Dear Amy

24

Chris can’t breathe.

He can’t breathe and he can’t think, and as he tears along the little country lane to the Grove he nearly hits an oncoming van, whose young driver honks furiously at him, his tattooed neck leaning out of the window to scream at him. The accompanying words, however, are ripped away by the wind.

On any other day, Chris would have turned around, followed him, bellowed his own insults, tailgated him – nobody treats me that way, no fucker! – but right now it’s like something that happened to somebody else, in a foreign country.

And besides, the wench is dead.

Where had he heard that before?

Well, it didn’t matter where he had heard it before, because the wench was not dead, despite his best efforts last night. She was still very much alive, thanks very fucking much, and walking around – those vast dark eyes; that abundant hair he’d seized in his fist so many times, now cut short around her shoulders; that full, cheeky fucking mouth.

Just sat there like the little girl she’d been, talking to some twat in a leather jacket. As if she knew he’d be passing. As if she knew…

Now calm down, Chris my old mate. If she is here to get you, then the place would be swarming with coppers by now, wouldn’t it? She’d have straight up handed them the cellar years ago, and Katie, and you’d be in the cells waiting to go to prison for practically fucking forever. She could have sent them round this morning.

But none of that’s happened.

She was supposed to have died. I thought she had died. Oh god, why isn’t she dead.

No. Stop panicking.

He massages his face with his shaking hand. Next to him, on the front seat, is the bag with Katie’s new nightgown in it. Poor Katie. She’s been such a good girl. Better than that insolent whore Bethan fucking Avery ever was.

And yet, there was always something about Bethan. Bee. The first one.

She’s come back.

His head rolls back hard against the driver’s seat.

‘What the fuck does she want?!’ he bellows at the roof of the car.

Chris never forgot the first day he met Bethan.

He hadn’t been living at the house then – nobody lived there – it was kept pristine waiting for whenever some scion of the owner’s family wanted to visit. There was a woman from Cherry Hinton that came in with her daughter to clean once a week, and they would chatter to each other in some alienating, nonsensical Eastern European language. Sometimes, in their sly glances and incomprehensible tittering, he caught the signage of their contempt.

He lived in the village full-time then, a mere half hour’s walk from the house. And walk he did, rain or shine, through the narrow streets and drowsy houses with their smattering of trees, until he reached the gravelled track to the Grove. The trees stopped there, and he joined the Fens – flat, bleak, washed with rain. In ditches on either side of the raised drive secret weeds grew, and overhead every so often flew fat black crows, or the large, streamlined shapes of swans. The wind howled here, knowing no impediment, all the way in from the North Sea. Its icy ruffling felt like a kiss against his face.

The house belonged to the Fen. Years ago the family that owned the Grove had farmed these lands, but no more. Now their patrimony was the house and the walled garden and the keeper’s cottage in amongst the outbuildings. What would have been an undulating landscape of walks was now under the industrial plough. The house was empty most of the time, an afterthought in the life of the family. It existed liminally, the vanishing relic of a lost way of life.

Chris could sympathize. He was also part of a lost world, where men like him had no place.

In his dusty backpack he carried his usual lunch – a cheddar cheese sandwich on thin sliced white bread, a Penguin bar and a bag of prawn cocktail crisps. It was what he had eaten for lunch every day, more or less, for the last fifteen years.

The backpack also contained two unopened letters, thrust into its bottom, to be read later. One was a thin envelope from the Avon and Bristol Police Force, and its smallness and slightness already told him to expect bad news. Another rejection.

The other was A4-sized, made of stout brown paper, and about a quarter of an inch thick. His hands had shaken slightly as he’d packed it. It was risky to take it out of the house, even though the odds were good that he wouldn’t see another soul today. That envelope could get him into a lot of trouble, should it fall into the wrong hands.

Its weight against his back made him sigh. It might not be strictly proper, but a man needed his pleasures. Chris did not have access to this new thing, the Internet, and what he heard of it did not fill him with confidence, but the magazines and newsletters of his earlier years were getting harder and harder to get hold of, and consequently the risk involved in getting them was growing. More and more of them were shutting down production, or featuring muck-brown foreign girls instead of the decent English ones he liked, or using older tarts to play young girls. None of it would do. English roses, that was what he wanted, barely more than budding. A man couldn’t help what he liked, after all.

‘Come on, Bee, we’ve got to get to school. We can look for it later.’

‘I know, I know, just give us a sec.’

He had been so lost in his reveries, thinking about what might be in that brown envelope, waiting for him, that he had utterly missed the real thing.

Two girls stood in the ditch on the side of the road; they’d been hidden from him by a bend in the track. One was short and plump and mousy blonde, though the way her school skirt skimmed over her generous bum was not without interest as she bent to inspect something in the thin ditch water. Had she been alone, he might have approached her, engaged her in conversation, manoeuvred himself into accidentally-on-purpose touching her through the taut grey serge, letting his fingers flicker over her. That was the trick, leaving them so they weren’t sure if it had been an accident or not.

And out here, on her own, what could she have done about it? Or said about it afterwards, to others?

Had she not been so near to the village, depending on her reaction, he might have ventured more.

But she was not alone. The other girl stood, her arms folded disconsolately around herself, her face hidden by her overhanging dark hair. She was tall, but not too tall, and slender, but not too slender, and her stooped posture and neglected unhappiness, something he’d taught himself to recognize, shone out like a dark sun.

He could feel something within him start to pulse, urgently, and when she raised her face and he saw her sad dark eyes, her full mouth, he could hardly breathe.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked suddenly, treating them to his most disarming grin, the one he practised in his mirror at home for exactly this kind of occasion.

The dark girl, Bee, shrugged silently, but the little blonde one offered him a sunny smile, full of repulsive pert confidence. He immediately realized that touching her would have been a bad idea, and swallowed down a little spurt of dislike.

‘It’s all right. Bee’s lost a necklace. A little silver cross. We was walking back this way last night and it must have broke.’

‘It was my mum’s,’ said the dark girl, this Bee. Her voice was low and sweet, and full of unspoken appeal. Those heavy brown eyes were upon him. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen it, Mister?’

‘No, no,’ he rapped out quickly, trying to control his hammering heart, his shortening breath. Her lips were a perfect deep rose. ‘But why do you think it’s in this ditch? Surely you’d be better looking on the road.’

‘We thought we saw a kingfisher down here,’ said the blonde girl. ‘But it weren’t.’

He didn’t even look at her.

‘Yeah,’ said Bee. ‘I wanted to show Nat. She’s never seen one.’

‘And it was definitely around here, then?’

They nodded, though the dark girl did so a little hesitantly, as though not sure. The corners of her eyes were crinkled a little, the whites red with distress. How old was she? Fourteen, fifteen? He longed to slide his arms around her, to comfort her, to pull her close. He drank in the sight of her, trying to think of something to say, something that might detain her.

‘A little silver cross, you say?’

‘C’mon Bee,’ said the blonde girl quickly, her voice strained, flat, oddly neutral. ‘We’ll be late for school. We can come back later.’

He glanced at her, impatiently, and realized his error – her suspicion was writ large on her face, before being quickly hidden. She didn’t know what she suspected yet – she was a little too young – but she had picked up on his eagerness, his interest in her friend, and realized it was not quite… normal.

He cursed himself for a fool.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Bee, reluctant to leave and seemingly oblivious to her friend’s alarm. ‘We should go.’

It would be a mistake to try and keep them now; it would only compound his bungling.

‘Very true,’ he said, affecting the tones of a concerned adult, the-fun-and-games-are-over-now type. ‘You can’t be late for school, girls. But what should I do if I see your necklace?’

He grinned at the object of his desire, waiting for the gift of her address, her phone number.

The blonde girl’s gaze narrowed at him.

‘You could leave it at our school, St John’s. It’s only in the village.’ She took the dark girl’s arm, pulling her after her, towards the lane, leaving him behind in the ditch.

‘Leave it for Bethan Avery.’ She tugged. ‘C’mon, Bee. We’re late.’

As they moved off, he had heard them murmuring, their voices carried further than they would have expected by the still flat air of the Fens.

‘Sorry about your cross. But what a creep.’

‘Aw, come on, Nat. He was only being friendly.’

He searched for hours before he found the necklace, glinting at the side of the lane. He had been about to give up. It was a sign, he realized, turning the fragile links over in his hands, running his finger down the cheap thin silver cross. It was a sign that fortune was finally answering his prayers. He squeezed the broken link in the chain closed with ease. The thing was probably worth a tenner, if that. Its value was clearly sentimental.

He didn’t reach the house until nearly eleven. The gardener, Malcolm, was already packing tools away and treated him to a curious wave.

Chris returned it, with a brusque good morning, but didn’t stop for conversation. He could barely breathe, the little silver necklace tucked into his fist. He retreated up into one of the first-floor bedrooms, and when he was sure Malcolm was gone, he thrust his hand into his unzipped jeans and worked himself frantically. Twice in the ditches by the lane had failed to slake his burning desire, had only increased it. He heard her voice again – ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen it, Mister?’ – that gentle entreaty, the way that Mister turned to Master in his memory, and it was over in seconds.

Later he turned the pages of his magazine, sprawled on the carpet, and the girls in the black and white photographs all had her face. He hung the necklace over the bedpost, so he could look at it and keep his hands free. The afternoon’s setting sun lit it into a little silver blaze, a star shining against the antique Jacobean wood.

Bethan Avery. Even her name was like music.

After all of these lonely years, these furtive gropings, there would be love at last. He could be anything she wanted. She was too young to know what she wanted, anyway, so he would be able to teach her, to mould her into whatever he desired. He imagined returning the necklace to her at some point during their special intimate times together, fastening it around her naked neck while she lifted her abundant dark hair up, and her pleased, grateful smile glowed more brightly than the silver.

He did not go to the school. That would have been madness. Instead he waited, hiding in plain sight, on pub benches and at bus stops, slowly piecing together her route home, his face hidden in newspapers as Bethan and her friend, who he took to calling The Gnat, sauntered by, too caught up in their girlish gossip even to notice him.

The Gnat left her on the corner of Church Road, and sometimes if their conversation had not quite finished, they could loaf there for hours, through the growing snow and rain, half-sat, half-leaning on the street sign, laughing at nothing, their hoods up over their heads. This both pleased and infuriated him – though it meant he spent more time with her, it also meant that some other man might see her there, as she twirled in her little grey school skirt, black cotton tights and cheap nylon coat, showing some dance move to The Gnat. Some spotty rival might appear and steal her away. When she was his girl, there would be no more exhibiting herself on street corners, that was for sure.

He didn’t have a car then – he’d been taught to drive in the Army, before he’d jumped/been pushed, though he’d never needed one – but he saw now that the time had come to get one, as surveillance was becoming impossible without it. There was nowhere to sit and wait on the rest of her route home without curtains twitching. All of this would be much easier with a car, especially now the bad weather had arrived, and sitting outdoors in it only attracted attention. Time to dip into his hoarded savings. He bought a neat but old Ford Fiesta from a taciturn man in a baseball cap on Milton Road, sold with the implicit understanding that it was going to fail its next MOT. Chris thought its sassy red colour might please her – and in any case, it suited his cover.

A plan had begun to form in his mind.

Snow fell and the freezing winds turned to ice. The Indian summer of a mere three weeks ago, when he’d first met Bethan, was little more than a memory. His hunger for her grew dangerously, explosively. He drove out to Ipswich, to Newmarket, to Norwich, picking up small, malnourished prostitutes he could pretend were her, thinking that soon, soon, he would have the real thing in his arms.

The rest of the time he spent working on the old priesthole below the main sitting room. It was filthy and full of layers of dead cobwebs – not suitable for a young girl – but he swept the flags, took measurements for a bed, a toilet, some soundproofing material. While he was sure that Bethan would come round, there was probably going to be a little girlish reluctance at first, until she understood the full force of the love and desire she had raised in him. And once she knew, how could she fail to return it? This was just a temporary measure, to stop her from running off home in a strop, he told himself. Once he was sure of her, he could move her into one of the main bedrooms. Or perhaps, considering her age and how near they were to her home, they could flee together, to the continent. Live together on the Costa del Sol, run a bar maybe. They’d serve runaway gangsters on the lam from England, who’d be unlikely to dob them in.

He lay in bed imagining scenarios where he mixed freely with these violent, dangerous men in their silk shirts and golden sovereign rings – besting them at poker, hiding their contraband from the corrupt Spanish police chief, defeating them in gun battles and being acclaimed their leader – and then returning to his adoring Bethan as she lay in bed, weeping at the thought of him almost being killed; vulnerable, tender, and entirely and utterly his.

Surely such love was worth risking everything for.