Helen Callaghan - Dear Amy

‘Is something wrong?’

‘No,’ she says, biting the end of the syllable off. Her bare thighs are still dappled with the bruises he gave her the day before yesterday, when the man had called by and she had tried to alert him – huge blossoms of brown and green and violet-blue.

‘You know, this is supposed to be a treat,’ he says, his tone clipped and offended. ‘If you’d rather go back downstairs…’

‘Sorry,’ she says quickly. As the word slips out, she realizes that she isn’t and that, more importantly, she doesn’t sound it. What’s more, she needs to do something about it: it’s tiny incidents like these that set off the runaway train of his rage. What starts with hurt looks, curt speech, agonizing stretched silences and a purply-pale colour marbling his cheeks, has ended before now in him grabbing her hair and smashing her head into solid objects while he shrieks like a crazy person, white spittle gathering at the sides of his mouth.

Now is the time to say No, I’m really sorry, and perhaps lean into his hated touch, and even elaborate on how grateful she is that he has saved her from the others. Then his hand will return to the back of her neck before moving down her spine or on to her lap, and dreadful though the sequel will be, it is better than when he is violent. Everything leads to the same outcome anyway. There is nothing she can do to avoid it. She tries and tries, but every response just serves his ends.

Today, however, the honeyed words will not come. They stick in her throat, in the place just under the collarbone.

His attention has turned back to the television, which is now showing the weather – bright but getting colder, with snow expected before too long – and she can sense his growing displeasure. She drinks the cheap chocolate quickly, as who knows when it will be taken away from her. The mug is patterned with Wedgwood-blue flowers, and chimes faintly when her ragged fingernails strike against it. It’s a twin of the one she smashed over his head.

On the stone mantelpiece, two silver candlesticks glint back at her. When she’s in this room, she thinks about those candlesticks and what she could do with them to a person whose back was turned. She thinks about that a lot.

Now it’s the regional news. As a rule, she is forbidden to watch or read the news unless expressly invited to, usually as he shows her the paper and its lack of any mention of her as evidence that his ‘associates’ have hushed up her disappearance.

But she realizes that she has caught him at a crossroads – he can’t decide whether he wants to get angry and fight with her – if you can call it a fight since he always wins – or whether he wants to give her a little longer to submit and play along, and while he thinks it over the local news keeps going, and something extraordinary happens.

‘Yesterday filming completed on a reconstruction of a decades-old mystery, the disappearance of fourteen-year-old Cambridge schoolgirl Bethan Avery, who vanished without trace in 1998. Colette Samson gives us this report.’

‘Thanks Tim, and here at Addenbrooke’s, early on Saturday morning, the hospital is replaying one of the darker scenes of its recent history.’

There is a long shot of a dark girl in an old-fashioned school uniform walking along a hospital corridor, a man shadowing her, his face vague, his hair blond.

Next to Katie, her captor has gone very still.

There is a cloying hit of stunned panic and swarming hope in Katie, and she moves her eyes away to the rug, wondering for a single mad instant whether she has let her face or body betray any of this.

Bethan Avery. That’s the name scratched on the cellar stones beneath their feet.

She waits, for one beat, two, for the blow, or for hard fingers pinching into the hollows of her shoulder; for him to become aware that she is watching this, too, and that he absolutely should not be allowing that to happen, but there is nothing.

There continues to be nothing.

‘On January fifth, 1998, the town was turned upside down by a terrible, seemingly motiveless assault on sixty-one-year-old Peggy Avery and the unexplained disappearance of Bethan Avery, her young granddaughter, who, it is believed, was lured away from her grandmother’s bedside and abducted, then presumed murdered when bloodied clothing was found on the Fens near her home.

‘However, Cambridgeshire Constabulary have confirmed they are reopening the case in light of new evidence, and are commissioning a brand-new reconstruction of the tragic events of early January 1998.’

It’s a film of the same girl from the hospital, only this time she and another girl are walking along a street of new, cheap houses, talking and laughing. They are replaced suddenly by a picture of a policeman in uniform, wearing a peaked cap that betrays him as quite high-ranking.

‘We have never given up hope of finding out what happened to Bethan, and of finding and prosecuting Peggy Avery’s murderer,’ he says. He has rheumy pale eyes and reddish skin, as though he’s been outdoors in the cold for a while. ‘And we now believe that someone out there has evidence that can help us.’

‘Is it true that there is potentially new information on this case?’

The policeman nods vigorously. ‘Yes indeed. We have been given the name Alex Penycote in connection with Bethan’s disappearance, in relation to a blond-haired, blue-eyed man. We suspect it might be an alias, but we’d be extremely interested in hearing from anyone who has met this person, or heard this name in any context, possibly from somebody representing themselves as working in health or social services. And of course, if you are Alex Penycote, we’d be delighted if you could get in touch with us so we can eliminate you from the enquiry as soon as possible.’ Katie steals a sideways glance at him through her lank, overhanging hair.

He has gone ghostly white. She does not think he is even breathing.

Now on TV it’s Mrs Lewis, who teaches English, and Classics to the posh kids who sign up for it; the one who’s got the agony column in the local paper.

What’s she doing on TV?

Katie is familiar with the column. Last year one of her exes, Joshua Barrett, and his best mate had tried writing their own stupid fake problems to the email address in the paper, but Miss had never published any of them. It was like she knew.

‘Yes, my name is Margot Lewis and I edit the advice column for the Cambridge Examiner . I’m just here to say to anyone out there watching who may know something about what happened to Bethan – you don’t have to be afraid.’

Katie thinks that if anyone looks afraid it’s Mrs Lewis – her hair is slightly skew-whiff and her eyes are huge.

‘I’m waiting to hear from you again. You can come forward and you will be protected from whoever it is you think is looking for you. If you don’t want to talk to the police, then you don’t have to, there’s a victim support number you can call, which is going out with this report, or, if you prefer, you can use the anonymous Crimestoppers number. Even though it was such a long time ago, we all desperately need to hear from you again, before anyone else gets hurt.’

‘Thanks, Margot, and that number is at the bottom of the screen. Back to you, Tim, in the studio…’

Katie has forgotten to breathe, forgotten all caution, and the next thing she knows his hands are around her throat and he’s shaking her like a rag doll as she yelps in terror.

‘Is this you? Did you talk to someone? Did you? Did you? ’

His eyes are tiny blue marbles of madness. His face seems to be all yellowing gritted teeth. Her hands flutter like birds, trying helplessly to push him away, push him off as she gasps for air, as everything goes grey. It’s like someone is turning the sound down and it hurts, it hurts , then finally he releases her and she falls backwards on to the couch, and they’re both wheezing with effort into the silence.