Helen Callaghan - Dear Amy

I let out a disgusted sigh.

‘I know,’ he answered. ‘He’d also, however, have very poor anger management and next to no ability to brook any kind of defiance or resistance from them. There’s a reason he chooses girls so young.’

‘Heaven forefend,’ I said, in bitter irony, ‘my rape victim dared to be cheeky with me.’

‘He’s a psychopath, Margot. He’s incapable of seeing any point of view but his own. He thinks this is a romance, and so it is, to him. But the worst part is that the violence escalates every time he imprisons a girl, and with each girl it takes less time for him to become disillusioned with them.’ He sighed. ‘That’s bad news for Katie: she’ll be coming to her cut-off point.’

I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to this. My heart hammered against my ribs.

And beneath it all, my fury coiled and rustled, like a fanged serpent. How dare you, whoever you are. How dare you.

‘I won’t labour this; though there have been no more bodies, we think there were two others between Becky and Katie – Hannah Murphy went missing after a youth club disco in 2011, and Chloe Firth in 2013. No evidence, but they haven’t been heard from since and they fit the victim profile – dark-haired white girls, both from East Anglia.’ He shrugged. ‘And then, Katie Browne. Katie from Cambridge, where it all started.’ He rubbed his chin, regarded the girls on the board. ‘Started with Bethan Avery.’

‘Who is writing letters now,’ I said. I felt exhausted. The heating was now far too high. I let his coat drop off my shoulders and on to the chair back.

‘Yes.’ He came and sat down opposite me, on an old trunk pushed up against his office window. Next to us, his wall and its web of misery sprawled away on either side. ‘Bethan Avery, who is writing letters now. But why now, after all these years?’

I felt very sad all of a sudden. ‘You think that she’s an accomplice, don’t you? That’s what this all must mean.’ I let my gaze stray up the morass of photographs, the notes, the maps. I was close to tears; it was as though Bethan had betrayed me. ‘She’s been helping him in some ghastly way, and twenty years in she’s had an attack of conscience. She writes as a child to garner sympathy, perhaps, but can’t commit to finally giving him up.’

Because really, it was the only thing that made sense. I just hadn’t wanted to admit it. There was no way, in the situation that she described herself being trapped in, she could post letters to a newspaper. This could only mean one of two things. Either her captor was in on it, or she was lying about the situation.

‘No,’ said Martin briskly. His gaze was very direct, unnervingly so. ‘Nobody thinks she’s an accomplice.’

‘Then what?’ I growled wearily, rubbing my temples. One of my migraines was lurking around the back of my head, considering whether to strike or not.

‘Greta and I think,’ and he seemed to choose his words very carefully, ‘that in a very fundamental sense, she is exactly who she says she is. She is a frightened girl who lived through a terrible ordeal and has never recovered.’

‘Fine,’ I snarled. ‘But why can’t she just say what happened to her so we can catch the bastard?’

‘Whoa, calm down,’ said Martin, putting a hand on my trembling arm.

‘I’m sorry.’ I bit my lip. ‘But it’s such a fucking huge… mess , Martin. I didn’t think helping this girl out would have such a massive effect on my life. I thought I’d tell the police about the letter and someone would sort it out, and now everything I have is in jeopardy, it’s all in free-fall. My house is in pieces – my house, which I love – I was nearly killed, and my employer’s going to find out about my past – Jesus, if they haven’t already.’

‘No, not at all,’ he said, then winced. ‘Well, maybe .’

I threw myself back in the chair with a horrified sigh, and covered my eyes with my hands.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I seemed to be saying it a lot lately. ‘I must sound like a perfectly selfish creature to you.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘you really don’t. I don’t think for a moment that when this started you imagined the consequences would escalate as quickly as they have.’

I uncovered my eyes and let my head flop back against the chair. ‘I just can’t see my way through to the end, now, not at all. It’s a labyrinth.’

‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘But the thing about labyrinths is that you’re always at your most lost just before you get to the centre.’

In the quiet, I could hear a clock ticking, gently, somewhere in the house, and as always there was the background whisper of the wind; and the fine, lost strands of the croaking crows.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked. His gaze was not on me any more, it was on the map on the wall. He had a calculating squint.

‘One thing hasn’t changed,’ he said, as though I had not spoken. ‘He’s keeping them all in the same place, wherever that is.’

‘But where would that be?’

‘Well, Bethan Avery was the first – it will be near her. It’s a cellar or basement, certainly the walls are stone and there are particular kinds of mould found on the girls’ bodies that only exist in cold, humid conditions. They’ve nearly all got some kind of lung infection in autopsy, depending on how long they’ve been down there. O’Neill thinks that after the initial abduction in winter the killer switched to summer for that very reason.’

‘But Katie went missing in October.’

‘Yes. And Katie wasn’t known to social services either, which makes her a little different. Something has changed. Maybe his supply dried up somehow. Or he had a brush with the law, or a conviction of some sort recently, which means he doesn’t have the same access to girls. Cambridgeshire Constabulary and MHAT have been running a mile a minute to analyse all the data we’ve got. There are a few good leads in there, too. And believe it or not, the reconstruction did turn up some interesting nuggets from the general public via the hotline number – the one they’re most excited about is an Irish hitchhiker.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah. She says she encountered someone very like our man outside a service station on the A12 near Ipswich in 2006. He offered her a lift.’

I stared at him. As far as I’d known, the reconstruction had been a bust.

‘A hitchhiker?’

Martin nodded. ‘Yes. She accepted, but as he opened the car door, there was something about him she didn’t like, so at the last minute she declined his kind assistance and he went for her, tried to drag her into his car. She saw the reconstruction in Belfast, of all places, and gave the hotline a call.’ Martin rubbed his head. ‘She describes him as very friendly at first, as he talked her out of the service station and over to his car door, but then he changed to “absolutely raging crazy angry” once he realized she was going back into the service station and he was going to lose her. She’d never seen anyone react like that before, and out of nowhere, from the second she turned him down. It fits our profile of him – he’ll be able to hold it together to deceive someone for a short while, but no longer than that.’

‘This girl didn’t go to the police?’

He shrugged. ‘She meant to report it, but never got around to it. She was nervous talking about it on the telephone ten years after it happened, according to O’Neill. She was only fifteen at the time.’

‘He wouldn’t need special access of the kind you’re talking about if he’s grabbing hitchhikers,’ I mused.

‘No, but we think he just liked the look of Miss Belfast, so acted on impulse. From what we can tell about her, she would have been exactly his type.’