31

My adventures with hospitals are not over. Perhaps they will never be over. Live in hope, says Martin, and I try to.

Once more I am walking down a long hospital corridor, and I am looking for somebody.

This time, though, I know exactly where I am going.

‘Hey,’ I say, knocking on the wooden door. ‘Is now good?’

‘Oh hi. Yeah sure. Come in.’

Katie Browne is lying on her hospital bed in a pale green nightshirt. She puts down the iPad she was holding. From the tinny sounds that issue from it, I guess that she’s been watching The Hunger Games again.

Early on I lent her my iPad and told her to buy what books she wanted and rent movies on my account. Martin was sceptical, but so far she has always had to be pushed to spend any money on it.

It means, though, that I can see what she reads and watches – what she consumes – and what she consumes is fantasy Amazons, warrior-women skilled in sword and bow and laser pistol, protectors of the weak, champions of justice. Because I have access to the same books and movies on my phone, I’ve started to consume them too.

It’s surprisingly therapeutic, and touching. Through her wounded, unspoken front I see into her dreamworld, and it fills me with hope for her recovery.

And, by extension, hope for my own.

Through her window I can look down on the swarming roads and towers of Addenbrooke’s. She follows my gaze, smiles.

‘Yeah. It is a cool view.’

I sit on the chair next to her bed. On the little bedside cabinet there is a riot of brightly coloured greetings cards.

‘You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?’ I ask.

‘Um, no.’ Her smile falters and she turns away, as though shutters have come down across her soul. It has been nearly three months, but Katie is not yet ready to discuss the cellar, or what happened to her, to the frustration of her support team. I can hardly blame her, really.

But when she is ready, I’ll be here.

‘I was going to say happy birthday.’

‘What? Oh, yeah!’ Her relief is palpable. ‘But you’re a day late.’

‘Yeah, I’m sorry. The meeting with the lawyers was yesterday.’

‘You met the lawyers?’ Her eyes widen. ‘I thought . . .’

‘No, not that meeting with my lawyers. I meant my divorce.’

Her dark eyes are wary. She does not know what to say about my divorce. Despite all she has been through, she is still essentially a child.

‘It’s OK,’ I say. ‘I’m over it.’

The meeting had taken place in London, which is where Stephen, my solicitor and newfound indispensable person, works from a smart office near Gray’s Inn. It was already late afternoon by the time I arrived, my guts heaving, my stomach in my mouth, and I was conducted into the ultra-modern meeting room and shown into a high-backed chair.

Eddy was already there. His presence was a physical shock, and I felt myself grow numb and light-headed.

Stephen’s assistant, Tanya, then moved to the sideboard. Behind her, London was visible in a milky dusk, framed by floor to ceiling windows. St Paul’s poked up tinily, like a novelty sugar bowl, and I almost wanted to lift up the lid and peek inside.

‘Would anyone like tea? Coffee?’ she asked in a small fluting voice, like a bird.

I shook my head. So did Eddy.

‘Not for me,’ he said.

Eddy looked the same, and yet also not – he was, as always, fastidiously neat, but his exquisitely cut white shirt and small lapelled black jacket made him seem like someone playing a part, perhaps that of a gangster or Bond villain, and his glittering cufflinks appeared vulgar, particularly in the context of our meeting and what it was about. It was as though he had lost the power to fill his own clothes. He was a generic version of himself, constructed of discount materials.

Or perhaps it was I that had changed, and I saw him with different eyes.

Who knows.

‘Penelope, you’ve had a chance to discuss the agreement with your client?’ asked Stephen.

Eddy’s solicitor was a woman, an ash-blonde tigress with a steely gaze, clad in a titanium-grey dress-suit and terrifying black patent high heels. I guessed instantly that this was the person who had advised him to get back with me so he could mortgage my house and use the proceeds to fight for his share of Sensitall’s innards.

This consideration really warmed me towards her, as you might imagine.

‘I have,’ she replied firmly.

‘Any questions?’

‘No, we’re fine.’ She glanced at Eddy, who was pretending to be engrossed in the highly polished table top.

Stephen flipped open a folder and took out copies of the documents.

‘Right then. Let’s get on with it.’

This agreement was a lot less scary to me than it could have been, for one simple reason: Eddy had been paid £30,000 for revelations about me that had appeared in a national tabloid. In a bleakly hilarious twist, there was a question as to whether I was entitled to some of this money as part of our shared assets.

The sheer betrayal of it all still took my breath away. He told some grubby reporter everything I had confided to him in the secrecy of our bed, that I confessed while we walked, hand in hand, along Grantchester Grind or through the Fens themselves; all of those deep and hidden things, which it turns out were all lies anyway, tales spun by the Red Queen out of desperation and terror, and always flight, flight, flight. Stories about the drug use, the breakdowns, the distant clashing rocks of my imaginary past.

Neither of us, however, is interested in fighting about this now. I, at least, have other priorities. As a consequence, I will keep my house, Eddy will keep his flat, and we will have no further dealings with one another.

Stephen pushed the sheaf of paper towards him. ‘Mr Lewis? You first.’

Eddy signed the documents quickly, contemptuously, as though this was all beneath him, and then shoved them over the desk to me.

There was a big cross drawn next to Margot Lewis, marking where I should sign my name. My pen paused over it, as though startled. After all, who is Margot Lewis? Can she legally sign documents? Does she even exist in any meaningful way?

In for a penny, in for a pound. My pen scratched decisively across the paper.

And just like that, we were done.

I lingered with Stephen on the steps of his offices while he fussed with his cashmere scarf.

‘Well, that was awful,’ I observed.

‘Yes, but better to have it over and done with.’ He fastened his coat against the cold breeze. Somewhere out there the City of London was knee-deep in rush hour, but here, in the medieval parkland of the Middle Temple, all was strangely quiet, serene. ‘I don’t think you’ve been holding out for a reconciliation.’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘Can I walk you to the station?’

‘Thanks, that’s very kind, but no. I’m meeting someone in the Delaunay.’

‘At least let me flag you a cab from the road,’ he said.

‘No really, it’s fine. I’d rather walk. And I haven’t spotted any reporters – though I haven’t properly beaten the shrubbery around here yet, so maybe I’m jumping to conclusions.’ I barked out a laugh, but he wasn’t fooled and he gave me a stern glance.

‘It’s nothing to joke about. This is going to get worse before it gets better, Mrs Lewis,’ he said, in his fussy no-nonsense lawyer voice. ‘There’s Christopher Meeks to consider. The arrest is just a taster. The trial will be a trial.’

He walked me up to High Holborn and left me with a cordial goodbye near Chancery Lane before being swallowed up by the swirling crowds descending into the Underground. I pulled my coat tighter around myself and ducked out of the human current, sliding in next to the kiosk dispensing the Evening Standard just until I could orient myself. The air smelled of fuel exhaust and hops. It was already nearly dark and the railings for the Tube entrance were cold at my back as I pulled out my phone, about to tap out a message.

Something made me glance up – a familiar voice.

Eddy was a mere few yards away, talking urgently into his phone, his forehead furrowed. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he was saying, his hand straying up to his collar to tug it as he often did when nervous. ‘I never promised . . .’

He turned, saw me. His mouth thinned. I could see him thinking – should I turn my back to her? Pretend I haven’t seen her?

In the end, to my surprise, he did neither of those things.

‘Look, I’ll ring you back, all right?’ He swiped the phone off, dropped it into his pocket and strolled over, with a little studied nonchalance, as though it meant nothing.

‘Fancy meeting you here.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I had business in town.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, clucking his tongue. ‘Me too.’

He came and stood next to me, and we both stared out at the tide of commuters flowing past, while we rested in the little harbour provided by the kiosk.

We could have been spies, meeting to pass on information.

‘You know,’ he said after a few moments, and his jaw was tight, ‘half of the stuff they printed in that newspaper didn’t come from me. I don’t know where they got that from.’

I sighed. The subject was already exhausted as far as I was concerned. Part of our signed agreement was that he promised never again to sell information about me to any newspaper or media outlet – rather like shutting the stable door after the horse is gone, in my view, but Stephen was insistent.

‘It doesn’t matter now,’ I said. It didn’t.

‘I know I’ve hardly been the ideal husband,’ he murmured, ‘but I really am sorry it worked out this way.’

‘Yeah. Me too.’ My hands were cold and I shoved them into my pockets. On the road, taxis were honking at one another over some perceived slight. The chill had brought out the roses in his cheeks.

‘Can I ask a question? Since we’re here?’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Why not?’

‘Did you really not know you were this Bethan Avery person?’

I craned up to look at him. ‘Are you serious?’

He shrugged, as if to say, Well yes.

‘No,’ I said coldly. ‘No I didn’t.’

It was his turn to sigh. ‘I suppose it explains a few things.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like why our marriage failed.’ He opened his palms, as though this were a fait accompli. ‘I mean, if you had no idea who you were, how was I supposed to know who you were?’

I stood up straight. It was time to go.

‘Does it matter? The important thing has always been that you knew who you were. You knew who you were and what you wanted and kept me posted.’

‘But . . .’

I wanted to tell him that our marriage failed because he left me for another woman, because he was greedy and egotistical, but instead, I simply tightened my scarf around my neck.

‘Eddy, I would love to stay and chat, but I have to go.’ I extended a hand. ‘I’ll see you around, no doubt.’

He wanted to say more, I think, but realized it would be pointless. We shook hands, like business colleagues, and within moments the human swell of commuterdom had funnelled him away into the depths of the Central Line, leaving me alone.

Martin was waiting outside the Delaunay, chafing his gloved hands together.

‘How did it go?’ he asked.

‘Eddy,’ I sighed out. Though my old rage, that furious, uncontrollable chthonic monster, has now subsided, sunk back into the depths, I am still bitterly disappointed in Eddy. However, I was not surprised. I could see past it.

I was coping better than Martin, it seemed.

‘You can’t stop the greedy bastard selling his story again,’ he said. ‘He can just turn “anonymous source”, and unless we catch him red-handed, there’s nothing you can do.’ He ground one fist into his palm, an unconscious gesture of rage. ‘Just so you know.’

I nodded. I understood.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked, and one of those hands now closed around my own.

‘Yes, I’m fine.’ I actually meant it.

‘Are you ready to celebrate your divorce?’

I gazed up at the brilliantly lit windows of the restaurant, and bit my lip. It smelled good. It looked good.

‘Yeah, I am . . .’ I was tired, and not terribly publicly inclined right then, but there was no way to say this without hurting him.

‘You’re not so sure, are you?’

I hesitated, mortified that my feelings had been so obvious to him. This was meant to be a treat he’d planned for me, after all.

‘You know,’ he said, and there was a warm twinkle in his eye as he slipped my hand into his pocket, ‘it’s entirely possible to celebrate divorces at home too, and in equally splendid style. Which is an option we should consider.’

‘But I—’

‘No. Not another word. You’re exhausted, I can tell. Let’s get a takeaway, stay in and chill some champagne.’

I grinned at him, pleased and relieved that he got it.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Let’s go home.’

I took the arm he offered, and we began the journey back to Little Wilbraham, to the house on the Fens.

‘What do I call you now?’ he asked me, the first time he took me back there. His voice was thick, drowsy.

I turned around in his arms. I had been sure he was asleep. I do not really sleep, myself, not yet.

‘What do you call me?’

I had been dodging this question for nearly two weeks at that point. I told everybody I was too exhausted to think about it – the reporters, the police, concerned well-wishers . . . the parents of the other murdered girls. Yes, I’ve been meeting them too. Again and again, I keep waiting for them to confront me – if Bethan, the first victim, had gone to the police instead of on some seventeen-year amnesiac bender, then so many lives might have been saved.

But none of them confront me.

Instead, they pity me.

It’s much, much worse.

‘Yes, you silly mare,’ said Martin. ‘You need a name.’

He was quite right. I must pick an identity and stick with it. Until then, I was in limbo.

‘I can’t decide,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to be Bethan Avery – you know, the mad girl who was kidnapped and kept in a cellar, then forgot about it for nearly twenty years. And I’m not sure I’m legally allowed to be Margot Lewis still.’

‘I can’t see why you’d want to be Lewis anyway.’

Well, that much was definitely true.

They fired me in the end, once Eddy’s revelations hit the papers.

It was bound to happen, of course. It’s a different world nowadays, or so they would have you believe. What with the dissociative amnesia, identity theft, fugue states and putting a child molester’s eye out – it all marks a girl’s card.

To be fair to St Hilda’s, I wasn’t exactly fired; I was placed on leave while ‘everything got sorted out’, as the head said, but we both knew I would never be coming back. I was lucky nobody was pressing charges against me, and at that point it was by no means clear that they wouldn’t in future.

Lily took me out to buy me exit cocktails at the Varsity Hotel rooftop bar, to take away the sting, but it was such a faff getting security to throw the reporters out that I couldn’t, for the life of me, relax for the first couple of hours.

That said, once they were gone, it’s impossible to stay unhappy up there, with the beautiful vista of Cambridge spread out on all sides, the frowsy towers and ivied walls, the emerald-green patches of garden, the river with its bracketing willows.

Also, they have booze.

‘What will you do?’ she asked me.

‘Years and years of therapy,’ I knocked back the remains of my white port Martini. ‘Or so they tell me.’

She tried to fight through the discomfort the idea gave her, and put on a brave face. I love her for that.

‘No, I mean, what will you do? How will you live?’

I set the glass on the table, looked to catch the waiter’s eye.

‘One day at a time.’

‘Sweet Jesus.’

‘I see what you did there. Very droll.’

She mimed a crash of cymbals, and I laughed out loud for the first time since I’d arrived.

‘There’s a third alternative,’ murmured Martin into my hair.

‘Yes?’

‘You could choose a new name. People do in these situations.’

I fell silent. This had occurred to me before.

‘A new name.’ I relaxed into his shifting grip. I didn’t say my primary thought out loud – but it feels like more running. ‘What would it be?’

‘Anything you like. Jane Smith. Princess Cuddlybottom. Spot . . .’

‘Spot?!’ I slapped at his hand.

‘Desperate Davinia, the Most Wanted Woman in East Anglia . . .’

‘Now you’re talking . . .’

‘Keith Bloggs. HMS Pinafore. Knickerbocker Glory. The Big Easy . . .’

I laughed, smothering it against his chest. ‘The sky’s the limit, I suppose.’

‘I think you would have trouble fitting that on a credit card, but yeah, it could work.’

I sighed happily.

From then on, in private, he refers to me as Ms Limit.

Katie tries to sit up, perhaps moved by my sombre mood, and I can see her wince. This has been her third, and hopefully last, bout of surgery.

‘How did the birthday go?’

‘It was all right,’ she says. She looks down at the bed. ‘I’m sorry about your divorce.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Are you . . . OK?’ Her dark eyes are guarded, will probably always be guarded now, but there is that flicker of kindness in them.

‘Yes. He’s a wanker, so I’m better off not married to him.’

She nods, relieved. This is also her opinion.

Ours is a deeply strange relationship. Margot, or more properly Mrs Lewis, was her teacher, the authority figure. Bethan is her comrade-in-arms, the only other person in the world who knows what it was like, who survived the cellar. But Bethan is fractured and frequently missing. For all her youth, Katie has more mental strength than Bethan ever did. In that sense, she leads me, and not the other way around.

And in leading me, she leads herself.

‘It was dreadful, what he did to you. Saying all that stuff to the papers . . .’

I shrug. ‘You know, it doesn’t make him less of an arse, but in a way I’m glad.’

She looks sharply at me, her smooth brow bent into a slight frown.

‘It was exhausting, living a lie, never trusting anyone, always terrified I’d be discovered. And it gave me excuses – reasons to not examine why I didn’t have a normal, joined-up life, why I never stayed in touch with anyone. I always knew something was very, very wrong with me, I just never dared look too closely at why.’ I sigh. ‘This way I’m forced to confront who I was. What I did to the real Margot.’

She visibly double-takes. ‘There was a real Margot? I don’t understand. I thought it was a name you made up.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘I didn’t make her up.’

My psychiatrist is a clean-cut thirty-something called Yufeng. It was he that I was finally referred to once Katie and I were wheeled out of the Grove in that ambulance, the doctor that Greta was trying to call on that last mad day that I became Bethan Avery again.

I get the impression he’s quite senior at the hospital, a hotshot with a growing international reputation, and that I’m something of a coup for him. He very kindly, after he was assigned to me, asked me if I would prefer a woman, and I told him no, I was good with this if he was. We get on – I can make him laugh from time to time despite himself – which makes me feel a lot more comfortable.

Together we embark on the course of drug-induced trances and psychotherapy my recovery requires. He tapes these sessions, and we listen to them together; I hear my own voice in the echoing acoustics of the digital recording, and don’t know it. It is Bethan Avery’s voice.

I was right to pick him in spite of gender empathy, as it turns out, because though the therapy has been exhausting and turbulent he has proved to be an unshakeable guide.

I told him that I am not that interested in recovering what happened with Christopher Meeks all those years ago, unless it is of material aid to the on-going police investigation.

‘You’re not?’ asks Yufeng, his hands steepled together, his focus in action. ‘Why not?’

‘I have always been much less interested in Christopher Meeks than he has been in me, and I see no reason for that to change. He’s going to get the full life tariff, isn’t he? I mean, they found those girls buried in the garden. He’s never coming out, right?’

‘It’s very unlikely,’ said Yufeng.

I offered him a little twist of a smile. ‘Well, then.’

‘You don’t want to know why he did those things? You’re not curious?’

My eyes narrowed, and I could almost feel him retreat, as though he had taken a psychic step backward. The shadow of my old rage lay over me.

But just for a moment. Then it was gone, like clouds passing over the face of the sun.

‘Yufeng,’ I said. ‘I already know everything about him that I’ll ever need. What I want to know now is, how did I become Margot?’

Some things I do not yet remember, and I have to take on faith. I remember escaping the Grove now, but very little else has come back spontaneously or even under hypnosis, and I have been told to expect that most of it may never.

They found evidence that I tried to make a reverse charge call to my grandmother’s house, and the new tenants – I’d been gone for two months by this time – told me she was dead. I do not recall this.

There was a coach journey to London Victoria. I don’t know how I got the clothes or money. I don’t remember losing the nightdress.

But incredibly enough, there is a record that these things happened.

It is forty seconds of CCTV footage that has survived by accident – linked to another case.

It’s Victoria Coach Station in jerky black and white.

The grainy film shows a young girl, with a slightly halting, stiff gait – perhaps she’s been cramped in the coach, or perhaps she’s recovering from some kind of fight – certainly she’s been injured. She wears a dirty dark hoodie and loose, ill-fitting pants. Despite the cold March evening she is clad in cheap flip-flops. She has no bag. She crosses the empty bus lanes with the other passengers to reach the concourse, where the camera is, in jolting stop-motion, and as she grows nearer my heart starts to hammer.

The small gaggle of pedestrians slow, as the ones with luggage mount the kerb. At the back, the girl, who has been glancing carefully all around herself, raises her head and spots the camera.

I stop breathing. I can see the dark eyes, the haunted expression. Though her nose is swollen and misshapen, badly broken, and her bottom lip is dark where it’s been split, I see Bethan Avery. But for the first time, I can also see me inside her.

On the last night I am out with Angelique, I tell Yufeng in my drug-drenched trance, we are somewhere out in Canary Wharf in the ruins of Docklands. Angelique is looking for this ex of hers who owes her some money. We find him, and some manner of exchange takes place under the pillars of South Quay DLR, the details of which she is very hazy about, but it involves her disappearing and leaving me alone for the best part of two hours, while I hide on a bench, partly concealed from the street by scaffolding. In fact, when she returns she is still very hazy, with that dead-eyed glaze that she wears more and more often.

I am furious and frightened because we are very likely going to miss the curfew and my bed will be given away for the night. The thought fills me with a thudding dread. What if I never get it back, and am stuck out here for ever with Angelique, in her London full of junkies and squats, unexplained favours and needle marks? This is a very real danger, as because I have no legal ID, the nuns cannot forward me on to social services as is their usual process if you stay longer than ten days. There is the real possibility that their patience will run out with me, particularly if I am regularly truant from my bed.

But I cannot tell them that I am Bethan Avery. Not now, not ever.

We need to get back before curfew, and she is making us late.

The DLR, however, is shut for repairs. We will have to walk to Canary Wharf proper. The night nips us with cold and we have no coats.

We are moving past a deserted, boarded-up house when I feel her slow.

‘Come on,’ I snap.

‘Can’t we stop for a minute?’ Her eyes drift towards the house.

‘No! We’re going to lose our beds for the night.’

‘Go on, Amy.’ This is what she calls me. It’s the false name I gave at the shelter.

‘No,’ I say coldly.

She doesn’t reply, instead voting with her feet, drifting off towards the semi-boarded door.

I can’t leave her alone in this condition.

Oh, fuck it.

I follow her.

We pad into the house. It stinks of urine and mould, but at least it’s empty. And so is Angelique, her arms slightly outset at her sides, her fingers gently waving, as though she is swimming through the fetid closeness of the old house.

I don’t like this. ‘Angelique,’ I say. ‘Why can’t you wait until we get back to Flicks?’

It’s a rhetorical question, and as I say it I can hear the defeat in my voice. She can’t wait because she can’t wait.

I try another tack, as I see her plump down on the filthy floor. ‘I am not sitting in here all night.’

Also doomed, I realize, as she flaps a hand at me. ‘Just a taste. It’s cold out there. Just to get me home.’

I sigh. ‘Just a taste.’

I watch her get her kit out – a Hello Kitty pencil case. She has about six disposable lighters in it, only one of which works at any given time. Once she has fixed herself up, she offers some to me, without enthusiasm.

‘No. Absolutely not.’

Instead, I light one of her cigarettes and sit there fuming silently while her eyes roll back in her head and she makes a little coughing noise. Then she coughs again, more loudly. She slumps sideways on to her side like a wax doll in the process of melting, and I sigh, hard, realizing that I’ll never get her back to Flicks while she’s like this.

It takes me a little while – until I finish my cigarette – to notice that she’s not breathing any more.

The ambulance seems to take for ever to come. I phoned it from the telephone box two streets away, and gave what I considered very clear directions to the derelict house, but they still stumble about for another ten minutes before I hear one shouting from within that he’s found her.

I stand on the corner, with the rest of the street flotsam, watching. My grip on Angelique’s little Hello Kitty bag is so tight my fingers hurt.

When I understood she was dead, there was a strange moment when I stopped swearing at her and commanding her to breathe. My conscious emotion was a kind of irritated fury, but to my surprise, I then burst into a hot white flood of fat breathless tears, squirting out with the force of bullets. I am, for some time, unable to master myself, even though in the back of my head I can hear a voice like hers screaming, ‘GET UP, GET OUT, THE PLOD WILL COME YOU STUPID COW!’ and I know it’s right, I know it’s true, but I cannot move.

The telephone box stinks of urine and is dotted with cards for prostitutes. I rub my wet red eyes with a scrap of tissue I find in her bag. The tissue is spotted with tiny drops of her blood.

I put the tissue back in the bag, and in the bottom I can see the last remaining detritus of her life. A new packet of three condoms, one missing. A half pack of mint Polos. A little bottle of Ysatis. A small roll of banknotes, perhaps as much as a hundred pounds. This astonishes me. I don’t think I’ve ever held this much money at one time before now.

There are also a few cards in the bottom of the purse – entries into clubs, vouchers for free food at charities. But there is also one – laminated – and I turn it over under the streetlights as the wail of the ambulance dies down, examining it under the hectic red and blue lights.

It’s a college ID card for West Hyrett School, which I’ve never heard of but is apparently in Essex and ‘Encouraging Excellence’. There’s a passport photo on it of someone it takes me a second to identify – a studious brunette with thick glasses and bright pink lipstick. It’s Angelique, of course, in her previous life, her hair a lacklustre centre parting, but her big eyes and good skin glowing through. I don’t recognize the name beneath the picture. She smiles, that crooked, secretive smile. I can feel the tears – powerful but mysterious – fighting their way back.

But I remember where I am. I drop the card back into the pencil case, drop it all in her handbag and holster it over my shoulder. The ambulance men have not come out of the house, but the police have arrived. It’s time for me to go. Tilting my head down and away, I head back towards the bright lights of London Bridge and a place to spend the night.

She didn’t look like a Margot.

‘You took her name.’ Katie’s hands are laced together over her bandages as she relaxes back on the bed.

‘Yes. I stole it. I stole her life.’

‘Stole it?’ Katie considers this. ‘You sound like, I dunno, you feel guilty.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Not guilty. She didn’t need it any more. I did. But still.’ I sigh. ‘It wasn’t mine.’

Katie is silent. She is thinking it; what Martin is thinking, what I am thinking.

I leave her with a kiss.

When I get home, I have barely hung my coat up before the doorbell rings behind me.

It’s Susannah, or more properly Detective Constable Watson, who came to my house after the letters were verified.

‘Hiya, Margot.’ She grins at me. I’d seen a lot of both her and Eamonn (her boss) during the trial and we’d all become quite friendly, but that was a couple of months ago.

‘Hello,’ I respond, surprised. ‘Come in. I’ll put the kettle on.’

She shakes her head. ‘Thanks, but no, I can’t this time. I’m really just passing by, but there was something I had to drop off to you and I thought, no time like the present.’

She holds out a small brown packet that she has taken out of her handbag.

I regard it with curiosity and a touch of reluctance.

‘Take it,’ she says kindly. ‘It’s nothing bad. We need to return this to you.’

When she’s gone and I have shut the door, I open the packet with shaking fingers.

Inside there is a paper bag, secured with a sticker marked ‘EVIDENCE’, some numbers and my name. I rip the seal, shaking the contents of the bag out into my palm.

The little tarnished silver cross and chain glint back at me.

I know the story of this necklace now. It came out in Christopher Meeks’s confession. I stir the dull links with one finger, thinking.

After a moment I lift it up and fasten it around my neck.

Tomorrow I’ll take it into the jewellers and get it cleaned.

But for now, it’s fine.

‘So, am I coming to yours tonight?’ he asks.

I am silent, thinking, my mobile pressed to my ear.

‘Margot?’

‘You know what, Martin, can I come to yours instead?’

‘What? Yes, of course. Is something the matter?’

I play with the cross with my free hand, gently turning the cool silver in my fingers, feeling the chain brush my neck. ‘No. But there’s something I need to do, and I might be back quite late.’

‘Is it what you were talking about last week?’ he asks.

‘Yeah.’

‘Do you want me to come?’

I think for a moment. That’s so, so tempting.

‘No,’ I say finally. ‘Thanks. But I need to do it alone.’

‘If you’re sure.’

I bite my lip. ‘Yeah. I am.’

It is late when I reach my destination – nearly seven o’clock – and the sun has set. I have second thoughts about the whole endeavour, but somehow I manage to find the little road and bang the ornate knocker.

When Flora Bellamy answers and sees me, her face sets like iron.

I hold up my hands, palms outward.

‘It’s all right. I understand if you don’t want to speak to me, and if you like, I’ll go.’

There is silence as she waits for me to state my business, but I can see the thin skin on her knuckles whitening around the door.

I realize that there is no other way to do this.

‘My name is Bethan Avery,’ I say. ‘And I knew your daughter.’