Dear Amy

21

This was impossible.

This was madness, true madness, something my adolescent peccadilloes merely hinted at. I sat very still in his ergonomic office chair while Martin Forrester attempted to reason with me.

‘Margot, don’t you see? It explains everything.’

He might have been speaking in a foreign language. He was telling me that once I understood it all, I would feel better than I’d ever felt. It explained all the things that had ever troubled me.

‘You’re mad,’ I said. I could think of nothing else to say. I was stuck out here in the middle of nowhere with a crazy person.

He explained it again, while I sat there, incapable of speech or movement, as though I was made wholly of wood. The sensation of being a spring wound down had never been stronger, and I was going to explode.

‘All right,’ said Martin. ‘It does sound mad. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.’ He handed me the piece of paper, the piece of paper with ‘Farrell’s Distribution’ on the letterhead.

I took the paper and read it again.

Then I read it once more, observing every character, every loop, every nuance.

‘Margot,’ said Martin, ‘speak to me.’

He suddenly appeared genuinely frightened for me. I suspected that for some reason I struck that indefinable chord in him. I don’t know why. We never know why.

All I knew was that after thirty-five years of being alive, thirty-five years of a varied and, I now realized, extensive existence, I had known him for two weeks and he was all I had in the whole wide world.

But that wasn’t any help now.

‘So,’ I said to him, ‘when did you work all this out?’ I must have sounded cold and unfriendly. That’s how I felt.

He sighed, then gave me a long look. ‘I suspected it from the first moment I Googled your picture on the school website.’ His head turned back towards the wall, with its freight of woe. ‘I wasn’t lying when I said I live with these pictures all day. Your nose was badly broken at some point and healed without being reset, and it changed your appearance, but the rest…’ He gave me a little smile, and a shrug. ‘I wasn’t that surprised when the analysis on the handwriting came back.’

I examined the piece of paper again without speaking.

‘When did I write this?’ I asked, not looking up from it.

‘You were writing it when they came to pick you up at that place, that warehouse,’ he said softly. ‘You were delirious… you don’t remember. I found it in your jacket pocket when I put you to bed…’ He tailed off.

I stared at the cold sunshine beyond the window. It was hard to see. My eyes were blurred. I managed a vague, cynical smile at Martin. Something was ticking urgently and precisely in my head, like a bomb. I handed him back the piece of paper, so I didn’t have to see the horror of it again.

The horror. I could not even deny it.

I shut my eyes.

It wasn’t Martin that was crazy, it was me.

It’s always been me.

The paper was in front of me again behind my closed lids, the one I’d written on in my fevered delirium, while my shoulder ached and the world warped and I waited for rescue, but I’d forgotten that. I’d forgotten Margot, I was writing the fourth letter to Dear Amy, in the childish, fussy script I knew so very well.

The words stood out like knives.

Dear Amy,

I am so frightened now, so very frightened and so sick, and I know he means to kill me very soon and there is nothing I can do. I know that no one knows where I am and that no one will rescue me, and I am so scared and I don’t know what to do. Please help me,

Love,

Bethan Avery

Then the ticking in my head stopped, and the bomb went off.

‘Fine,’ I snapped, leaping to my feet, my hands balling into fists. I no longer felt the pain in my shoulder. ‘Fine. I’m a head case. I’ve wasted everybody’s time pretending to be Bethan Avery.’ I could hardly breathe with terror, with shame, and also with pure rage – the rage of Furies, the rage I can never quite let go of. ‘Was it really necessary to bring me all this way? To humiliate me like this? I had no idea I was writing these things, that I was this… this disturbed. This wasn’t just some shitty little plot for attention, you know. I genuinely thought…’

‘But you’re not pretending to be Bethan Avery.’ He was unmoved by my anger, his hands resting on his knees as he stared up at me. ‘That’s the whole point. You are Bethan Avery.’ His mouth twisted into a half smile, but his eyes were sympathetic. ‘That’s who you’ve always been. And your suicide attempts and your breakdowns and your pills are all down to one thing: you are pretending to be Margot Lewis.’

My mouth worked, soundlessly.

‘Stop this,’ I said, and the mortified tears sprung, unheeded, and gushed down my face, as if they were something utterly separate from me, entirely outside of my control. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry I led you on like this. But there’s no way in the world that I’m her. That’s just insanity.’

He stared at me for a long moment.

‘All right,’ he said briskly. ‘Come with me.’

He was standing now, and steering me towards the door. ‘Do you have everything in your bag?’

‘Um, yes, yes I do…’

I was being led out of the house, through the door, into the bright, brittle sunshine. His Range Rover was parked outside, a thin film of fallen leaves lying over the bonnet and roof. ‘Get in the car.’

‘What?’

‘Fine, you’re not Bethan Avery. Get in the car.’

‘But…’

‘I have something to show you.’

‘What do you mean?’ I was growing alarmed by him, by the steely change in his attitude.

‘You may not be doing this deliberately,’ he said, ‘but that doesn’t change the fact that there are consequences to your actions. Get in the car. Now.’

I don’t know why I did it, but I did. Perhaps it was due to the complete collapse of any and all moral authority I might have pretended to, but I let him push and prod me into his chocolate-brown Range Rover and sat meekly while he drove away from his house down the winding country road through the village, heading south.

I was absolutely poleaxed.

I had written letters pretending to be Bethan Avery, a likely long-dead murder victim. It was morally repugnant and very likely illegal. Most horrifyingly, now that I had been confronted with this, I could guess for you exactly when I had written them. The last had been in the warehouse, in Farrell’s Distribution. I didn’t even have drink to blame. The second had been after Eddy’s visit, when he’d tried and failed to seduce me. And the first…

The first had been after the police had visited the school for the final time. Katie Browne had been missing for nearly a month. They’d told the headmaster that they could find no evidence that she’d been kidnapped – she’d packed a bag and taken some personal effects and money – so they were scaling back the search. She was sixteen, after all. I had been in on the meeting, and listened with increasing ire. So what if she was sixteen? So what if she had problems? If she’d been lured away from her house and had concealed why, not even leaving a note, then clearly something wasn’t right.

‘If she’s just absconded with some boyfriend,’ I said, aware that my cheeks were red, and I was shaking slightly, and that I was scaring the others more than a little, ‘then why wouldn’t she just say?’

The policeman, transparently alarmed at my apparent lack of self-control, had coughed and harrumphed and shrugged and said that ultimately it wasn’t illegal to leave your home when you were of legal age.

‘But it is illegal to bail out of school,’ I said. ‘And it is very suspicious and out of character that this girl would behave that way. She was very committed to her swimming, for example.’

More mumbling and blushes. I suspect, looking back, that the young officer hadn’t agreed with me about this. There was more information that had come up, which he couldn’t disclose, family troubles, etc., that led them to believe she’d left voluntarily. Other forces had been notified, and they just wanted to let us know, thanks very much for the tea, get in touch if you hear anything else.

So much for the search for Katie Browne.

Martin drove in silence and, having nothing to say in the face of my epic humiliation, I did nothing to break it.

We barrelled down the M11 for an hour, passing the turn-off to Stansted, before rolling off the motorway and taking a series of increasingly narrow country lanes.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked eventually. When he’d told me to get in the car, I’d thought we were only going down the road. My shoulder had started to hurt again, cold sweat trickling into the wound through my compromised bandage.

‘Wastenley,’ he said. His voice was neutral, and it was impossible to tell what he was thinking. ‘We’re nearly there.’

The name sounded familiar, as if I should know it, but in my confused, lost state I couldn’t conjure its context. ‘And where is Wastenley?’

He turned to me and narrowed his eyes, as if I had failed a test.

‘You’ll see.’

Wastenley was an expertly trimmed and planted Essex village – there was a sign on the road into it announcing it was a 1989, 1993, 1997 and 2012 winner of Britain in Bloom. I could feel my heart sink. I have never felt comfortable in these kinds of places – places where everyone knows one another, where people have deep roots and where everyone is expected to contribute and, in this instance, compete.

The village gardening committee was run like the Kremlin during the Cold War.

Who had said that? It sounded so familiar somehow.

Martin drove past picture-perfect thatched cottages with exquisitely tidy gardens, past a manicured village green only just beginning to go patchy with encroaching winter, and a twee little post office with a Victorian pillar box outside. A sign taped to the noticeboard advertised a Gilbert and Sullivan revival from the Wastenley Amateur Dramatic and Operatic Society in the Meadhall.

Martin was looking for something, and every so often I would catch him glancing at me.

It was another test, of course. This place must have something to do with Bethan Avery (I couldn’t think why, as its pristine and affluent order would have seemed a million miles away from Bethan’s situation, raised on the edge of town with her impoverished grandmother). Martin, with this insistence that I was Bethan (an inexplicable madness – the handwriting expert was, quite simply, wrong) was expecting me to recognize something about it.

Well, I could happily swear to never having seen any of it in my life before. I had no idea why I had agreed to come, and I grew more and more morose, considering the scale of this monumental disaster. The list of things I needed to do to fix my life had started to grow exponentially. I needed to head off the police before they talked to the school about me – to throw myself on their mercy. I wondered if wasting police time came with a prison sentence. On the other hand, other than the incident with Greta, which I now viewed with a new, horrible sense of shame – she’d seen through me, of course – I wasn’t sure how much time I’d wasted. Mo Khan had analysed the letters, but he clearly hadn’t done much of a job of it, and so here we were.

The letters had caused all of this, and I had written them; there was no escaping from any of that.

Unless Martin had written them, and planted the final one on me.

Or laid hands on them after someone else had written them.

The thought flashed coldly through my brain.

I’d seen the stacked books in his office – the vulnerabilities of young girls in care. If anyone knew how to work the system, to get access to these girls, it would be him.

My heart thudded in horror.

Why did I agree to get in a car with him?

We rolled slowly to a stop in a tiny close of three cottages. On the left was a white plaster and timber confection, built, I would guess, some time in the eighteenth century, and lovingly updated and restored. I got out into the cold wind, and it ruffled my hair as I followed Martin through the squeaky timber gate and along the garden path to the front door.

He gave this door a single, authoritative knock.

I stood back, increasingly alarmed and uncomfortable, and waited. The smell of burning bracken was in the air. What would Martin want out of me to keep silent about all of this? I was at his mercy too.

I was in real trouble.

After a minute or so, just as the silence between us grew unbearable, someone approached slowly through the diamond-shaped spyglass set in the door, moving with the tell-tale carefulness of old age.

Martin raised an eyebrow at me, just before the door opened, revealing a tiny old woman with a perfectly white bun of hair balanced on top of her head. She was gently fat and a pair of cat’s eye glasses perched above her forehead, as if just pushed back rather than removed before she returned to whatever task had been absorbing her. Her hands were white with flour and she was rubbing at them with a tea towel.

‘Hello?’ she asked.

Martin’s expression had changed almost magically into that of polite puzzlement and just a hint of embarrassment, but I saw too that it wasn’t real – as though he were an actor, waiting until now to play his part.

‘I am so sorry to bother you. My wife and I are looking for Kettle Lane, and we’ve been driving around forever. She suggested I stop someone and ask, and frankly the village is deserted…’

Strangers at the door would trouble many old people, but not this spry little bird with her blue apron and flour-dusted fingers. Her bright eyes alighted on us both, examining us with fearless curiosity. ‘Oh, that’s fine, most people get lost. You need to go back out, and straight ahead until you come to the main road, past the Green, keeping it on your right, and then turn left down a very narrow little road – it looks like a private drive, but that’s Kettle Lane. You’ll know you’re there when you see the graveyard just before it.’

Her accent was as beautifully polished and precise as cut glass.

‘Thanks so much,’ said Martin.

‘My pleasure,’ she said, with a grin full of even but yellowing teeth. ‘If you run into trouble, just ask in the post office. They’re practically next door. They’ll point you straight.’

They exchanged polite goodbyes and the door closed, leaving me absolutely bewildered but relieved. I don’t know what I had been expecting.

‘So,’ said Martin, guiding me back to the Range Rover. ‘Remember anything?’

‘No, of course not. I’ve never seen this place before. Who was that?’

His eyes narrowed, and a faintly cruel smile played around his face, though whatever the joke was, he didn’t seem to find it that funny.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you’re really Margot Lewis, then this is your childhood home.’ He spared a glance over his shoulder at the cottage. ‘And that was your mother.’

I don’t really remember what happened next. I felt faint, and suddenly Martin caught me under my arm and helped me back into the Range Rover, his face stricken with concern.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said roughly as he closed my side of the car. I could tell I was alarming him, that he felt he’d overreached himself.

He climbed in next to me, and the door thumped shut on us both, sealing us into the silent cell of the interior.

I wanted to say something, but couldn’t. To deny it all. To ask where the hell we were, what all of this was about. My mouth felt loose, my skin numb.

He sat next to me, his fingers tapping the steering wheel.

‘I…’ I swallowed. All the saliva had dried up in my mouth. ‘Who is she?’

‘She’s Flora Bellamy.’ He did not turn to me, instead glancing back towards the house. Behind one of the leaded windows, a curtain twitched. ‘Her daughter, Margot Bellamy, left home in 1997, when she was sixteen. Took up with an older boy who got her into some unpleasant scenes. Got into some unsavoury scrapes with the law. Turned up high as a kite for Christmas dinner that year and was told by her angry father never to return.’

I breathed in, breathed out.

‘She never did. Police showed up a few times, looking for bail, statements, asking questions. Then nothing. Nothing that lasted for years. The father, Bob, was ex-army and something of a martinet by all accounts; he never forgave her…’

‘He ran the village gardening committee,’ I said softly, this nugget reappearing to me like a flickering spark falling through darkness – but where from? I know this because I know it, surely, however much I’ve tried to block it out.

‘Did he?’

‘Yes,’ I say with certainty. ‘Because it was good for discipline. It was all good for discipline…’ I trailed off.

Why was that all I could remember? I couldn’t even see his face. I couldn’t see hers – the woman in the cottage. She had been an utter stranger to me.

Martin waited in silence.

‘Anyway, the daughter’s name wasn’t even to be uttered out loud in the house,’ he continued, ‘but after he died ten years ago Flora contacted the Salvation Army looking for Margot. She was their only child.’

A kind of burning shame was falling over me, like a veil of fire.

‘And the Sally Army found her. Living in London. Didn’t take long. Didn’t do any good. Margot refused contact and refused to say why.’

A silence fell again. I realized, in my shocked condition, that this statement was actually a question, and an answer was expected.

You know, he made me get up at six every morning of my life. He stood there and watched me wash and brush my teeth until I was fourteen. To make sure I did it properly, he said. Stood and stared, with his arms crossed. What father does that?

And then laughter, a peal of bitter laughter, and that too had a jangling note within it, like cut glass.

‘What do we do with women that let their children be abused?’ I asked. ‘Women who live in fear, who daren’t rock the boat? Should we forgive them? Should we, shall we say, cut them a little slack? Blame their parlous mental state? Pardon all in the great wailing cry, “But I love him…”’ I looked out of the window and shook my head. ‘If you can’t be strong for your children – if you can’t get it together for your children – then what purpose do you serve? Why are you even alive at all? What possible comfort could you be to them?’

I said this last dully, staring out of the window, and out of the corner of my perception he shifted uncomfortably.

‘That’s very harsh.’

‘It’s a viewpoint refined by experience.’

He tapped the steering wheel gently for a moment, as though considering this.

‘So,’ he asked quietly, ‘whose experience? Is this Margot or Bethan that’s talking now?’

What an excellent question, but I could barely compass what it meant, never mind answer it. I am not Margot Bellamy. I am not Margot.

Dear God, if I’m not her, then who the hell am I? What’s going on? How is any of this even possible?

I shut my eyes. They’re wet. Something was coming. A sea change. I felt it in my quaking heart, my sinking stomach.

Perhaps I don’t know who I am, but there is somebody, somebody I remember.

I could see her in my mind’s eye, cigarette in hand, tracing airy figures in smoke as she talked and gestured, as though she was summoning the spirits of the demi-monde. Her short, peroxide hair stuck up in spiky angles, and that scent of hairspray went everywhere with her, like a following ghost.

And that sharp, cut-glass accent – soaked in indifference and noblesse oblige, as though she was a grand duchess in exile. Everyone we met in those squats and communal hostel rooms remarked upon it. As I had come to know her better, I had dismissed it as an obvious affectation, like her alias.

‘Angelique,’ I whispered.

‘What?’

‘I don’t know if this is my house.’ I wiped at my eyes impatiently with the back of my hand. ‘I think it might be Angelique’s.’