Dear Amy

20

I was woken by church bells and the raucous cries of crows.

My shoulder hurt less, but my limbs were just as heavy. It was very restful, actually, to just lie there and be unable to do anything.

Then I remembered.

‘Martin,’ I shouted, or attempted to. My voice was tremulous and insubstantial.

My car was still in the juggernauts’ graveyard. I had to get it back. I had to get to the police and describe my attacker. I had to get Wendy to forward my mail somewhere safe. I had to… tell Martin that I knew who Bethan Avery was.

I couldn’t see my mobile phone.

I touched my shoulder. It was still a little hot and tender, but the bandages felt far less tight. This gave me so much confidence that I got out of bed and stood up in one motion. I was in the process of taking my first step when the dizziness hit me and I collapsed to the floor. For a moment I couldn’t move at all.

I was so frustrated and angry that I wept hard but silently into the coarse carpet for a few seconds.

Now, now, Margot, you were just a touch too hasty, that’s all. If you stand up slowly then you’ll be all right.

I sat up, slowly. Even this made me feel vague and numb. How the hell could I accomplish anything in this condition? If that thug burst in here right now I would be utterly helpless. This sobering notion gave me renewed strength. Sitting around and crying about it was quite simply not a luxury I could afford.

I tugged down the shoulder of my shirt to examine my injuries with my own eyes. I gently pulled off a little of the tape and lifted the bandage. Even this hurt, the cooler air stinging it. It was a knife cut, a long furrow beginning at the top of my shoulder, and coming down over my chest until it was level with my armpit. It was a perfectly straight line, about a quarter of an inch deep at its widest, with slightly raised edges that were white against the angry red skin surrounding it. Within the lacing of the stitches, the blood within had congealed to a dark ruby red. I peered at it. It looked ugly, but was hardly the death-dealing injury I had mistaken it for. I replaced the bandage carefully, the tape refusing to stick properly again. Sod it.

I stood up, slowly. Far better. I still felt weak and dizzy, but it would pass. I tried to smooth down my tangled, sweaty hair.

The room, now that I saw it in daylight, was small but pretty, with pale blue curtains and a sanded grey wood dresser. This supported a warped antique mirror that threw my reflection back at me at a slightly queer, fun-house angle. A conch shell rested before it.

Nudging aside the curtains, a tiny but beautifully maintained scrap of garden lay below me, edged in dark green hedging. Blue tits and chaffinches were darting in and out of a bird feeder. Beyond the garden were fields, their stubble ploughed under, bounded by a thin ribbon of trees. The landscape was flat, the sky wide – this was the Fens, I understood immediately – but where in the Fens?

It was a beautifully cold, sunny day on the very lip of autumn, before it turns to winter. With my good arm I opened the window. There was a squeal, then the fresh tang of a cold breeze ruffled against my face.

Where was I?

I made it, one foot at a time, to the top of the stairs. On the landing, a trio of plastic crates full of papers, folders and other bric-a-brac stood one atop the other, the debris of a house move, if I was any judge. Getting down the stairs was the worst thing and took the longest time.

Eventually I found myself in a small living room, low ceilinged and crammed with bookshelves. Books burst untidily out of these, stacked up in rows two deep in places, every available nook and cranny full of them – non-fiction, literary novels, a smattering of crime and thrillers with their titles in large block capitals. There was lots of twentieth-century literary biography – De Beauvoir, Sartre, Miller, Hemingway – clearly Martin had a thing for Left Bank writers.

There was also a record collection comprised of real records near the wide-screen television – vinyl, stacked in their own cabinet and with the names on the spines. As I hobbled nearer I could make out the Sex Pistols, the Stranglers and the Clash, which made me smile. So Martin spent his leisure hours mourning the fact he was too young for the punk rock revolution, did he? How adorable.

Stop that, Margot, I told myself sternly.

Everything looked slightly amazed, a little jumbled, as though this was the condensation of the contents of a much larger home.

I had never heard Martin talk of a Mrs Forrester, but to me this looked like the pad of a divorcee rather than a bachelor, with its sense of belongings decanted into a smaller space than they were used to.

A pair of glass doors led to the little garden, and in the middle of the room stood a low coffee table surrounded by a sofa and chairs. A remote for the expensive stereo and a glass bowl full of coins and keys lay on top of it, but despite the genial messiness, there was no sign of any dust – I suspected he got someone in to clean as he didn’t strike me as a neat freak.

There was also no sign of my phone, though.

I sighed.

‘What are you doing downstairs?’ Martin asked suddenly from behind me.

I started, shocked. He had emerged from the hallway, and behind him I could see a door standing open, displaying a vast, very expensive iMac, and an ergonomic desk chair with a mesh back. It must be his office.

I blushed hotly, aware of myself as nosy and furtive.

‘Um, where am I?’

He furrowed his brows, as though in disbelief. ‘You… well, this is my house. In Little Wilbraham. Why aren’t you in bed?’

‘Oh.’ I bit my lip. ‘I have to make a phone call,’ I mumbled, feeling very vulnerable standing there, sticky and dishevelled and sheet white.

He raised a finger, as though I had a point, and vanished back into his office before reappearing a second later with my iPhone, fully charged. ‘Here you go.’

I accepted it without looking at him. I was embarrassed, very embarrassed, for a variety of reasons. The circumstances of my presence here created a peculiar kind of intimacy with him, one I hadn’t thought I wanted but did not resent.

‘Martin,’ I began awkwardly.

‘Yeah?’

‘Um… thanks, you know. For everything. I’m sorry about…’ I twitched my shoulders vaguely and the hurt one twanged. ‘Well, you know…’

‘You thanked me already.’ He put his hands on his hips and looked down at the floor. ‘So don’t worry about it.’ His head snapped up suddenly, as though he’d had a burst of inspiration. ‘Are you hungry yet?’

Before I tackled Martin about what I had realized in my dream, I wanted to talk to Lily, to whom I owed an apology. I might have been right about the fact that strange men were after me, but I had still behaved disgracefully, and unlike Ara, I thought with a little stab of shame, Lily did not deserve to be spoken to in that way.

She didn’t answer – and when I thought about it, I realized she might be in class. In fact, I ought to be in class, I remembered with a gut-lurching spasm of guilt.

‘What?’ asked Martin. He had stopped by my shoulder while I sat on the sofa, in order to put a fresh cup of hot coffee in front of me. Bless him, he’d remembered I take it black. The smell of it immediately made everything seem fractionally more manageable.

‘I need to call work. What time is it?’

‘Don’t worry about that. The police took care of it.’ He flicked a tea towel back over his shoulder and vanished into the kitchen. ‘Toast? It’s all I’ve got, I’m afraid.’

I paused, frowning at the coffee, then at the door he had gone through.

‘The police called my work?’ I could hear the suspicious note in my voice. ‘Very obliging of them.’

‘I told them you weren’t in a fit state to bother yourself.’ I could hear bread being sliced in the next room. I was starving, I realized. ‘You weren’t, at the time.’

‘I’m surprised they let me leave with you.’

He chuckled drily, then stopped dead.

‘What?’ I asked, craning my head round towards the kitchen.

Silence.

I stood up, hobbled towards the open door to be met by him.

‘What?’ I repeated. ‘What’s so funny?’

He glanced down, embarrassed again. ‘I was the only person you would leave with. You wouldn’t give them the names of anyone to call.’

I met his eyes as they came up. They were very green. ‘Tell me.’

He licked his lips. ‘You were on their system, and since you were obviously distressed they wanted to send you to Narrowbourne, and then I said, you know, you could stay with me in Little Wilbraham overnight, and you liked that plan, and after some very fast talking, and getting O’Neill out of bed and running it past him, they reluctantly agreed. So, here you are.’

‘I don’t understand. Why would they send me back to Narrowbourne?’ A cold dread and fury was starting to hammer against my breastbone. ‘Good God, I was the one that lunatic attacked, why would-’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s not like that.’

‘I mean he broke into my home and tried to kill me,’ I continued, feeling the ignition turn in the engines of my rage. ‘I didn’t imagine that, did I? Or did I?’

‘Margot, stop. Stop-’

‘I mean, maybe I did, maybe this is-’

He raised a quelling hand. ‘Stop!’

I paused, waiting, as my chest rose and fell.

‘It’s exactly what you think it is,’ he eyed me keenly. ‘Whoever kidnapped Bethan Avery saw your picture in the paper, or you on TV, found out where you worked, followed you home and attacked you there.’

My mouth snapped shut. I was so unused to people agreeing with me lately that I think I was astounded.

He offered a little bounce of a shrug. ‘That’s exactly how it went down. And it’s something that should have been anticipated, given everything we know.’

I considered this and sighed. My anger was draining away. ‘Well…’ I took a deep breath, tried to force some calm back into my lungs. ‘Why should it have been anticipated? Why should these people come after me? If I knew where Bethan Avery was, we wouldn’t need to pay drama students and film crews and get underfoot at hospitals making movies about her, would we?’

Something queer came into his expression then, something both sympathetic and yet speculative.

And increasingly, nothing about this whole incident and its fallout made any sense. If, as I had suspected before the attack, I was being hunted because Bethan’s kidnapper thought I knew where she was, why had he not tried to question me about her whereabouts? And what about the other man, the one from the car park? Was there really a gang after all? And why had the police wanted to send me to Narrowbourne? I couldn’t go home, obviously. I probably had come over as a little hysterical (and who could blame me) but why not keep me in hospital overnight? I mean, I know the NHS is under pressure, but still…

I felt sick. I couldn’t remember much at all about the previous night. The hospital had been a blur. When I don’t remember things, it’s never a good sign. I don’t remember drinking, so there wasn’t even that for an excuse.

Oh Jesus, maybe I am really crazy.

‘These men…’ I began.

A faintly embarrassed look stole over his face. ‘Well, man.’

‘There were two…’

‘No. The other fellow who followed you to the car park was, um, an undercover police officer.’

‘What?’ I asked, stunned.

He shrugged, his mouth twisting ruefully. ‘Yeah. The police have had you under surveillance for a couple of weeks now.’

‘They… surveillance?’

‘Yes.’ He was rubbing at the back of his neck with his hand.

‘I don’t… they think I knew who was writing the letters, don’t they?’ I drew a sharp intake of breath. ‘Martin, I think they’re right. Listen, I’ve been thinking about my time with the nuns, and there was a girl there who could have been Bethan Avery. Someone I knew at the hostel. Her name was-’

‘Margot, I don’t think it was anyone you knew at the hostel. We found Bethan Avery. Last night.’

I couldn’t reply. I was absolutely amazed.

‘You have? I don’t understand… Martin, tell me. Honestly. What’s going on? Who is it?’

He looked at me then for a long silent moment, before he threw down the tea towel. ‘Come with me.’

I pulled my arm around myself and shivered, despite the cheery warmth of the house.

‘Take a seat,’ said Martin, bending down to clear papers off the mesh-backed office chair.

I couldn’t, not straight away. I was transfixed.

On the wall opposite, a map had been put up – a gigantic view of East Anglia, scattered with pins. Over the top of this was a collage of sorts – a diagram of missing girls. They smiled out with guarded shyness from school portraits, they glowered from mug shots, they lay curled and sunken on steel gurneys or wrapped in rotting blankets.

I blinked, overwhelmed, horrified. Then I began to distinguish what I was looking at out of this carnage. There were six major hubs of photographs, connected by arrows. Some of these pointed at the girls, some at random locations, and all were dotted with notes – Cambridge Methodist Youth Club, St Hilda’s Academy – with an icy shock I recognized Katie Browne in her St Hilda’s uniform.

In the upper left corner was Bethan Avery, and I was struck suddenly by how similar the two girls were, with their dark hair and suspicious, keen dark eyes.

‘What is this?’

Martin came to stand at my shoulder. His heat was palpable, even through my shivering cold.

‘The other victims,’ he said, almost gently. ‘I mentioned them before, remember?’

‘The ones you think he killed?’

‘The ones we’re now sure he killed.’ He placed a hand on my good shoulder. ‘Or at least the ones we know about.’

I tried to parse this. ‘There’s… good God…’

‘Six, yes. Six we know about. Two more that we suspect.’

I was shaking. ‘But…’ I pushed my hair out of my face. ‘They’re all so young.’

‘Let me talk you through it,’ he said, releasing my shoulder. His tone was still gentle, but there was something glittering underneath, some hard edge of determination. ‘It works like this. In 1998, he kidnaps Bethan Avery while she is visiting her grandmother in hospital. He keeps her for no more than two months, but she escapes.’

I nodded.

‘There’s no evidence,’ he continues, ‘and the case dries up. No body, though everyone assumes she must be dead because of the blood loss on the nightdress they found.’

‘Yes, I know,’ I said, trying to rein in my impatience.

‘Fine, so we’ll come back to Bethan. Because I think that’s what’s happening in this case. We’re coming back to Bethan. The next one that we know about is Jennifer. And there’s a long gap – about three and a half years – which makes a few of us very nervous, as someone like this, well, three and a half years is a long time when you’re that driven.’ He scratched his stubbled chin thoughtfully. ‘I think that when we catch him we’ll find there was another victim during that period-’

‘Or that Bethan’s escape frightened him off for a while.’

Martin let out a short hmm. ‘Possibly. But yes, sorry, Jennifer Walker.’ His finger nearly fell on the face of a heartbreakingly young girl in a pink sundress, seemed to reconsider and then touched the photo margin below instead. ‘She was only twelve. Like all of them, she was known to social services, in this case in Norwich. The social services thing is going to be a theme, I warn you. She was put into residential care for six weeks when her mother refused to leave her father after his conviction for breaking her jaw. He got out of prison, moved back in, and Jenny was moved out in very short order.

‘So, Jenny is bullied in care and wants to run away. Tries a couple of times, is brought back. She’s a sensitive sort, finds it very hard. This is also going to be a recurring theme, incidentally. She’s last seen in a McDonald’s with a strange man before vanishing. It hits the media. Search parties, press conferences, the works… Sorry, are you cold?’

‘I… a little.’ My teeth were beginning to chatter.

‘Try this.’ He put a heavy Barbour jacket over my shoulders, and leaned over and switched on a mobile heater by the window. ‘It won’t take long to warm up.’

‘Thank you.’

‘So,’ he continued, ‘after ten days a family out camping find her buried in a shallow grave near a picnic ground in Thetford Forest. She’d been strangled, and buried in a white nightdress that wasn’t hers. Again, there were no hair or fibres really, as she’d been washed post-mortem – but not well enough to take out all the DNA, so we do have a profile on him if he’s ever caught. The nightdress is still creased from the packet it came out of. Everyone thinks of Bethan Avery, and there’s talk about a serial killer, but even though Jennifer and Bethan have their own Crimewatch special and there are a billion people and their dogs phoning in with leads, nothing comes of it.

‘So a couple more years go by, and then in 2003, the summertime again, Lauren Jacks goes missing. Lauren is from Newmarket, about fifteen miles up the road, and she’s another girl that appears to have absconded from care. Her body isn’t found, and it’s not clear whether she just ran away.

‘Then two years after that, something changes. Sarah Holroyd, who’s twenty-one and three months pregnant, is found dumped by the side of the A11, near Mildenhall.’

He stabbed the point on the map with his finger, but I didn’t see it. I was staring at a photograph near the pin, and couldn’t actually breathe or speak.

‘No attempt to bury her – she was nude. She’d been beaten to death. But her body was suggestive – she’d definitely been kept alive somewhere in poor conditions for a significant period in the run-up to the murder, and more than that – she looks, physically, like the others. Well, she doesn’t there, obviously, poor girl… sorry, are you all right?’

‘I… I could do with sitting down.’ I thought I was going to faint. I’ve never fainted before.

He was so obviously mortified, I pitied him. ‘I’m so sorry, Margot, I’m used to looking at these kinds of pictures, I forget that other people…’

‘No, it’s fine.’ I swallowed, let the mesh chair take my weight. I deliberately turned my eyes away from the gruesome photo of the dead girl, with her misshapen jaw and open, staring, bloodshot eye. ‘I’m fine.’

He peered at me, and there was concern, but also something else – that speculative tilt to his head, as though I was being tested for something. ‘If you’re sure.’

‘Yes. Go on.’

‘Well, Greta, who you met in London recently…’

I suspect my face spoke volumes.

‘Well, she thinks Sarah and then Becky, the next victim, made him angry somehow, so their remains are treated far less respectfully – they’re literally dumped at the side of the road near rubbish bins – and they die more violently. Sarah was pregnant when she was abducted – we think, perhaps, that this would have made him feel she was promiscuous and unworthy, and Becky, from all accounts, was a notorious firebrand. She would have fought him all the way down.’ He twitched his head sideways. ‘You may not have had much time for her, and with good reason, but Greta worked up a profile on our man and it’s very convincing if you are an aficionado of those sorts of things.’

‘Since I’m not, I’ll take your word for it.’ Believe it or not, I didn’t say this to be snippy. I don’t even like watching this sort of thing on the TV. I find it too disquieting.

He acknowledged this with a tiny nod and a twist of his mouth. ‘Regardless, Greta suspects he is someone that would appear very affectionate to his victims initially. He would believe he’s in a romantic relationship with them.’

I treated him to an incredulous raise of my eyebrow. ‘So he seduces them into coming with him?’

‘No, absolutely not. Or, rather, not ultimately. What happens, we think, is that he befriends these girls somehow, or passes himself off as something he is not, and through doing that he is able to get them to accompany him somewhere he can abduct them. Of the girls that are found, every single one of them has injuries that are consistent with some kind of forcible imprisonment, forcible assault – broken nails, restraint marks on the wrists and ankles, malnutrition. However crazy he is, he must know that all things considered, they don’t want to be with him. And the injuries we find are always as old as the girl’s disappearance – the incarceration happens straight away. Greta thinks the incarceration is the whole point. It’s all about control. He gets to have a person in his power that he can dominate totally, someone who is not in a position to reject or abandon him.’

I let out a disgusted sigh.

‘I know,’ he answered. ‘He’d also, however, have very poor anger management and next to no ability to brook any kind of defiance or resistance from them. There’s a reason he chooses girls so young.’

‘Heaven forefend,’ I said, in bitter irony, ‘my rape victim dared to be cheeky with me.’

‘He’s a psychopath, Margot. He’s incapable of seeing any point of view but his own. He thinks this is a romance, and so it is, to him. But the worst part is that the violence escalates every time he imprisons a girl, and with each girl it takes less time for him to become disillusioned with them.’ He sighed. ‘That’s bad news for Katie: she’ll be coming to her cut-off point.’

I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to this. My heart hammered against my ribs.

And beneath it all, my fury coiled and rustled, like a fanged serpent. How dare you, whoever you are. How dare you.

‘I won’t labour this; though there have been no more bodies, we think there were two others between Becky and Katie – Hannah Murphy went missing after a youth club disco in 2011, and Chloe Firth in 2013. No evidence, but they haven’t been heard from since and they fit the victim profile – dark-haired white girls, both from East Anglia.’ He shrugged. ‘And then, Katie Browne. Katie from Cambridge, where it all started.’ He rubbed his chin, regarded the girls on the board. ‘Started with Bethan Avery.’

‘Who is writing letters now,’ I said. I felt exhausted. The heating was now far too high. I let his coat drop off my shoulders and on to the chair back.

‘Yes.’ He came and sat down opposite me, on an old trunk pushed up against his office window. Next to us, his wall and its web of misery sprawled away on either side. ‘Bethan Avery, who is writing letters now. But why now, after all these years?’

I felt very sad all of a sudden. ‘You think that she’s an accomplice, don’t you? That’s what this all must mean.’ I let my gaze stray up the morass of photographs, the notes, the maps. I was close to tears; it was as though Bethan had betrayed me. ‘She’s been helping him in some ghastly way, and twenty years in she’s had an attack of conscience. She writes as a child to garner sympathy, perhaps, but can’t commit to finally giving him up.’

Because really, it was the only thing that made sense. I just hadn’t wanted to admit it. There was no way, in the situation that she described herself being trapped in, she could post letters to a newspaper. This could only mean one of two things. Either her captor was in on it, or she was lying about the situation.

‘No,’ said Martin briskly. His gaze was very direct, unnervingly so. ‘Nobody thinks she’s an accomplice.’

‘Then what?’ I growled wearily, rubbing my temples. One of my migraines was lurking around the back of my head, considering whether to strike or not.

‘Greta and I think,’ and he seemed to choose his words very carefully, ‘that in a very fundamental sense, she is exactly who she says she is. She is a frightened girl who lived through a terrible ordeal and has never recovered.’

‘Fine,’ I snarled. ‘But why can’t she just say what happened to her so we can catch the bastard?’

‘Whoa, calm down,’ said Martin, putting a hand on my trembling arm.

‘I’m sorry.’ I bit my lip. ‘But it’s such a fucking huge… mess, Martin. I didn’t think helping this girl out would have such a massive effect on my life. I thought I’d tell the police about the letter and someone would sort it out, and now everything I have is in jeopardy, it’s all in free-fall. My house is in pieces – my house, which I love – I was nearly killed, and my employer’s going to find out about my past – Jesus, if they haven’t already.’

‘No, not at all,’ he said, then winced. ‘Well, maybe.’

I threw myself back in the chair with a horrified sigh, and covered my eyes with my hands.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I seemed to be saying it a lot lately. ‘I must sound like a perfectly selfish creature to you.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘you really don’t. I don’t think for a moment that when this started you imagined the consequences would escalate as quickly as they have.’

I uncovered my eyes and let my head flop back against the chair. ‘I just can’t see my way through to the end, now, not at all. It’s a labyrinth.’

‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘But the thing about labyrinths is that you’re always at your most lost just before you get to the centre.’

In the quiet, I could hear a clock ticking, gently, somewhere in the house, and as always there was the background whisper of the wind; and the fine, lost strands of the croaking crows.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked. His gaze was not on me any more, it was on the map on the wall. He had a calculating squint.

‘One thing hasn’t changed,’ he said, as though I had not spoken. ‘He’s keeping them all in the same place, wherever that is.’

‘But where would that be?’

‘Well, Bethan Avery was the first – it will be near her. It’s a cellar or basement, certainly the walls are stone and there are particular kinds of mould found on the girls’ bodies that only exist in cold, humid conditions. They’ve nearly all got some kind of lung infection in autopsy, depending on how long they’ve been down there. O’Neill thinks that after the initial abduction in winter the killer switched to summer for that very reason.’

‘But Katie went missing in October.’

‘Yes. And Katie wasn’t known to social services either, which makes her a little different. Something has changed. Maybe his supply dried up somehow. Or he had a brush with the law, or a conviction of some sort recently, which means he doesn’t have the same access to girls. Cambridgeshire Constabulary and MHAT have been running a mile a minute to analyse all the data we’ve got. There are a few good leads in there, too. And believe it or not, the reconstruction did turn up some interesting nuggets from the general public via the hotline number – the one they’re most excited about is an Irish hitchhiker.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah. She says she encountered someone very like our man outside a service station on the A12 near Ipswich in 2006. He offered her a lift.’

I stared at him. As far as I’d known, the reconstruction had been a bust.

‘A hitchhiker?’

Martin nodded. ‘Yes. She accepted, but as he opened the car door, there was something about him she didn’t like, so at the last minute she declined his kind assistance and he went for her, tried to drag her into his car. She saw the reconstruction in Belfast, of all places, and gave the hotline a call.’ Martin rubbed his head. ‘She describes him as very friendly at first, as he talked her out of the service station and over to his car door, but then he changed to “absolutely raging crazy angry” once he realized she was going back into the service station and he was going to lose her. She’d never seen anyone react like that before, and out of nowhere, from the second she turned him down. It fits our profile of him – he’ll be able to hold it together to deceive someone for a short while, but no longer than that.’

‘This girl didn’t go to the police?’

He shrugged. ‘She meant to report it, but never got around to it. She was nervous talking about it on the telephone ten years after it happened, according to O’Neill. She was only fifteen at the time.’

‘He wouldn’t need special access of the kind you’re talking about if he’s grabbing hitchhikers,’ I mused.

‘No, but we think he just liked the look of Miss Belfast, so acted on impulse. From what we can tell about her, she would have been exactly his type.’

I spared a glance at the wall. ‘So, clearly, the rest of the time, he’s choosing them somehow. They’re mainly vulnerable girls in the social services system, and they share a certain physical type. Somehow he has access to a pool of these kinds of girls…’

‘Absolutely.’

‘So, a social worker perhaps, or a policeman.’

‘No. The police looked into this, but there is nobody that had official contact with all the girls during the time period. It’s far more likely he’s an ancillary worker who moves around and works on short contracts, possibly a driver, because the girls are in different council catchment areas. He almost certainly has more than one identity.’

‘It doesn’t necessarily follow that he’s a driver,’ I said. ‘He could be a locum of some sort.’

‘He could, but probably isn’t,’ replied Martin, with the sure conviction of someone who has had this conversation before. ‘Greta and I think he’s bright but not educated past secondary school. He’ll be fundamentally incapable of taking any kind of orders, or tolerating criticism, so he probably works alone and for himself, possibly as a taxi or bus driver, or in catering, or as a janitor. Or maybe he just volunteers for a charity. Any of those could expose him to these girls.’

I shivered, imagining it. You never know who is in the background, watching you as you go through your daily life. ‘Surely people are vetted if they’re going to be working with vulnerable children?’

‘They are now, yes – this is a post-Soham world – but they weren’t always.’ He let his head rest forward. ‘And remember, vetting only works if you’ve been caught before, or your offences are still on file.’

I managed a weak chuckle. ‘That I can vouch for.’

We exchanged wan smiles.

‘So you’ve found Bethan Avery?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes,’ he said, and he didn’t look away. ‘I think so, most definitely. Margot, I’ve got something to tell you. It may bother you.’

I shivered in expectant silence. Then I said, ‘Go on.’