The Second Life of Amy Archer

by R. S. Pateman

  ‘You’re not going to let her go, are you?’ Brian implores, leaning against the door.

  ‘She’s not under arrest,’ Lois says simply.

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘just under suspicion. And God knows that’s nothing new for me.’

  ‘But you can’t let her go.’ Brian clutches his head. ‘You heard what Esme said!’

  ‘That’s the problem,’ Lois says. ‘It’s what Esme said. Not Amy.’

  ‘So you don’t think Esme is Amy?’ I say, with a nod of satisfaction.

  Lois stares into me. I hold her gaze. She blinks.

  ‘It’s not a matter of what I think.’ She puts her pen down. ‘It’s a matter of what I can prove.’

  I walk towards the door.

  ‘Stand aside, Brian,’ Lois says.

  Brian’s eyes are hard with hatred.

  ‘I never really knew you, did I, Beth? All those years and you . . . What kind of a woman are you?’

  I chew my bottom lip, hold back the tears.

  ‘Clearly,’ I say, ‘I’m the kind of woman who’d marry a man foolish enough to believe this crap . . . the kind who was so devoted to her child that she never gave up on her . . . even though you, her father, had.

  ‘The kind of woman who . . . who, when she found out the truth, took your indifference as a sign of guilt and, in a moment of . . . madness, accused you of being involved. Who knew in her heart that such a thing was absolutely ridiculous . . . who didn’t really need your denial to know she was wrong. The kind whose heart you have broken a thousand times over . . . but never more completely so than now.’

  Lois gets up from the table and leads Brian away from the door.

  As the door swings to behind me I walk along the corridor, out of the police station.

  Seeing Esme and Libby in the car park stops me dead. They’re about to climb into a police car when they see me too. Esme’s mouth twitches, as if she’s holding back tears or words. Or she might be suppressing a smile.

  I shiver.

  Libby’s hand is shaking as she puts it on Esme’s shoulder.

  ‘Come on, Esme,’ she says. ‘Let’s go.’

  The girl stares at me a moment longer, then turns to get into the car.

  ‘My name’s Amy,’ she growls. ‘Get it? Amy.’

  I walk on and don’t look back. I blink at the bright sunshine and take the long route home, past Amy’s school. Hazard tape criss-crosses the closed gates and there are still police cars in the playground.

  I lean against the gates, grip the railings tight. A policeman on the other side walks towards me.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he says.

  ‘Help?’ I start to laugh. Hysterically. ‘Of course you can’t. You never could. No one can help me.’

  He frowns and checks the padlock on the gate.

  P is for padlock. Padlocks are for locking things in.

  ‘I think you’d best be on your way,’ the policeman says. ‘There’s nothing to see here.’

  ‘No. That’s right,’ I say. ‘There is nothing to see here.’

  I let go of the railings and walk away. Nothing to see. Least of all the truth.

  There are hordes of journalists outside my house. They rush at me as I approach. I’m buffeted by questions, blinded by camera flash, jostled and chased right up to my front door. I slam it shut behind me, breathing deeply, then run to the front room and close the curtains.

  I am glad of the refuge of darkness, but the clamour outside filters through. The reporters keep calling my name and shout out questions about Amy and Esme.

  Mrs Archer. Amy. Esme. Amy. Mrs Archer. Esme.

  Amy.

  I feel like I’m going to explode, and put my hands to my head, holding it, keeping myself together.

  I walk slowly towards the fireplace. Amy stares back at me from the photo on the mantelpiece. My reflection hovers in the mirror above. Above Amy. I’m like her ghost. An echo. Or she is like mine.

  I grab the mantelpiece for support, feel something move beneath my hand. My stone. My talismanic stone. A symbol of love and hope and truth. I hold it in my palm. It used to be round and smooth, but now it feels jagged, as rough as pumice.

  Mrs Archer.

  Amy.

  Mrs Archer.

  The stone ricochets from the mirror. Cracks ripple.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to the many people who helped get me to the end of my rainbow.

  Oli Munson at A.M. Heath, who set me on the Yellow Brick Road and helped me skip without tripping. Thanks also to all at Blake Friedmann.

  Jemima Forrester at Orion – for waving your wand and making the world spin. Your insights made the editorial process magical – and the book so much better. And cheers to everyone at Emerald City (aka Orion) especially Kate Mills, Gaby Young, Louisa Macpherson, Jon Wood, Jane Selley and Laura Brett.

  Marietta Crichton Stuart, Jean Dobson, Rebecca Howe, Suzanne & Betty Jansen, Gordon & Jill Johnston, Diane, Graham & Aiden May, Ant Parker, Kathryn Penn-Simkins, Mark Rogers, Marnie Searchwell, Dave Sellers, Claire Dissington & Albert, Chloe Thomas, Ginny Tym, Helen de Vane and Judith Weir – for making Kennington less like Kansas and more like Oz.

  Jadzia Kopiel, life coach extraordinaire, who helped make sense of the tornadoes. Mark Russell and Richard Vessey for seeing off the lions and tigers and bears.

  Everyone at NIBS writing group for their wicked critical support. Sarah Evans whose endless readings and telling feedback pointed the way. Claire Collison and Sarah Waters for proving it could be done.

  Polly Beale, Candy Bowman, Judith Buck, Jacques Christen, Len Dickter, Kerrie Finch, Lynne Foster, Rick Gem, Jo Hadfield, Paul Kitcatt, Maureen Landahl, Lorna, Patrick, Oscar & Maddie Mills, Jane, Laura & Elen Morgan, Consalvo Pellecchia, Nigel Rees, Andy Tough & Cathy Brear, Carolyn Yates – and all the other fully paid up members of the Lollipop Guild.

  Bella, my fluffy outsized Toto.

  My mum Joan, sister Sue and niece Eléna. There’s no place like home.

  My dad Jim – my Tin Man, Scarecrow and Lion all rolled into one. I miss you.

  Boosie. Because, because, because, because, because . . . because of the wonderful things he does.

  A Note from the Author

  The Second Life of Amy Archer took around a year to write but its DNA can be traced back to a story that featured on television around twenty years ago. It might have been Crimewatch but I can’t be sure.

  The story showed preparations for a reconstruction of a missing girl’s last known movements. They didn’t just show the ‘missing girl’ in the place where she’d last been seen; they went behind the scenes too, something I’d never seen before or since.

  I watched a young girl – an actress with a resemblance to the missing girl and dressed in identical clothes – being briefed by police, who told her where to stand, what to do and so on, as if they were directing a film and telling a story. Which they were of course. Or part of a story anyway.

  The image struck me. It was blurring the lines between fact and fiction; the reconstruction was simultaneously real and fake. The police were after information, so they could only show what they knew to be the facts; this girl, in those clothes, in that place at that time.

  What happened after that was a mystery; a matter of conjecture. Any hunches the police might have had couldn’t be portrayed for fear of polluting the memories they were hoping to jog.

  It got me thinking about memory and perception. About how the actress might feel tracing the steps of someone who looked just like her, who’d been in that exact spot, in those exact clothes, and never been seen again.

  I wondered how that might affect her. Would she grow up haunted by her missing twin? Perhaps she’d be anxious about being the ‘type’ who fell prey to paedophiles. If she had kids of her own when she grew up, would her doppelgänger experience make her more anxious about stranger danger? Then again, maybe she’d just forget about it all and go back to her friends at drama class. The acting experience mig
ht even end up on her CV.

  And I wondered how it might affect the parents of the missing girl. The heartbreak of seeing ‘their daughter’ again. The tease of it. The hope.

  Like a lot of writers, I kept a notebook where I jotted down thoughts, observations, phrases and the like, for use in the books I never seemed to get around to writing. I scribbled in my notebook: ‘Police reconstruction. Fall out for lookalike/parents?’

  But I took it no further.

  The idea sat in the notebook for the best part of twenty years. I can’t say I forgot about it completely as it sprang to mind every time I saw a police reconstruction on television or heard press reports of another missing child.

  When I began taking my writing ambitions a little more seriously, I knew this was the idea that I wanted to run with. Here was the essence of a novel that would eventually become The Second Life of Amy Archer.

  I knew when I started that this book would be about second chances, about loss and hope, memory and illusion, doubt and belief.

  My story emerged from the gaps in between.

  R.S. Pateman

  In conversation with

  R.S. Pateman

  Beth’s is a very strong, authentic female voice, and as a reader you are constantly in her head, living the nightmare right alongside her. Why did you choose to write a novel with a central female narrator?

  I’m not much of a planner when I write. I tend to just jump off and see what happens and where I land. It makes for a chaotic – but interesting – writing process.

  I knew the basic premise of the book, but didn’t have much idea about the plot or how it would be told. However, writing in the first person has always felt right to me, so when I sat down to write the book, that’s what came out.

  Only it wasn’t Beth’s voice at first, but Libby’s. And it was past tense, not present. I suppose the biggest surprise was that it wasn’t Dana’s voice that came to me. It was wondering about the effects of being a reconstruction double, like Dana, which had sown the seed for the story after all.

  Somewhere along the line though, I’d made a (unconscious) decision not to tell it from her point of view. And I don’t know how or why Libby became the narrator. As Esme’s mother she wasn’t the obvious choice, which is probably why the first few thousand words didn’t feel ‘right’. So I tried doing a chapter in Beth’s voice. That was better. I had a sense of Beth right away. When I tried the chapter in the present tense she became even clearer.

  I jumped ship; the real drama was in Beth’s head as Amy’s grieving mother, rather than Libby’s, the (possibly?) scheming fraudster. Seeing events through Beth’s eyes made the action and its emotional fallout more immediate, intimate and intense. There was more scope – and greater ambiguity – in Beth’s view of things.

  There was never any doubt that in this novel my narrator would be a woman. That may well have its roots in my childhood. I grew up in a children’s home run by my mum. We ‘lived in’, and as the residents and staff were all female, I was immersed in a world of female sensibilities for the first twenty-two years of my life.

  What are the challenges and rewards of writing an unreliable narrator?

  Again, my chaotic writing process meant I didn’t know I was writing an unreliable narrator until I was two-thirds of the way through the first draft. I knew ‘something’ was missing and, after running through the story with a friend of mine, I changed the ending to give it more emotional punch. The new ending meant that Beth would have to become an unreliable narrator.

  The challenge was in giving clues throughout the book so that the ‘reveal’ at the end wasn’t completely out of synch with Beth’s character. The clues had to be subtle but discernible, but not enough to be damning and irrefutable. There had to be scope for doubt and uncertainty.

  The reward was pulling the rug out from under the readers’ feet and, hopefully, surprising them and making them reappraise their perceptions of events and characters – just like Beth had to do in the light of Esme’s claims.

  ‘Faith makes fools of us all.’ Does clinging to psychics help or hinder Beth?

  Both. Faith can be a strength, but if it becomes so entrenched that it clouds judgement, then it can be a liability too. It’s a matter of balance – not one of Beth’s strong points perhaps!

  What made you choose to leave the ending so deliberately ambiguous? How do you think readers will interpret it?

  All the way through, I couldn’t make up my mind if Esme was who she said she was or if she was making things up. I hoped it would become clear as the book went on. It didn’t.

  I wanted Esme to be Amy – but if she was, that would make Beth guilty. And if Esme wasn’t Amy, that would make her a vicious little girl. I couldn’t bring myself to point the finger at either of them, so left it open.

  What’s more, siding with Beth or Esme would also mean coming down one way or the other on the possibility of reincarnation. And that’s another can of worms entirely.

  The different ways readers have interpreted the ending are really interesting – and just as inconclusive! So far, the split is fifty—fifty on Beth being guilty. Or not.

  Have you ever had any experiences in your past that informed your writing about psychics and the possibility of reincarnation?

  I’ve been to see psychics umpteen times with varying degrees of ‘success’. Some of the things I’ve been told were incredibly accurate – others were way off the mark. And while some of the things they’ve predicted have come true, others haven’t. Yet.

  I’ve had one or two ‘spooky’ things happen to me as well. Not ghosts, but odd occurences, sensations and déjà vu moments. Enough to leave me undecided on the possibility of certain phenomena like reincarnation.

  As Jill says, it’s all a matter of interpretation.

  There’s very little in the novel that could be called autobiographical, but the location is one major exception. All of the four and a half novels I’ve written and stashed in my desk are set in Kennington, south-east London (and so is the desk).

  Kennington has played a big part in my life – and my family’s. My grandparents were from the area and lived there or thereabouts for most of their lives. In 1954 they moved into a new block of flats by the park. Four years later, my parents married and lived in the flat with my grandparents for a while. I live in the same flat now.

  Sitting on my sofa seven floors up, all I can see is sky – and the top of a beautiful tree in Kennington Park. I’ve ‘wasted’ many hours looking at it, especially once its intricate architecture has been exposed by autumn gales.

  I think of it as my family tree as it has been admired by three generations of my family (four, counting my niece Elena). It’s a constant. I love that. It anchors me.

  And when – purely by chance – the Art team at Orion came up with the cover of the book, it seemed so right (and a bit spooky) that it should feature bare trees.

  Kennington Park was south London’s first public park. Like most parks, it suffered from years of maintenance and infrastructure cutbacks, vandalism and crime.

  I used to walk my dog Bella here, and kept thinking someone should do something about improving and repairing the park. It turned out that someone was me; in 2002, I co-founded the Friends of Kennington Park. In 2011, after a lot of hard work by a lot of people, the park was awarded a Green Flag for excellence in a public open space.

  Voluntary work with the Friends was rewarding – but it gave me the perfect excuse for not writing. A new playground for local kids? Or another chapter? No contest for a writer looking to procrastinate.

  That changed when I saw two very successful local authors in separate TV interviews – both filmed in the park. They’d got on with their writing. It was time I did the same. And I did – but I had to leave Kennington to do it. The novel was written at a friend’s house in the middle of nowhere in the Cotswolds, an experience and location which inspired my next book.

  But I don’t resent the time I spent on the
park. Apart from helping to restore a great public space, I see it as a kind of prep for my writing career – it has given me ideas, experience of public speaking, developed research skills and nurtured the dogged determination any writer who wants to be published needs.

  Sometimes I see her in the roundabout’s blur. Hear a giggle in the squeak of the slide. But she’s not really there, of course. Nor are the slide or the swings.

  I have been robbed of the last place Amy was ever seen.

  One of the biggest changes brought about by the Friends is the new playground. It opened on the site of a derelict tennis court in 2005.

  But it’s not the playground Amy went missing from. That was the playground once found on the park’s border with Camberwell New Road. My sister and I used to play there very happily when we visited our grandparents.

  Fast forward forty-odd years and the site was considered too small, too detached from the rest of the park and too close to the road. It was a sad, neglected space and felt unsafe – not right for a playground but ideal for a crime scene.

  So, after years trying to change people’s perceptions and experience of the park, it turns up as a crime scene in my book. I hope the other Friends will forgive me!

  The park’s Arts and Crafts style café was opened in 1871, making it one of the earliest refreshment houses of its kind still in use today.

  My granddad used to take my sister and me to the café for an ice cream after we’d been in the playground or watched the Punch & Judy shows that were put on regularly in the park in the 1960s. I’ve never liked Punch & Judy but I’ve always liked ice cream.

  The café was closed for many years but re-opened, quite by chance, at the same time the Friends group started. Moving the playground next to the café put children and parents at the heart of the park and changed its atmosphere for ever.