Dear Amy

22

‘Hello, my darling. Did you sleep well?’

Katie blinks awake in the sudden daylight flooding down the steps, which she can see is low-angled, cool, tinted a faint pale yellow. It must still be dawn. He has opened the door and is carrying something carefully in both hands.

‘Yes,’ she says, filled with terror, wondering what this could all mean.

Then she smells what he is carrying on the tray.

It is breakfast.

There is sausage and beans and toast and a fried egg, burned lacy around the edges. This all sits next to a mug of hot, sweet tea. Her mouth fills with saliva, almost gushes with it.

‘Tuck in,’ he says, giving her head an indulgent pat.

She does. She tears into the meat first with ravenous desire – she has been starving for meat, has dreamed of meat. Chewing it hurts her sore gums, burns her mouth going down, but she doesn’t care.

‘Greedy girl,’ chuckles her captor, as she scoops up the microwaved beans with the thin white toast. ‘You keep this up, you’ll get fat.’

Katie, too busy devouring the feast before it can be seized from her, does not reply.

‘Ah,’ he sighs after a little while, ‘what am I going to do with you?’ He squeezes her arm affectionately.

His hands are clean, but his sleeves and trouser legs are covered in damp mud.

He sees her looking. ‘Yes, just doing a bit of digging in the garden while you slept, you lazy little loafer.’

She manages a wan smile.

‘You know, when we move away from here, you’ll need nicer table manners than this if we ever eat out.’

This gets her attention, though it doesn’t stop her from folding the fried egg in half and popping it in her mouth, letting the warm yolk melt on her tongue as she swallows it. ‘What… moving?’

‘Yes, yes, I’m afraid so,’ though he won’t meet her gaze. ‘They’re turning this place into some kind of hotel or convention centre or some such thing. The surveyor’s coming tomorrow, they say. And anyway, I’m getting bored of working here. Done it for too long. It was all right once I left the army, but you can get tired of a place.’

Katie’s head is ticking and whirring.

‘Bored of working here’… ‘All right once I left the army.’

He has never once volunteered a single detail about himself or his past life that has sounded authentic before today. He has tripped up, forgotten his own lies – or perhaps merely abandoned them – as liars are wont to do. Previously, he has only ever admitted to owning this house, being its master, being part of a sordid cabal of high-powered kidnappers.

Something has changed in him. Or more properly, something has happened; she understands, young as she is, that Chris does not change or evolve the way a normal person might.

He is reacting now to some outside stimulus of which she knows nothing.

Whether this is good or bad news for Katie remains to be seen.

‘Maybe we can go abroad, like to Spain. Or maybe even further, Thailand or somewhere like that. Would you like that?’ he asks her, smiling.

‘When?’ she asks, and as she says it she realizes that she’s been too quick, looked too interested. His eyes narrow at her. ‘I mean,’ she adds, as though merely making small talk, ‘will it be before Christmas?’ She forces herself to dredge up some facsimile of girlish enthusiasm, and butter her voice with it. ‘I hear that Thailand is one of those countries where Christmas comes in the middle of summer. They do barbecues on the beach. That sounds so mad. I’ve always wanted to see that.’

He chuckles again, strokes her dirty hair and then rubs his thumb along her cheek while she lifts the tea and drinks deeply. ‘I’ll see what I can do. But we’ll be leaving very soon. Now, would you like a bath?’

She nods yes, injecting her voice with all the enthusiasm she can muster for the idea. Katie would love a bath; give the world for a proper bath, though a part of her suspects that even should she scrub herself raw between now and the end of the world, she will never, ever feel clean again.

However, she does not love the baths Chris gives her, which he calls his ‘favourite time with his favourite girl’. The thought appals her.

She sets the mug down – not on the tray, next to herself – but he quickly scoops it up to join the paper plate. Bugger. He never forgets the mug, the only potentially sharp object she is ever entrusted with.

She wonders whether any of the others before her hung on to their mug. Like Bethan Avery. She wonders whether other girls were given knives, forks, plates, bowls and glasses, small freedoms, and each and every one has been used in an attempted escape and taken away from her successor, and then after that her successor, so that now Katie eats with her hands from paper plates.

When was Bethan here? 1998? An unimaginable aeon to Katie, who had not yet been born then. How many girls have been in this cellar between Bethan and Katie, in all of those long years? Girls who tried to escape; girls who were cunning and bold in the face of evil; girls who dissembled, who fought; girls who had plans?

What became of them all?

Katie is starting to guess.

She tries to control her trembling as he takes the tray with its paper plate, and wipes at her fingers with the wet napkins he has brought down.

‘Now the shops are open, I’m going to nip out and get you some clothes for the journey,’ he says. ‘Something pretty to wear. And when I get back I’ll run our bath.’ He stands up, the tray in hand. ‘So sit tight.’

The door closes behind him, and after the rattle of the keys in the locks, he is gone.

Katie cannot account for it, but she is rigid with terror.

She tries to talk herself into calm. Yes, it was strange he brought breakfast. Yes, it is not her usual bath day. Yes, his disappearance last night was odd, his reappearance stranger.

It’s no use. Her mind ticks inexorably onwards, to realization. Nothing about his words this morning have made any sense. There is no way he can get her as far as Dover without being caught, never mind Thailand. He’s not maintaining his cover as the house’s owner because there is no longer any point.

The important things she must take away – the indisputable truths – are that tomorrow, Friday, surveyors are coming to the Grove and she cannot be found here. That Mrs Lewis has been on TV looking for Bethan Avery, whom people believe is alive, and if Bethan is alive, then she will lead the world right to Chris, and right to this very cellar.

And Chris has been digging in the garden.

She puts her hands to her face, barely able to breathe, as she realizes that what she has so quickly devoured, what he so carefully cooked for her, was her last meal before her execution.