Helen Callaghan - Dear Amy

There were no letters from Bethan, though there were a dozen messages from helpful folk who had watched the news segment, and while having no inside knowledge they definitely had opinions, which they were keen to share. Some claimed Bethan had murdered Peggy for an inheritance. Or that Bethan had had a boyfriend who murdered Peggy. Or that she had been mixed up with Satanists.

Wendy looked at me very strangely indeed.

Once I got home, and the shopping was unloaded and stowed away, I made myself a thrown together salad of halloumi and spinach and ate it at the counter in the kitchen, washing it down with a glass of Merlot. In the maroon depths of the wine I could see my own loneliness reflected back at me. It was the sort of thing that Eddy and I had always drunk together.

It was eight o’clock by now and it was dark outside. On the table were a pile of marked essays – I’d worked steadily to catch up on them – so all that was left were the letters for my column; the non-Bethan letters. I was looking forward to them. I could lose myself in them; pretend to an objectivity that I could never seem to apply to myself.

First, however, I’d have to go to the corner shop. I had bought pallet loads of supplies but forgot milk. I finished the salad and grabbed my coat, which I’d left carelessly lying on the back of one of the chairs. I took a tenner out of my purse and pocketed my keys.

It was freezing outside. I thrust my hands deep into my pockets and set off at a fast clip up the street. I could see the lights on in Marek’s shop, a friendly glow in the cold black night.

‘Hello,’ he said, as I entered the shop. A buzzer grizzled briefly, then silenced as the door shut behind me. Marek was seated at the counter – a large, roughly triangular-shaped mound of heavy-jowled middle-aged man with a perpetually mournful downturned mouth and thin, flat hair. With a little frisson of alarm I saw that the Examiner was open before him, with the feature they’d run on the filming of the reconstruction. A picture of me, looking wild-eyed and waylaid in the middle of my interview, was under his right hand.

‘Hello there,’ I nodded in response, and quickly picked up a plastic jug of milk from the shelf. ‘It’s bloody cold outside,’ I observed while he carefully poked the amount into his ancient till.

‘Hah. This is not cold,’ he said, frowning at the keys. ‘I have seen what real cold is like.’

Behind him, his teenaged son, who was stacking cigarettes along the back of the counter, rolled his eyes at his father’s back and offered me a grin.

‘Are you still off the fags?’ asked Marek.

‘Yep.’

He let out a tiny disappointed sigh.

‘I gave up three years ago, Marek. I think it’s going to be a permanent arrangement.’

Again he sighed. ‘People worry too much about being healthy,’ he said with disapproval. ‘You should enjoy life more. Buy more cigarettes.’

He held out his hand for my tenner, which I surrendered.

‘I see your picture was in the paper,’ he said, while he very carefully counted out my change. ‘You look good.’

‘Why thanks, Marek.’

‘Is that husband still gone?’

I felt the blush rise to my cheeks. ‘Um, yes.’

‘Not coming back?’ asked Marek, checking my change again, while his son looked pained and shrugged at me.

‘No,’ I said, and felt the truth of the words. ‘I think that’s going to be a permanent arrangement too.’

Marek rumbled out a long hmmmm that could have meant approval or disapproval. ‘A good-looking woman like you will not be single for long.’

‘I’m in no rush,’ I said, sparing him a smile, the jug of milk dangling from one hand. ‘Good night.’

‘Good night,’ he said, following me to the door to lock it for the night.

As the light went out behind me, the street seemed a more threatening place. The night was still freezing, at least to me. Whoever was it, I thought, that invented orange street lighting? It makes everyone look evil and the sky goes a horrid, lurid violet. It’s unnatural.

I was musing on this, and other, less weighty matters as I walked home along my street when I realized, with a shock, that someone was sitting in their darkened car, right next to me, as I passed it. I’d assumed that I was totally alone, and now there was a person, not three feet away, separated from me only by a car door. The engine was off, the headlamps were dark, but there was a man in there, in complete darkness, doing nothing, merely staring straight ahead, as though waiting for something. I stole a surreptitious glimpse of him as I passed by.

He turned away as soon as he saw me looking, but it was the man who’d waited outside the school, the man I’d cut up in the car. I knew him by his squared shoulders, his unmoving form. The baseball cap was still on his head. At first I’d thought he belonged in a uniform – my quick glance saw an almost military precision in his bearing, although his features were hidden in the darkness.

I walked on, not varying my pace, and not looking back, trying to give no sign that I perceived that anything unusual was happening.

I checked out the houses as I went, calculating which door to bang on if this strange man should get out of his car and come after me. I listened for his engine to rev up, or his door to open. I heard nothing, the nothing you hear when you are convinced someone is watching your back.

I’d reached my own house. My keys were already balled in my fist, sticking out from between my fingers, more vicious than knuckledusters when used correctly. I preferred not to speculate as to whether this creature knew I was in the house alone. I jammed the front door key into the lock, twisting it so hard that for a horrid moment I thought it would snap. Then the door opened, letting me into light and relative safety. As I turned to shut it behind me, I risked a look up the street. He was still there, unmoving; simply waiting.

I don’t think he realized that I’d recognized him, or even noticed him. I put the milk down near the kettle and tried to sort myself out. I was breathing hard, and my heart beat a skipping tattoo beneath my jacket. I felt light and panicky.

I ran upstairs to our, or rather my, bedroom, which overlooks the street. I didn’t turn the switch, but instead crept forward to the window. Fractionally, I pushed aside a tiny fold in the curtain and peeped out.

I could just about see him, at the very edge of the perspective the window gave me. He was still in the dark Megane, though it looked brown in the sodium light. Other parked cars near him hid his registration plate from me. He was still waiting.

I don’t know how long I watched him watching my house, as my breath condensed slightly on the cold glass and my legs started to cramp. Then, with appalling suddenness, the engine started with a faint roar and the headlights came on, dazzling me.

I held my breath.

He shot away from the kerb with a growl, and headed off, at speed, past my house and off to the main road. He was gone.

I breathed again. The street was blameless and empty once more. I waited and waited, but he did not return. Eventually, I got up and went downstairs to make a cup of tea and phone Lily.

‘Following you, you say,’ said Lily, leaning back on her shabby couch, pausing to yank a small green stuffed dinosaur out from behind her back before settling in. There were tired lines around her eyes, and I realized guiltily that it was late, and she had a sick toddler to look after and school in the morning. ‘Are you sure?’

Lily has three small children that she has pretty much raised alone, with occasional input from her harried, perpetually gloomy mother. She specializes in short, passionate, fraught relationships with desperately unsuitable men. The last one was a married master at one of the colleges who was on the brink of resigning over her, and the one before that had to leave the country after he was caught trying to sell cocaine to the bevy of privately educated female undergrads he was coaching in tae kwon do. Perhaps, all things considered, there’s a good reason that Lily’s mother looks old before her time. If the single life is an urban jungle, Lily hacks through it with a giant machete, and engages romantically only with hungry jaguars and cannibal tribesmen.