25

Chris waited, watching the police station in an agony of suspense. Bethan and her man had suddenly gathered themselves together and headed off in a hurry back to their car – a big Range Rover, a car for people with big heads, in his opinion – and he had followed them here at a discreet distance, which had been difficult considering how hot on the pedal the other man had been.

They’d parked round the back of the cop shop, then walked in through the front door.

Finally, Chris had pulled up in the car park opposite the police station – he didn’t know what they did in the offices the car park belonged to, it looked like law. In amongst the gleaming Beemers and Mercs his dusty blue Megane stood out, and he attracted jaundiced looks from the suits that walked past him. Parking in Cambridge was always hotly contested.

Well, let them try and contest it with him now. He had an illegally imported canister of Mace in the dashboard, which he kept in case any of the girls had ever required a little extra encouragement to get in the car for the first time, and he was in just the right mood to use it. After all, you couldn’t build proper relationships with all of your sweethearts at first – the world was full of nosy beggars and troublemakers, endlessly wanting to see ID or get you to sign in or run fucking criminal background checks. That was the latest thing – this is what you got for volunteering to help underprivileged kids in today’s society; no wonder the country was going to the fucking dogs – sometimes you had to admire your girl from afar before you were ready to let her into your life. Sometimes that was safest – for both of you.

On the other side of the street, people streamed in and out of the police station and students cycled by, but Bethan and that fellow she was with didn’t come out again.

Oh, Bethan. What am I going to do with you?

Well, if she was dobbing him in he was safer here than at the house, he supposed. It was hardly worth rushing back to his little Katie if they were heading that way anyway. He’d already withdrawn what was left of his savings while he was out buying Katie’s nightdress, and it was wadded in his jacket pocket. There wasn’t much money left after all these years – these girls, they bled a man dry.

On the other hand, it would do nobody any good if they got talking to Katie. He should end it decently with her. If he left now for the Grove and got it finished with, he could be on his way to the coast, or the wilds of Scotland, with Katie tidied away and nobody any the wiser.

And now this one, his first love, who’d broken his heart. What did she think she was playing at? He’d watched the house CCTV, no one had come while he was out last night; there’d been no one while he was digging the new patch by the rhododendrons to put poor Katie in. Katie loved rhododendrons – well, he was sure she would, if he asked her. No sign of the police. No sign of anyone.

What was Bethan playing at?

He let his forehead fall on the steering wheel, ignoring the besuited tart that scowled at him through the car window.

Was she torturing him? Did she know he was following her, and she’d come here to bait him? Inside, she was probably describing a lost cat or stolen bicycle, aware of him out here, sweating, watching her.

Oh, you wicked minx.

He’d been so wrong about her. He’d had clues, early on, that there would be trouble in paradise, during Phase One. But did he listen? Did he pay attention? Did he buggery.

Phase One, as he called it in the little black notebook he kept with his stash of magazines, began on 15 December 1997. He had arrived at this date after considering various practical factors. It would be nice to have everything cleared away and spend Christmas with Bethan, after all, and see the New Year in with her.

A new start for a new year.

The Fates had smiled on the venture early – his phone call to the UK Border Agency had quickly seen the Eastern European cleaning duo removed from their weekly slot. Old Mr Broeder had charged him through the agent, Mr Merrills, with finding replacements, but it was easy enough, with Christmas coming up, to fob him off. Everyone knew Old Mr Broeder, in his Knightsbridge lair, had no interest in anything but his club and his antique collecting, and Young Mr Broeder, his grand-nephew and the ersatz heir, who was allegedly a student, had no interest in anything that wasn’t turbocharged or in skirts.

At the Grove, Chris was effectively the Master.

And there was no reason to tell Bethan any different once he got her here.

He’d bought a new outfit that made him feel awkward and clownish – baggy jeans, a hoodie, a stupidly expensive pair of what his mother would have called tennis shoes. It was what trendy liberal do-gooders wore, apparently. He had his shaggy blond hair cut into the longish style that was popular for men, just like that one out of Oasis, the group with the two Manc brothers that swore all the time. They were inexplicably popular with Bethan and The Gnat, though The Gnat had loudly declared to Bethan that she preferred Blur, who were just more of the same as far as Chris could make out. He had to remember to forgive Bethan for her immature tastes and poorly chosen friends – she was young, and had no father figure in her life to correct and guide her . . . at least not yet.

He parked up the street from the dumpy little brick maisonette she lived in, trying to control his pounding heart, his mouth dry as he walked out of the car and towards her door.

It was all about confidence. Fair heart never won fair lady, and all that. Christ, years ago, before his mother’s latest boyfriend, Derek, had made him join the Army (it had been that or dobbing him in to the coppers), he had been a past master at chatting up old people on the doorstep and getting inside their houses. If Derek the Dick hadn’t started noticing the money and stuff coming through the flat, he’d have got clean away.

The flags leading to the door were cracked and uneven but weeded, and there was a bright little planter by the front, though the flowers in it were gone, of course, their dead remains already in compost. Peggy was particular about the garden, it seemed, if not about herself.

He knew there was no mother, hence Bethan’s distress at the loss of the necklace. He had braced himself for the presence of a father, though hopefully one that would be in full-time work.

But his surveillance had proved that there was only a grotesquely fat old woman, clad day-in and day-out in the same leggings and one of three baggy tunic-like shirts. These all bore the names of holiday destinations she could never possibly have visited in big letters, as though by force of will she could persuade herself this was Barbados or Fiji or San Diego.

Most days she didn’t leave the house, but every so often his binoculars had caught her hobbling her doughy self out with her cane to the post office to collect her pension, or to the shops for cigarettes if Bethan wasn’t around to run these errands for her.

The doorbell produced no response, as his nervousness grew. Finally, he knocked loudly, twice.

‘Give us a minute!’ came back the cracked, hoarse reply, and through the dappled glass he could see Peggy coming towards him, her gait halting. He could hear her breathing even through the door. The disgusting fat pig . . .

The door opened, showing a sliver of the woman’s face.

‘Hello . . . Peggy, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’ In their folds of flesh her eyes were deep-set, bright and suspicious. ‘Can I help you?’

‘I’m Alex Penycote. From South Cambridgeshire Social Services.’

‘Yes?’

‘This is just an informal visit. Can I come in?’

‘Of course, yes, yes.’ She shuffled backwards. Her accent was different, something Northern, possibly Geordie. ‘Sorry I was a bit abrupt. Thought you were here to sell me something. Or convert me. Come in.’

And just like that, he was inside the sanctum, being led through the tiny, neat house with its smell of boiling potatoes and roasting beef pie. She hadn’t even asked him for ID.

His heart soared.

‘Is this about Melissa?’ Her voice was rasping and the breathing harsh. It was not just exertion – something was wrong with her.

‘Sorry?’ he asked.

She turned, her knuckles whitening on the cane’s head, and the suspicion was back. She knocked on the wall, just under a hanging photograph of an exquisite brunette with a wavy perm and Bethan’s fathomless black eyes – a photo that had clearly been taken by a professional. ‘Bee’s mother. My daughter. Melissa. Have you found her?’

‘Oh, sorry, no. This is just a follow-up visit to check that everything’s OK with Bethan.’

‘What d’you mean, checking on Bethan?’ she asked, her voice rising. ‘Nobody’s come for years. We’re fine here. Just the pair of us wondering where her bloody mother is, that’s all.’ She breathed in hard, her eyes narrowing. ‘Did some interfering bugger call you lot up?’

‘What? No, no, nothing like that. It’s purely routine. It’s just that since she’ll be leaving school in a year or so, and our care, we just want to manage her transition . . .’

‘She’s not leaving school.’ Peggy had dropped her anger as quickly as she had picked it up, and was once again moving into the kitchen. ‘She’s staying on. She’s bright. Aren’t you, pet?’

‘What’s that, Nanna?’

The kitchen was as small and pokey as the rest of the house, but bright and clean. A pot bubbled merrily on the stove, and the oven made a gentle humming. At the Formica table in the middle of the room sat Bethan, surrounded by books.

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.

They had done the same to Melissa, after all.

That was it. He would tell her that they had killed Melissa – beautiful Melissa, who had run off to London to be a model, then given birth to her and vanished, never to be seen again. After all, neither Bethan nor Peggy had any real idea of what had become of Melissa – only suspicions.

And this shadowy cabal; they’d ordered him – well, not ordered him, because he was rich and powerful, nobody ordered him around – but strongly suggested that they pick up her daughter too. And he couldn’t say no, because they would ruin him, but now here she was and unless she helped him conceal her then . . .

His shame at his reception was going out, like a fast tide. That was it. That was the answer. And perhaps he would tell her the truth eventually, one day, when they were both far away and he was sure she knew who really held the whip hand over her.

When the car started, he felt much, much better. He was already glad – so very glad – that he had come. Everything was falling into place.

He didn’t get Bethan for Christmas, or see in the New Year with her. He arrived at the Grove the next Friday afternoon, 19 December, and with a sinking heart recognized the glossy 4x4 in the drive, its front tyres crushing the lawn, and the cheerful bellow of Young Mr Broeder. Phase Two, it seemed, would have to wait.

Young Mr Broeder (or Caspar, as he insisted upon being called) would be staying for a long weekend, with two Hooray Henrys he rowed with and an icy posh self-assured blonde called Julietta who Chris detested on sight. He threw out their champagne and Cognac bottles and their empty trays of takeaway, listened to them yowl and chatter to one another in the house while he busied himself in the grounds, their ghetto blaster filling the cold winter air with meaningless pounding noise that they never seemed to tire of. Dubstep, they called it. Apparently Young Mr Broeder had composed it, out of a selection of dustbin lids banging together from the sounds of things. What the fuck did they teach them at university, anyway?

When Christmas Eve rolled around and they finally buggered off, it was too late to move to Phase Two. Christmas came and went, and then New Year, and he sulked at the inherent unfairness of his life. He knew social workers had this time off, so despite endless and furious thinking, he could come up with no reason to contact the Averys, and stalking Bethan was too dangerous.

It had been the longest he had gone without seeing her since that day he had first laid eyes on her, and the absence was killing him. First thing Monday morning, he was calling that number of Peggy’s.

He had, when he started, no clear idea of what he intended, other than to get close to her and wait for an opportunity to suggest itself. He had half-formed the conviction that she should go willingly with him – which was not to say, fully informed, that would be a little too ambitious – but there could be no question of trying to force her into the car or using violence against her, at least anywhere where he might be seen. Some ruse would have to be devised.

But the cold lonely Christmas had hardened his dreams into plans, and the closer he came to realizing them, the more he had to bleakly consider the danger they put himself and Bethan in. Especially him. Unfair as it was, they wouldn’t be sending her to prison.

On the other hand, nobody but Old Mr Broeder knew about the hidden cellar, and good luck if they wanted to get any sense out of him. When the hue and cry went out, as it almost certainly would, the police had to be in a position to search the house and find nothing.

If they even got this far. He had a plan for that too, now he thought about it.

He used up the soundproofing material he’d purchased, and bought more just in case, driving for miles so as not to arouse suspicion, being constantly jostled by a post-holiday crowd of shoppers. He queued patiently in Marks & Spencer in St Albans with his lacy bras and panties, his cotton nightdresses in the basket. He surveyed the other women in the queue around him – not one of them was a patch on his girl, he thought with quiet satisfaction. His glee seemed to fill him up, threaten to spill over. His girl.

He bought ready meals and cans of soup and individual pots of yogurts. He pondered whether to buy games, or books, or chocolates, before deciding that he would let her earn them first. The thought made him smile.

In the final load of soundproofing and rope he purchased from the building supplies store in Stevenage, he also threw a ball-peen hammer into the cart.

In the car, in the here and now, Chris tried to ease out his tensed, cramped shoulders, rolling them in their sockets, feeling his wiry muscles sing and stretch.

Nothing from the police station still.

All right. Ten more minutes.

If nothing happened and she didn’t come out, he was heading back to the Grove.

To Katie.