‘Since I’m not, I’ll take your word for it.’ Believe it or not, I didn’t say this to be snippy. I don’t even like watching this sort of thing on the TV. I find it too disquieting.
He acknowledged this with a tiny nod and a twist of his mouth. ‘Regardless, Greta suspects he is someone that would appear very affectionate to his victims initially. He would believe he’s in a romantic relationship with them.’
I treated him to an incredulous raise of my eyebrow. ‘So he seduces them into coming with him?’
‘No, absolutely not. Or, rather, not ultimately. What happens, we think, is that he befriends these girls somehow, or passes himself off as something he is not, and through doing that he is able to get them to accompany him somewhere he can abduct them. Of the girls that are found, every single one of them has injuries that are consistent with some kind of forcible imprisonment, forcible assault – broken nails, restraint marks on the wrists and ankles, malnutrition. However crazy he is, he must know that all things considered, they don’t want to be with him. And the injuries we find are always as old as the girl’s disappearance – the incarceration happens straight away. Greta thinks the incarceration is the whole point. It’s all about control. He gets to have a person in his power that he can dominate totally, someone who is not in a position to reject or abandon him.’
I let out a disgusted sigh.
‘I know,’ he answered. ‘He’d also, however, have very poor anger management and next to no ability to brook any kind of defiance or resistance from them. There’s a reason he chooses girls so young.’
‘Heaven forefend,’ I said, in bitter irony, ‘my rape victim dared to be cheeky with me.’
‘He’s a psychopath, Margot. He’s incapable of seeing any point of view but his own. He thinks this is a romance, and so it is, to him. But the worst part is that the violence escalates every time he imprisons a girl, and with each girl it takes less time for him to become disillusioned with them.’ He sighed. ‘That’s bad news for Katie: she’ll be coming to her cut-off point.’
I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to this. My heart hammered against my ribs.
And beneath it all, my fury coiled and rustled, like a fanged serpent. How dare you, whoever you are. How dare you.
‘I won’t labour this; though there have been no more bodies, we think there were two others between Becky and Katie – Hannah Murphy went missing after a youth club disco in 2011, and Chloe Firth in 2013. No evidence, but they haven’t been heard from since and they fit the victim profile – dark-haired white girls, both from East Anglia.’ He shrugged. ‘And then, Katie Browne. Katie from Cambridge, where it all started.’ He rubbed his chin, regarded the girls on the board. ‘Started with Bethan Avery.’
‘Who is writing letters now,’ I said. I felt exhausted. The heating was now far too high. I let his coat drop off my shoulders and on to the chair back.
‘Yes.’ He came and sat down opposite me, on an old trunk pushed up against his office window. Next to us, his wall and its web of misery sprawled away on either side. ‘Bethan Avery, who is writing letters now. But why now, after all these years?’
I felt very sad all of a sudden. ‘You think that she’s an accomplice, don’t you? That’s what this all must mean.’ I let my gaze stray up the morass of photographs, the notes, the maps. I was close to tears; it was as though Bethan had betrayed me. ‘She’s been helping him in some ghastly way, and twenty years in she’s had an attack of conscience. She writes as a child to garner sympathy, perhaps, but can’t commit to finally giving him up.’
Because really, it was the only thing that made sense. I just hadn’t wanted to admit it. There was no way, in the situation that she described herself being trapped in, she could post letters to a newspaper. This could only mean one of two things. Either her captor was in on it, or she was lying about the situation.
‘No,’ said Martin briskly. His gaze was very direct, unnervingly so. ‘Nobody thinks she’s an accomplice.’
‘Then what?’ I growled wearily, rubbing my temples. One of my migraines was lurking around the back of my head, considering whether to strike or not.
‘Greta and I think,’ and he seemed to choose his words very carefully, ‘that in a very fundamental sense, she is exactly who she says she is. She is a frightened girl who lived through a terrible ordeal and has never recovered.’
‘Fine,’ I snarled. ‘But why can’t she just say what happened to her so we can catch the bastard?’
‘Whoa, calm down,’ said Martin, putting a hand on my trembling arm.
‘I’m sorry.’ I bit my lip. ‘But it’s such a fucking huge… mess, Martin. I didn’t think helping this girl out would have such a massive effect on my life. I thought I’d tell the police about the letter and someone would sort it out, and now everything I have is in jeopardy, it’s all in free-fall. My house is in pieces – my house, which I love – I was nearly killed, and my employer’s going to find out about my past – Jesus, if they haven’t already.’
‘No, not at all,’ he said, then winced. ‘Well, maybe.’
I threw myself back in the chair with a horrified sigh, and covered my eyes with my hands.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I seemed to be saying it a lot lately. ‘I must sound like a perfectly selfish creature to you.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘you really don’t. I don’t think for a moment that when this started you imagined the consequences would escalate as quickly as they have.’
I uncovered my eyes and let my head flop back against the chair. ‘I just can’t see my way through to the end, now, not at all. It’s a labyrinth.’
‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘But the thing about labyrinths is that you’re always at your most lost just before you get to the centre.’
In the quiet, I could hear a clock ticking, gently, somewhere in the house, and as always there was the background whisper of the wind; and the fine, lost strands of the croaking crows.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked. His gaze was not on me any more, it was on the map on the wall. He had a calculating squint.
‘One thing hasn’t changed,’ he said, as though I had not spoken. ‘He’s keeping them all in the same place, wherever that is.’
‘But where would that be?’
‘Well, Bethan Avery was the first – it will be near her. It’s a cellar or basement, certainly the walls are stone and there are particular kinds of mould found on the girls’ bodies that only exist in cold, humid conditions. They’ve nearly all got some kind of lung infection in autopsy, depending on how long they’ve been down there. O’Neill thinks that after the initial abduction in winter the killer switched to summer for that very reason.’
‘But Katie went missing in October.’
‘Yes. And Katie wasn’t known to social services either, which makes her a little different. Something has changed. Maybe his supply dried up somehow. Or he had a brush with the law, or a conviction of some sort recently, which means he doesn’t have the same access to girls. Cambridgeshire Constabulary and MHAT have been running a mile a minute to analyse all the data we’ve got. There are a few good leads in there, too. And believe it or not, the reconstruction did turn up some interesting nuggets from the general public via the hotline number – the one they’re most excited about is an Irish hitchhiker.’