Then there were a few takes of them talking while people passed them by. In a few they argued; in a few he appealed to her, one hand curled around her arm possessively; in one he grabbed her, holding her close, the implication clearly being that he had a weapon tucked against her belly or back and was frog-marching her discreetly out of the building.
‘I need to go to the loo,’ I murmured to Martin. ‘Be right back.’
It took me about five minutes to find the ladies’, and I felt chilled, queasy that someone could just grab a girl like that. It could happen to anyone. Alone in the toilets, I fell prey to a slippery spurt of paranoia, and quickly splashed my face with cold water, keen to return to the safety of the herd. My heart pounded beneath my jacket.
When I threw open the doors, Martin was waiting for me.
I nearly jumped out of my skin.
‘Are you all right? You looked pale.’
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘It was just a little upsetting to watch. It felt so…’
‘Visceral,’ he supplied. ‘When you see it like that, it becomes so much less abstract. You see how it works. What happens to people.’
I gazed back up at him. He was standing very close.
‘Yes. Exactly. Visceral.’
For a moment I thought he was going to put his arms around me. I wanted him to, in the worst way – I wanted to be enfolded by him, to rest my head against that muscular chest, to set this burden down. I could feel myself starting to grow flexible, limp, waiting for his touch…
But it didn’t come. I stole a quick glance at him, at the peculiar way he had frozen, as though stopping himself.
We both cast our eyes down, pretending that each had not seen the other’s reaction, though my flush must have been apparent, as was his.
Of course he shouldn’t be hugging me, or encouraging me, I reminded myself stiffly. He knew things about me. I was not a suitable girl.
‘Come on,’ he said, with a warm, only slightly stilted, tug of my arm. ‘It’s time for your close-up, Mrs Lewis.’
13
Today must be Sunday, because Katie has been allowed out of the cellar room and up into the lounge for the evening, with its patterned blue rug covering the wooden floor, and the old-fashioned fireside chairs, built of black studded wood on a monumental scale, and the low couch with its deep cushions. The news is on, and an earnest man in a suit is on television talking about some company that has either lost millions of pounds or lied about having it in the first place. Her hands are clasped around a chipped mug of thin hot chocolate. She’s enjoying its heat far more than its taste.
She’s sitting next to him on the couch, and the sense of stuffing and cushions is strange after days of incarceration. The patterned silk is slippery against the backs of her legs.
Outside brisk autumnal winds thump against the windows, making low moans as they rattle through the rotting frames, the draft raising the light hairs on her arms into goose pimples, stirring the brown leaves on the trees shading the house into a crackly susurrus.
He is watching the television but she can sense his boredom, and his hand reaches out and casually begins to stroke the back of her neck. She stiffens, as she always does.
‘Is something wrong?’
‘No,’ she says, biting the end of the syllable off. Her bare thighs are still dappled with the bruises he gave her the day before yesterday, when the man had called by and she had tried to alert him – huge blossoms of brown and green and violet-blue.
‘You know, this is supposed to be a treat,’ he says, his tone clipped and offended. ‘If you’d rather go back downstairs…’
‘Sorry,’ she says quickly. As the word slips out, she realizes that she isn’t and that, more importantly, she doesn’t sound it. What’s more, she needs to do something about it: it’s tiny incidents like these that set off the runaway train of his rage. What starts with hurt looks, curt speech, agonizing stretched silences and a purply-pale colour marbling his cheeks, has ended before now in him grabbing her hair and smashing her head into solid objects while he shrieks like a crazy person, white spittle gathering at the sides of his mouth.
Now is the time to say No, I’m really sorry, and perhaps lean into his hated touch, and even elaborate on how grateful she is that he has saved her from the others. Then his hand will return to the back of her neck before moving down her spine or on to her lap, and dreadful though the sequel will be, it is better than when he is violent. Everything leads to the same outcome anyway. There is nothing she can do to avoid it. She tries and tries, but every response just serves his ends.
Today, however, the honeyed words will not come. They stick in her throat, in the place just under the collarbone.
His attention has turned back to the television, which is now showing the weather – bright but getting colder, with snow expected before too long – and she can sense his growing displeasure. She drinks the cheap chocolate quickly, as who knows when it will be taken away from her. The mug is patterned with Wedgwood-blue flowers, and chimes faintly when her ragged fingernails strike against it. It’s a twin of the one she smashed over his head.
On the stone mantelpiece, two silver candlesticks glint back at her. When she’s in this room, she thinks about those candlesticks and what she could do with them to a person whose back was turned. She thinks about that a lot.
Now it’s the regional news. As a rule, she is forbidden to watch or read the news unless expressly invited to, usually as he shows her the paper and its lack of any mention of her as evidence that his ‘associates’ have hushed up her disappearance.
But she realizes that she has caught him at a crossroads – he can’t decide whether he wants to get angry and fight with her – if you can call it a fight since he always wins – or whether he wants to give her a little longer to submit and play along, and while he thinks it over the local news keeps going, and something extraordinary happens.
‘Yesterday filming completed on a reconstruction of a decades-old mystery, the disappearance of fourteen-year-old Cambridge schoolgirl Bethan Avery, who vanished without trace in 1998. Colette Samson gives us this report.’
‘Thanks Tim, and here at Addenbrooke’s, early on Saturday morning, the hospital is replaying one of the darker scenes of its recent history.’
There is a long shot of a dark girl in an old-fashioned school uniform walking along a hospital corridor, a man shadowing her, his face vague, his hair blond.
Next to Katie, her captor has gone very still.
There is a cloying hit of stunned panic and swarming hope in Katie, and she moves her eyes away to the rug, wondering for a single mad instant whether she has let her face or body betray any of this.
Bethan Avery. That’s the name scratched on the cellar stones beneath their feet.
She waits, for one beat, two, for the blow, or for hard fingers pinching into the hollows of her shoulder; for him to become aware that she is watching this, too, and that he absolutely should not be allowing that to happen, but there is nothing.
There continues to be nothing.
‘On January fifth, 1998, the town was turned upside down by a terrible, seemingly motiveless assault on sixty-one-year-old Peggy Avery and the unexplained disappearance of Bethan Avery, her young granddaughter, who, it is believed, was lured away from her grandmother’s bedside and abducted, then presumed murdered when bloodied clothing was found on the Fens near her home.