‘What?’
‘Yeah. She says she encountered someone very like our man outside a service station on the A12 near Ipswich in 2006. He offered her a lift.’
I stared at him. As far as I’d known, the reconstruction had been a bust.
‘A hitchhiker?’
Martin nodded. ‘Yes. She accepted, but as he opened the car door, there was something about him she didn’t like, so at the last minute she declined his kind assistance and he went for her, tried to drag her into his car. She saw the reconstruction in Belfast, of all places, and gave the hotline a call.’ Martin rubbed his head. ‘She describes him as very friendly at first, as he talked her out of the service station and over to his car door, but then he changed to “absolutely raging crazy angry” once he realized she was going back into the service station and he was going to lose her. She’d never seen anyone react like that before, and out of nowhere, from the second she turned him down. It fits our profile of him – he’ll be able to hold it together to deceive someone for a short while, but no longer than that.’
‘This girl didn’t go to the police?’
He shrugged. ‘She meant to report it, but never got around to it. She was nervous talking about it on the telephone ten years after it happened, according to O’Neill. She was only fifteen at the time.’
‘He wouldn’t need special access of the kind you’re talking about if he’s grabbing hitchhikers,’ I mused.
‘No, but we think he just liked the look of Miss Belfast, so acted on impulse. From what we can tell about her, she would have been exactly his type.’
I spared a glance at the wall. ‘So, clearly, the rest of the time, he’s choosing them somehow. They’re mainly vulnerable girls in the social services system, and they share a certain physical type. Somehow he has access to a pool of these kinds of girls…’
‘Absolutely.’
‘So, a social worker perhaps, or a policeman.’
‘No. The police looked into this, but there is nobody that had official contact with all the girls during the time period. It’s far more likely he’s an ancillary worker who moves around and works on short contracts, possibly a driver, because the girls are in different council catchment areas. He almost certainly has more than one identity.’
‘It doesn’t necessarily follow that he’s a driver,’ I said. ‘He could be a locum of some sort.’
‘He could, but probably isn’t,’ replied Martin, with the sure conviction of someone who has had this conversation before. ‘Greta and I think he’s bright but not educated past secondary school. He’ll be fundamentally incapable of taking any kind of orders, or tolerating criticism, so he probably works alone and for himself, possibly as a taxi or bus driver, or in catering, or as a janitor. Or maybe he just volunteers for a charity. Any of those could expose him to these girls.’
I shivered, imagining it. You never know who is in the background, watching you as you go through your daily life. ‘Surely people are vetted if they’re going to be working with vulnerable children?’
‘They are now, yes – this is a post-Soham world – but they weren’t always.’ He let his head rest forward. ‘And remember, vetting only works if you’ve been caught before, or your offences are still on file.’
I managed a weak chuckle. ‘That I can vouch for.’
We exchanged wan smiles.
‘So you’ve found Bethan Avery?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes,’ he said, and he didn’t look away. ‘I think so, most definitely. Margot, I’ve got something to tell you. It may bother you.’
I shivered in expectant silence. Then I said, ‘Go on.’
21
This was impossible.
This was madness, true madness, something my adolescent peccadilloes merely hinted at. I sat very still in his ergonomic office chair while Martin Forrester attempted to reason with me.
‘Margot, don’t you see? It explains everything.’
He might have been speaking in a foreign language. He was telling me that once I understood it all, I would feel better than I’d ever felt. It explained all the things that had ever troubled me.
‘You’re mad,’ I said. I could think of nothing else to say. I was stuck out here in the middle of nowhere with a crazy person.
He explained it again, while I sat there, incapable of speech or movement, as though I was made wholly of wood. The sensation of being a spring wound down had never been stronger, and I was going to explode.
‘All right,’ said Martin. ‘It does sound mad. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.’ He handed me the piece of paper, the piece of paper with ‘Farrell’s Distribution’ on the letterhead.
I took the paper and read it again.
Then I read it once more, observing every character, every loop, every nuance.
‘Margot,’ said Martin, ‘speak to me.’
He suddenly appeared genuinely frightened for me. I suspected that for some reason I struck that indefinable chord in him. I don’t know why. We never know why.
All I knew was that after thirty-five years of being alive, thirty-five years of a varied and, I now realized, extensive existence, I had known him for two weeks and he was all I had in the whole wide world.
But that wasn’t any help now.
‘So,’ I said to him, ‘when did you work all this out?’ I must have sounded cold and unfriendly. That’s how I felt.
He sighed, then gave me a long look. ‘I suspected it from the first moment I Googled your picture on the school website.’ His head turned back towards the wall, with its freight of woe. ‘I wasn’t lying when I said I live with these pictures all day. Your nose was badly broken at some point and healed without being reset, and it changed your appearance, but the rest…’ He gave me a little smile, and a shrug. ‘I wasn’t that surprised when the analysis on the handwriting came back.’
I examined the piece of paper again without speaking.
‘When did I write this?’ I asked, not looking up from it.
‘You were writing it when they came to pick you up at that place, that warehouse,’ he said softly. ‘You were delirious… you don’t remember. I found it in your jacket pocket when I put you to bed…’ He tailed off.
I stared at the cold sunshine beyond the window. It was hard to see. My eyes were blurred. I managed a vague, cynical smile at Martin. Something was ticking urgently and precisely in my head, like a bomb. I handed him back the piece of paper, so I didn’t have to see the horror of it again.
The horror. I could not even deny it.
I shut my eyes.
It wasn’t Martin that was crazy, it was me.
It’s always been me.
The paper was in front of me again behind my closed lids, the one I’d written on in my fevered delirium, while my shoulder ached and the world warped and I waited for rescue, but I’d forgotten that. I’d forgotten Margot, I was writing the fourth letter to Dear Amy, in the childish, fussy script I knew so very well.
The words stood out like knives.
Dear Amy,
I am so frightened now, so very frightened and so sick, and I know he means to kill me very soon and there is nothing I can do. I know that no one knows where I am and that no one will rescue me, and I am so scared and I don’t know what to do. Please help me,
Love,
Bethan Avery
Then the ticking in my head stopped, and the bomb went off.
‘Fine,’ I snapped, leaping to my feet, my hands balling into fists. I no longer felt the pain in my shoulder. ‘Fine. I’m a head case. I’ve wasted everybody’s time pretending to be Bethan Avery.’ I could hardly breathe with terror, with shame, and also with pure rage – the rage of Furies, the rage I can never quite let go of. ‘Was it really necessary to bring me all this way? To humiliate me like this? I had no idea I was writing these things, that I was this… this disturbed. This wasn’t just some shitty little plot for attention, you know. I genuinely thought…’