Of course – he’d looked me up, I told myself, and tried to relax. It’s what professional people do. The fact that there’s a picture of me on the school website isn’t the same as him standing next to me while I called Arabella Morino a bitch on her doorstep.
Nevertheless, paranoia lingered over me, making it hard to return his frank gaze. I shrugged myself out of my grey coat, trying to avoid it.
The waitress, a little blonde whip-thin girl with black eyeliner and a Turkish accent, came over to take our orders. I chose a pot of tea, and while he discussed coffee with her, I took the opportunity to slyly study him out of the corner of my eye. He was taller and more rough-hewn than I’d expected. He wore a gold TAG Heuer watch that looked oddly ostentatious on his darkly haired wrist, as though he’d stolen it. I found myself unexpectedly and inappropriately interested in it. Someone had bought him that – it was not the kind of watch you buy for yourself. I scanned his broad hands, their backs lightly covered with hair, for a wedding ring, and came up blank.
How intriguing.
I bit my lip, refocused. I was here on a mission. Not to be sidetracked.
‘Did you come from nearby?’ I asked, as the girl withdrew and I pushed my coat over the back of my chair. The atmosphere in the cafe was warm and close, the ambient chatter and clash of crockery almost but not quite loud enough to require me to raise my voice. It was an excellent choice of venue, I realized – we were unlikely to be overheard.
His reply was a crisp nod. ‘Very near. I’m at Corpus.’ He gestured down the street towards Corpus Christi, a pretty little college I had been inside a couple of times with an old boyfriend. ‘I’m in college on a Monday. I run a postgrad seminar in the afternoon.’
‘And where are you the rest of the time?’
‘At the Institute, near the Law Faculty on Sidgwick Avenue.’ He shrugged. ‘Unless I’m travelling, of course. I do that a lot.’
I couldn’t place his accent – it was professional and precise, but with a broad Northern burr beneath it. Geordie? Yorkshire? No, Lancashire. North Manchester or Bolton, if I was any judge.
‘I know Sidgwick Avenue well,’ I said. ‘I did Classics.’
He grinned suddenly, and his teeth were white, sharp. With that and his piercing eyes and hirsute hands I suddenly realized what he put me in mind of – a kind of civilized werewolf. ‘Ah! I pass that faculty every day,’ he said. ‘I often wonder what folk get up to in there.’
I laughed, clutching my handbag and the precious letters contained therein on my lap. ‘Other than secret rituals and delirious bacchanals? Nothing much.’
‘You disappoint me.’ He raised an eyebrow at me. ‘But why Classics?’
I shrugged, surprised at the question. I hadn’t anticipated that I would be talking about myself so much with a handsome man, and my blush burned deeper, spreading down my throat in a wave, making my ears tingle. Damn, damn and double damn. He can see you, you know. ‘It spoke to me the most. And I was lucky – I had a very good private teacher before I came up.’
‘A private teacher? Your parents must have been keen.’
I shook my head. ‘No, it wasn’t like that. I was looked after by nuns. But one of them was very learned, and she gave me a head start. I took my A levels at night school.’
Our drinks arrived, and there was a flurry of business involving spoons, sugar and milk, with the waitress making two trips to our table. We sat in patient silence, under a kind of unspoken agreement not to say anything about the letters until she was gone.
‘So,’ he began directly, the minute we were relatively alone (on the table behind him, an older woman in a green duffle coat attacked a slice of cheesecake with a fork, a copy of Camus’ L’Etranger in her free hand, and across the aisle three medical students from St Catherine’s, a girl and two boys, were chattering excitedly about a party they’d been to at Peterhouse the evening before, passing a mobile phone between them, each new picture making them burst into increasing laughter). ‘I wanted to meet you in person and explain exactly why I’m… why we are interested in your letters from Bethan Avery.’
‘I was wondering about that.’
‘Justly so.’ He raised the coffee to his lips and drank deeply, like a man who was in a constant hurry. ‘And I know you have limited time, so I’ll be brief.’
I sipped my tea, waiting.
‘As you’ve probably guessed, what we do at MHAT – the Multi-Disciplinary Historical Analysis Team – is historical analysis of crime data.’ He replaced his mug of coffee on the table, gesturing with his broad hands for emphasis. ‘We have a statistician, three criminologists, two psychologists, lawyers, police and social services liaisons… the idea is that we pool our expertise and come up with something that is greater than the sum of our parts.’
‘Hence multi-disciplinary.’
‘Exactly so.’ He nodded. ‘Most of the analysis we do in our day jobs deals with general trends, rather than specific cases. It’s used to inform police investigative procedure, and every so often public policy. It’s big brushstrokes stuff, as a rule: poverty is an indicator in drug-related crime, or opportunistic robbery drops when you install street lighting.’ Again, the grin. ‘Common sense, if you like, only they have to pay us to look into it, since common sense – as I’m sure you’re aware – frequently turns out to be complete bollocks.’
I stifled a little laugh. ‘Indeed.’
‘So we do the work, write a report, send it off, and governments and others use the report to justify spending money.’ He shrugged. ‘Or not spending money, as is more often the case.’
I waited, perplexed. ‘I still don’t…’
He cocked his head at me with taciturn sympathy, as though he understood my bemusement.
‘It’s like this. That’s what we normally do. But we don’t always work on big projects. Sometimes we’ll do a little project – for instance, what happens to a sample of secondary school-age girls known to social services in the East Anglia area between 2001 and 2007 – it’s literally a little project for a local care trust we hand off to a PhD student to work up for us – and then our student comes back with something interesting. For instance, she finds out a few of these girls have been misplaced over the years.’ He leaned back into his seat and his eyes flicked out towards the street again. ‘Misplaced in similar ways.’
Suddenly I thought I was beginning to get it.
‘You discovered a pattern.’
He gave the tiniest acknowledging nod. ‘Well, my student discovered an anomaly, in the first instance, so credit to her. The team worked up the pattern.’
I pondered this. ‘2001, you say? But Bethan went missing in 1998…’
‘Yes, that’s right. Bethan Avery was not the girl we first became curious about.’
‘I don’t-’
‘Do you follow the news, Margot?’
I shrugged, a little apologetically. ‘Not as much as I should, I daresay.’
‘I daresay not.’
Something in his tone made me go still.
‘What? What is it?’
‘Believe it or not, you are not the first person to bring up the subject of Bethan Avery recently.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Well, here’s the thing. Nobody ever found who killed her. They found bloodstained clothes, but no body. There was an enormous manhunt and nothing ever turned up.’ He leaned forward. ‘But now this other girl has gone missing…’
‘You’re talking about Katie Browne,’ I breathed, realization dawning.
‘So you knew Katie?’
‘She was a student at my school.’ A beat, then I corrected myself. ‘Is, I hope.’
‘Most people think she just ran away,’ he said. ‘Problem child, and…’
‘I know.’
‘But not you,’ he said, as though appraising me. ‘Why is that?’
I felt there was something I wanted to say, but then I had the peculiar realization that I didn’t quite know what it was yet. There was something about Katie, something about the way she had disappeared, but…