I wasn’t lying with my earlier letters, or playing a cruel trick. I want to give you another clue. But, you have to pay me first, that’s how we make things fair.

I want your (used) toothbrush, wrapped up in the usual place.

Yours faithfully, and Happy Birthday,

X

16.

The letters came like clockwork after that, once a year, on her birthday. Clues piled up, locations, symbols, possible places that Bobby could be.

Every year X demanded something else of hers in exchange for these clues, something she had used: a lock of her hair, her favourite t-shirt, a piece of paper with a lipstick kiss on it, even a dirty sanitary pad. She gave him these things wearily, having been conditioned to obey, thinking with every letter that she would go to the Police, and then telling herself that doing so would jeopardise the only real connection she still had with Bobby. She parcelled everything her pen pal wanted up in plastic bags, tucking it into the space behind the tree in the terracotta pot by her front door, and each year he sent her a new set of coordinates in return for her offering. Something, for something, he’d said.

She learned to approach everything else in life this way: quid pro quo, I’ll do this, if you do that. It stretched her already fraught relationship with her mother to something papery, thin, and brittle. She would only obey instructions if she was first given something to make the sacrifice seem worthwhile. Even the smallest of daily tasks became a negotiation: ‘I’ll only go to school,’ she said once, over breakfast, ‘If you pay for my driving lessons.’ The statement dropped into the silence between them like a concrete weight, and her parents looked at each other, knowing better by then than to argue. Instead, they gave Laura what she wanted, and she was driving before the year was out. She continued at school, excelled in class, passed all her exams with flying colours. Her behaviour in all other respects was faultless: she never acted out, or drank, or partied. Laura kept herself to herself, and gave nothing to anyone without first accepting payment. It broke her mother’s heart, but by the time Laura was eighteen years old, the damage was done, and Mrs. Scott didn’t know how to go back in time and repair the cracks in her child. She considered herself lucky that Laura hadn’t given into drugs, or gone off with an unsuitable man, and all the time, Laura kept wrapping little, intimate parts of herself up in plastic, and leaving them outside her front door, like donations to a perverted god.

As the latitude and longitude codes came in, year after year, she marked them on her map, and then took that map, her compass, and enough money for the bus fare until she passed her test and got her driver’s licence, and went on excursions. Each time she ended up somewhere innocuous and not remotely momentous, to a spot where Bobby couldn’t possibly be buried: the very middle of a busy road, or next to a public phone box, or in a random car park. Once, she even stood dead in the middle of a frozen food aisle in a supermarket, map in hand, foolishly staring at the rows of cabinets stocked with ice cream and frigid chopped vegetables. Shoppers gave her a wide berth, eyeing her nervously, but she had learned long ago to avoid the judging eyes of others, and instead created her own sad little bubble of stillness in the aisle around which everyone else flowed like water around a stone.