Helen Callaghan - Dear Amy

I clucked my tongue sadly. ‘Same location. Same type of girl. Same social background. And now Bethan Avery is writing letters.’

‘All circumstantial.’

I knew this. I tried not to sigh.

Then, surprisingly, his hand was over mine, and he gave it a light squeeze.

‘Margot.’ His green gaze was hard to meet, but I made myself do it. ‘You’ve already made a huge difference. You’ve provided new evidence for the historical case, and this has lit a fire of new evidence under the investigation into Katie. Everything that’s happening is happening because of you.’

I stared down at his hand, charmed by it.

He let mine go quickly, as though he had surprised himself in some guilty act.

There was a moment of silence. Then he picked up his glass of red, setting his shoulders, clearly determined to bluster his way through this odd, intimate transgression. ‘We will find her, you know.’

I smiled wryly at him. ‘Which one?’

‘One, either, both,’ he said. He cocked his head at me. ‘Can you meet me Saturday morning, probably obscenely early?’

‘Why?’

‘That’s when they’re filming.’ He grinned. ‘I thought you might like to see it.’

I shrugged, as though it meant nothing to me. ‘Yeah.’

For a long moment, I considered mentioning what had occurred to me on the drive home from London in his car – that maybe, in that lost, hidden past of mine, I had crossed paths with Bethan Avery.

But I didn’t, and the moment passed.

‘So, what happens in one of these things?’ I asked, rubbing my hands together in their mittens. Our breath steamed in the cold, still air.

We stood outside Addenbrooke’s Hospital, surrounded on all sides by enormous buildings, a brisk modern city within a city, inhabited mostly by people in pale uniforms – though not many at this time of the morning, a little after seven. Dawn had only just departed. Thin, tremulous sunshine trickled down into the narrow lanes and pathways between the towering medical skyscrapers, far too weak to provide any warmth. I craned upwards, peering into the lemon sky, tracking the flight of faraway birds. Nearby, trendily dressed young people were carrying bulky black and chrome equipment into lifts, muttering amongst themselves about proper brass monkeys weather, this is too fucking early, careful – careful with that!

‘Have you seen the previous reconstruction? The one from 1998?’ asked Martin, seemingly untroubled by the weather and looking snug in a dark grey fleece and jeans.

I nodded, my chin lost in my chunky knitted scarf. ‘Yeah. It was on YouTube.’ I did not add how disturbing I found this. Who went about loading old footage of obscure child abduction reconstructions on to the Internet?

On the other hand, it had been there for me to watch, so I suppose I should be grateful. Bethan’s fate had not been wholly forgotten it seemed.

‘This will be a little more in-depth. We’re going to try to widen the search to include this Alex Penycote character.’ Martin steered me towards the lifts. ‘Come on.’

We followed a worried middle-aged woman and her husband, who appeared to be nothing to do with the reconstruction, and three burly young men carrying cabling and cameras, into a large steel lift, and then followed them all out again a few seconds later on to a long, chilly skywalk.

‘They’re going to film in four locations – Peggy’s ward, the adjoining corridors where Bethan was last seen, the lobby where the tea and coffee used to be served, and just outside the grounds.’ Martin took my arm, noticed my shaking. ‘Margot, are you all right?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘It’s just a bit cold.’

He contorted his brows, an unspoken question.

‘I’m not a big fan of hospitals, generally, if you’re after full disclosure.’

‘Who is?’ he replied. ‘But seriously, are you all right?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said. I smiled at him. ‘I’m actually sort of excited. The smell of the greasepaint and all that. I have no idea how these things are done.’

He smiled back, but there was something else in it, something speculative.

‘Good,’ he replied. ‘Come on, it’ll be warmer once we’re in the building proper. I’ll introduce you to the production team.’

We passed through a warren of corridors, descending stairs into a lower, older level of the hospital, where the modern skywalks and steel gave way to more Victorian brick. The intense rasp of disinfectant and the bland wafts of institution cooking followed us throughout, the clatter of heels and squeaking of trolleys trailing us like curious ghosts.

When we reached a crossroads, stairwells and wards spiralling off on either side, Martin came to a stop.

‘They’re too rammed for space, yeah?’ a brightly dressed girl with a long golden-brown ponytail was telling a small crowd gathered around her. ‘They won’t close off the corridor for us. So we can film, but we can’t show anybody’s faces. Anyone wants to come through here, we need to stop filming, yeah?’

There was a collective groan. ‘Does that include nurses or patients or both?’ asked an older man, stood at the back, pushing a big light on a tripod.

‘We need to be out of here in an hour,’ she continued, as though she hadn’t heard this, ‘so jump to it.’ She tossed her long ponytail. ‘Where have Thea and Roddy got to? Are they ready? Ah, Dr Forrester, hiya! And you must be Margot, yeah?’

She dropped the clipboard and came forward, shaking our hands with a brisk dispatch completely at odds with her querulous turn of speech, as though we were soldiers in the field come to report further intelligence to their commanding officer.

‘Hello Tara,’ said Martin. ‘Nice to meet you in the flesh at last.’

‘Yeah, yeah, you too.’ She smiled and turned to me. ‘Now, Margot, you don’t mind doing an interview with us, do you?’

‘What?’ I asked, astonished, not quite sure I had heard right. ‘What could I know?’

She shook her hands at me, as though to bat away the depths of my misunderstanding. ‘No, no, you’re not an expert or a witness, yeah? We’ll just ask you about the letters, and you can answer a couple of questions about how the person who wrote them isn’t in any trouble, yeah? You just need to talk, and then re-state the appeal from your column in the same words – Pete or Dr Forrester can brief you if you’ve forgotten them. We might not use the footage, depending on time, but since you’re here, it would be a shame to pass up the opportunity, yeah?’

‘Absolutely, if you think it will help,’ I said, though in truth I was more staggered than anything. I hadn’t harboured any ambitions to appear on television before now.

‘Great. I’ll get Sophie to you with a waiver to sign. Got to get back to it – need to find my director. Laters.’

I nodded towards the blonde girl’s departing back. ‘Is she a policewoman?’ I asked, possibly with a touch of scepticism.

Martin shook his head. ‘No. She’s the producer.’ He gestured to one of the group; a short, stocky young man with dark hair in a buzz cut and black eyes and a pale mouth, rubbing his small chin and gazing at an iPad. Next to him, a tall bearded man with tousled hair was pointing and poking at the screen. ‘The little guy is Pete Wilkins. He’s the police liaison; he’s here to oversee everything. But he won’t get involved unless things go really wrong. The full brief is written up beforehand and given to the production company – what shots are required, where they should be – it’s storyboarded in an office long before anyone arrives here.’

I considered this while the lighting men started to set up, pushing us gently but firmly out of the way as the brightness of the floodlights filled the gloomy space, giving it the aura of a studio, or perhaps an operating room. We moved back, by common consent, to rest against the cream-painted wall, which was a cold, unyielding presence against my shoulder blades.