Dead Letters Anthology (24 page)

I took the letter out of the envelope again. I couldn’t help it. I wanted to read it in the light of what I now knew and see if that changed things – if the letter made more sense, in other words. I found that it did, quite a lot. Amanda’s father – I now knew from my online researches that the ‘R’ in ‘R. Rouane’ stood for Raymond – clearly believed that the location shown in the blurry black-and-white photograph was somehow connected with his daughter’s disappearance. He had read Amanda’s diary not because he was some sort of perverted voyeur but because he was desperate and had nothing else to go on. Selena and her mother were against what he was doing – this was a full three years later, remember, they could be forgiven for believing it was time to move on – but Raymond was pursuing his investigations anyway. Perhaps he felt guilty for some reason, perhaps he felt he had no choice. His need of Selena’s approval was palpable. It wasn’t just that he wanted to be reconciled with her. Above all, he wanted her to understand what he was doing.

Was I reading too much into it? I looked again at the photograph, the cold-looking expanse of greyish water, the blurred line of trees. There was something unsettling about it, something inauspicious. If you saw this place pop up on your TV screen, and the person sitting next to you told you someone had died there, you wouldn’t be surprised. I found myself thinking of that Japanese horror film about a group of teenagers on holiday in a lakeside cabin. One of them finds a video tape with an odd piece of film on it. Everyone who watches the film dies.

I never watch horror movies. Well, hardly ever. The Wikipedia article said that one of the suspects in the Amanda Rouane missing persons case had been walking his dogs in the vicinity of a local beauty spot called Hatchmere Lake. If it was Hatchmere Lake in the photograph, there certainly wasn’t anything beautiful about it. Not that you could see from the photo, anyway.

Why would Amanda have written about such a place in her diary?

Met someone for a shag there, most likely. Could it have been the wrong person, someone who meant her harm?

It was hardly an original concept, not exactly Inspector Morse. I put the letter and the photo back in the envelope and resolved to put the lot in the post to Selena the following day. It was her business, not mine.

I wondered if Raymond Rouane was still alive. He wasn’t in the telephone directory, but who was to say he was still in Manchester. People do get away from here, sometimes. I glanced again at the return address on the back of the envelope. Raymond Rouane had been writing to Selena from a mental hospital. Nothing in any of the articles I’d read said anything about him being a doctor, or a nurse, even a ward orderly or kitchen staff. I could only assume he’d been a patient.

That explains it then, I can hear you saying. I have to tell you I don’t agree. There are people in mental hospitals who talk more sense than all the staff put together, more sense than anyone on the outside, either. Take it from one who knows.

The question was: if I rang her up, would she think I was crazy?

I was thinking about Selena, and of course she would. What would you think if someone telephoned you and said they’d been looking you up online, and by the way, they had an item of post for you which they just happened to have opened and read?

I knew that calling her was impossible, but I had to do something. It seemed that overnight I had become one of those freaks: people who develop a fixation with someone they’ve read about in the newspapers or seen on TV. I felt proprietorial about Selena’s story, her situation, her relationship with her father (be he alive or be he dead). I knew already that her sister was still missing – the Wikipedia article would have been updated if Amanda had been found – but I wanted to know how Selena had been coping, how she was now.

And we really did share a connection, through the letter, and because I was living in her flat. Or what used to be her flat – you know what I mean.

I didn’t phone her up, don’t worry. I wrote her a note instead:

Dear Selena
,

This letter was accidentally forwarded to my address in Chorlton. It looked important, so I took the liberty of finding out your current address from the online directory. I hope this finds you well. I have been wondering if you might be the same Selena Rouane whose sister went missing in the 1990s. I remember the case well, because your sister and I were almost exactly the same age.

With best wishes,
Aileen McConahey

This was about the tenth version of the note I’d written and I’d given up trying to second guess how deranged it sounded. I was past caring, or at least that’s what I tried to tell myself. I stuck a new address label on to a new A5 envelope then slipped the letter inside, together with my note. I’d included both my landline and my mobile numbers as well as my email address. I assumed she’d remember the street address. I stuck down the flap with extra Sellotape then posted it in the pillar box just down from the bus stop. This took a little longer than it sounds – I don’t move at the speed of light, even on a good day – but my mission was accomplished. I leaned on the post box to catch my breath, wondering what my chances were of being able to fish the letter out again, with a piece of bamboo cane, for example, or a length of Matchbox car track (remember that?) which would at least be more flexible. I decided they were pretty remote. Not to mention that trying to inveigle a letter out of a post box with Matchbox car track would almost definitely be classed as an illegal act. Tampering with the Queen’s mail, it’s called. Even if it’s your own letter you’re trying to retrieve, fishing things out of post boxes is still a no-no.

* * *

I didn’t really expect to hear from Selena, but I couldn’t leave the subject alone, either. Two days after sending my note, I took the bus into town and went to the Manchester Media Archive. I reckoned on being there an hour, perhaps less. I ended up staying most of the day. They had a new facility installed, whereby you could transfer articles in the microfiche archive straight to a ‘print’ screen, which was a vast improvement over the old photocopy system and saved me no end of time and trouble. At no point during the exercise did I ask myself what I thought I was doing. My actions seemed to have passed beyond the realms of the rational and into compulsion.

There were photos, so many photos. Here at last was Amanda Rouane as I suspected she had really looked at the time: a straight-waisted, long-faced, rather awkward young woman an inch too tall for her own comfort. Would I have been friends with her at school? Probably not, probably I’d have recognised a fellow freak and avoided her accordingly.

Photographs of Selena – there were plenty of those, too – showed her as a prettier but less interesting-looking version of her sister, a prime example of that elusive creature, the normal teenage girl. That was how she seemed in the photos, anyway. I suspect the loss of Amanda and whatever came after soon changed all that.

Even in its inconclusiveness, the Wikipedia article had been about as bald a statement of finality as you could wish for: this is all we know, this is all we’re ever going to know. Following the events of that summer through the newspapers day by day gave them the texture and the tempo of a story not yet completed. I couldn’t help focussing particularly on the articles about Allison Gifford, the twenty-nine-year-old English teacher at Amanda’s sixth form college who was suspended from her job on account of an ‘intimate liaison’ she was supposed to have had with Amanda three months prior to her disappearance. In their coverage of the second suspect, Brendan Conway, the press were less avidly prurient but there was decidedly more in the way of conventional witch-hunting. Conway was a social security claimant with a learning disability and a skin disorder. He adored his dogs though, the two Irish wolfhounds he took care to exercise every day, and that gained him brownie points with the tabloids in the end, once it was established that he hadn’t abducted Amanda and that he wasn’t even a common-or-garden pervert either, just a poor idiot with a bad rash who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And everywhere, everywhere in the newspaper photographs, Hatchmere Lake, that anonymous expanse of greyish water I had pored over in the blurred snapshot, reproduced for me here on a larger scale and in focus, with an adornment of police tape, in colour, in double-page spreads three days running in the
Warrington Guardian
, with police dogs and without police dogs, above all and most incongruously with a blue July sky unravelled above it like a swathe of coloured cellophane. Amanda had apparently been sighted close to Hatchmere Lake once, twice, possibly three times on the day of her disappearance, hence the arrest of the dog-walker Brendan Conway as a suspect, hence the search of the perimeter, the dragging of the lake itself (twice), the carnival array of red-and-yellow ‘Keep Out’ notices.

Nothing was found, though. Nothing that related to Amanda, anyway. Six weeks from the date of Amanda’s disappearance, the newspaper coverage had dropped away almost to nothing.

There was no mention, anywhere that I could find, of Amanda’s diary.

* * *

I found myself thinking that I could, if I wanted to, take a taxi out to Lymm and walk along the high street, which was where the last definitive sighting of Amanda Rouane had taken place. (Leanne Beetham, who worked at the Spar shop in Lymm and who had been serving behind the counter that Saturday afternoon, confirmed that Amanda had been into the shop at around two-thirty, when she purchased a can of Coke and a Twix bar.) I could even walk past her house if I wanted to. Lymm was not a large place, and by any normal standards it was not so far from the high street to what had once been the Rouane family home on Sandy Lane. But so far as I was concerned, we might as well have been talking about the distance from the Earth to the Moon. I would probably make it along the high street and back (on a good day) but getting from there to Sandy Lane would be an agony. I could always instruct the taxi to do a circuit, but how would I explain my movements? I couldn’t face the look in the driver’s eyes.

I made the trip on Street View instead. I could see at once that there had been changes. The Spar wasn’t there, for a start. Amanda probably wouldn’t recognise the place. The houses on Sandy Lane were a mix of Georgian and Victorian cottages with newer builds. The house that used to be the Rouanes’ is a 1970s semi with an integral garage, nondescript but clean-looking; what you’d expect from the newspaper coverage, really.

There’s something so dispiriting about houses like that. I bet Amanda hated it.

I think about her, and it’s as if we’re circling each other, casting each other sidelong looks. Can I trust you? When the chips are down, can I trust you with my story? Or are you just the same as everyone else?

I think about the dead letter, which is really a long-line communication between Amanda and me. Amanda hugs her father in 1994. Raymond Rouane picks up a pen in 1997, leaning the hand that touched his daughter’s hair upon the paper as he writes his note. I touch the ink, the paper, the hand, Amanda. A bridge that spans a distance of twenty years.

This is the point in the story where you’d expect me to start talking about being haunted, about being pursued by Amanda’s ghost, about losing the (already precarious) balance of my mind. But you can’t be haunted by someone who’s still alive. And Amanda is still alive, I can sense it.

* * *

“Is that Aileen?” said Selena. I knew it was Selena without her having to say. Her voice at the end of the phone: hesitant, embarrassed-sounding, a soft northern accent.

“Speaking,” I said. I felt hot, and a little breathless. I was living through a moment I had anticipated a hundred times, a thousand, in my imagination, without ever truly believing it would actually happen.

“This is Selena Rouane. You posted on a letter to me. I wanted to say thanks.”

There was something in the way her words came out that made me think she’d been rehearsing them, that she’d thought them up beforehand as an excuse for telephoning. We were on equal ground, it seemed. That knowledge should have made me feel less nervous, but it didn’t. I knew that a single wrong word from me – a word that sounded too knowing or too raw – would end the conversation on the spot.

“That’s no problem. I thought it might be important, so.” I paused. “You don’t see that many hand-written letters these days.”

“That’s true.” She laughed, just a little, which I took as a good sign, even though I knew I couldn’t count on her sharing my obsession with paper and envelopes. Amanda might, but not Selena. Selena would have learned to be more practical – she would have had to. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I was just wondering. Did you happen to notice the date on the postmark? From when the letter was mailed to you, I mean?”

“The beginning of last week, I think. I would check for you, only I threw the envelope away.” I hadn’t, but I thought it sounded more plausible that I would have done. “I’m sorry if it was important.”

“Oh, no, that’s all right.” She spoke in a rush. She seemed anxious to reassure me that I’d done nothing wrong. “I don’t need it. I just wondered, you know, how long the letter might have been in the system.”

The better part of two decades, give or take. Now we both knew.

“It just seemed strange,” she went on, “that the letter should turn up now, after so many years.”

“Not as strange as you might think,” I said. “I heard of one dead letter that resurfaced after eighty years, from a soldier in the First World War. He was killed at Ypres, I think it was. The letter was delivered around the year two thousand, to his great-granddaughter in Gravesend, with her morning mail. No one really knows what happened to it in between.”

“My God,” Selena said. “It must have been like seeing a ghost.” She fell silent for a moment. “How did you get to hear about it? Do you work for the post office?”

“It was in a book I read, that’s all. I’m interested.”

“In soldiers?”

“In letters.”

I pressed the phone tight to my ear. I heard a car go by, though I wasn’t sure if that was at my end or at hers. Her mention of soldiers had disconcerted me, then I remembered it was I, not her, who had brought up the subject. The story about the letter from the soldier at Ypres is perfectly true. It was forwarded fifteen times before it reached the great-granddaughter.