Dear Amy

2

‘I don’t know why you make me do these things,’ Chris says. His voice is broken, as though he’s on the brink of tears. ‘Why can’t we just be happy? Why can’t you just be grateful?’

Katie does not reply, does not seem to be expected to, even though he has removed the gag. He’s not even looking at her, in any case. Her chest hurts and her right side, from shoulder to hip, aches as she huddles on the dirty tartan blanket.

She had tried to hit him with the mug and its scalding contents and run for the door, but she gained only a few seconds before he caught up with her, and his fury had been terrifying, unlike anything she could have imagined. She’d been sure that she would die, and was surprised to find, in the aftermath, as she wheezed through bruised ribs, that she hadn’t.

He threw her down the steps, back into her cellar prison, and left her there without food and water for a long time.

This is his first reappearance.

‘I have tried and tried my best for you.’ He rubs at his sallow face with a kind of frantic energy, which she knows bodes ill. ‘You girls, you’re all the same.’

Katie remains silent. She has been a prisoner in the cellar for… four, no, maybe five weeks. She would strike off the days on the stone as a calendar, except that she has no way of telling when one day has ended and another begun. Anyway, marking the stone might make her captor angry, and Katie will do anything, anything at all, to prevent that from happening again – though whatever she does, it’s never quite enough.

‘What do you think would happen if I turned you over, eh? If the others got wind of you, got their hands on you? You can’t imagine the things they’d do to you.’ His eyes are huge, almost comical, though she knows better than to laugh. ‘They’re ruthless. They know no mercy, I tell you. There’d be nothing left of you but a red wet stain on the floor.’

She has heard this story many, many times before. He tells it again and again, almost word for word, as though it is a script, an oath, a prayer. He is part of a gang, which seizes and holds young girls for sex. She is constantly being told how fortunate she is that Chris has protected her so far from their more violent demands. He could revoke this protection at any moment.

All Katie knows is that she has to hang on until somebody finds her, or Chris makes a mistake. She imagines rescuing avengers charging in here, sweeping her up in their arms. To her surprise, it is not her dad she dreams of coming down here and beating Chris to within an inch of his life while her mum carries her to safety, but Brian; his huge beefy arms, his soft blue eyes that can go very hard indeed if, as he often says, someone “is taking the piss”.’

Chris swipes at his own eyes with his fingers.

‘Why do you do this, Katie? Why?’

Now he does seem to want an answer.

She thinks for a moment, and because she is young and convinced that evil is not a universal condition, because the longing to be back with her mum and Brian is a physical ache as terrible as her crushed ribs, she tells the truth:

‘I just want to go home.’

She bursts into tears.

Her voice is tiny, quavering in the dark space, but still he flinches, as though she has slapped him, and his little red eyes swivel down to her, with their ever-present rage and a tinge of fear.

‘What are you on about? I already told you. You can’t go home. You’re dead if you go home.’

‘I know, you said, but…’

His fist hits her hard in the temple, and her teeth clack together, stamping her tongue with cuts. Her mouth fills with blood.

‘Do you think I’m lying? Is that it? DO YOU, YOU UNGRATEFUL LITTLE SOW?!’

He launches himself at her.

And as the terrible evening wears on, she finds at one point she is lying on her belly, her cheek crushed into the stone floor. On the wall opposite, under the swaying light of the bulb, she can see thin words etched on to the bricks nearest the floor, like hen scratchings. From here she can read them: ‘12/1/1998 BETHAN AVERY’.