Dear Amy

15

It was Tuesday night, and the reconstruction – ten minutes’ worth of vague acting and the appeal from me – had aired. I could barely watch it, caught between the twin poles of dread and exposure. Lily had wanted me to come round, for us to watch it with her mother; I had gently declined.

There had been no further communications from Bethan Avery in the meantime. Or Messrs Calwhit, Blank, Mettle. Or Eddy. Or Martin.

This last, funnily enough, seemed to rankle most of all. I fought the absurd feeling that I was being discarded for being insufficiently attractive to traumatized kidnap victims.

Yeah, that’s right, Margot – it’s all about you, I thought ruefully. Pull yourself together. It’s only been a day or two.

I sat down on the couch, in front of the grey and silent television, and looked at the clock on the cable box. It was six, and it was dark outside, dark early today in these days of early darkness, because of the fog. I don’t like fog. Apart from being inconvenient and dangerous, I dislike it on principle. Walking through it, there is the sensation of veils lifting and falling behind you, white gauzy veils, but there is no final one that is lifted, leaving what you are really looking for completely exposed.

Perhaps this is why I objected to the fog more today than I would on other days.

I stared at the blank television and kidded myself that I was thinking.

I kicked my shoes off and pulled my legs up under me on the sofa. I had a bag full of essays and a couple of letters for the column to answer, so I thought about them for a few minutes, without getting up. I couldn’t just sit here and helplessly watch the work pile up.

After all, I’m not helpless.

‘I’m not helpless,’ I said aloud.

The silence in the house mocked me.

I had never felt so worthless.

I had received a commission, an imperative, a cry for help… and I’d got nowhere. I’d learned that the plea was genuine, shortly before it had been smothered by my own bull-headed carelessness, insensitivity and stupidity. I hadn’t found out anything at all about where Bethan was now, or come any closer to learning about her state of mind. The void that Bethan had vanished into was still a void, issuing nothing but a trio of backward-looking letters. I could not shake the feeling that I’d failed somehow – the sensation one must have when one runs to a panicked shout heard in a wilderness, only to find a bloody garment nosed by wild animals, or a piece of rope hanging over the edge of a precipice, the frayed end wafting in a mountain breeze.

I tried to tell myself that the reconstruction had literally only just aired, but my spirits would not lift.

She was still with me; she was almost tangible. But I knew, in my heart of hearts, she would offer no more material help. The distance between herself and me bristled with tension, and her badly contained panic as she waited for her rescue; waited for the eyes hunting through the darkness to light on her, for the first and last time.

I walked into the kitchen, and switched on the light. The kettle rested on the counter, empty, and I picked it up, pulling out the plug. I took it over to the sink, placing the red and chrome spout under the tap. Before me was the kitchen window, looking into my back garden. I peered through it, swiping at the condensation on the cold glass.

There was nothing out of the ordinary, just the night and the fog.

What had I expected?

Disquieted, I turned off the tap.

The house phone rang – a sudden shrill squawk of electronic noise. Shocked, I dropped the kettle, which crashed into the stainless steel sink, water gushing everywhere. I swore and lifted it out, sure it had scratched the metal. Wiping my wet hands on my trousers, I hurried out to answer the phone.

I moved into the dark hall and swiped up the handset.

‘Hello?’

There was no reply, just a dense electronic silence.

‘Hello, can I help you?’

Nothing. But not quite nothing – there was breathing; not heavy, but light, silent, controlled. Expectant.

‘Who is this?’ I asked, though I knew by then they would not reply.

The click and purr of the receiver being replaced was my only answer. When I hit 1471 on the keypad, I was told that the caller had withheld their number.

The next morning, I was walking through St Andrews churchyard after my run, on my cool-down, and the bells were ringing. Today I felt a fierce, sharp optimism.

Watery daylight touched the shrivelled grass, the sky was pearly grey and thick as cream. Nearby, an old couple, smothered and muffled in heavy winter clothes, negotiated the broken and buried graves. The woman held a stiff brush of sturdy flowers, a no-nonsense winter bouquet. They were making their way to the newer part of the graveyard.

A pair of magpies fluttered down from the church tower, to strut and bob over the bodies of the ancient dead. I smiled at them, and they ignored me with cavalier indifference.

I paused by the old church door, and sat down on the step, delaying the start of my morning, with its fuss and bustle, just wanting to breathe in the peace and space. The bells chimed happily into the white sky. The magpies paused, too, as though listening. Then they hopped up into the cold air and in a few quick flaps were gone.

I had to go too.

I should have been terrified, or at least nervous. But I can honestly say that I wasn’t. These swinging fits of despair and hope seemed normal to me. I suppose Eddy would say that I wasn’t in my right mind. Maybe I wasn’t; maybe I was in some other mind – a mind that was more my own than any other. I think I was excited, more than anything, terribly excited. Perhaps I was terrified, but I enjoyed the terror. Is that strange? I was menaced, but for once it wasn’t the ghosts of my own mind that haunted me so tirelessly, so inconclusively, but something active, something evil, something cruel and decadent, something I could hate with a will.

I was sitting on the church steps, and instead of being in a frenzy of fear, I felt tensely calm and utterly vindicated. Let them do their worst. I was hunting for lost things, and if I could find Bethan then I would prove to my doubting and querulous heart that nothing was lost for ever. That peace and contentment and innocence and justice were not lost for ever. That I was not lost for ever.

I stood up, dusted my hands on my sweatpants, and went home to get changed and get into work.

When I got back to the house, Eddy was there.

I had a little warning beforehand, but not much – I had been strolling along our road in the morning sunshine, enjoying the cool breeze against my hot, sweaty skin, and the birds as they flitted through the tree branches while I wound the cord of my headphones around my iPhone.

I was wondering if there was any way to go in and check Dear Amy’s post without having to run into Wendy, who, since my first television appearance, had raised her game in terms of passive-aggressive digs. I had been led to understand in no uncertain terms that all of this extra work and fuss I had put the staff through was extremely inconvenient.

And yet, when I came into the Examiner’s office last night after school, looking for any more letters, she had practically run from the other side of the office, shooing away the intern standing directly in front of the cubbyholes and reaching to fetch my post, in order to hand the bundle to me herself with the maximum possible bad grace.

In short, I was deeply preoccupied that morning, so I didn’t spot Eddy’s smoke-grey Porsche Carrera parked up on my right until I was nearly on top of it – I could have reached out and touched the bonnet. The driver’s seat was empty.

I felt a little giddy, a little sick. What now?

I shoved my phone into the pocket at the back of my running leggings and pulled out my house keys while considering my strategy.

The truth was, I didn’t have one. I simply didn’t want to fight with Eddy at the moment. I had things to do, things to think about. The idea of it exhausted me and left the fragile accord I’d come to with myself on the church steps in shreds.

Why couldn’t he just sign the arbitration? If he signed the arbitration, we could talk about the rest. I didn’t want anything unfair. Why was he behaving this way?

I was going to have this conversation with him now, and ask him. Like a grown-up. There would be no repeat of the scenes at Ara’s house the other day. I forbade it.

I turned on to my path, past the high hedges of unruly leylandii, and sure enough he was waiting on the step.

‘You’re still running?’ he asked. The sun gleamed in his golden hair. ‘I keep telling you it’s terrible for your joints.’

His voice was faintly hoarse.

Straightaway I could see that something had changed, and not for the good. When he had appeared here last time he had been impeccably turned out, as was his habit when going to or from work.

This new Eddy looked as though he’d been out all night. His shirt was crumpled and limp, his coat thrown over it, the jacket missing, the tie just a little off-centre, his shoes dull with a slight patina of dust. I daresay anyone else would have found him respectable enough – he’d shaved and his hair was neat – but I’d had four years of getting to know all of Eddy’s idiosyncracies. Something was wrong.

‘And yet I still persist in it,’ I said, coming to a stop before him. ‘Like you. Why are you here?’

‘What, we can’t talk any more? Do I have to book an appointment with you now you’re a TV celebrity?’

‘I thought we were doing this through your lawyers.’

‘We could still discuss it like reasonable people.’

I folded my arms. I was shaking a little, and it wasn’t just because I was cooling down.

‘We could indeed,’ I said, ‘but I’m left wondering why you’d buy a dog and bark yourself. What are you up to?’

He offered me his tight, crooked smile.

‘You’re being very paranoid, Margot.’

‘Not paranoid. Direct. It’s completely different.’ I cocked my head at him. ‘Did you call me last night?’

‘What?’

‘Call me,’ I supplied again. ‘Last night.’

‘No,’ he said, but there was a rising note in his voice, and I wasn’t sure he was telling the truth. ‘Are you going to invite me in?’

I considered him for a long minute. ‘This isn’t a good time. I need to get to work in an hour and a half.’

‘It won’t take long.’ His hands fell into his coat pockets. ‘And it’s urgent, Margot.’

I raised my eyebrow at him, but I was already applying my key to the lock. ‘Really?’

‘Yes,’ he said, with a little shrug. ‘I need your help.’

So once again he was in my kitchen, and I was making him coffee. He took a seat at the pine table, and as I stole surreptitious glances at him in the reflection of the kitchen window, I could see he looked older, tired, and there were dark pouches under his eyes when his face tilted forwards.

Despite myself, something within me clenched in pity. I wanted to go over, put my hands on the tense muscles of his shoulders, knead the knots out of his hard flesh, feel the warmth beneath my palms; in short, to get on with pretending that none of this had happened.

It was impossible, but I wanted it anyway.

‘You said it was urgent,’ but there was a soft note in my voice.

‘Yes. I need some money,’ he said.

This was so frank it took me a second or two to parse it. I put the kettle down.

‘You want me to lend you money?’

He shook his head. ‘Yes. No. In a way.’ He sighed, leaned back in the chair, and there was no disguising his tiredness any more as he rubbed his eyes. ‘Ara and Gareth are trying to force me out at Sensitall.’

I blinked at him. This was very bad news for Eddy. Everybody knew the company was going to do very well indeed in due course, but for now, things were still building. If he was forced out, a great deal of his work would have been for nothing.

‘Gareth has issued me with a parting offer that’s worth about…’ he paused, as though catching himself before saying too much, and there was a flash of banked cunning in his expression that hardened something in my heart, ‘… about a third of my real share.’

Gareth was the other partner in their start-up business, who contributed capital and had got them the lease for the offices. My mind ticked and whirred – of course, he’d been an ‘old friend’ of Ara’s, and she’d brought him in.

I’d met him a couple of times at dinner parties and company social events at expensive restaurants and hotels – a squat, short man with thinning ginger hair and a pronounced underbite beneath his moustache. He’d always been extremely charming and gallant with me, exercising a flirtatious banter that seemed to maximize my personal vanity without ever crossing over into insolence.

That said, charming or not, he was Ara’s man at the end of the day. She had called and now he was answering.

‘Tell them you won’t take it,’ I said. On the face of it, it seemed a simple enough riddle to solve, if you weren’t too greedy about it. ‘If they want rid of you that badly they’ll raise their offer or liquidate the company under you. Get them to up your share offer, so you’ll see a profit when the business does.’ I shrugged at him. ‘In any event, I don’t see what this has to do with me any more.’

I put the kettle back on the stand, snapped it on.

‘Margot, you don’t get it,’ he said, with a deathly earnestness. ‘If I can get the retainer together, there’s a solicitor in London who thinks she can get my offer doubled…’

‘Then complete the arbitration I sent you and mortgage that flat of yours,’ I said as the kettle switched off, gouting steam into the air.

He raised his chin, his eyes meeting mine, and a hateful light burned within them.

He had become someone I didn’t recognize.

‘I didn’t work and sweat like a fucking bastard for two years just so that pair of twats can kick me to the kerb now.’

His voice was low, harsh and very cold. I found myself a little afraid of him.

‘That’s great,’ I said, moving to fill the mugs with boiling water, so I didn’t have to look at him any more. ‘But, like I said, it’s nothing to do with me.’

‘If we hold off on the divorce we could get a loan out on this house,’ he said.

‘Hold off?’

‘I mean, forget about the divorce.’

I had been about to pour water into the waiting mugs.

‘What do you mean, forget about the divorce?’ I asked carefully, my back still to him.

‘You know what I mean,’ he said. ‘Stop pretending you don’t.’

I wanted to be reasonable. I had promised myself that I would be reasonable, and calm. And to be honest, there was something in me that had wanted him to show up here again, for us to talk.

It was tough doing this alone, this life, to sit in here in the dark at night, to be haunted by thoughts of shadowy stalkers and lost girls and silent phone calls.

If this had panned out some other way, I would probably have taken him back, I realized.

I turned to face him.

‘I don’t want to forget about the divorce, Eddy.’ I crossed my arms.

‘Margot, I know I-’

‘I don’t want to be married to you because I don’t think you love me.’

And as I said it, trembling as I was, I realized that it was completely true.

‘In fact, if we’re doing full disclosure, I’m not sure you ever loved me, but be that as it may, I’m really quite positive you don’t love me now.’

‘Oh come on,’ he said, and he was clearly angry, his chair squeaking as he drew back, ‘I made a mistake, I admit it! I know I was a bastard, and you’re still furious about Ara, but-’

‘No,’ I said, and felt the truth of it. ‘I’m not furious about Arabella, not any more. You didn’t love her either.’ I pulled the band out of my sweaty hair, to let the cool air nearer my burning brain. ‘You’re a liar – it’s the company you really want.’

‘What?’

My promised calm was fraying and snapping like a weak tent in a strong wind. ‘You went after that woman for her money and now you’re bricking it because she was more than a match for you. And there is no way in hell I’m going to risk my house because your sexual takeover of the company went tits up.’

He looked stunned, as though I had slapped him.

‘Everyone makes mistakes, Margot. You should know that better than anyone. And you might want to think about that before you decide to get all self-righteous. What if they found out about your old mistakes at that school of yours?’

I gripped the kitchen counter behind me, numb with horror. ‘Was that supposed to be a threat?’

‘Oh for God’s sake, I was just pointing out a fact.’ He had gone an angry scarlet. ‘What’s the matter with you? You’re twitching all over the place. Are you off your meds again?’

I flinched inwardly. I had forgotten that he knew me just as well as I knew him.

He pointed his finger hard at me, with something like triumph. ‘I knew it! I knew it when I saw you on TV!’

‘I think you should leave.’

‘Margot, you don’t realize this, but you need me-’

‘Get out. Get out now.’

He looked about to say more, but instead merely held up his hands and shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’ He got to his feet, snatched up his coat and offered me a bitter smile. ‘But if you need someone to ring next time you’re thrown in the loony bin, you might want to remember this conversation.’

I kept utterly still until I heard the door slam after him. I didn’t start crying until I was quite sure he was gone.