‘Saff,’ he said, ‘I don’t need worrying about, OK. Please God, don’t worry about me. Just focus on yourself. Focus on school, on these A-levels. Then focus on getting into university. Then focus on getting a good degree. And then, maybe then, I’ll let you worry about me. But until then, we’re good here, OK?’

  I nodded but I felt a lurch in the pit of my stomach. Aaron would be thirty-one by the time I left university. And then what? I thought of Clive, or Owen, or whatever his name was, and his sad little bedroom and his sad little stripy dressing gown and I thought he looked like he was probably about thirty-one and I didn’t want that for Aaron.

  ‘I might not even go to university,’ I said.

  ‘ ’Course you will,’ he said.

  ‘Why? Just because I’m clever, there’s no law about it. I can do whatever I want to after I’ve left school. I could get a job and get my own place and then you could have this flat to yourself.’

  He laughed. ‘I don’t want this flat to myself! Why would I want this flat to myself?’

  ‘So you can start a family.’

  He laughed again, loud and hard. ‘I don’t want a family, fam! You’re my family!’

  I laughed too, but inside I was starting to feel panicky. Aaron was such a good man. He’d worked hard at school, like me, and got good exam results, but here he was working in a betting shop and doing people’s gardens and then coming home and having to worry about me, wasting the prime years of his life, and I thought, you know, maybe it would be better if I wasn’t there.

  After dinner I told Aaron I was going to Jasmin’s and he said have fun and I said will do and I headed out with a heart full of strangeness about everything. I sat on one of the outdoor gym bikes on the plaza and idly wheeled the pedals round and round with my hands inside my pockets, my hood up against the chill night air. I put some music on my phone and listened for a while, watching people come and go. No one looked at me. No one saw me. When you wear a hood, you’re invisible.

  And then after a while Roan and Alicia left the restaurant, and I waited to see what they would do and you want to know what they did? Those dirty devils? They checked into a hotel, the Best Western by the drama school.

  My jaw fell open. I don’t know why I was surprised. It had all been leading to this moment. But it still shocked me. Roan was going to have sex with a woman he wasn’t married to. About half a mile away from the woman he was married to. He was going to lay her down on a bed and do things to her.

  I shuddered slightly, pulled down my hood, showing my pink hair to the world, and I went to see Jasmin.

  31

  Owen and Deanna had spent two hours messaging the night before. She’d been trying to persuade him to think about getting his job back at the college. She’d made some good points, some compelling points. Mostly to do with the fact that the girls who’d reported him would be gone in a few months, there’d be a whole new intake, no one to remember what had happened, he could have a clean slate. Also to do with the fact that he’d quite enjoyed his job. And the longer he left it without having a job, the harder it would be to explain to a potential employer what he’d been doing.

  Her concern had made him realise that up until now he’d not had one person in his life to offer him proper, empathetic, sensible, caring advice about his life, his choices, not ever. Not since his mother had died.

  They’d said goodnight at eleven o’clock; Owen could have gone on talking for hours, but Deanna of course had to be up early for work. Owen had fallen asleep with his phone on his chest, a smile on his face.

  He gets out of bed now and goes to his bedroom window. The police are back. They’re still picking around in the back garden. They’d cordoned the whole garden off last night before they left, spoken to all the residents, asked them not to cross the cordons. There’d been a solitary policeman stationed outside the building site all night long.

  Owen peers down to the spot in the grass that the police had been examining yesterday, where they’d found the phone case. Something flashes through his thoughts as he stares at the grass.

  A movement of some kind, a cry of pain.

  He shakes the thought from his head and heads to the bathroom where he showers and washes his hair. In the mirror in the bathroom he looks at his hair and decides that it is now officially too long. He’s not sure he can be bothered to go to the hairdresser’s just for a trim, so he takes a pair of scissors from the bathroom cabinet, smooths his hair down on to his forehead with his fingers, then trims it across the line of his eyebrows. He starts at the left side and watches the dark fronds fall into the sink where they look like tiny discarded moustaches. He is about to trim from the right-hand side and back to the middle when there is a loud, insistent thumping at the door. He jumps slightly and the tip of the scissors nicks his skin. A bead of blood appears and he rubs at it roughly and shouts out, ‘What!’

  ‘Owen,’ says Tessie. ‘The police are here. They need you to come out.’

  He sighs. ‘I’ll be a few minutes.’

  ‘Sir’ – he hears a male voice – ‘we need you to come out now. Please.’

  ‘I just got out of the shower. You’ll have to wait.’

  ‘Sir, please just come out.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ Owen mutters under his breath. He dries himself roughly with his towel and pulls on his old dressing gown. He opens the door and sees Tessie recoil slightly at the sight of him.

  ‘Can I at least get dressed?’ he says to the uniformed officer standing beside her.

  The officer turns to a woman standing behind him. It’s DI Currie, the female detective. She nods. ‘But I’ll need PC Rodrigues to go in with you, I’m afraid.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m so sorry. It’s just procedure.’

  ‘But what’s the issue here? What’s the urgency?’

  ‘The urgency, Mr Pick, is that we need to bring you into the station to question you regarding the disappearance of Saffyre Maddox. We also have a warrant to search your room.’ She holds up a piece of paper. Owen blinks at it. ‘I’m afraid that means that we need to ensure that you don’t touch anything in your room. I’m so sorry.’ She smiles at him. It’s an unnerving smile. It looks almost soft, but there’s something cold and hard at the very far corners of it.

  He starts to say something, but then realises he can’t find any words. He’s also aware on some level that whatever is going on here is something that he could make infinitely worse by saying or doing the wrong thing. So he nods, firmly, and heads for his room, the male PC following close behind. His eye goes around his room as he dresses; he tries to think what might be here, what they might find that could connect him in any way to the disappearance of a girl he’d never heard of until two days ago, a girl he may have imagined seeing entirely.

  ‘Faster, Mr Pick, if you wouldn’t mind.’

  He throws on yesterday’s outfit. He’d put it on his washing pile, intending to wear something fresh today, but he can’t think straight enough now to put together another outfit. He pulls on his old, glued-together shoes and runs his fingers through his wet hair. Something on his forehead comes away under his fingertip; it’s the dried blood from the nick from the scissors. Blood follows and he goes to pull a tissue from the box by his bedside table but the PC says, ‘Sir. Please do not touch anything.’

  ‘But I’m bleeding.’

  ‘We can sort you out once we have you in the car. Just leave that for now, please, sir.’

  Owen tuts. Then he takes one more look around the bedroom, grabs his jacket from the hook on the back of the door and follows the policeman back down the hallway.

  Tessie stands by the door. She is wearing a silk kimono over green pyjamas. Her hair is down. She looks tired and sad. As Owen passes her, she touches his arm and says, ‘What did you do, Owen? What did you do?’

  ‘I didn’t do anything, for God’s sake. You know I didn’t do anything.’

  Tessie turns and walks away.

  ‘For God’s sake, Tessie,’ he shouts after her. ‘You know I didn’t!’

  She walks into her bedroom and pulls the door quietly shut behind her.

  He feels a hand on his shoulder. ‘Mr Pick, please, we need to leave.’

  He shrugs the hand off, anger beginning to replace the shock and awe. ‘I’m coming,’ he says. ‘I’m coming, OK?’

  As he leaves the house, he is suddenly aware that the proportions of the street outside are all off, that there’s something not right, a feeling of impending chaos, and then they appear: a flock, a pack; a dozen men and women with cameras, with microphones, pressing towards them. The PC and the detective both cover him instinctively with their arms and hustle him onwards, through the throng.

  ‘Mr Pick, Mr Pick!’

  They know his name. How do they know his name? How did they know this was going to happen? How did they know?

  He glances up and straight into the lens of a camera. He opens his eyes wide and is dazzled by a burning white flash. Something forces his head down again. He is in a car. The car door is closed. There are faces at the window, faces and lenses. The car moves quickly; people touch it; they are so close Owen doesn’t understand why their feet aren’t being crushed by the tyres. And then he is not on his street any more, he is on the main road and there are no more people with cameras, just normal people going about their business. Owen sits back in the seat. He exhales.

  ‘Who told them?’ he asks the backs of the heads of the two people sitting in the front.

  ‘The press?’ says the woman.

  ‘Yes. Who told them you were coming to get me?’

  ‘I’m afraid I have no idea. They knew we’d been searching the area. People talk. I’m sorry you had to experience that.’

  ‘But … it’ll be in the papers,’ he says. ‘People will think I did it.’

  ‘Did what, Mr Pick?’

  He peers at her face in the rear-view mirror. She’s looking right at him. There’s that chilling smile again.

  ‘The thing!’ he says. ‘Whatever the thing is that you’re arresting me for.’

  ‘You’re not under arrest, Mr Pick. Not yet.’

  ‘Then why?’ He stares out of the window, watches a small girl from a dog-walking company trying to load a giant bloodhound into the back of a van. ‘Why am I here?’

  He looks at himself in the rear-view mirror. His hair has started to dry. It’s shorter on one side than the other and sticking up on the top. The blood from his cut has dried into a kind of huge tear shape, dripping into his eyebrow. He looks horrendous. Absolutely horrendous. And the nation’s press has just photographed him like this, being placed into the back of a police car to be questioned about a missing teenage girl. He doesn’t even like teenage girls. And he’s not even under arrest. He’s left his phone at home. What if Deanna is trying to message him? What if she thinks he’s ignoring her?

  And then an even worse thought hits him. What if he’s in the papers tomorrow? With his crooked hair and blood-encrusted eyebrow and yesterday’s clothes looking like a horrible pervert, with a headline screeching something like ‘IS THIS SAFFYRE’S KILLER?’ He groans out loud.

  ‘Are you OK, Mr Pick?’

  ‘No!’ he replies. ‘God. No. Of course I’m not OK. I’m going to be in the papers and I’m not even under arrest! Is that even legal?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid it is legal, Mr Pick. I’m afraid it is.’

  ‘But everyone will have seen my face and then you’ll let me go and no one will care that I didn’t do it, they’ll just remember my face. I’ll never get a job, I’ll—’ He envisages Deanna peeling open the Evening Standard on the Tube tonight. ‘Oh God!’

  ‘Mr Pick. Let’s just take this one step at a time, shall we? Hopefully we’ll be able to let you go within an hour or two. We’ll notify the press. They’ll have no interest in running the story if there’s nothing to it. So, let’s just see how we get on, shall we?’ She smiles again.

  Owen sits back, folds his arms around his stomach and rocks slightly. The world feels like a straitjacket, sucking all the air out of his chest cavity, squeezing his bones. He looks at people out of the window: normal people doing normal things. Walking to the shops. Going to work. Being normal suddenly looks like the most alien concept in the world, something he can barely conceive of.

  ‘Do I need a lawyer?’ he asks.

  ‘That’ll be up to you. Do you have one?’

  Tessie’s friend Barry is a lawyer. But he’s not Owen’s lawyer. ‘No,’ he says.

  ‘Well, we can assign you one if necessary.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘No. I’m sure I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Let’s see how we go, shall we?’

  Owen nods.

  And then, like a house falling on him from the sky, its shadow getting bigger and bigger, faster and faster, he suddenly remembers something.

  In his underwear drawer. Shoved in in a slightly shameful rush after his night out with Bryn, with the intention of putting them in the public bin on the street corner next time he was out, and then completely forgotten about.

  The date-rape drugs.

  A terrible overdose of adrenaline hits the pit of Owen’s stomach. His head spins. His heart stops and then races, sickeningly. ‘Oh my God,’ he whispers.

  ‘Everything OK?’ says DI Currie, peering at him in her mirror.

  ‘I think I’m going to …’ He puts his hand over his mouth. He suddenly realises he’s going to be sick. ‘I’m going to …’

  DI Currie tells the PC to stop the car. They pull over by a grass verge and DI Currie exits and opens his door just as Owen tips forward and throws up, noisily, painfully. His skin ripples with goosebumps and his head throbs with the force of it. He gasps and throws up again. DI Currie appears in front of him, a tissue in her hand. She looks down at him. Owen can’t tell if it’s pity in her face, or disgust. He takes the tissue and dabs his mouth with it.

  ‘All OK?’ she asks him.

  He nods.

  ‘Ready to keep going?’

  He nods again.

  She smiles and waits for him to put his legs back into the car before closing the door and going back to the passenger seat.

  ‘Something you ate?’ she asks a moment later, looking at him in the mirror.

  He nods, his fist balled against his mouth. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Must be.’

  She smiles, but she doesn’t look as though she believes him.

  32

  ‘Mum,’ says Georgia, walking into the bathroom without knocking. ‘They just arrested him!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The policewoman detective person. She just went into the house over the road with another cop. Came out with the creepy guy. Put him in a car and drove him away! There’s journalists and all sorts out there, taking pictures! Come and see!’

  Cate dries her hands on the backs of her jeans. It’s been two hours since DI Currie was here talking to them, since Roan left for work. She’d thought things might be winding down, but apparently not. She goes to the front door with Georgia.

  There are people hanging around, a couple of small film crews packing their things away. Cate goes outside and wanders over to a young woman in a yellow anorak with a furry hood and says, ‘What’s been going on? Where have they taken that guy?’

  ‘Owen Pick, you mean?’ The woman, whom Cate assumes to be a journalist, shoves some wires into a black bag and zips it up.

  ‘I don’t know his name – the guy who lives in that house? Youngish, with dark hair?’

  ‘Yeah. Owen Pick. They’ve taken him in for questioning.’

  ‘About Saffyre Maddox?’

  ‘Yes. Apparently they found some of her stuff outside his bedroom window and traces of blood on the wall and in the grass.’

  ‘Oh my God.’ Cate brings her hands to her mouth. She hears Georgia gasping beside her.

  ‘Oh my God, is she dead?’ asks Georgia.

  The woman shrugs. ‘No body found yet, but it’s looking increasingly likely.’

  ‘God, that’s so sad,’ says Georgia. Then she says, ‘That guy is weird. It doesn’t surprise me much that he could do something like that.’

  The journalist stops and looks at Georgia. ‘They don’t know for sure yet that he did. So probably best not to start spreading that about.’ She pauses, looks at Owen Pick’s house and then back at Georgia and says, ‘Although, you know …’

  Cate follows her gaze towards the house. She thinks about that night weeks ago when Georgia thought she’d been followed home by Owen Pick. She thinks about that night a few days later when Tilly appeared on her doorstep to say she’d been accosted on the other side of the street. She thinks of the string of sex attacks in the area. She thinks about Roan seeing Owen Pick on Valentine’s night, staring at their house.

  She feels a weight lift from her gut, a weight she had barely acknowledged until now: the weight of doubt, the weight of suspicion, of thinking that at any moment now the world could collapse on her head.

  She and Georgia make a cake. It’s nearly the end of the half-term holiday. Georgia’s been revising all week, or out with friends, and Cate’s barely seen her. It’s one of those grey, muffled days where everything feels fuzzy and unformed. The focus of weighing and measuring and counting and stirring is exactly what the day calls for.

  Georgia has one of her playlists on Spotify, a mixture of music that Cate once danced to in nightclubs and modern music that sounds meaningless and empty to her ears. They’re making something they found on the internet called a Choca-Mocha cake. Cate gets an espresso from the coffee maker and leaves it on the side to cool. Georgia is creaming sugar and butter together. The oven hums as it heats up.

  Owen Pick’s face keeps passing in and out of Cate’s consciousness. That vaguely displeased look he has about him, as though he’s constantly thinking about unsavoury things. His hair with that slightly defeated, second-hand look about it. The worn-down shoes, incongruous in contrast with strangely smart clothes that look as though they don’t come naturally to him. He looks the type, she thinks. He seems the type: a single guy, living alone with an eccentric landlady in a grubby-looking house with tatty curtains at the windows.