We passed through a warren of corridors, descending stairs into a lower, older level of the hospital, where the modern skywalks and steel gave way to more Victorian brick. The intense rasp of disinfectant and the bland wafts of institution cooking followed us throughout, the clatter of heels and squeaking of trolleys trailing us like curious ghosts.
When we reached a crossroads, stairwells and wards spiralling off on either side, Martin came to a stop.
‘They’re too rammed for space, yeah?’ a brightly dressed girl with a long golden-brown ponytail was telling a small crowd gathered around her. ‘They won’t close off the corridor for us. So we can film, but we can’t show anybody’s faces. Anyone wants to come through here, we need to stop filming, yeah?’
There was a collective groan. ‘Does that include nurses or patients or both?’ asked an older man, stood at the back, pushing a big light on a tripod.
‘We need to be out of here in an hour,’ she continued, as though she hadn’t heard this, ‘so jump to it.’ She tossed her long ponytail. ‘Where have Thea and Roddy got to? Are they ready? Ah, Dr Forrester, hiya! And you must be Margot, yeah?’
She dropped the clipboard and came forward, shaking our hands with a brisk dispatch completely at odds with her querulous turn of speech, as though we were soldiers in the field come to report further intelligence to their commanding officer.
‘Hello Tara,’ said Martin. ‘Nice to meet you in the flesh at last.’
‘Yeah, yeah, you too.’ She smiled and turned to me. ‘Now, Margot, you don’t mind doing an interview with us, do you?’
‘What?’ I asked, astonished, not quite sure I had heard right. ‘What could I know?’
She shook her hands at me, as though to bat away the depths of my misunderstanding. ‘No, no, you’re not an expert or a witness, yeah? We’ll just ask you about the letters, and you can answer a couple of questions about how the person who wrote them isn’t in any trouble, yeah? You just need to talk, and then re-state the appeal from your column in the same words – Pete or Dr Forrester can brief you if you’ve forgotten them. We might not use the footage, depending on time, but since you’re here, it would be a shame to pass up the opportunity, yeah?’
‘Absolutely, if you think it will help,’ I said, though in truth I was more staggered than anything. I hadn’t harboured any ambitions to appear on television before now.
‘Great. I’ll get Sophie to you with a waiver to sign. Got to get back to it – need to find my director. Laters.’
I nodded towards the blonde girl’s departing back. ‘Is she a policewoman?’ I asked, possibly with a touch of scepticism.
Martin shook his head. ‘No. She’s the producer.’ He gestured to one of the group; a short, stocky young man with dark hair in a buzz cut and black eyes and a pale mouth, rubbing his small chin and gazing at an iPad. Next to him, a tall bearded man with tousled hair was pointing and poking at the screen. ‘The little guy is Pete Wilkins. He’s the police liaison; he’s here to oversee everything. But he won’t get involved unless things go really wrong. The full brief is written up beforehand and given to the production company – what shots are required, where they should be – it’s storyboarded in an office long before anyone arrives here.’
I considered this while the lighting men started to set up, pushing us gently but firmly out of the way as the brightness of the floodlights filled the gloomy space, giving it the aura of a studio, or perhaps an operating room. We moved back, by common consent, to rest against the cream-painted wall, which was a cold, unyielding presence against my shoulder blades.
‘I suppose it makes sense,’ I offered. ‘All that forward planning. Something like this needs to resemble reality, if it’s to work at all.’
‘Yes and no.’
‘What does that mean?’
He gestured towards the bright space in front of us. ‘There are multiple reasons to film a reconstruction.’
I waited for him to elaborate on this.
‘Jogging memories is only part of the plan,’ he said. ‘After all this time, it’s unlikely anyone remembers anything new.’
‘Then why do it?’ I frowned, trying to understand. The crowd buzzed around me, busy as bees with their bulky, shiny equipment. ‘It looks expensive.’
‘Because there’s always the hope that someone who does know what happened – either the abductor themselves, or someone else who perhaps suspected them or even shielded them – will have their conscience pricked and come forward.’
I thought about this for a second or two. ‘Could someone like that have a conscience?’
‘Probably not. But it’s worth a go. These things -’ he gestured towards the set, taking in the working men barking monosyllabic commands to one another, the lights, ‘these kinds of crimes – they invite you to be part of the story. Someone who is already part of the story might be tempted to get swept further into it.’ He nodded towards the police liaison, Pete. ‘This is why they do them. A re-enactment is very psychologically powerful – it puts incredible pressure on people who have information, and it motivates others to interrogate their own experiences.’
I nodded, as though I understood.
At the far end of the corridor, near the lintels of a set of fire doors, a nurse accompanied a very sallow, very drained man curled into a small ball in a wheelchair. His hair was a smoke of thin grey, curled up in disordered shapes; from the neck down he was covered by a bright orange blanket. He was being pushed by an orderly, who was chatting to the nurse who giggled back, both appearing to be utterly unconscious of all the unusual activity around them, yet both betrayed themselves as utterly captivated by it. I heard the whispered words, ‘It’s a Crimewatch thing, for some old missing persons case,’ from the nurse.
Martin was on to something, I realized.
The crew stepped out of the way with bad grace as the small group approached, and as he passed me, on his way into the ward on the left, I heard the old man whisper in a small, mucus-cracked voice, ‘I’m ready for my close-up,’ and then, with a swift, surprising vitality, he offered me a bawdy wink and smile.
I smiled back, amused and charmed.
‘Look at you. Already flirting,’ said Martin. There was warmth in his voice. ‘There’s someone I want you to meet.’
He led me gingerly past the men setting up equipment to one of the stairwells, where one of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen was deep in conversation with a blond man. The girl had long dark hair and an exquisitely fine complexion, which, now that I looked, I realized was the result of several layers of expertly applied make-up. She wore a school shirt and skirt, purple V-necked pullover with a grey stripe trim, black tights and ugly shoes. Her plain brown mascara had been lightly oiled, as though to suggest tears.
‘This is Thea, who’s playing Bethan,’ Martin said as we drew near. ‘And this gentleman is Roddy, who’s going to be Alex.’
Roddy was in nondescript jeans and jacket. I realized that in her letters Bethan had never offered much information on how he dressed.
The pair acknowledged us with distant little smiles, but did not pause in their urgent conversation, which appeared to be about regional accents.
‘So, Ian says go neutral,’ said Thea, in an achingly upper-middle-class actressy voice, ‘but I’m thinking that since her family was a bit Jeremy Kyle Show I should do something more Normal for Norfolk,’ then the pair of them burst into tinkling, affected laughter.
A sharp little stab of dislike shot through me.
Martin squeezed my shoulder. ‘Drama students, eh?’ he whispered to me. ‘Shall we find a seat and wait for the show?’
The morning passed in a kind of constantly interrupted tedium, as nothing much happened, but it kept having to be halted while staff and patients moved through the corridor on their business. Again and again, the scene reset as extras dressed as nurses, doctors and visitors ambled up and down the corridor, while Thea and Roddy marched towards us, a rolling camera preceding them, Roddy walking swiftly about ten feet behind Thea, while she stumbled and wiped at her face in distress.