‘Maybe my problems would evaporate,’ I said with chilly preciseness, ‘if people would stop reminding me of them whenever I feel I am starting to outgrow them.’
‘That’s not fair.’ She was making an effort to keep her voice even, but the high spots of colour were starting to bloom in her cheeks, and her eyes were narrowing. The wine bottle had stilled in her hands. ‘I am merely suggesting that you have been off your pills for three weeks, and now you are being written letters by dead girls and followed by masked gunmen. You write for an advice column, for fuck’s sake – of course you’re going to get crank letters. It doesn’t mean you have to make it all about you.’
I was speechless, though my mouth opened, moving helplessly.
‘You think I’m making this up?’
Her lips thinned, and inside her head I could see that determination warred with diplomacy.
‘Margot, I’m not saying you are imagining these things, or at least imagining all of them. I am just asking you to consider the possibility that you being off your meds and these things suddenly happening to you might, conceivably, have a correlation.’ She held out her palms, as if to demonstrate she had no more concealed weapons. ‘That’s all.’
But she didn’t need any more concealed weapons. She’d already stuck me, hard enough for blood. I was recoiling, and all I could think was, I need to get out of this house right now.
‘Margot, no, don’t, don’t leave like this-’
I’d already snatched up my bag and pushed past her, through the door and back out into the night; with its freight of sinister and perhaps delusionary predators, its memories and its acid cold.
17
I drove home. My phone rang. I switched it off. I remember almost nothing about the journey – the next thing I recall is being sat at my own kitchen table, with the desk lamp on, wiping the tracks of tears from my face with a furious energy that burned the skin beneath my fingers.
I’m a crazy person.
And so we’re back here again.
I don’t know who I am. I’ve never known, it seems, but the world is full of opinions on the subject. I had a breakdown. Well, one and a half, if we’re heading towards full disclosure. A few people know about it, because it is good to have friends, good to confide, is it not?
But telling people things about yourself is always, always a mistake – like a drug, in a way – the euphoria of communication and trust is always followed up by the regret of paranoia and suspicion. You describe yourself shrieking and being dragged backwards into rooms with gurneys and hypodermic needles – horrible, horrible needles – and there is a part of the other person that will always see you that way.
Things, once known, can never be unknown.
No matter how hard you try, I add to myself, perhaps nonsensically.
I considered the possibility of opening a bottle of wine, but dismissed it.
I leaned back in the chair, stretching out my shoulders. I was shaking with shock, and for a long moment I actually considered going out and buying a pack of cigarettes, before recalling, We had this discussion, Margot, remember? You quit. A big part of being a non-smoker is not smoking.
Yeah, I told myself, I remember. I don’t smoke.
I tried to calm down and think about Lily, painful as it was, and then I realized that while her words smarted and burned me, I wasn’t actually angry with her. Not angry like I had been at that, yes, let’s say it again Margot, bitch Arabella.
I may not have liked what Lily had to say, but she wasn’t trying to hurt me. Which only made it worse, in a way.
I didn’t know what to do. I would apologize to her in the morning, I decided, but before that, I would briefly entertain the notion that there might be something in what she said.
I thought about the letters. I thought about Martin Forrester and that ghastly police psychologist. The letters are real, I told myself. Other people think the letters are real. You are not imagining the letters.
But was I imagining my pursuit?
I made myself think back, to the man in the dark Megane, and the man in the car park who I’d encountered that night, and I had a clean sharp memory, of Mr Megane pulling away from the kerb the instant I did, even though he hadn’t answered a phone, or collected anybody, and once again its strangeness was compelling – his upright posture, his cap and dark glasses.
No, I did not imagine that. I did not imagine Mr Car Park either, but now that I am sat here in my own house, I realize that the man in the car park was a different type of threat. He wasn’t wearing an obvious disguise.
That does not, however, mean he wasn’t following me.
Oh no, there was something here, all right.
I didn’t want wine any more, and certainly not cigarettes. I wanted good black coffee, and lots of it. I stood up, filled the kettle, and the rushing tap was shockingly loud in my silent kitchen. My brain was whirring. I was being shown something, something important, and Lily and my self-doubt were suddenly beside the point.
Bethan Avery was out there, and she was as real as her letters. This, being true, meant something else. It meant that whoever had seized Bethan was somebody who could exact nearly twenty years of silence from a fourteen-year-old girl, a silence so absolute and heavy that it was sacred even now.
The pale net curtain stirred over the kitchen window, motivated by some draught in the house. I frowned. There should be no windows open in here. I peered into the garden. Absolute darkness. It did not mean the garden was empty.
As I did so, I suddenly understood what was happening.
We had broadcast an appeal to Bethan Avery, Martin Forrester and I, but she was not the only person that had seen it. Whoever had taken Bethan had seen it, too.
She had warned me, after all, in her letters that there was a gang. That this might happen.
Bethan’s kidnapper thought I knew Bethan. And not through anything as impersonal as letters, but that I knew her now, that I’d spoken to her, that I knew where she might be…
That was what this shadowy following wanted – the man parked outside the school who’d followed me home, the smiling man in the concrete car park – they wanted me to lead them to Bethan.
The woman herself had eluded them, but it would be easy enough to trace me from my column in the Examiner. All that remained was for them to find Bethan through me and renew her twenty-year silence…
And perhaps they could find Bethan through me.
My growing suspicions refused to be silenced, crowding into my thoughts, driving all else out, till it seemed there was nothing left but a kind of screaming behind my skull.
You could have met Bethan Avery in that hostel years ago. You could. And she’s reached out to you now.
Because she knows you.
I covered my mouth with my hands in a sudden thrill of dread.
I had to tell someone! I had to tell them everything, all about Angelique, the hostel, the drugs, that old life I had tried to bury and forget for ever. Furthermore, I had to make them believe me while I did it. This was fast becoming a matter of life or death.
Martin Forrester.
I realized that I wanted to talk to Martin Forrester right now more than anyone else in the world.
I glanced at the kitchen clock. Would he mind me phoning this late? I doubted it, not with what I had to tell him. I could ask him whether we should go to the police. I could talk to another human soul about this, and hear him speak back to me.
I stood up. My shoulders ached and my back was stiff. I must have been sat there for hours.
I walked over to the phone, and picked it up.
Something was wrong. It took me a second or so to realize what it was, as I hunted for the Post-It note containing Martin’s number. The phone was utterly silent – there was no dialling tone. It was dead.