Dead Letters Anthology (23 page)

I was eleven, a fraught, difficult age, or at least it was for me, a circumstance that was only partially assuaged by our new quarters. The Salisbury house was actually a bungalow, a peculiar 1920s white elephant the army had doubtless picked up cheap in a probate sale. It was exceptionally spacious, and positioned close to several extended bridleways that led right out into the countryside and as far as Salisbury Plain if you had the stamina. I loved that house, and in particular my own bedroom, which had a separate, smaller annexe room leading off it.

The first week in a new house is perplexing, exciting and disturbing in equal measure. Your home is not your own yet – a fact that is repeatedly borne in on you when you find odd items of post still turning up for the people who were there before you. The day after we moved into the Salisbury bungalow, a letter arrived for a Ms Lucy Davis, which was strange in the first place, because I had repeatedly heard both my mother and father refer to the family who had just moved out as the Buchanans. I think it was probably that fact, as much as my own pent-up resentment and anxiety about the move, which made me feel that it would be all right for me to open the letter. The Buchanans were the rightful ex-tenants – any items of mail addressed to them should be forwarded as quickly as possible and without undue tampering. This Lucy Davis on the other hand – who was she? Did she actually exist, even?

The envelope had been postmarked in Westbury the day before. What made things even odder was that the letter had originally been sent to a place called Tytherington, a made-up name if ever I’d heard one. When I looked it up later in our
Road Atlas of Great Britain
I was surprised to find it was a village less than ten miles from us, over towards Warminster. The address in Tytherington had been typed directly on to the envelope. Someone had crossed it through with a blue biro and written the Salisbury address – our address – to one side of it. The letter inside was written in a spiky, difficult-to-read script that I almost thought I recognised, and filled with strange, somehow threatening exhortations to ‘stay calm’ and ‘not to say anything’. I could barely make out its meaning, but the letter filled me with a prickling unease nonetheless, mainly because I couldn’t help wondering what might happen next. Lucy Davis did not live here – probably she never had – and so the letter would never arrive. I stopped reading halfway through and put the letter back inside the envelope. Then I did the only thing I could think of doing, which was to stick down the flap with some Gloy Gum and replace it on the doormat where I had found it. Luckily I had steamed it open, rather than tearing it, and unless you looked at it particularly closely you couldn’t tell.

The next time I passed through the hallway it had disappeared.

Neither Mum nor Dad said anything about it, and I supposed that was the end of the matter. It wasn’t, though. Three days later another letter turned up, the same crossed-out address, the same Ms Lucy Davis. I only glimpsed it this time – Dad got to it first, and I remember being quite relieved about that, because it meant I wouldn’t have to know anything, although what there was to know I had no idea. It was a full week before the next one arrived. This time I was alone in the house – Mum was up at the training ground, Dad was in town somewhere. I knew he’d be gone for a while – plenty of time to steam open the letter, if that was what I wanted to do.

I knew I shouldn’t. Not only because the letter wasn’t mine to open, but because of how reading the first one had made me feel. But I couldn’t resist. It was almost as if there was a story going on, a story I had made myself a part of by opening the first letter, and now I had no choice but to see how it continued.

This third envelope felt thicker, as if there was money inside. In fact there were photographs, two of them, each showing a girl about five years old, dressed in denim dungarees and a yellow T-shirt.

There was a note with the photographs. It said: ‘Sarah misses you’. Just that. No ‘dear Lucy’, nothing.

I felt flooded by the same uneasy prickling sensation, and a feeling of horror so strong that for a few moments I thought I might be physically sick. I told myself later that it was guilt I felt, guilt about opening the letter in the first place, which was partly true but by no means the whole of it. I stuffed the photographs and the note back in the envelope, almost tearing it in the process. The idea of looking at them again was impossible, like looking through a drawer of my father’s underclothes. I smoothed down the flap then carefully resealed it with glue, as I’d done before. When Dad came back from town, I made a point of showing him the letter.

“It came while you were out,” I said.

He went quiet for a moment, then picked the envelope up off the mat and turned it over to look at the back. “I don’t know why these keep coming,” he said. “Someone must have the wrong address, I suppose.” He took the letter into his office. I never saw it again, and so far as I was aware there were no more. A week went by, then two, then I stopped wondering.

I remember about ten years ago, when I first purchased a computer, looking up ‘Lucy Davis’ on the Internet. There were millions of results, of course. It is a common name.

* * *

The person who owned the flat before me was a Dr Outhwaite. He went south when he retired, to be closer to his daughter, and I can only assume that like most people moving house these days he used a postal redirection service. For the first six months after taking possession of the flat I received no wrongly addressed mail at all. Afterwards, for a period of about a year or so, I received the odd bit of junk mail addressed to D. Outhwaite, or David Outhwaite, or Dr D. A. Outhwaite – credit card offers, mainly, and once a shoe catalogue. I did also receive a letter addressed to the daughter, Sonia Outhwaite. The letter looked vaguely official, so I sent it on. I didn’t see the point of forwarding the credit card offers or the shoe catalogue, so I did what most people do and threw them away.

Dr Outhwaite lived here for ten years and eight months. I know that because he had the place rewired just after he moved in, and there was a dated guarantee certificate for the work that was forwarded to me by my solicitor. That’s why when a letter arrived for someone who wasn’t the doctor I knew that either the sender had the address completely muddled, or they were clutching at straws. The letter was addressed to a Selena Rouane, but I knew she couldn’t have lived here for more than a decade, if at all.

The surname, Rouane, was unusual. The letter had a Manchester postmark, but no return address, so I either had to open it or throw it away. I felt awkward about throwing it away as it clearly wasn’t junk mail. I thought that if I opened it I might find a return address, or some other clue as to how the letter might be redirected, either back to the sender or on to the intended recipient.

The envelope was a brown A5, the kind you send tax returns back in or whatever, sealed with that rubberised glue that comes so easily unstuck you don’t even need to steam it. I unpeeled the flap, carefully, without tearing. There was another envelope inside the first, a long white one this time, folded near one end and slightly grubby. It was still addressed to Selena Rouane but at a different address, in Lymm, which is a village near Warrington. The writing on the envelope was in black biro, bunched together and vaguely chaotic, the kind you might call mad professor’s writing. The brown envelope had been addressed in loose, even capitals.

The white envelope did have a return address, as I’d hoped – R. Rouane, c/o Blackthorn Ward, Thomas Walsey House, Blanchfort Rd, Manchester. The impossibility of this bore down on me at once: the Walsey was gone, shut down – it had been one of the last long-stay psychiatric hospitals in the area and there had been a lot of negative press about its closure.

How long ago had that been, exactly? Eight years? Nine? I glanced at the postmark and saw that the letter had first been posted in 1997, more than a decade ago. No wonder it looked grubby. Where had it been all this time? It occurred to me that whatever was in the letter, logic said it was well past its read-by date. There could be no harm in destroying it – and yet I knew I couldn’t do that, not until I’d seen what was inside.

I steamed it open, always a tricky procedure to accomplish cleanly when the paper has become friable. I couldn’t see that it mattered, really – who was ever going to know that I’d even received it? – but old habits die hard. Inside the envelope was a single sheet of ruled white paper, torn from a notebook it looked like, the spiral-bound kind, folded in three around what turned out to be a photograph. I felt a frisson of disquiet, fear even – this was so like the Lucy Davis business, and yet the photograph was not of a child, but of a landscape. A blurred, black-and-white snapshot of what looked like a lake, or some other wide stretch of water, with a range of low hills in the background. The sky above was cloudy, almost the same colour as the water. The whole scene had a sombre, rain-soaked ambience that reminded me of a half-term camping trip I’d been on, when I was at school in Northallerton. There were four of us to each tent, and it poured non-stop for almost the entire week. Who takes kids to Yorkshire in November, for goodness’ sake?

The image was so indistinct it was impossible to make out any detail. The paper bore a short note, in the same handwriting as on the envelope:

Selena – this is the place, I think. It fits the description in Amanda’s diary exactly. I know this is difficult for you, and for your mother, but I need to know the truth. Nothing seems to make sense otherwise, and at least this is something to go on. I’ll let you know if I find out anything more. Would you at least think about coming to see me? I do miss you, you know.

All my love, Dad

I felt guilty, if I’m honest. The letter was so clearly private, intended to be read by the recipient and no one else. I now knew things I had no right to know, even if none of them made sense to me. Who was Amanda, and why had Selena’s dad been reading her diary?

I remembered how I’d felt about the Lucy Davis letters, that the very action of reading them had made me part of her story. I felt the same way now.

None of my teachers had ever called me imaginative – at least, that word was never included in any of my school reports. I have the feeling most of them saw me as a boringly adult child, never brilliant but not a simpleton either, not exactly biddable but under control. But that’s army kids for you – everything battened down and no loose ends, because every army kid knows loose ends can kill.

This letter was a loose end. Someone else’s loose end. I folded the note carefully around the photograph and put them back in the envelope. Then I replaced the white envelope inside the brown envelope. Seeing everything back the way it had been made me feel better. At least I could think straight. I wondered about the name, Rouane. There can’t be too many of those, I thought, even in a city the size of Manchester.

In fact there was just one: Rouane, Selena, 145 Carferry Road, Chorlton. I searched the address on Google Maps and discovered that Selena’s house was one of a row of small Victorian terraces facing directly on to the street opposite the park. Carferry Road was twenty minutes’ walk away, half an hour at the most, five minutes by bus.

I could get rid of the letter today, if I wanted to. All I had to do was stick on another address label and drop it back in the postbox. I could even put the original letter inside a new envelope and post that instead. That way, Selena Rouane would most likely assume that the letter had been redirected straight from Lymm. If she had suspicions about it having been opened, she would blame the Lymm people, not me. Not that she knew I existed, but even so.

It is easy to fall into paranoia. All it takes is a tiny seed – opening an envelope that isn’t addressed to you, for instance. I googled Selena Rouane because I was curious, and because I still had the computer on from looking up her street address. It was an offhand, perfunctory gesture, one I fully expected to be met with a barrage of irrelevant results, as had happened when I googled Lucy Davis. What I found instead was a missing girl. Amanda Rouane turned out to be Selena’s sister. She went missing in the summer of 1994, when she was seventeen. Which made her the same age as me. In 1994 I had been in Cyprus, studying for my A Levels and secretly getting anxious about applying to universities and, for the first time in my life, not having the security of my insecure army-kid background to fall back on. If I hated the people in my hall of residence I would have to deal with it, because I was going to be stuck with them. I didn’t read the British press much, or any press come to that, certainly not enough to have come across a story about a girl going missing from a village near Manchester. I’d never even been to Manchester, not then.

There was a big police search, two primary suspects, both later released with no charges. No body, no ransom demand, nothing. I clicked on as many articles as I could find, which wasn’t nearly as many as there would be these days. Most papers only started going online in the mid 1990s, and even now their online archives are far from complete. There was a summary of Amanda Rouane’s case in the Wikipedia article on famous unsolved disappearances, and also a few write-ups at sites devoted to UFO abductions and lesser spotted serial killers (was Amanda Rouane taken by aliens? Was she the unidentified fourth victim of the Barbershop Butcher?) but aside from that it was mainly just repostings of the Wiki piece and the odd mention under 1994 at various ‘this happened then’ listings. If I wanted the kind of detailed day-by-day, week-on-week coverage you would expect to find in any missing persons case now, I would have to go to the Manchester Media Archive and look through about ten tons of microfiche.

Photographs of Amanda Rouane showed her either in her school uniform – a long-faced, slightly toothy adolescent with her dark hair in a centre parting – or in a too-big windcheater with clip-on silver earrings in the shape of bumblebees. Didn’t they have any better photographs of her, I wondered. I bet she hated the school uniform one.