7

Corpus Christi is literally a two-minute walk from the Copper Kettle. It’s a tiny but ancient college, its inner jewel-green sward of lawn penned in on all sides by a beautiful sandstone quadrangle that does what it can to keep the town out on the busiest tourist route in Cambridge. To pass through its gate is to go from King’s Parade with its fudge shops and whirring cameras and brash young men cheerfully touting for business for punt tours and to enter into a semi-monastic hush that has hung over that space for the best part of a thousand years.

Except when the balls are on or the bar is open, of course. I have very happy memories of Corpus, if rather mixed memories of Hans, the Classics postgrad I was dating at the time and who finished with me on Christmas Eve and then wanted to get back together on New Year’s Day. I suspect there was another woman involved in that case, too, but I never got to the bottom of it, preferring instead to not return his phone calls or emails.

Christmas Eve, I ask you.

In any case, it wasn’t Hans on my mind as I drifted along after Martin Forrester into the college, too deeply shocked to think straight.

The porters nodded polite greetings as he led me through the gate, and then across New Court and up the wooden staircase to his office, the steps creaking beneath our feet. The staircase itself was chill, the air still. From far away I could hear voices in the court below making arrangements to meet in Hall for lunch.

As we crested the final flight, with its quartet of doors, the names of the dons inhabiting them painted neatly on the walls next to them, I saw that there was a pair of chairs on the landing and that one of them was occupied by a lanky, dark, curly-headed youth I recognized.

‘Daniel!’ I burst out, pleased and surprised.

‘Miss Bellamy!’ He stood up, grinning though nervous, and we went through that strange moment when one of your old pupils realizes they are now expected to greet you as an adult. I decided to make it easier for him, and swooped in to shake his hand, but instead I found myself, with surprise bordering on almost-alarm, clasped in a hug.

It was proving to be a very strange day.

‘It’s awesome to see you!’ he said. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I . . .’ I stammered for a moment, lost for an easy way to explain my errand, and touched by his enthusiasm. ‘I’m taking some advice for a column I write.’

‘Wicked,’ he replied affably. With a start I realized I hadn’t seen him since he’d left St Hilda’s three years ago and that he was now at least five inches taller than me.

‘Enjoying uni?’ I asked.

His gaze slipped uneasily from mine to Martin Forrester’s.

‘Yes,’ said Forrester drily. He did not smile. ‘Mr Collier is enjoying uni enormously, possibly a little too much. Are you here about your missing essay on penal theory, by any chance?’

Daniel blushed. ‘I just need another day; it will be in your inbox first thing tomorrow – I swear, Martin. I won’t let you down again.’

Forrester frowned at him, his sharp dark brows contorting, his face like granite, and for a second I was worried for Daniel. ‘All right. Count yourself lucky I have more interesting visitors today. That essay needs to be in my inbox when I switch on my computer tomorrow or I won’t read it. Now bugger off.’

‘Thanks, Martin, you’re a star. Bye for now, Miss Bellamy!’ He bounded off down the stairs with a wave.

I smiled after him, bemused but pleased, while Martin Forrester unlocked his office door. When I turned back to him, he was observing me with a hidden, calculating expression.

‘Is something the matter?’

‘Miss Bellamy, he said. You didn’t correct that boy.’

I felt a hot blush stealing into my cheeks and up my throat. ‘Ah. Ah. No, I didn’t. Possibly because I’m expecting to be Miss Bellamy again before too long.’

It was suddenly his turn to look embarrassed and flush redly. ‘I see. Of course. Sorry.’ He pushed the door open, and something on the other side seemed to be offering resistance of sorts. ‘Come in.’

His office was light and airy after the darkness of the staircase, his window overlooking the roofs and gables of Old School Lane. Crows occasionally fluttered up out of the trees, like raised dust devils. The room itself smelled of furniture polish and leather. The resistance to opening the door had been provided by a huge tower of tottering books, piled on the floor against an overflowing bookcase that had no further room for them. Most of them looked brand new, as though they had never been opened, and many of them sported the legend ‘Ed. by Martin Forrester’. As I settled into the chair he offered me, I saw that they were all on roughly the same subject: Serial Sexual Abuse in Care; New Perspectives on Caring for the Disadvantaged Youth; Raised by Wolves – the State as Fosterer. On the walls were posters for conferences, a couple of blownup photocopies of XKCD cartoons, and a big print of the Horsehead Nebula. Postcards from all over the world peppered a noticeboard next to the tall, groaningly full bookcase.

I saw no photographs of women or children on his desk, then told myself off for looking for them. Bad, nosy girl.

He settled into the chair opposite me and sighed. ‘Any tea? Coffee?’

I shook my head. ‘No thank you.’ I let my handbag, with the letters inside, rest on the red rug beneath me. ‘So, what’s the next move? I give you the letters, I guess.’

‘Yes. The guy we’re planning on showing the letters to is called Mo Khan,’ he said. ‘He’s based in London. He’s agreed to see the letters tomorrow at ten.’

I nodded.

‘You have the letters with you, right?’ asked Forrester.

‘Oh yes,’ I said.

I reached into my bag and handed the buff-coloured envelope containing Bethan’s letters over to him. He opened it and gently shook them out. I noticed he was careful not to touch them. In the muted sunlight slanting into his office they looked creased and pathetic.

‘Interesting,’ he remarked, more to himself than anybody else, and peered down at them, almost close enough to smell them. ‘Very interesting.’ Then he said, ‘These weren’t written in any cellar. These were written and posted recently.’

‘Yes. It’s very strange. It’s well over fifteen years later, why the present tense? She’d be in her thirties by now.’

‘Well, that presupposes she wrote them. I have to tell you, Mrs . . . Miss Bellamy.’

‘You know what? Call me Margot. Titles are a moral minefield right now.’

‘Margot,’ he said, raising an eyebrow, and there was a glitter of something beneath it that took me aback for a second, raised butterflies in my stomach. ‘Call me Martin. I suppose what I’m saying is that there are many more reasons to assume it’s the work of our killer rather than any of the victims.’ His lips twisted into something rueful, something compassionate. ‘I think you need to brace yourself for that possibility.’

I didn’t reply. The thought was repugnant – but I saw his point.

He perused the letters for a few moments longer and scratched his stubbled chin with a thoughtful unselfconsciousness. ‘Still, all of these new details . . . Hmm. I suppose it would be pointless to ask if you had any idea who’d written them?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Absolutely none.’

‘There is something you could do for us on that front, actually,’ said Martin, as though deep in thought.

‘Which is?’

‘I imagine,’ he said, ‘based on your column, that you have relationships with mental health professionals who provide you with feedback and advice.’

‘I do,’ I said warily.

‘You could take a copy of the letter around to the local psychiatric hospitals. See if any of the staff know anything about it.’

I rubbed my tired eyes, careful not to smudge my mascara. ‘I suppose it’s worth a go,’ I said, ‘but I don’t know how successful that’ll be. There is such a thing in the world as medical confidentiality.’

‘Hmm,’ said Martin, absorbing this, his piercing gaze falling upon me once more.

‘Though,’ I said, thinking, ‘what I could do, now you mention it, and probably should have done already, is go back through the files I keep of all the letters I get on the column, and see if the handwriting in any of them resembles these. I think that’ll be a dead end, too, but it would be stupid not to try. I mean, I think we can assume she’s a local woman, if it is a woman. The Examiner isn’t exactly the most obvious place to send a letter like this – if it has a circulation of more than twenty thousand I’d be amazed,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ murmured Martin. He seemed lost in thought, looking at the letters again. ‘I wonder what Mo will say,’ he muttered. ‘Lovely forgeries . . .’

‘Are you so sure they’re forgeries?’ I asked, then instantly regretted it. Of course they were probably forgeries. I was letting my imagination run away with me for the thousandth time – the notion of the captured girl, now a woman, trapped and trying to write her way out of her fate possessed me, made my heart thud dangerously in dread.

But now I’d asked the question, I had no real desire to retract it.

He raised a heavy eyebrow in surprise. ‘Well, I suppose I can understand that you want to believe . . .’

I cut him short. ‘I understood that the assumption of death was never much more than that. An assumption.’

I think I was giving him a fairly wild stare at this point.

‘Yeah, it’s an assumption.’ He waved a hand in dismissal. ‘And it’s true that there’s a lot we can’t assume – because we simply don’t know what happened to her. But the overwhelming preponderance of evidence suggests that she was held against her will somewhere, probably by whoever murdered Peggy, and that she received a serious injury, possibly while trying to escape. It all suggests that whoever attacked her finished the job and buried her somewhere. And then moved on to the next girl.’

‘But you can’t be absolutely sure,’ I said. ‘What if she is still being held somewhere? We know she was injured, agreed, but what if she was recaptured . . . What if whoever it was treated her for her wounds? There are tons of cases where kidnapped women and girls have been held for decades, in some instances. Maybe that’s what’s happening here . . .’

‘Then how is she sending these letters? Is her kidnapper providing her with stamps? And here’s the big question – why doesn’t she just write to the police? Mrs Lew— Margot, listen to me. I don’t know if these letters are forged or not, or whether Bethan Avery is alive or dead. That’s why we’re showing them to Mo. These letters interest me because they’re strange and very similar to Bethan’s journals, and I’ve never seen or heard of anything like them before. If this is a scam, it’s a very elaborate one.’ He held out his hands in appeal, inviting me to see reason. ‘But it doesn’t prove she’s alive. Far from it. So far, it only proves that someone wants us to think she is.’

I sighed.

‘Or rather, for you to think she is.’ I was pinned down again by that green stare. ‘These letters could have been sent to any paper, local or national, and got a response. And yet somehow they’ve ended up with you.’

I thought about this for a long moment and shrugged. ‘I have absolutely no idea why.’

He leaned back in his chair, then let out a sigh, lightly misted with compassion and barely hidden exasperation.

‘You know’ – his gaze rolled up to the plain plaster ceiling – ‘it would be fun to imagine that this girl had somehow managed to survive for seventeen years. It’s not that I’m . . .’ he was choosing his words carefully, ‘immune to the imaginative appeal the idea has,’ he said. ‘But until someone can prove it . . .’ He shrugged.

I sighed. ‘Of course you’re right.’

He regarded me with a thin sliver of suspicion for a long moment, as though he was trying to work out whether I was humouring him.

Suddenly he was on his feet. ‘Come on, you’ll be late. I’ll walk you out.’

We strolled back across the courtyard, which was starting to fill up as students and staff wheeled back into college for lunch.

‘Margot, I wouldn’t build too much upon these letters. Even if we do find out they’re real, what good does it do us if this woman won’t tell us what she calls herself now? Or where she lives?’

I felt a pain in my chest, and realized it was my heart beating against my ribs. Martin was talking to me as though I were an overexcited child. He sounded momentarily like one of the counsellors at the clinic. I shuddered. Maybe life really is as simple as the people at the clinic suggest. I always have trouble believing it. I expect that’s because I know it’s not true.

‘Perhaps she doesn’t know where she lives, if she’s being held captive in this place. She doesn’t know she’s been forgotten. I’m sorry,’ I said as we reached the heavy darkness of the gatehouse. ‘But somehow I believe in the letters.’ I gave a tiny, apologetic twitch. ‘I just do.’

We faced each other. The cool air blew between us and I could feel myself anchored to the ground by the stony weight of my conviction. ‘This woman, Bethan Avery, could still be alive. I’m not even saying she’s being held prisoner. She believes she is, though. She’s still the girl kidnapped twenty years ago. She wants to be set free.’

Martin rubbed his chin once more, seemed about to speak, then fell silent, with a sharp shake of his head, a policy decision in action. ‘I’ll take the letters to Mo tomorrow. There’s no point discussing anything until then.’

We had reached the gate, and with an old-world courtesy he reached out and shook my hand. Again that warm, firm grip, surprisingly gentle from such a burly man.

‘It was genuinely lovely to meet you, Margot. And I’ll let you know the minute we hear anything,’ he said. ‘In the meantime, if there are any more letters, don’t hesitate to call.’

‘I will.’

He turned away, but before he could leave . . .

‘Martin, wait.’

He paused mid-step, regarding me.

‘You said that there was something else interesting about the letters. In your first email. I meant to ask you what it was.’

His face set a little, smoothed into something almost defensive.

‘The handwriting . . . ?’ he mused out loud, and for the first time I had the sense that he was not being wholly honest – that he knew exactly what I meant.

‘No, you said something else. That there were “other reasons” the letters were of interest.’

He froze, and then, as though considering, glanced quickly over both shoulders, then moved to rejoin me at the gate.

He bent low, next to my ear, and there was a strange, ambiguous moment during which I wasn’t sure if he meant to kiss me or not. I was about to draw away when he whispered, ‘The second letter mentioned soundproofing.’

‘What?’

‘Soundproofing,’ he repeated. ‘They found fragments of insulation material on Bethan’s nightdress, they think it was used for soundproofing.’ He stepped back, with a little shrug. ‘It was never made public.’ He beetled his brows at me. ‘So please keep that to yourself.’

It was over and I was back on King’s Parade, in the mob of tourists, hurrying academics and office and shop workers in search of some lunch. I wandered, in a kind of weird, anxious dream, back towards the Copper Kettle and my bicycle. A big tour group was coming towards me and I stepped out of their way. As my groping hand reached out to steady myself it touched glass, and I became aware of a loud ticking, sinister and yet familiar.

I was in front of the Corpus Clock. I glanced at it, caught. Behind the glass a huge rippling gold disk, backlit in bluish-pink, the edges ratcheted with teeth, moved in fits and starts. Above it was a large gleaming metal locust – the Chromophage, the time-eater – who rode the teeth as they moved beneath its chrome body, each one issuing a harsh metallic click.

I have stood here for up to a quarter of an hour at a time before now, entranced by its slightly irregular, sinister movement, which is only absolutely accurate every five minutes. On one of our first dates, Eddy taught me to read the markings on the gold-plated disk to translate the hour. I sighed and glanced down at the inscription in stone below it: ‘Mundus transit et concupiscentia eius.’

‘“The world passeth away, and the lust thereof,”’ I murmured.

I considered Martin Forrester, his piercing eyes, his thick dark hair, before firmly shaking my head and trying to dismiss him from my thoughts.

I had to go.

Work passed in a dream, and then there was the Classics Club after school – we were doing the third of our Conversational Ancient Greek nights this year, which is normally hugely amusing, but somehow I felt a little distant, a little lost, and had to work hard to hide this from the kids. We were doing an improvisation with Demeter asking in various shops and public amenities whether anyone had seen her lost daughter Persephone – the goddess of the fields looks for her daughter, the goddess of spring growth, who has been abducted by Hades, Lord of the Dead and the Underworld.

It was the sort of thing the children found funny and as a consequence their language skills raced ahead – in their version, Persephone has lied to her mother about where she’s gone and is instead hiding with her unsuitable boyfriend underground – but tonight everything about it, especially the ribald undercurrent, grated upon my nerves.

It was late when I got back home, and there were no further letters from Eddy’s lawyers. The bedroom was slightly chilly, and I hurried into the bathroom, anxious to huddle myself into my bed as soon as possible. I pulled the cord dangling from the bathroom ceiling, and the light came on with a hum and a click.

My face was thrown back at me from the fluorescently lit mirror. I looked dreadful. A light sheen of sweat covered all the visible surfaces of my skin. My nervous lines had returned – they never really go away – but right then they were pronounced. When they get worse, the muscles they bind start to jump. Then they are twitching cords running from my cheeks to my chin, framing my nose with its rumpled bent bridge, making me look like a gargoyle or a damned soul.

I washed my face carefully, and then fumbled through my bag, finding the right bottle of pills. I was tired, so it took a few minutes. ‘ZORICLORONE – TAKE AS DIRECTED’, and then my name. I unscrewed the lid and shook one into my damp palm. It was snow white against my pink skin.

I raised it to my mouth. The woman in the mirror mimicked my actions, my greedy haste. I suddenly stopped and so did she. What the hell was I taking it for? I looked terrible but I felt . . . I felt fine. I could take my quiet heart and clear mind to bed to a just sleep, as deep and refreshing as a baby’s. I couldn’t remember feeling so good for a very long time.

The harried, nervous woman in the mirror raised a sardonic eyebrow at me, wondering what I would do next. She glanced down at the pill she held in her palm. Then she carefully tipped it back into the bottle, screwed the top back on and yanked decisively at the cord hanging from the ceiling, dismissing me with darkness.

I left the bathroom and stumbled through the gloom to my bed, barking my shin against the bedside table in the process.

But I slept like a baby.