanists.

Wendy looked at me very strangely indeed.

Once I got home, and the shopping was unloaded and stowed away, I made myself a thrown together salad of halloumi and spinach and ate it at the counter in the kitchen, washing it down with a glass of Merlot. In the maroon depths of the wine I could see my own loneliness reflected back at me. It was the sort of thing that Eddy and I had always drunk together.

It was eight o’clock by now and it was dark outside. On the table were a pile of marked essays – I’d worked steadily to catch up on them – so all that was left were the letters for my column; the non-Bethan letters. I was looking forward to them. I could lose myself in them; pretend to an objectivity that I could never seem to apply to myself.

First, however, I’d have to go to the corner shop. I had bought pallet loads of supplies but forgot milk. I finished the salad and grabbed my coat, which I’d left carelessly lying on the back of one of the chairs. I took a tenner out of my purse and pocketed my keys.

It was freezing outside. I thrust my hands deep into my pockets and set off at a fast clip up the street. I could see the lights on in Marek’s shop, a friendly glow in the cold black night.

‘Hello,’ he said, as I entered the shop. A buzzer grizzled briefly, then silenced as the door shut behind me. Marek was seated at the counter – a large, roughly triangular-shaped mound of heavy-jowled middle-aged man with a perpetually mournful downturned mouth and thin, flat hair. With a little frisson of alarm I saw that the Examiner was open before him, with the feature they’d run on the filming of the reconstruction. A picture of me, looking wild-eyed and waylaid in the middle of my interview, was under his right hand.

‘Hello there,’ I nodded in response, and quickly picked up a plastic jug of milk from the shelf. ‘It’s bloody cold outside,’ I observed while he carefully poked the amount into his ancient till.

‘Hah. This is not cold,’ he said, frowning at the keys. ‘I have seen what real cold is like.’

Behind him, his teenaged son, who was stacking cigarettes along the back of the counter, rolled his eyes at his father’s back and offered me a grin.

‘Are you still off the fags?’ asked Marek.

‘Yep.’

He let out a tiny disappointed sigh.

‘I gave up three years ago, Marek. I think it’s going to be a permanent arrangement.’

Again he sighed. ‘People worry too much about being healthy,’ he said with disapproval. ‘You should enjoy life more. Buy more cigarettes.’

He held out his hand for my tenner, which I surrendered.

‘I see your picture was in the paper,’ he said, while he very carefully counted out my change. ‘You look good.’

‘Why thanks, Marek.’

‘Is that husband still gone?’

I felt the blush rise to my cheeks. ‘Um, yes.’

‘Not coming back?’ asked Marek, checking my change again, while his son looked pained and shrugged at me.

‘No,’ I said, and felt the truth of the words. ‘I think that’s going to be a permanent arrangement too.’

Marek rumbled out a long hmmmm that could have meant approval or disapproval. ‘A good-looking woman like you will not be single for long.’

‘I’m in no rush,’ I said, sparing him a smile, the jug of milk dangling from one hand. ‘Good night.’

‘Good night,’ he said, following me to the door to lock it for the night.

As the light went out behind me, the street seemed a more threatening place. The night was still freezing, at least to me. Whoever was it, I thought, that invented orange street lighting? It makes everyone look evil and the sky goes a horrid, lurid violet. It’s unnatural.

I was musing on this, and other, less weighty matters as I walked home along my street when I realized, with a shock, that someone was sitting in their darkened car, right next to me, as I passed it. I’d assumed that I was totally alone, and now there was a person, not three feet away, separated from me only by a car door. The engine was off, the headlamps were dark, but there was a man in there, in complete darkness, doing nothing, merely staring straight ahead, as though waiting for something. I stole a surreptitious glimpse of him as I passed by.

He turned away as soon as he saw me looking, but it was the man who’d waited outside the school, the man I’d cut up in the car. I knew him by his squared shoulders, his unmoving form. The baseball cap was still on his head. At first I’d thought he belonged in a uniform – my quick glance saw an almost military precision in his bearing, although his features were hidden in the darkness.

I walked on, not varying my pace, and not looking back, trying to give no sign that I perceived that anything unusual was happening.

I checked out the houses as I went, calculating which door to bang on if this strange man should get out of his car and come after me. I listened for his engine to rev up, or his door to open. I heard nothing, the nothing you hear when you are convinced someone is watching your back.

I’d reached my own house. My keys were already balled in my fist, sticking out from between my fingers, more vicious than knuckledusters when used correctly. I preferred not to speculate as to whether this creature knew I was in the house alone. I jammed the front door key into the lock, twisting it so hard that for a horrid moment I thought it would snap. Then the door opened, letting me into light and relative safety. As I turned to shut it behind me, I risked a look up the street. He was still there, unmoving; simply waiting.

I don’t think he realized that I’d recognized him, or even noticed him. I put the milk down near the kettle and tried to sort myself out. I was breathing hard, and my heart beat a skipping tattoo beneath my jacket. I felt light and panicky.

I ran upstairs to our, or rather my, bedroom, which overlooks the street. I didn’t turn the switch, but instead crept forward to the window. Fractionally, I pushed aside a tiny fold in the curtain and peeped out.

I could just about see him, at the very edge of the perspective the window gave me. He was still in the dark Megane, though it looked brown in the sodium light. Other parked cars near him hid his registration plate from me. He was still waiting.

I don’t know how long I watched him watching my house, as my breath condensed slightly on the cold glass and my legs started to cramp. Then, with appalling suddenness, the engine started with a faint roar and the headlights came on, dazzling me.

I held my breath.

He shot away from the kerb with a growl, and headed off, at speed, past my house and off to the main road. He was gone.

I breathed again. The street was blameless and empty once more. I waited and waited, but he did not return. Eventually, I got up and went downstairs to make a cup of tea and phone Lily.

‘Following you, you say,’ said Lily, leaning back on her shabby couch, pausing to yank a small green stuffed dinosaur out from behind her back before settling in. There were tired lines around her eyes, and I realized guiltily that it was late, and she had a sick toddler to look after and school in the morning. ‘Are you sure?’

Lily has three small children that she has pretty much raised alone, with occasional input from her harried, perpetually gloomy mother. She specializes in short, passionate, fraught relationships with desperately unsuitable men. The last one was a married master at one of the colleges who was on the brink of resigning over her, and the one before that had to leave the country after he was caught trying to sell cocaine to the bevy of privately educated female undergrads he was coaching in tae kwon do. Perhaps, all things considered, there’s a good reason that Lily’s mother looks old before her time. If the single life is an urban jungle, Lily hacks through it with a giant machete, and engages romantically only with hungry jaguars and cannibal tribesmen.

I moved my hands through my hair and sighed. ‘It was the same guy that was at the school today. I’m positive. And I think he was probably the same guy who phoned the school looking for me, but I’m not sure about that.’

‘Whoever phoned probably had nothing to do with it,’ she replied with a flick of her ochre-painted nails. ‘Did this guy in the car follow you all the way home from school?’

‘I didn’t go straight home. I went up to the paper first. Then Waitrose.’ I was exhausted.

‘But did he follow you there?’

‘I don’t know!’ I burst out in frustration. ‘I don’t keep a constant lookout for sinister types spying on me!’

Lily frowned at me.

‘I’m so sorry, Lils,’ I said, mortified. ‘I’m bang out of line, I know. I’m very tired and maybe I’m imagining the whole thing.’

She rubbed her chin thoughtfully. ‘Maybe. But you know, perhaps you want to be careful. People see you on TV, and…’

‘How do you mean?’

She opened her mouth, as though about to say something, then shut it again. ‘Did you see his face?’ she asked.

‘I did the first time. It was too dark the second. But it was definitely him.’ I shrugged helplessly. ‘And there’s something else.’

‘What?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said, ‘but I’m starting to wonder whether I’ve met Bethan Avery before.’

She did not reply, merely stared at me.

I found this unaccountably difficult to discuss. I do not enjoy talking about my past, even to Lily, who doesn’t know the full extent of it.

‘It’s just… I met, well, I met a lot of very, very damaged people in those years with the nuns,’ I say. ‘And now I’m starting to wonder whether she was one of them.’

‘Have you told this to the police? Or that friend of yours, the criminologist?’

I shook my head. ‘Not yet. I mean, I can’t… What would I say? I have no memory of ever meeting her.’

Lily frowned, her jaw jutting slightly. ‘It doesn’t change the fact that this is a man following you, not a woman. You know, I think,’ said Lily, about to pronounce her final word on the subject, ‘that you should phone the police if you see this creep again. Get them to come over and ask him what the hell he thinks he’s doing.’

The drive home passed in a strange kind of dream. I reflected not on the man, but instead on the hostel and the girls I had met there, trying to recall any nugget of information that would help.

But mostly I thought about Angelique, the Queen of the Night.

I was sitting in a church the second time I met her.

I had wandered into the church after being shooed away from a library, and then the blissfully warm lobby of a department store. I was huddled in a pew at the back, contemplating the stained-glass window behind the altar.

I still had four hours to kill.

St Felicity’s had strict requirements for those receiving its largesse. First and foremost, if you weren’t back by nine at night, you lost your bed. No ifs or buts.

Furthermore, no single women were allowed to stay in the hostel between eight in the morning and six at night, while the nuns and volunteers scrubbed the cheap linoleum in the rooms and boiled the sheets in their constant and bitterly fought rearguard action against lice and bedbugs.

As a consequence all I remember of that first week, before the nuns took me in semi-permanently, was a cold, dreary nomadism where I shifted from place to place, looking to wear out the hours until I could return – eat, wash, go to bed, get up, eat, leave, and do it all over again.

Now I was in one of those tiny dark churches London is littered with – medieval boltholes overshadowed on all sides by high industrial buildings. This one was dedicated to St Eugenia who, from what I could see, had been some sort of martyr, and perhaps cross-dresser, who had disguised herself as a man if I understood the mosaics correctly.

I’ve never been a particularly religious person, though I have my beliefs. But I was drawn to the church’s shelter and peace, harbouring me against the bitter wind outside. Above my head, someone was practising on the wheezy old organ – some elaborate classical piece – and a trailing fugue of falling notes came from above.

I was thinking about nothing, my habit during such hours, when I was startled by somebody throwing themselves into the pew next to me with such force that the wood creaked and I nearly leapt straight up in the air.

It was my neighbour from the upper bunk, grinning at me, her dark eyes gleaming in the dusty candlelit space. One of the teeth next to her right canine was missing, a spot of blackness in her face.

‘Well, hello there!’ she said, her voice and laughter shattering the calm, clearly very amused by my shock and surprise.

‘Are you mental?’ I snarled, still light-headed and shaking. ‘You nearly gave me a heart attack!’

‘Sorry. Sorry. But it was funny. You should have seen your face.’ She offered me a pleased smile, as though contemplating a job well done. She had a strangely refined accent, at complete odds with her appearance. I wondered if it was real, or if she was making fun of me.

I crossed my arms over my chest again. ‘What are you doing in here?’

‘Avoiding people.’ She gave me a cool look. ‘Like you, probably. Are you going to steal that?’

‘What? What are you on about?’

She nodded over to a battered collection box, attached to the centre of a wrought-iron stand containing rows of shelves filled with sand and tea lights.

‘Am I what?’ I asked in horror. ‘God no. I was just looking at the stained glass…’

‘Yeah, yeah, I’m sure you were.’ She got up, those long legs unwinding endlessly as she did so, and strolled over to the candles. She did not even look round to see if the coast was clear. She tugged at the battered iron corner of the box, which rattled but didn’t move. ‘Bugger.’

‘Stop that!’ I hissed at her, appalled, but also secretly thrilled at her heretical daring. ‘There’s somebody up there!’

‘Who’s that, God?’

‘No, whoever’s playing the organ, you muppet!’

‘That’s a tape recording…’ She flapped a dismissive hand at me, inspecting the fixture holding the box.

‘It bloody isn’t! They’ve stopped in the middle and restarted at least two times.’

She shrugged and retreated back to the pew after a few seconds. ‘It’s bolted on anyway,’ she said, as though to make it absolutely clear that she had not desisted because I had commanded her to, and that she feared neither God nor the organist.

She was silent for a few seconds, giving me the opportunity to study her out of the corner of my eye while the music continued above.

In profile she had fine features, big black eyes, a petite nose dusted with freckles, and plump, sensuous lips. She could have been beautiful, in fact, but the most obvious thing about her was her state of deep disrepair. Her peroxide-blonde hair was dyed to the point of colourlessness. Angry red spots dotted her brow and cold sores bracketed her mouth. Her lips were slightly feathery with peeling skin, and she was pale, too pale, almost a sallow green.

Her arms, bare from the elbows, were dusted with little blue fingertip bruises, and in the crook of the right nestled an ugly mass of red and purple, pocked with little black marks.

‘If you’re cold you should go to the Southbank Centre,’ she said suddenly.

I threw her a surprised glance.

‘They keep it heated all day. And they can’t throw you out unless they catch you up to no good, like begging.’ She gestured expansively, not looking at me, as though demonstrating that it cost her absolutely nothing to tell me this. ‘It’s, like, one of those public space things.’

I considered this for a long moment. ‘Thanks,’ I said.

She was still looking away, but she nodded, once.

‘What happened to your face?’ she asked.

I froze.

I was aware of the effect I had on people at present, and suspected it was why I had been moved on from the library and the department store. My face, and the reason I was homeless, had a very close correlation.

‘I tripped,’ I replied stonily.

She glanced back at me then, no doubt taking in my two black eyes and swollen, broken nose.

‘Yeah. You “tripped”.’ She snickered. ‘Of course you did.’

‘It’s true.’

She seemed to be thinking, her finger now at the corner of her mouth as she worried at the nail and its cracked casing of peach-coloured varnish.

Or perhaps, looking back on it, she was merely nervous.

‘Do you want to come to a party?’

‘A party? What, now?’

‘Well it will have to be now because we have to be back at Flicks for nine or we’ll lose our beds.’ She didn’t wait for my answer, rolling once more to her feet, her sleeve falling to hide her wounded arm. Her back was straight, tense, and I realized that despite her affected accent, dramatic mannerisms and recklessness, that this was because she feared my refusal, my rejection. ‘Come on, if you’re coming.’

I couldn’t tell you how my relationship with her developed, how I got her name out of her, even whether we were friends or merely acquaintances forming our own pack for survival. I knew her name at this point – Angelique, which she pronounced carefully, lingering over each syllable as though it were music, which made me think it was not her real name at all – and before long we were staying out later and later each night before returning to the hostel. She was universally admired and introduced me to her friends – a grimy circle of skinny people I did not particularly like and who didn’t like me, though that might have been to do with the taciturn way I refused to answer any of their questions. They offered me draws on spliffs while Angelique vanished into the back rooms of their filthy squats with them before returning, her eyes dull, her limbs languorous. Before long she stopped hiding what she was doing and started shooting up in front of me.

I can’t remember when I started to join her in this. I just know that I did.