Beside me, Martin’s brow furrowed more deeply but he said nothing.
As for myself, I began to get a sinking feeling.
‘I just wanted, before we do this,’ said Greta, ‘to ask a few questions. We don’t want this to appear at all staged, and it would be far more convincing if we composed it together.’ She smiled again, as if sensing that I was becoming more and more uncomfortable with her.
‘By all means.’
‘So you live in Cambridge?’
‘Yes.’ I tugged down the hem of my skirt. ‘Well, Girton really. It’s a village just outside the centre.’
‘Are you local to Cambridge?’
‘After a fashion,’ I said. ‘Once I left the university I got work in London and then came back to live in the town itself. I went into teaching.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘A teaching job in Cambridge? You were very lucky.’
I had achieved a double first in Classics from Cambridge University, and I am fluent in Latin and most flavours of Ancient Greek. Recalling the fraught hours of revision, the late-night reading and stammering my way through my viva voce, I was tempted to remark that there was a little more than luck or even talent involved. It had all been bloody hard work.
For God’s sake, Margot, calm down. She’s just being polite.
‘Which of the colleges were you at?’ she asked now.
‘St Margaret’s.’
A sharp little light came on in her eyes, as though she’d caught me in a lie. ‘Isn’t St Margaret’s a graduate college?’
‘Graduates and mature undergraduates. I was twenty-two when I came up. I studied my A levels at night school.’
One of her dark red eyebrows lifted. ‘And from there to Oxbridge.’ She let out a little laugh. ‘Such an achievement! Though I imagine you felt a little out of place with the usual hothouse flowers at Cambridge. It must have been very alienating at times.’
‘I did all right,’ I said, trying to keep my voice even. ‘I got by.’
I was treated to another maddening pause while she considered this, as though I had blurted out something incriminating. But this was all a Rubicon I needed to cross, so instead of giving my impatience its head, I did a little trick I’d been taught by Mother Cecilia years ago in another life, whenever things weren’t going my way: I concentrated on my breathing, letting it silently slow down, pausing just before the inhale. I should not always be the Fury.
It would have done me good to have remembered it when talking to that trollop Ara, but hey-ho.
‘So you would have been in Cambridge, what, from around 2007?’
‘Yes.’
‘And in all that time you’ve had no contact with anyone from the case? Anyone at all?’
‘Not to my knowledge.’
She offered me a prim little smile. ‘And have you been contacted by missing persons before?’
I blinked. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’
‘Through your work on the paper?’
I thought about this. ‘Well, yes. Sometimes I get letters from people who have run away from home. Certainly never from a potential kidnapping victim before.’
‘I did wonder,’ she said, clasping her little hands in front of her, ‘why you got into that line of work on the paper. Do you feel you empathize with people with problems?’
I frowned at her. ‘Yes. Don’t most people?’
‘And you like to help them out? This satisfies you?’
My frown deepened. ‘Is there any reason it shouldn’t?’
Again that tiny smile.
Oh, fuck this. Seriously, my inner Fury whispers to me. Take the fight to her.
‘Is this about the addiction? Or my breakdown?’ I asked, just a touch more loudly than I’d been speaking up until this point.
‘I…’ She was startled and glanced at Martin, tried to resume the smile, resume control of events.
‘Because it really, really, feels like it is,’ I continued. ‘And that’s fine, you know. I’m happy to tell you about it…’
‘I didn’t mean to imply-’
‘So basically I started a brand-new job writing copy at some wretched PR start-up in London where I was working up to eighteen hours a day, and before long I became a lot less fun to be around,’ I said, as though her answer had been, Please do. ‘Anyway, the business went under after the director decamped to the Caribbean owing me two months’ salary and bonuses, which I’d already spent. None of this was particularly good news, but it was all doable, or so I thought, until in the middle of it all Mother Cecilia, who got me off drugs when I was a teenager and was, to all intents and purposes, my only family, was stabbed to death three days before Christmas in the women’s refuge she managed.’
‘Margot, I-’
‘That effectively did for me for a little while, and I went to bed and didn’t get up, and then continued not to get up until someone broke in to find out what had happened to me and I attacked them.’ I inspected my dark red painted nails for an instant, then leaned back in the chair, meeting her gaze head on. ‘And so I found myself in the uncomfortable position of being sectioned under the Mental Health Act.’
Greta had stopped smiling now, so that was a plus. I didn’t dare look at Martin.
‘I muddled along for a little while with drugs and therapy and it became clear that celebrities and copywriting and the bright lights weren’t for me. I wanted to be a teacher and work in Classics, like Mother Cecilia, because she was always a real person.’ I crossed my legs again. ‘She didn’t need a reason to help people. She just did it.’
‘Now, Margot-’ she began a little nervously.
‘The rest you know, as you have access to my social services files and have clearly not stinted from using it. The short answer to your original question, and the only relevant one, is no, I have no idea who is sending me the letters.’
I shrugged into the resulting ringing silence.
After all that, the rest was an anti-climax. Greta produced two lines of distant appeal – ‘Dear Bethan, please get in touch. I can’t help without more info’ – and it occurred to me, in a snarl of anger, that I had been summoned all the way down to London for this.
I changed it to ‘Bethan A – don’t be afraid – to help I need to know more about you’ and there was some pointless toing and froing (‘Are you suggesting that she should be afraid?’ I snapped at Greta after she had resisted this minor point for a good ten minutes) but in the end the resulting text was something we could both live with.
They also wanted to publish my picture, and as Greta talked, I realized that this was the one good idea that she was likely to have. A picture would give Bethan someone she could connect with. They suggested using the one from the school website, which cast my rather bent nose into unattractive relief, but I had a better idea – Lily dabbled in amateur photography, and could take a black and white one especially for this purpose. I have always found my school photo a little corpse-like, and the death’s head grin I wore wasn’t likely to encourage confidence.
‘There’s nothing wrong with that photo,’ observed Martin, with a gallantry that verged on the confrontational. ‘I like it.’
My heart lifted its head fractionally from where it lay in the basement of my ribcage.
But by the end of the interview, after my initial lively annoyance, I had sunk into a kind of low funk, and I wanted out; away from her, away from him. How foolish of me to think that I would ever escape the low looming shadow of my past, that in any case where it mattered I would ever be taken seriously. And yet, while I sulked as Greta fired off the email with the approved text and Martin stirred to stand up out of his cheap office chair, I could not repent embarking on this journey. Wherever Bethan Avery was, her own misery was greater than mine.
After Greta’s fulsome and false goodbyes, I trudged after Martin back past the twin gorgons at the reception desk and into the lift to the car park. He was silent and thoughtful, and I could feel the mortified blush rising in my cheeks.