I dreamed of her regularly. Sometimes I saw her, but more often than not she was a presence, a person I knew was in the room but who was never quite in focus, shadowy and plaintive and wisp thin; a cloud, a vapour.
A ghost.
Once again, I reminded myself not to chew my nails.
I wasn’t well and I felt fine. I breathed easily but far too quickly, my eyes were bright – too bright; I’d dispensed with the pills that slowed down my thoughts, but now they raced away out of control.
I was living in strange days.
All I ever knew about drugs I learned from Angelique.
I met her while I was in St Felicity’s. She was in the bunk above me in the dorm – a slight teenage girl who dyed her dark hair white-blonde, and who was roughly the same age and height as me. Her skin was pale and spotty, her lips dry, and she perpetually dabbed at them with a tube of cherry Chapstik. She did not really sleep the first night she arrived, instead tossing and turning endlessly above me, making the old planks creak. I did not really sleep either, as a rule, so it didn’t trouble me, but I wondered at her pathological restlessness.
At eight the next morning in the shelter cafeteria, I was eating my frugal breakfast of roll, jam and butter. I was surprised this morning to find my upper neighbour had brought her tray over and was settling in next to me, straddling the bench and arranging her long, pathetically skinny legs under the trestle table. With her big eyes and narrow body she resembled a distressed gazelle, and her clothes were hanging off her.
I regarded her suspiciously.
‘Morning,’ I said.
She did not reply, but nodded, not meeting my gaze. We ate in silence, and after she had picked at her roll, tearing tiny holes out of it, like a bird might, and licked the jam out of the little packet and drained her tea, she got up and left without a word.
‘O’Neill wants to do a reconstruction,’ said Martin.
We were back on King’s Parade, only this time we had graduated from coffee to lunch in the Cambridge Chop House, somewhere I’d passed dozens of times but never eaten in. I wore a dark green jersey top and rust-coloured skirt and boots, all the while persuading myself that I had not dressed with any extra care for this meeting. My make-up was also an afterthought, I had explained to myself, while I carefully slicked my lips a muted dark pink.
I paused, my fork suspended over my cod and cheddar fishcakes. ‘What sort of reconstruction?’
‘A crime reconstruction,’ Martin replied, slicing into his calves’ liver with gusto. ‘Filmed, and broadcast on television.’
‘For Bethan?’ I asked in surprise.
‘Yep.’
‘After so long? I thought I read that there had been one already, in the nineties, why don’t they show that one again?’
He was chewing now, so shook his head silently. ‘No. They want a new one,’ he answered after a few seconds. ‘They want to include some details from the letters. Alex Penycote and his description, for one.’
I didn’t know what I felt about this. On the one hand, good, but on the other hand, Katie had been missing for nearly six weeks, during which time nobody had been looking for her, and now… this – this sudden escalation in the hunt for what could be the wrong girl.
Suddenly, I wasn’t so hungry.
‘Are you all right?’
I shrugged, helplessly.
He seemed to understand. ‘Remember, Margot, we still have absolutely no evidence that Katie was abducted by the same man.’
I clucked my tongue sadly. ‘Same location. Same type of girl. Same social background. And now Bethan Avery is writing letters.’
‘All circumstantial.’
I knew this. I tried not to sigh.
Then, surprisingly, his hand was over mine, and he gave it a light squeeze.
‘Margot.’ His green gaze was hard to meet, but I made myself do it. ‘You’ve already made a huge difference. You’ve provided new evidence for the historical case, and this has lit a fire of new evidence under the investigation into Katie. Everything that’s happening is happening because of you.’
I stared down at his hand, charmed by it.
He let mine go quickly, as though he had surprised himself in some guilty act.
There was a moment of silence. Then he picked up his glass of red, setting his shoulders, clearly determined to bluster his way through this odd, intimate transgression. ‘We will find her, you know.’
I smiled wryly at him. ‘Which one?’
‘One, either, both,’ he said. He cocked his head at me. ‘Can you meet me Saturday morning, probably obscenely early?’
‘Why?’
‘That’s when they’re filming.’ He grinned. ‘I thought you might like to see it.’
I shrugged, as though it meant nothing to me. ‘Yeah.’
For a long moment, I considered mentioning what had occurred to me on the drive home from London in his car – that maybe, in that lost, hidden past of mine, I had crossed paths with Bethan Avery.
But I didn’t, and the moment passed.
‘So, what happens in one of these things?’ I asked, rubbing my hands together in their mittens. Our breath steamed in the cold, still air.
We stood outside Addenbrooke’s Hospital, surrounded on all sides by enormous buildings, a brisk modern city within a city, inhabited mostly by people in pale uniforms – though not many at this time of the morning, a little after seven. Dawn had only just departed. Thin, tremulous sunshine trickled down into the narrow lanes and pathways between the towering medical skyscrapers, far too weak to provide any warmth. I craned upwards, peering into the lemon sky, tracking the flight of faraway birds. Nearby, trendily dressed young people were carrying bulky black and chrome equipment into lifts, muttering amongst themselves about proper brass monkeys weather, this is too fucking early, careful – careful with that!
‘Have you seen the previous reconstruction? The one from 1998?’ asked Martin, seemingly untroubled by the weather and looking snug in a dark grey fleece and jeans.
I nodded, my chin lost in my chunky knitted scarf. ‘Yeah. It was on YouTube.’ I did not add how disturbing I found this. Who went about loading old footage of obscure child abduction reconstructions on to the Internet?
On the other hand, it had been there for me to watch, so I suppose I should be grateful. Bethan’s fate had not been wholly forgotten it seemed.
‘This will be a little more in-depth. We’re going to try to widen the search to include this Alex Penycote character.’ Martin steered me towards the lifts. ‘Come on.’
We followed a worried middle-aged woman and her husband, who appeared to be nothing to do with the reconstruction, and three burly young men carrying cabling and cameras, into a large steel lift, and then followed them all out again a few seconds later on to a long, chilly skywalk.
‘They’re going to film in four locations – Peggy’s ward, the adjoining corridors where Bethan was last seen, the lobby where the tea and coffee used to be served, and just outside the grounds.’ Martin took my arm, noticed my shaking. ‘Margot, are you all right?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘It’s just a bit cold.’
He contorted his brows, an unspoken question.
‘I’m not a big fan of hospitals, generally, if you’re after full disclosure.’
‘Who is?’ he replied. ‘But seriously, are you all right?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said. I smiled at him. ‘I’m actually sort of excited. The smell of the greasepaint and all that. I have no idea how these things are done.’
He smiled back, but there was something else in it, something speculative.
‘Good,’ he replied. ‘Come on, it’ll be warmer once we’re in the building proper. I’ll introduce you to the production team.’