He could hardly breathe at the sight of her, her dark hair drawn up in a ponytail, the top button of her school blouse unfastened, the tie discarded, showing the white flash of her neck. And those dark, bottomless eyes…
‘Hello, Bethan,’ he said. His throat was dry. Smile at her. Do the smile.
‘Hello,’ she answered politely but distantly, her eyes moving over him once, and then back to her books.
‘Pet, why don’t you take your homework upstairs so…’ she gestured impatiently at him. ‘Sorry, forgotten your name.’
‘Alex. Alex Penycote.’ He hitched the smile at Bethan a little higher, aware that it was desperate, almost a rictus.
‘… So Alex and I can talk.’
‘About me.’ She fixed Peggy with a look. There was something Chris didn’t like in that look – cynical, knowing, older than her years. But it was also affectionate, full of shared understanding. A strong bond, in other words. Together they would have borne the burden of the missing Melissa over long years.
Bethan had no business having strong bonds she would only have to learn to break. This was a complication.
‘Aye, we’ll talk about you,’ went on Peggy with a hacking laugh. ‘But if your ears start to burn then shout down.’
Bethan shrugged and swept to her feet. ‘It was nice to meet you,’ she said to Chris, with the same throwaway civility she’d greeted him with.
And then she was gone, books in hand, her light footfall tripping up the stairs.
‘Always in such a bloody hurry, aren’t they? Cup of tea?’
It was as though a bomb was going off between his ears, a ringing silence of shock and humiliation.
She hadn’t recognized him.
He’d prepared a story to explain their meeting, was braced for her opening burst of surprise, her follow-up questions about the necklace – but nothing. Bethan had looked straight through him. As though he was some sort of stranger.
‘I said, a cup of tea?’ reiterated Peggy, her heavy brows coming down. The glint of suspicion returning.
‘Oh yes, milk and three sugars please,’ he beamed up at her, through the gut punch feeling, his sick disappointment and his growing rage.
Peggy rambled on, as she shuffled slowly around the kitchen, turning off the potatoes and the oven, boiling the kettle, carefully placing the cup before him with a shaky hand. Telling him about Melissa, who’d run away to London to be a model and had come home with more than she’d bargained for; dumping the daughter on Granny and heading off for Amsterdam and another vague modelling contract – in Chris’s opinion Melissa sounded like the sort of self-absorbed wastrel better off unfound – and how tough it had been taking on Bethan at her time of life. But she was no trouble, not really, a very good girl. Chris nodded along and smiled and let her talk and tried to calm the storm of misery at work in his heart.
She had obsessed him, taken possession of him body and soul, to the point where she was his first thought in the morning and his last one at night, and for her part she did not even recognize him.
He was nothing to her.
Well, all that would change.
He let Peggy talk – the point of the exercise was to establish Peggy’s trust in him, after all, and not Bethan’s – but it was very hard to pay her any kind of attention, and he had to work to stay civil and focused as she slurped her tea and breathed in her laboured, noisy way, whinging on about the failure to track down Melissa, as though this was Chris’s fault somehow. He had no sympathy. If Peggy hadn’t wanted a runaway child-abandoner for a daughter she ought to have raised her better.
For his part, he rifled through the forms he’d taken from the post office and put in the folder under his arm, tutting that he’d forgotten the right one, careful to make sure that Peggy only saw the official printing in the briefest of snatches. Of course Peggy didn’t look, not really. That was the wonderful thing about the power of authority.
He was terribly sorry, he explained. He needed to complete the right form. He would have to come back and talk to both of them some other time, and with Bethan alone at some point, and in any case, he could see that he was interrupting their dinner. Could he have their phone number? He wrote it down in his folder as she read it out, trying to control his triumphant tremor.
And then, because he couldn’t bear to leave without seeing Bethan again, even though she had so wholly disrespected him, he asked to use the toilet and was directed up the stairs.
The stairs creaked beneath him, the cheap carpet worn and frayed with countless steps. There were three doors at the top of the landing, as he’d been told – one lying open at the end, which was the bathroom, one on his right, door closed, with a little novelty sign saying, ‘GONE CRAZY – BACK SOON!’
On his left, the door was open, and Bethan Avery lay upon her belly on her pink bed, while walls of posters of gleaming-toothed young men surrounded her on all sides, like an admiring audience.
The air left his body in a low whoosh.
She was poring over a textbook lying open before her, her legs raised up and crossed at the ankles, a pair of headphones against her ears, holding back the dark tide of her hair. She was oblivious to his presence, and he could hear some kind of distant tinny sound, obviously the music, being piped into her head while she chewed the end of a ragged pen.
And then, as though some sixth sense had prompted her, she glanced up.
‘Hi,’ she said, though the word had more of the character of a question, and she did not smile.
‘I was… sorry, I was looking for the bathroom…’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Straight ahead of you,’ and pointed towards the end of the landing with the pen.
‘Thanks.’
He was rewarded with an equally brisk smile that vanished as soon as her head dropped once more to her book. He had been dismissed.
He was trembling as he shut the thin door behind himself. He splashed his face with cold water and rubbed it dry on one of Peggy’s foofy little pink guest towels.
Scraping his hands through the ridiculous haircut, he imagined going into her room, seizing her about her mouth, straddling her back, teaching her a good hard lesson while that fat sow waited downstairs, oblivious…
No, no. He was here on a mission. A time was coming when he would get to see all of Bethan whenever he wanted; it would be stupid to spoil everything now. He was the hunter, the stalker, the wily one. He passed by her door again, pleased that he managed not to steal another glance at her, aware only of Bethan as warm periphery, of the tiny beat coming out of her headphones. He managed a friendly but professional smile at Peggy, a few parting words, and then he was outside and letting himself back into his car. He was shaking, shaking with terror and desire and fury and elation at his success.
Fumbling to fit the keys in the ignition, teeth gritted, he replayed her again and again in his mind. He had been mistaken about her, he realized, and she was not the imploring waif he remembered shedding tears on the Fens. She was cheeky sometimes, and distant, and would be in need of some correction if she was to be his dream girl again.
Who did she think she was, treating him that way?
He sighed. It was hardly her fault, he supposed, considering how she’d been brought up by that pig in a dress, but it made a difference to how he would have to deal with her. He would have to put the fear of God into her. He would have to…
And it came to him, whole and of a piece. The Grove, the girl, and what he would tell her. As he played it in his mind, he could feel himself believing it.
He was a rich man, a powerful man, and he was in a club that exchanged young girls amongst themselves. He had kidnapped her and was supposed to pass her on, but he had fallen in love with her, and he was going to keep her.
But these others, oh, they were rich and powerful too. If one let the side down, they would all be in trouble, so they would do all they could to punish both her and him if they caught them. So she would not be able to leave him, he would tell her, because they would kill her loved ones – her granny, and that friend of hers, The Gnat.