‘These men…’ I began.
A faintly embarrassed look stole over his face. ‘Well, man.’
‘There were two…’
‘No. The other fellow who followed you to the car park was, um, an undercover police officer.’
‘What?’ I asked, stunned.
He shrugged, his mouth twisting ruefully. ‘Yeah. The police have had you under surveillance for a couple of weeks now.’
‘They… surveillance?’
‘Yes.’ He was rubbing at the back of his neck with his hand.
‘I don’t… they think I knew who was writing the letters, don’t they?’ I drew a sharp intake of breath. ‘Martin, I think they’re right. Listen, I’ve been thinking about my time with the nuns, and there was a girl there who could have been Bethan Avery. Someone I knew at the hostel. Her name was-’
‘Margot, I don’t think it was anyone you knew at the hostel. We found Bethan Avery. Last night.’
I couldn’t reply. I was absolutely amazed.
‘You have? I don’t understand… Martin, tell me. Honestly. What’s going on? Who is it?’
He looked at me then for a long silent moment, before he threw down the tea towel. ‘Come with me.’
I pulled my arm around myself and shivered, despite the cheery warmth of the house.
‘Take a seat,’ said Martin, bending down to clear papers off the mesh-backed office chair.
I couldn’t, not straight away. I was transfixed.
On the wall opposite, a map had been put up – a gigantic view of East Anglia, scattered with pins. Over the top of this was a collage of sorts – a diagram of missing girls. They smiled out with guarded shyness from school portraits, they glowered from mug shots, they lay curled and sunken on steel gurneys or wrapped in rotting blankets.
I blinked, overwhelmed, horrified. Then I began to distinguish what I was looking at out of this carnage. There were six major hubs of photographs, connected by arrows. Some of these pointed at the girls, some at random locations, and all were dotted with notes – Cambridge Methodist Youth Club, St Hilda’s Academy – with an icy shock I recognized Katie Browne in her St Hilda’s uniform.
In the upper left corner was Bethan Avery, and I was struck suddenly by how similar the two girls were, with their dark hair and suspicious, keen dark eyes.
‘What is this?’
Martin came to stand at my shoulder. His heat was palpable, even through my shivering cold.
‘The other victims,’ he said, almost gently. ‘I mentioned them before, remember?’
‘The ones you think he killed?’
‘The ones we’re now sure he killed.’ He placed a hand on my good shoulder. ‘Or at least the ones we know about.’
I tried to parse this. ‘There’s… good God…’
‘Six, yes. Six we know about. Two more that we suspect.’
I was shaking. ‘But…’ I pushed my hair out of my face. ‘They’re all so young.’
‘Let me talk you through it,’ he said, releasing my shoulder. His tone was still gentle, but there was something glittering underneath, some hard edge of determination. ‘It works like this. In 1998, he kidnaps Bethan Avery while she is visiting her grandmother in hospital. He keeps her for no more than two months, but she escapes.’
I nodded.
‘There’s no evidence,’ he continues, ‘and the case dries up. No body, though everyone assumes she must be dead because of the blood loss on the nightdress they found.’
‘Yes, I know,’ I said, trying to rein in my impatience.
‘Fine, so we’ll come back to Bethan. Because I think that’s what’s happening in this case. We’re coming back to Bethan. The next one that we know about is Jennifer. And there’s a long gap – about three and a half years – which makes a few of us very nervous, as someone like this, well, three and a half years is a long time when you’re that driven.’ He scratched his stubbled chin thoughtfully. ‘I think that when we catch him we’ll find there was another victim during that period-’
‘Or that Bethan’s escape frightened him off for a while.’
Martin let out a short hmm. ‘Possibly. But yes, sorry, Jennifer Walker.’ His finger nearly fell on the face of a heartbreakingly young girl in a pink sundress, seemed to reconsider and then touched the photo margin below instead. ‘She was only twelve. Like all of them, she was known to social services, in this case in Norwich. The social services thing is going to be a theme, I warn you. She was put into residential care for six weeks when her mother refused to leave her father after his conviction for breaking her jaw. He got out of prison, moved back in, and Jenny was moved out in very short order.
‘So, Jenny is bullied in care and wants to run away. Tries a couple of times, is brought back. She’s a sensitive sort, finds it very hard. This is also going to be a recurring theme, incidentally. She’s last seen in a McDonald’s with a strange man before vanishing. It hits the media. Search parties, press conferences, the works… Sorry, are you cold?’
‘I… a little.’ My teeth were beginning to chatter.
‘Try this.’ He put a heavy Barbour jacket over my shoulders, and leaned over and switched on a mobile heater by the window. ‘It won’t take long to warm up.’
‘Thank you.’
‘So,’ he continued, ‘after ten days a family out camping find her buried in a shallow grave near a picnic ground in Thetford Forest. She’d been strangled, and buried in a white nightdress that wasn’t hers. Again, there were no hair or fibres really, as she’d been washed post-mortem – but not well enough to take out all the DNA, so we do have a profile on him if he’s ever caught. The nightdress is still creased from the packet it came out of. Everyone thinks of Bethan Avery, and there’s talk about a serial killer, but even though Jennifer and Bethan have their own Crimewatch special and there are a billion people and their dogs phoning in with leads, nothing comes of it.
‘So a couple more years go by, and then in 2003, the summertime again, Lauren Jacks goes missing. Lauren is from Newmarket, about fifteen miles up the road, and she’s another girl that appears to have absconded from care. Her body isn’t found, and it’s not clear whether she just ran away.
‘Then two years after that, something changes. Sarah Holroyd, who’s twenty-one and three months pregnant, is found dumped by the side of the A11, near Mildenhall.’
He stabbed the point on the map with his finger, but I didn’t see it. I was staring at a photograph near the pin, and couldn’t actually breathe or speak.
‘No attempt to bury her – she was nude. She’d been beaten to death. But her body was suggestive – she’d definitely been kept alive somewhere in poor conditions for a significant period in the run-up to the murder, and more than that – she looks, physically, like the others. Well, she doesn’t there, obviously, poor girl… sorry, are you all right?’
‘I… I could do with sitting down.’ I thought I was going to faint. I’ve never fainted before.
He was so obviously mortified, I pitied him. ‘I’m so sorry, Margot, I’m used to looking at these kinds of pictures, I forget that other people…’
‘No, it’s fine.’ I swallowed, let the mesh chair take my weight. I deliberately turned my eyes away from the gruesome photo of the dead girl, with her misshapen jaw and open, staring, bloodshot eye. ‘I’m fine.’
He peered at me, and there was concern, but also something else – that speculative tilt to his head, as though I was being tested for something. ‘If you’re sure.’
‘Yes. Go on.’
‘Well, Greta, who you met in London recently…’
I suspect my face spoke volumes.
‘Well, she thinks Sarah and then Becky, the next victim, made him angry somehow, so their remains are treated far less respectfully – they’re literally dumped at the side of the road near rubbish bins – and they die more violently. Sarah was pregnant when she was abducted – we think, perhaps, that this would have made him feel she was promiscuous and unworthy, and Becky, from all accounts, was a notorious firebrand. She would have fought him all the way down.’ He twitched his head sideways. ‘You may not have had much time for her, and with good reason, but Greta worked up a profile on our man and it’s very convincing if you are an aficionado of those sorts of things.’