It should have been you. Yes, that’s what I said. I even meant it at the time. I mean, who would have missed Bethan Brannigan? Who was she in the scheme of things? Emily White was unique; a gift; Bethan was nothing; nobody. Which is why, when Bethan disappeared, she was caught in the headlines, pipped at the Post, eclipsed in the mourning for Emily.
Front-page headlines: EMILY DROWNED! MYSTERY DEATH OF CHILD PRODIGY.
In the wake of such momentous news, everything else takes second place. LOCAL GIRL DISAPPEARS barely makes it to page six. Even Bethan’s mother waited until morning before reporting her daughter’s absence to the police —
I have very little memory of what happened after that. I made it home; that much I know. Ma noticed I was feverish. She put me to bed, where I was to stay. Headaches, stomach cramps, fever. The police came round eventually, but in the circumstances I was unable to tell them much. As for Mr White, it took them forty-eight hours to realize that he, too, had vanished —
By then, of course, the fugitives were long gone. The trail was cold. And why, they thought, would Patrick White have kidnapped a child he hardly knew? Feather revealed a motive, confirmed by Mrs Brannigan. The news that Bethan was Patrick’s child delivered a much-needed blast of oxygen to the story — and once again, the hunt was on for the missing girl and her father.
Patrick’s car was found by the road fifty miles north of Hull. Brown hairs taken from the back seat confirmed that Bethan had been in the car, although of course there was no way of knowing how long ago that had been. Meanwhile, bank receipts showed Patrick White emptying his savings account. Then, after three cash withdrawals of ten thousand pounds each, the credit trail stopped abruptly. Patrick was running on cash now. Cash is nicely untraceable. Sightings of a man and a girl were reported to the police from Bath. Two weeks and a city-wide search later, these reports were dismissed as a hoax. More sightings, this time in London, were also judged unreliable. An appeal from Mrs Brannigan met with a similar lack of result.
Nearly three months later, with no solid evidence to the contrary, folk were beginning to wonder whether Patrick, unhinged by the tragedy, hadn’t staged a murder-suicide of his own. Ponds were dredged; cliffs investigated. In the Press, Bethan acquired the first-name status that often precedes a grisly discovery. Candles were lit in Malbry church, To Angel Beth God Loves You, et al. Mrs Brannigan led a series of prayer campaigns. Maureen Pike held a jumble sale. Still the Almighty stayed silent. Now they kept the story alive merely on speculation; the life-support of the world’s Press, a machine that can be kept running indefinitely (as in the case of Diana — twelve years gone, and still in the headlines) or switched off at the public’s whim.
In Bethan’s case, the decline was fast. A cut rose swiftly loses its scent. BETH — STILL MISSING wasn’t a story. Months passed. Then a year. A candlelit vigil in Malbry church marked the anniversary. Mrs Brannigan was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, as if her God hadn’t tortured her enough. That made the papers for a while — TRAGIC BETH’S MUM IN CANCER SHOCK — but everyone knew the story was dead, covered in bedsores and waiting for someone brave enough to turn off the machine at last —
And then they found them. By accident; living in the back of beyond. A man had been rushed to hospital after suffering a sudden stroke. The man had refused to give his name, but the young girl accompanying him had identified him as Patrick White, and herself as his daughter, Emily.
A STROKE OF LUCK! blazoned the Press, never at a loss for a suitable cliché. But the story itself was less easy. Eighteen months had passed since Bethan Brannigan had disappeared. During most of that time she and Patrick had been living in a remote Scottish village, where Patrick had home-schooled the child, and where no one had even suspected that this bookish man and his little girl might be anything other than what they had appeared to be.
And this child — this shy and reticent fourteen-year-old who insisted her name was Emily — was so unlike Bethan Brannigan that even her mother — now bedridden, in the terminal stages of her disease — was hesitant to identify her.
Yes, there were similarities. The colouring was similar. But she played the piano beautifully, although she never had at home; referred to Patrick as Daddy and professed to remember nothing at all of the life she had led eighteen months ago —
The papers had a field day. Rumours of sexual abuse were the most common, of course, although there was no reason for any such assumption. Next came the conspiracy theories, digested versions of which were disseminated in all the best journals. After that, the deluge — dumbed-down diagnoses from possession to psychic transference; from schizophrenia to Stockholm syndrome.
Our tabloid culture favours simple solutions. Quick fics. Open-and-shut cases. This case was unsatisfactory; messy and unfathomable. Six weeks into the investigation, Bethan had still not opened up; Patrick White was in hospital, unable — or unwilling — to speak.
Meanwhile Mrs Brannigan — still known to the tabloids as Bethan’s Mum — had sadly since given up the ghost, giving the papers one more excuse to misappropriate the word tragedy, which left poor Bethan alone in the world, except for the man she called Daddy —
It must have come as a shock to learn that Patrick really was her father. Certainly, they mishandled it; and then Dr Peacock compounded the harm, changing his will in her favour, as if that could somehow erase the past and banish the ghost of Emily —
It can’t have been easy for her, poor thing. It took years to recover even the semblance of normality. Taken into care at first, then into a foster home, she learnt to fake what she did not feel. Her foster parents, Jeff and Tracey Jones, lived on the White City estate. They’d always wanted a daughter. But Jeff’s good humour turned sour when he’d had too many drinks, and Tracey, who’d dreamed of a little girl to dress up in her own image, saw nothing of herself in the silent, sullen teenager. All emotion suppressed and concealed, Bethan found her own ways of coping. You can still see the scars of those early years, their silvery traces down her arms, beneath the ink and filigree.
Talking to her, looking at her, there’s always the sense that she’s playing a part; that Bethan, just like Albertine, is only one of her avatars, a shield thrown up against a world in which nothing is ever certain.
She never told them anything. They assumed she had blocked the memory. I know better, of course; her recent posts confirm it. But her silence ensured Mr White’s release; the charges against him were quietly dropped. And although the Malbry gossips never stopped believing the worst, father and daughter were finally left to get on with their lives as best they could.
It was years before I saw her again. By then, like myself, she was someone else. We met almost as strangers; made no reference to the past; talked every week at our creative-writing group; then she wheedled her way into my life until she found the right place to strike —
You thought she was in danger from me? Quite the opposite, I fear. I told you, I’m incapable of harming as much as a hair on her head. In fiction, I can do as I please; in real life, I’m condemned to grovel before those people I most hate and despise.
Not for very much longer, though. My death list gets shorter day by day. Tricia Goldblum; Eleanor Vine; Graham Peacock; Feather Dunne. Rivals, enemies, parasites — all struck down by the friendly hand of Fate. Well, Fate, or Destiny, or whatever you want to call it. The point is it’s never my fault. All I do is write the words.