Helen Callaghan - Dear Amy

She flinches again as he reaches down and pats her arm.

‘Sorry,’ he gasps, but it is with the same distracted air as her own reply earlier. He is not thinking about her at all. ‘Sorry.’

Katie does not dare move.

He has switched off the television with the remote and is staring ahead of himself, his bottom lip moving, trembling a little. She has no idea what it means, except that…

‘12/1/1998 BETHAN AVERY’

Jesus, she realizes, they think Bethan Avery is alive . She must have written to Mrs Lewis’s column, that’s why she was on TV.

But what did that mean for Katie?

‘Sorry,’ he mumbles again.

He is on his feet and hauling her up, barely looking at her, and though faint and fighting still to fill her lungs, she gets up quickly, keen not to provoke him. He is pushing back the rug with his foot, lifting up one corner, and the trapdoor is there.

There is a second, perhaps two, as he bends down to lift it up by its heavy ring and swing it open, during which the candlestick on the right edge of the mantelpiece seems almost to wink at her over his bowed, balding head. She is perhaps ten feet from it. She could never reach it in time, particularly while he has hold of her arm.

You couldn’t reach it this time, you mean.

Then the moment is past and she is being pushed ahead of him down the narrow steps that yawn before her and thrust through the open doorway of her cell. The stone is cold beneath her feet, the darkness absolute as the door shuts behind her, and yet she cannot be sorry.

He did not touch her – and he does not. It is the first time since her arrival that he has left her alone, and something within her tentatively resets, is allowed to breathe, to think, to cautiously inhabit her own skin.

Once again, she wrestles with the dangerous illusions of hope, while she lies wrapped in her blanket in the dark. Above she can hear his footfalls moving relentlessly up and down the ceiling. He is pacing, and it goes on for a long time.

He feeds her late, much later than usual, providing her with her usual Sunday ‘treat’ of a microwaved ready meal – some kind of meat and rice; it’s impossible in the dark to judge what it’s supposed to be – a can of fizzy drink and a small sweet pastry, but he does not speak to her.

When she falls asleep at last, her head buried against her arm, she is sure she can hear something from the rooms above that may be the wind, or may be him – a kind of low but rising howl, such as might come from a dangerous wounded animal.

‘Ah, Margot.’

The deputy head, Jane, had bustled up to me and was giving me a strange look, as though she had caught me napping. ‘Are you all right?’

I smiled, a little confused. ‘Yes, I’m fine. Just distracted. Is something wrong?’

‘There’s been a call for you,’ she said. ‘Someone for a Margot Lewis.’

I offered her an apologetic look. I was buried in calls, mostly going to the Cambridge Examiner . There had been a constant stream of them, true, though nothing promising by way of leads, Martin had told me.

That said, it was still very early days, and the reconstruction hadn’t yet been broadcast.

‘I’m sorry, Jane.’

She let out a half-sympathetic, half-annoyed sigh. ‘Well, he didn’t mention Bethan Avery. He said he had something of yours that you’d lost.’

I frowned. ‘I don’t think I’ve lost anything. My mind, maybe. Did he leave a number?’

She shook her tight curls. ‘No. He said he’d just call back. He wanted your home phone number but I wouldn’t give it to him. I told him to talk to you.’

Curiouser and curiouser.

‘Did he say when he’d call back?’

She shrugged expressively. ‘No idea. Told him not to bother in class time.’

‘I see. Thanks, Jane.’

‘Probably a reporter,’ she said. ‘Trying to find out what this “new evidence” is.’ She threw me a speculative look.

I sighed. ‘Well, he’s on a hiding to nothing. Even if I knew what it was, the police say I’m not to talk to people about the letters.’

It was a delicate hint, but she took it regardless.

‘By the way, Margot, can you do Biology with Year Ten in the lab? Rob is going home at two; he’s got a hospital appointment.’

I nodded. I didn’t have a choice.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘See you later.’

‘Bye,’ I said, lost in thought. Whoever this mystery caller was, it wasn’t Martin. He had my home phone number already. Could it have been Mo Khan, or the police? Surely they’d contact Martin before me.

Something I’d lost? Like what?

I searched through my bag – my wallet, my keys, my phone, all present and correct. Whoever it was had known I was a schoolteacher, but not where I lived.

Not where I lived yet , I thought with a sick little start. And he’d been after my phone number.

I’d been very naïve, I realized. I had been worried that this business might follow me to the school. I hadn’t suspected that it might also follow me home.

Whoever they were, they still hadn’t phoned back when I left for the Examiner offices. I was back in the car again, idling my engine at the painted, wrought-iron gates of the school, as I had a supermarket run to do – I loathe supermarkets, so plan each trip as comprehensively and rarely as possible, as though they were expeditions to the summit of Everest. Lily is constantly telling me to have my shopping delivered, but something about this seems, I don’t know, decadent.

I was waiting for a cream-coloured station wagon to get out of my way so I could pull out. Also idling at the kerb was a scruffy dark Megane with a single man at the wheel. He was casually dressed, but something about his demeanour seemed to suggest that he would be more at home in a uniform. His back was straight, his shoulders squared, and he stared at nothing so intently that he distracted me. When I looked back at the road the station wagon was gone and had been replaced by another car. I thumped the wheel in annoyance.

Gaggles of children swarmed out of the gates, making it even more difficult to drive out of the school. I scratched my scalp, leaning on the wheel, as someone pulled up right in front of me, boxing me in, and swung wide their car door, inches away from my front bumper. Bloody madmen – their children had to run into the middle of the road in order to get in. One, Alice Wright, turned to wave at me. I smiled in a strained fashion.

As the idiot took off I pulled out right after him, managing to cut up the guy in the Megane, who pulled away from the kerb at the same moment I did. I waited for the expected honk of rage on his horn, but it never came. I glanced in my rear-view mirror, and saw him, his face implacably calm, hidden behind large sunglasses and a baseball cap, his thick knotty arms crossed on the wheel.

I supposed I had wished the traffic upon myself. Usually I wait around at school, marking a few essays, until it thins out. But I very badly wanted to go home after shopping. I was tired, nervous, and I wanted a long bath, and then afterwards to sit in my bathrobe, drinking tea and watching Sherlock . The gridlock improved after the bridge, as the road forked. My temples were sore and I rubbed them. I must have been frowning again without noticing it.

It wasn’t until I’d actually got to the Examiner , or it might have been a little before, that it occurred to me that there was something strange about the man in the Megane. He’d parked at the gate, running his motor, for all the world just another dad come to collect his children from school, but when he’d pulled out after me there’d been nobody in the car with him.