The police cordon is still stretched across Cate’s street the next day. The helicopters are back. But there’s nothing on the news. Clearly they haven’t found anything yet. Clearly there’s no body in there. If there was, Cate thinks, surely they’d have found it by now?

  Roan is eating a bowl of cereal, standing up. He’s making annoying eating noises, scarfing it down for some reason as though he’s late for something.

  ‘Are you in a hurry?’ asks Cate.

  ‘Yeah, a bit. I want to be at work early.’

  ‘You went in early yesterday.’

  ‘Yes. Lots on. Two other clinicians on holiday – you know, half-term. Need to catch up with myself.’

  ‘You could do that here,’ she says, gesturing at the kitchen table.

  ‘This is your zone,’ he says.

  ‘Not at seven in the morning it’s not. I’m about to have a shower and get ready, why don’t you stay here a while and catch up?’

  He scrapes the bowl for the last spoonful of cereal and swallows it down. ‘I need to be at work,’ he says, taking the bowl to the sink. ‘I need access to things there. Why are you so keen to keep me here?’

  She shrugs. ‘All this, I suppose.’ She points upwards in the direction of the helicopters. ‘And that.’ She points towards the front of the house. ‘It’s unsettling. I mean, if something did happen to that girl, right here, right over the road, then maybe it’s not safe. I mean, do you think we should be thinking about keeping Georgia in at the moment?’

  Roan stops, his back curved over the sink. He sighs, then turns. ‘Maybe ask the police about that? See what they say.’

  She nods. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘maybe.’

  He moves towards her, puts a hand on her arm. ‘It’ll be fine, whatever it is. I’m sure we’re safe.’ He picks up his bag, his coat, his scarf. ‘I will see you later. I’ll try and get back early tonight. Maybe we could even do something.’

  She forces a smile. ‘Yes,’ she says. And then, before he disappears from view, she says, ‘Roan? Who’s Molly?’

  He stops. Then he turns and looks at her. ‘Molly?’

  ‘Yes. I kept meaning to say. You got a card from her. Valentine’s day. Georgia opened it by mistake and I put it away because I knew you’d be cross about her opening your stuff. Then I forgot about it.’ She goes to the drawer and pulls it out. ‘Here,’ she says. ‘Sorry.’

  Roan walks towards her and takes the card from her hand. She watches him open it and read it. He smiles. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘Molly! Yes. I know Molly. She’s a patient. Or at least, she was. I don’t see her any more.’

  ‘And she has your address?’ She shows him the envelope.

  He looks slightly confused. ‘She does appear to, yes.’

  ‘How?’

  He takes the envelope from her hand and stares at it for a moment. ‘I literally have no idea,’ he says. ‘I mean, maybe it was in my office, on a letter or something?’

  Cate takes the card from him and puts it back in the drawer. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘you should be more careful.’

  He gives her a strange look. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘You’re right.’

  He kisses her briefly on the cheek and then he goes.

  She grips the back of a chair, feeling her heart racing in her chest, the sickening rush of adrenaline caused by the confrontation. She hears the front door slam, but almost immediately she hears it open again. She hears Roan’s voice in the hallway and then a female voice.

  The door to the apartment opens and Roan walks back in, with DI Angela Currie following behind.

  ‘No problem,’ he’s saying to her. ‘No problem at all.’ He catches Cate’s eye. ‘This is DI Currie. She just wants to ask us a few questions.’

  Cate touches her collarbone. ‘Me too?’

  ‘Yes, please. If you have the time?’ says the detective.

  ‘Sure. Yes. Can I get you anything? A tea? Coffee?’

  DI Currie taps a plastic bottle of water in her hand and says, ‘Thanks, but I’m fine.’

  Roan leads her into the living room. She sits on the armchair. Cate and Roan sit side by side on the sofa.

  ‘So,’ DI Currie begins, ‘sorry to bother you this early in the morning, but it literally just came to our attention, and I have to be honest, I don’t really know how we missed this before, but having interviewed you both separately regarding this missing person case – Mrs Fours as a potential witness and Dr Fours as someone who worked closely with Saffyre – it has only just come to our attention that you both live here. And obviously that throws a very different complexion on things; opens up a whole new angle. So I hope you don’t mind if I ask you both a few more questions?’ She smiles and then she looks upwards and says, ‘Bloody helicopters. I’m so sorry. It must be a nightmare. But we’re nearly done now. They’ll be gone soon. I promise.’

  She pulls a ballpoint pen and notebook from her shoulder bag.

  ‘Mr Fours, we spoke a couple of days ago about Saffyre coming under your care for a while and you confirmed that you stopped your sessions with her roughly a year ago?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And you didn’t see her again after that?’

  ‘No. Or, as I told you yesterday, I saw her around the area a couple of times, but not to stop and talk to.’

  ‘So after you signed her off from treatment, that was the end of your relationship with her?’

  ‘Yes. That’s correct.’

  ‘Great,’ says DI Currie, ‘thank you for clarifying that for me. And then, on the night of February the fourteenth, Valentine’s night, it was the two of you that had dinner together, in the village?’

  They both nod.

  ‘And you both returned home at around eleven thirty p.m.?’

  They nod again. Cate says, ‘Roughly.’

  ‘And you were both in bed by midnight?’

  Cate and Roan exchange a look. Cate says, ‘Yes, thereabouts.’

  Roan nods and then he turns to the detective and says, ‘Well, I might have been a bit later than that. I seem to recall going outside for some reason.’

  Cate stares at him.

  ‘I mean, it’s not particularly fresh in my mind, it was over a week ago, I wasn’t sober, but I do remember coming outside – I think I was putting some rubbish out. And I heard something. And I looked over the road and that guy, the one from the house opposite, he was just standing there.’

  ‘Standing there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he see you?’

  ‘No. I was in the front garden, by the bins. I was out of view. I could see him through a gap in the hedge.’

  ‘And what was he doing, this man?’

  ‘Just standing, staring. He looked drunk. I’ve had run-ins with him before when he’s drunk. He stared at me once when I was out running, around the corner. Stood and stared for quite some time. When I asked him what his problem was, he just asked me if I was married. I thought it was … odd. And then there was that other time.’ He turns to Cate and gives her a complicitous look. ‘Remember, earlier this year, when Georgia was walking home in the dark and he got really close to her and was freaking her out.’

  Cate stiffens slightly. She’s not completely comfortable with what Roan’s implying. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘that is true. And he is a bit odd, but that doesn’t mean …’

  ‘No,’ DI Currie cuts in. ‘No, you’re right, Mrs Fours. It doesn’t mean anything. Obviously. But it’s all worth making a note of.’ She turns back to Roan. ‘So this happened at roughly midnight?’

  ‘Yes, roughly midnight.’

  ‘And then you came back inside and went to bed?’

  ‘Yes. That’s right.’

  ‘And when you were out there, putting out the rubbish at midnight, apart from the man across the street, did you see anything else? Anyone else?’

  ‘No. That was all. The man across the street.’

  ‘Is it possible’, she continues, ‘that he might not have been staring at you, that he might have been staring at someone else?’

  Roan wrinkles his brow. ‘I don’t know what you—’

  DI Currie closes her notepad. ‘Would it be possible, do you think, for you to show me exactly where you were standing that night, when you saw your neighbour staring towards you?’

  ‘Sure,’ says Roan.

  They all get to their feet.

  Cate throws on one of Josh’s hoodies from the hallway and follows Roan. DI Currie follows Cate and they head out to the little wooden covered area in the front garden where the communal bins are located.

  ‘I was standing here,’ says Roan. ‘I put the bag in the bin. I’d just closed the lid and I saw him through here.’ He points out a gap in the hedge that grows in front of a low brick wall.

  DI Currie stands in Roan’s place and peers through the gap. She stands back and peers around the corner to the front path and the metal gate at the bottom. Then she peers once more through the gap in the hedge. She writes something down in her notebook and then she shuts it.

  ‘Wonderful,’ she says, ‘thank you so much. I think that’ll be all we need from you both for now. But a last question, Dr Fours. I know you say that you hadn’t seen Saffyre since your final appointment with her back in March 2018, but can you think of any reason, any reason at all why she might have been in the vicinity of your house on the night she went missing?’

  ‘So, she was—’ Cate begins.

  ‘We don’t know anything for sure yet. We’re looking at dozens of possibilities. But that is one possibility, yes. So, Dr Fours, can you …?’

  Cate looks at Roan. Roan shakes his head, firmly. ‘No,’ he says. ‘No. There is absolutely no reason I can think of why she would have been here. None.’

  ‘And you definitely didn’t see her?’

  ‘I definitely didn’t see her.’

  There is a long pause, as though DI Currie is hoping that Roan might say something else. When he doesn’t, she smiles again, that unnerving smile of hers that is half Clinique consultant in Debenhams and half twisted primary school teacher. ‘Thank you again, so much, both of you. And as I say, we’re nearly done here. I reckon the cordon will come down in the next hour or two. You can get your street back!’

  She puts her hands into the pockets of a very nice green woollen coat with big buttons, smiles one more time, and then she is gone.

  Cate and Roan look at each other. He takes his phone out of his pocket and checks the time. ‘Fuck,’ he says, ‘I really need to get going.’ He drops another perfunctory kiss on Cate’s cheek and, moving very quickly, strides away from her, down the garden path and on to the pavement.

  30

  SAFFYRE

  Last December was cold. Do you remember it? So cold. Or maybe I remember it that way because I spent so much of it outdoors.

  It’s odd, I know. I had a home, a warm home – almost too warm, you know the way they heat these council buildings, no thermostat, central settings. I had Aaron taking care of me and nice food and a nice bedroom and yet … for some reason I really did not want to be there. Maybe it was because my granddad wasn’t there any more. Maybe it was that simple. But it felt more complicated than that to me, like I was turning into something else, something not entirely human.

  I don’t know, maybe I read too much Harry Potter growing up, but I didn’t feel grounded up there on the eighth floor; I felt untethered, like there was no gravity up there. I needed my feet on solid ground. I needed the air on my skin. I needed trees and soil and damp and moonlight and daylight and sun and wind and pigeons and foxes. It was like I was becoming feral.

  That’s an exaggeration. Obviously. I was still going to school every day. I was still showering, still making my hair look nice, wearing eyeliner, wearing clean underwear, you know; I wasn’t dirty feral. I was just outdoorsy. Any time I could be outdoors I took the opportunity.

  I spent a lot of time in the building plot opposite Roan’s house. It was cool there. I could see all the comings and goings through the gaps in the hedges without any risk of being spotted. The fox came to see me often. I brought him other processed-meat gifts and he was always very grateful to me. And then there was the guy whose bedroom window faced out on to the land. I don’t know what his name was, but I called him Clive. I don’t know why, he just looked like a Clive.

  He was kind of odd. And I say that as someone who is also kind of odd. If I stood on top of the JCB that was parked on the plot I could see right into his room through the gap in his curtains; it was like an old lady’s bedroom. He had this nylon counterpane thing over his lumpy little bed, and one of those clunky antique wooden wardrobes like they have in bad B & Bs with a mirror on the outside door and his manky little stripy dressing gown hanging off the back of his door and a painting of a rugged landscape in a crap frame. The room looked cold. He sat in it every night in an armchair with his headphones on and a laptop on a cardboard box in front of him and he looked at his stuff – I don’t know what stuff, I couldn’t see the screen. Not porn though, I know that, because I never saw him doing what men do when they look at porn.

  Sometimes the woman would come in, the white-haired woman he lived with. I always saw him sigh and roll his eyes before he opened the door to her. She would have her arms wrapped round her waist and a sour look on her face and say something to him and he would say something to her and she would look even more sour, then go.

  I felt sorry for him. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to be him. He looked old enough to be married with a kid or two. He was clearly doing something wrong to be living as he was living. I wondered if he was cross about being so lonely. I wondered about Clive a lot.

  Our paths crossed about a week before Christmas. He was walking up the little hill that joins Roan’s road to the Finchley Road. It was late, about eleven o’clock. He looked a state. His hair was all over the place; his work bag was hanging off his shoulder, pulling his jacket down on one side. His shirt had a big stain on it and he was kind of stumbling along. He glanced at me and I saw that he was drunk. He smiled then and as we passed each other he said, ‘Merry Christmas!’ and I said, ‘And a Merry Christmas to you too, Clive.’

  He stopped and said, ‘Clive?’

  I smiled and said, ‘Nothing. Just kidding. Merry Christmas.’

  ‘Owen,’ he said. ‘My name’s Owen.’

  ‘Owen,’ I said. ‘I’m Jane.’

  ‘Merry Christmas, Jane.’

  We shook hands. His was clammy and sticky.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘bit sweaty. Been dancing. A school disco. I’m a teacher though. Not a student. Obviously.’

  He laughed. I laughed.

  ‘Night night, Jane.’

  ‘Night night, Owen.’

  Then he went and I went and I thought, Owen, his name’s Owen.

  Roan took Alicia out for dinner just before Christmas. He took her to the nice little French restaurant nestled below my block of flats. I’d followed them from the clinic, watched them go in. I took my paparazzi-style photos: click, click.

  Alicia looked beautiful. She was beautiful. Much more beautiful than Roan’s wife. And she was getting more beautiful the longer her affair with Roan went on, like he was pumping her full of some magic elixir. She had her red hair down in long waves and was wearing a black coat and red Chelsea boots and a pink scarf and red lips and black tights. She couldn’t stop smiling. He looked more circumspect, held the door for her, as was his way, quick look over his shoulder as he went in.

  I watched them being led to a table right at the back of the restaurant.

  I wouldn’t be able to see them from where I was standing so I put my phone back in my pocket and went home.

  Aaron was there. He’d bought a Christmas tree and that cheered me up. One good thing about Granddad going was that Aaron got to sleep in the bedroom now, not in the living room, and we could have a proper Christmas tree, not the funny little skinny space-saving one we’d been using for years, which sat on a tabletop. The tree smelled so good. I stood with my face buried inside its branches and breathed it in.

  Aaron passed me the box of decorations from the cupboard in the hallway. ‘There you go,’ he said. ‘Girls’ work.’ He winked and I gave him a shove. Aaron’s not exactly a feminist but he’s no chauvinist either. He likes the idea of the world being run by women. He likes women.

  I dressed the tree and stared from the window every now and then, down to the plaza below where the posh little restaurant was and as I stared I found myself wondering what I was doing, following Roan about the way I did, taking pictures of everything he did. I wondered where it was all heading. I wondered if I was mad, maybe. But I didn’t feel mad. I felt totally fine.

  Aaron put our dinner on the table. He said, ‘It’s nice to have you here. For once.’

  He said this with a smile because he wasn’t having a go at me. He meant it as it sounded.

  ‘You know,’ he said, spooning yellow rice on to his plate, glancing over my shoulder at the twinkling tree, ‘it feels kind of strange. First Christmas without my dad. If you want to talk about it …’

  I just smiled and shook my head and said, ‘I’m fine. Really.’

  ‘I do worry about you, Saff. We all do.’

  I threw him a questioning look.

  ‘The family. Me. Lee. Tana. The girls.’

  ‘Not much of a family really, is it?’ I said.

  ‘Oh. That’s harsh.’ He smiled. ‘It’s quality, not quantity, yeah?’

  I smiled too. ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘Just keep us in the loop, Saff, OK? Whatever it is that’s bothering you. Who ever it is that’s bothering you. We’re all here for you. Yeah?’

  I looked up at him. ‘But what about you?’ I said. ‘Who’s here for you?’

  He looked kind of abashed. ‘What do you mean?’

  I said, ‘You’re nearly thirty. You work two jobs. You haven’t had a girlfriend since you were like twenty-four or something. Who’s worrying about you?’

  Aaron put down his knife and fork and looked at me very sternly. Aaron looking stern, I should add, is not very stern at all. He has the face of an angel.