Helen Callaghan - Dear Amy

Things, once known, can never be unknown.

No matter how hard you try, I add to myself, perhaps nonsensically.

I considered the possibility of opening a bottle of wine, but dismissed it.

I leaned back in the chair, stretching out my shoulders. I was shaking with shock, and for a long moment I actually considered going out and buying a pack of cigarettes, before recalling, We had this discussion, Margot, remember? You quit. A big part of being a non-smoker is not smoking.

Yeah, I told myself, I remember. I don’t smoke.

I tried to calm down and think about Lily, painful as it was, and then I realized that while her words smarted and burned me, I wasn’t actually angry with her. Not angry like I had been at that, yes, let’s say it again Margot, bitch Arabella.

I may not have liked what Lily had to say, but she wasn’t trying to hurt me. Which only made it worse, in a way.

I didn’t know what to do. I would apologize to her in the morning, I decided, but before that, I would briefly entertain the notion that there might be something in what she said.

I thought about the letters. I thought about Martin Forrester and that ghastly police psychologist. The letters are real, I told myself. Other people think the letters are real. You are not imagining the letters.

But was I imagining my pursuit?

I made myself think back, to the man in the dark Megane, and the man in the car park who I’d encountered that night, and I had a clean sharp memory, of Mr Megane pulling away from the kerb the instant I did, even though he hadn’t answered a phone, or collected anybody, and once again its strangeness was compelling – his upright posture, his cap and dark glasses.

No, I did not imagine that. I did not imagine Mr Car Park either, but now that I am sat here in my own house, I realize that the man in the car park was a different type of threat. He wasn’t wearing an obvious disguise.

That does not, however, mean he wasn’t following me.

Oh no, there was something here, all right.

I didn’t want wine any more, and certainly not cigarettes. I wanted good black coffee, and lots of it. I stood up, filled the kettle, and the rushing tap was shockingly loud in my silent kitchen. My brain was whirring. I was being shown something, something important, and Lily and my self-doubt were suddenly beside the point.

Bethan Avery was out there, and she was as real as her letters. This, being true, meant something else. It meant that whoever had seized Bethan was somebody who could exact nearly twenty years of silence from a fourteen-year-old girl, a silence so absolute and heavy that it was sacred even now.

The pale net curtain stirred over the kitchen window, motivated by some draught in the house. I frowned. There should be no windows open in here. I peered into the garden. Absolute darkness. It did not mean the garden was empty.

As I did so, I suddenly understood what was happening.

We had broadcast an appeal to Bethan Avery, Martin Forrester and I, but she was not the only person that had seen it. Whoever had taken Bethan had seen it, too.

She had warned me, after all, in her letters that there was a gang. That this might happen.

Bethan’s kidnapper thought I knew Bethan. And not through anything as impersonal as letters, but that I knew her now, that I’d spoken to her, that I knew where she might be…

That was what this shadowy following wanted – the man parked outside the school who’d followed me home, the smiling man in the concrete car park – they wanted me to lead them to Bethan.

The woman herself had eluded them, but it would be easy enough to trace me from my column in the Examiner . All that remained was for them to find Bethan through me and renew her twenty-year silence…

And perhaps they could find Bethan through me.

My growing suspicions refused to be silenced, crowding into my thoughts, driving all else out, till it seemed there was nothing left but a kind of screaming behind my skull.

You could have met Bethan Avery in that hostel years ago. You could. And she’s reached out to you now.

Because she knows you.

I covered my mouth with my hands in a sudden thrill of dread.

I had to tell someone! I had to tell them everything, all about Angelique, the hostel, the drugs, that old life I had tried to bury and forget for ever. Furthermore, I had to make them believe me while I did it. This was fast becoming a matter of life or death.

Martin Forrester.

I realized that I wanted to talk to Martin Forrester right now more than anyone else in the world.

I glanced at the kitchen clock. Would he mind me phoning this late? I doubted it, not with what I had to tell him. I could ask him whether we should go to the police. I could talk to another human soul about this, and hear him speak back to me.

I stood up. My shoulders ached and my back was stiff. I must have been sat there for hours.

I walked over to the phone, and picked it up.

Something was wrong. It took me a second or so to realize what it was, as I hunted for the Post-It note containing Martin’s number. The phone was utterly silent – there was no dialling tone. It was dead.

I followed the cord to see if it was plugged in – maybe I’d pulled the plastic out of its socket – but it was connected, all right. I wiggled the plug in the socket, to see if this made any difference. Still nothing. I replaced the handset, then went into the hall to try the phone there. It, too, was dead. I suppose I’d known all along that it would be.

I stood in the darkened hall, trying to shake off my sick, frightened feeling. The mobile. Where the hell was my mobile? Oh yes, I remembered now. I had switched it off and thrown it contemptuously on to the back seat of the car when Lily had tried to call me on the drive home. Not that my mobile would do me much good here – there was hardly any signal out at this end of the village.

I listened intently, but there was nothing but the faint creak of the house settling about me, the tiniest rustle of dead leaves in the cold still autumn outside. Perhaps the phone was nothing, some glitch with the cable company – or perhaps, whoever they were, they were waiting for me outside, waiting for me to realize the line was dead, and to panic and run out into their grasp.

Why on Earth had I come back to the house?

You know, maybe Lily has a point. Maybe I am insane.

I lifted the phone again, but it was still dead.

That draught, that draught in the kitchen when I’d filled the kettle – where had that been coming from?

‘What now?’ I whispered.

I had to get out of here. I had to get my mobile.

I retreated back into the kitchen, the dizzying vertigo of unreality making me feel as light as air, horribly conscious of how the window framed me by the lamplight, displaying me to anyone who might be watching from the night-shrouded garden. There was a steak knife lying in the sink, slightly greasy from the cooking I’d been doing yesterday. My knuckles whitened around the black plastic grip.

‘Calm down,’ I whispered to myself, but the knife shook anyway.

Now I was back in the kitchen the idea of leaving it appalled me. The rest of the house was silent and unlit – the only sound was the hum of the refrigerator, constantly startling me.

I moved to switch the kitchen fluorescents on, to chase the darkness infesting the house back outdoors and into the night, but found I didn’t dare. My hand covered the switch. It was sweating on to the cold white plastic, leaving salty smears.

There was a sudden sound, a momentarily unidentifiable change. I leapt away from the wall and raised the knife – I didn’t think about it, some part of my reptile brain must have done it for me – then realized it was only the fridge motor winding down.