Helen Callaghan - Dear Amy

There was a pause. ‘Revenge?’ someone ventured at the back, not wishing to put their hand up and commit.

‘Yep, vengeance. But a particular type of vengeance.’ I wandered over and drew a large cross on the board. In the upper left-hand corner I wrote Nemesis. ‘The Greeks imagined two major categories of crime that needed punishment,’ I said, counting them off on my fingers while the class watched. ‘There are the crimes mortals commit against the gods – crimes such as hubris, or personal arrogance in the face of divine will,’ I tapped on Nemesis’s name, ‘and there are the crimes that are committed by mortals against one another despite the gods’ injunction.’

I tapped on the right-hand upper quadrant of the cross. ‘So, who do you think punishes mortals for the crimes they commit against each other?’

The room was silent while everyone frowned. Outside, a lorry honked angrily on Trumpington Road.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘The goddesses that punish mortals are called the Erinyes, or you might have heard them called their other name – the Furies. Erinyes literally means “the Angry Ones”, though they are sometimes called “the Kindly Ones” out of respect for their powers.’

There was an approving gasp somewhere, as if something had made sense.

‘The Furies are ancient goddesses of the underworld – older than the Olympian gods – and it is their job to punish sins. Traditionally, there are three of them and they are named. First is Alecto,’ I said, writing her name in the lower right-hand quadrant of the diagram. ‘And her name means “unceasing anger”. Next is Megaera, and her name means “the grudging one” or “the jealous one”. And finally,’ I said, still writing, ‘There is Tisiphone. And Tisiphone’s name means “implacable revenge”. Together they punish the most serious crimes, such as murder or rape, particularly when those crimes involve family members.

‘So,’ I said, putting the chalk down. ‘How do you think the Furies punish criminals?’

‘They chase after them and rip them apart,’ said Charlotte, a tiny blonde wisp of a girl.

‘Sort of, though it’s a little crueller than that. Aeschylus tells us they locate their prey by smelling upon them the blood of those they’ve harmed…’

‘Eww,’ someone said at the front.

‘They then pursue their quarry day and night with shrieks and curses, wielding iron whips…’

‘They nag you to death!’ chipped in Malek Singh from the back of the class, making scattered laughter ripple across the room.

‘You may find it funny,’ I said, though I was smiling when the chuckles settled down. ‘But when you think about it, what the ancient Greeks are describing here is the psychological effect of a guilty conscience, and the terror of exposure-’

With a sudden crash the bell rang and I had lost them.

‘All right,’ I bellowed over the clatter of books and shifting chairs. ‘I want you to be up to speed on your Olympian gods and chthonic goddesses for next week! Which means I want you to know what “chthonic” means!’

They had placed the line at the very bottom of my column, which I was now reading over in the staff room. My picture seemed huge, irrelevant and a little saccharine. I wondered if I might have scared Bethan off.

You’re being ridiculous, I told myself, which is something you are very good at. The thing only went in the paper on Saturday night. Give it a chance.

Through the staff room windows I could hear the distant yells and shouts of the children, and a quick breeze was swiping yellow-gold chestnut leaves off the trees, and they fluttered down in whirling drifts on to the lawn outside. I looked down at the message I’d put in the paper. I was trying, desperately, to keep a hold on my world – my job, my vanished husband and my column – but I was disconnecting. The ties to my ordinary life were loosening, snapping, and the dark world of Bethan Avery was becoming more real than my own. After all, what were my petty griefs against the irresistible pull of her stricken letters?

I dreamed of her regularly. Sometimes I saw her, but more often than not she was a presence, a person I knew was in the room but who was never quite in focus, shadowy and plaintive and wisp thin; a cloud, a vapour.

A ghost.

Once again, I reminded myself not to chew my nails.

I wasn’t well and I felt fine. I breathed easily but far too quickly, my eyes were bright – too bright; I’d dispensed with the pills that slowed down my thoughts, but now they raced away out of control.

I was living in strange days.

All I ever knew about drugs I learned from Angelique.

I met her while I was in St Felicity’s. She was in the bunk above me in the dorm – a slight teenage girl who dyed her dark hair white-blonde, and who was roughly the same age and height as me. Her skin was pale and spotty, her lips dry, and she perpetually dabbed at them with a tube of cherry Chapstik. She did not really sleep the first night she arrived, instead tossing and turning endlessly above me, making the old planks creak. I did not really sleep either, as a rule, so it didn’t trouble me, but I wondered at her pathological restlessness.

At eight the next morning in the shelter cafeteria, I was eating my frugal breakfast of roll, jam and butter. I was surprised this morning to find my upper neighbour had brought her tray over and was settling in next to me, straddling the bench and arranging her long, pathetically skinny legs under the trestle table. With her big eyes and narrow body she resembled a distressed gazelle, and her clothes were hanging off her.

I regarded her suspiciously.

‘Morning,’ I said.

She did not reply, but nodded, not meeting my gaze. We ate in silence, and after she had picked at her roll, tearing tiny holes out of it, like a bird might, and licked the jam out of the little packet and drained her tea, she got up and left without a word.

‘O’Neill wants to do a reconstruction,’ said Martin.

We were back on King’s Parade, only this time we had graduated from coffee to lunch in the Cambridge Chop House, somewhere I’d passed dozens of times but never eaten in. I wore a dark green jersey top and rust-coloured skirt and boots, all the while persuading myself that I had not dressed with any extra care for this meeting. My make-up was also an afterthought, I had explained to myself, while I carefully slicked my lips a muted dark pink.

I paused, my fork suspended over my cod and cheddar fishcakes. ‘What sort of reconstruction?’

‘A crime reconstruction,’ Martin replied, slicing into his calves’ liver with gusto. ‘Filmed, and broadcast on television.’

‘For Bethan?’ I asked in surprise.

‘Yep.’

‘After so long? I thought I read that there had been one already, in the nineties, why don’t they show that one again?’

He was chewing now, so shook his head silently. ‘No. They want a new one,’ he answered after a few seconds. ‘They want to include some details from the letters. Alex Penycote and his description, for one.’

I didn’t know what I felt about this. On the one hand, good, but on the other hand, Katie had been missing for nearly six weeks, during which time nobody had been looking for her, and now… this – this sudden escalation in the hunt for what could be the wrong girl.

Suddenly, I wasn’t so hungry.

‘Are you all right?’

I shrugged, helplessly.

He seemed to understand. ‘Remember, Margot, we still have absolutely no evidence that Katie was abducted by the same man.’