Helen Callaghan - Dear Amy

He comes down the steps, carrying the bowl carefully in his hands, and her mouth waters at the smell despite herself. He switches the light on, and she blinks helplessly under the glare of the single light bulb swinging from the ceiling.

‘Hungry, are we?’

She nods.

He smiles, and then, just as carefully as he carried it down, pours the soup into the drain near the door, it leaving a sad little plume of steam as it vanishes.

‘Do you think I didn’t hear that racket you made earlier?’

Within moments her hair is gathered into his fist, yanking her forward, and the first blow lands.

I picked nervously at the lapels of the olive green suit I’d bought the night before from a tiny but very expensive boutique on Rose Crescent. My eyes had watered as I’d handed over my card – with Eddy gone, such purchases were on an emergency-only basis from now on.

And yet there was a tiny part of me that was almost, I don’t know, relieved. I would be my own mistress again. I would see a way through to becoming Margot once more, Margot before she was abandoned, before she was humiliated. Margot might not have the money for many suits, but what she did have was at least all hers.

I’d dressed for this meeting, and Martin gave me a sideways glance and raised eyebrow as he jumped down from his brown Range Rover and opened the door for me. A hank of his long dark hair had fallen out of the band at the back, brushing his face, and I wondered for a long moment what it would feel like to reach out and tuck it back behind his ear.

‘You look well, Margot,’ he said, and treated me to a vast, wolfish grin while I climbed up into the leather seat. I felt a variety of competing and co-mingling emotions – nervousness, pleasure and, in the midst of these, a vague, hot little flicker of desire, out of place and inappropriate but not unwelcome. Martin himself wore a Ted Baker T-shirt and jeans, and I could surreptitiously admire his fine, well-muscled arms while he drove off.

‘Is the suit too much?’ I asked, with a stab of self-consciousness. Easy on the eye or no, his casual wear alarmed me.

‘No, not at all.’ He glanced into the rear-view mirror. ‘You look… it’s very nice.’

‘I felt I’d better make an effort to look respectable.’

He shook his head, pulling away down Huntingdon Road, carefully avoiding the wobbling arcs of cyclists. ‘There’s nothing to worry about. But I need to warn you, there’s a change of plan. It’ll be the psychologist, Greta, and O’Neill might join us later. Greta is going to give you some copy for your column, and you just need to get the paper to publish it under your name.’

Something about his speech felt a little stilted, as if there were something he wasn’t telling me.

‘Sounds like a plan,’ I said, settling into the seat.

He turned down Storey’s Way, and we drove in silence past the newer colleges – Fitzwilliam, Murray Edwards (it was New Hall in my day) and Churchill, with their Sixties architecture and modern sculptures.

‘So Bethan Avery is writing the letters,’ I said after a few moments.

There was a pause. ‘Yes,’ he said eventually. ‘She is.’

‘What does it mean?’ I asked.

His intense green gaze flicked away from me, out of the window, through the trees shielding the lane to the Astronomy Institute. ‘I don’t know.’

Silence fell between us again.

‘Gerry seemed a little freaked out,’ I ventured after a while. Gerry was the Examiner ’s managing editor, a very grand title indeed considering only ten people worked there, including me. He had regarded me with polite amazement and just a hint of reproach as I explained what had been going on, as though I had been engaged in some unsavoury activity behind his back.

Martin shook his head again. ‘Nope, all squared with O’Neill. Remember, if something comes of this, there will be an opportunity to sell on the exclusive. This could be a big deal for him.’

My lips thinned. ‘Charming.’

If he heard my own air of reproach, he shrugged it off. ‘If we find Bethan and can get her to help with the search for Katie, it’s going to be a win-win for everybody, including her.’

I sighed, only slightly mollified. I don’t know why I was surprised, or even disappointed. Of course there were engines of self-interest and opportunism at work here. That’s just the way the world is. But it was a consideration that made Cambridge a little greyer, a little flatter. ‘I suppose.’

He raised an eyebrow at me, but didn’t reply.

Around us London honked and hissed and hammered. It had begun to rain – a faint sodden drizzle, and smart umbrellas were beginning to snap open on the pavements, hoods were drawn up, heels struck a little faster as they passed by. After the long drive, suddenly a wealth of secret energy seemed to surround me and buoy me up. There is something about London that always makes me feel more sharply alive. Every time I come here, I wonder why I don’t live here any more.

And then, just as suddenly, I remember why not, and a little puff of coldness blows across my heart.

We pulled into the underground car park beneath a squat grey block of offices, after a sceptical guard opened the barrier to let Martin drive through. Then there was a steel-grey staircase, then a steel-grey lift, and finally a steel-grey reception area with two bored middle-aged women in police uniforms. Their eyes flicked up and down Martin, and then up and down me.

‘I’ll tell her you’re here,’ said one; a lifetime of heavy smoking growled deep within her voice, like a lifting portcullis.

We were left to mill in the lobby together.

After what seemed like an age but was probably merely two minutes, while I fiddled with my bag and Martin stood, muscular arms crossed, a side door opened and a tiny woman with a tightly styled short red bob emerged, her heels making sharp little taps as she crossed the marble. She was dressed in a cool blue dress and pink cardigan, her identity pass dangling from a lanyard around her neck. Her face was smooth and youthful, her eyes hazel and twinkly behind ironically chunky horn-rimmed glasses.

‘Martin!’ she said, as though his presence was a delightful surprise, despite the fact that she must have been expecting us.

‘Greta,’ he said, leaning in to kiss her cheek decorously. ‘Good to see you.’

‘And you,’ she said. ‘Who’s this?’ she asked, turning to me.

I don’t know why, but there was something disingenuous about both the question and the lilt in her voice as she asked it, and it rattled me. Of course she must have known who I was, and this was merely a simple way to guide Martin into introducing us. Even though I was little more than a messenger, I felt the subject of intense but cloaked interest, and I didn’t like it.

‘Margot,’ I said briskly, shaking the proffered hand. ‘Margot Lewis.’

‘Margot,’ she said, as though sounding my name out for falsehoods. ‘Of course. Follow me.’

We were led up a dingy stairwell and through a series of corridors lined with offices, glass windows offering views inside them. Within the offices, towering piles of manila files balanced everywhere on desks and filing cabinets, and every so often I caught a glimpse of something intriguing – a map covered in pins, or an anatomically correct cloth doll.

‘Just in here,’ said Greta, pushing an already open door wider and letting us into a fusty-smelling room. Her office (it must be hers as there was a photo on the desk of her younger self with two small girls) was a little larger than the others I’d seen, and much tidier – though she still had to clear a chair free of books before Martin could sit in it. She wheeled her own chair out from behind the dark obstacle of her desk to face us, and I recognized a practical strategy meant to put me at my ease.