He sips the scalding tea gingerly. His heart jumps about again at the thought of the police rifling his bedroom, the pills in his sock drawer. He tries to work out what he’s going to say about the pills when they inevitably find them. How will he explain Bryn? How will he explain his relationship with an insane incel who wants to incite mass rape of women?

  Owen taps his fingertips against the tabletop and tries to control his breathing. He can feel a red ball of panic hurtling towards him, threatening to swallow him up. He pictures the police behind the reflecting glass again. He cannot freak out, he cannot. Barry will be here soon. Barry will tell him what to do.

  He takes another sip of tea, too quickly, feels it scald the inside of his mouth, winces and says fuck under his breath.

  Finally the door opens again and the two detectives return. The woman says, ‘We’ve contacted Mr Blair. He’s on his way. We can carry on talking while we wait – that could get you home quicker? Or you can wait until he’s here. It’s up to you.’

  He thinks again of the pills in his underwear drawer.

  He says, ‘I think I’ll wait.’

  35

  Roan comes back from work early that evening.

  Cate glances up at him from the screen of her laptop when he walks into the kitchen. ‘Oh!’ she says. ‘You’re back early.’

  He walks past her and directly to the fridge and starts pouring himself a glass of wine before he’s even taken off his coat. He holds the bottle aloft and says, ‘Want one?’

  It’s barely 6 p.m., but she nods.

  ‘How was your day?’ she asks.

  ‘Pretty grim,’ he says, unzipping his coat and taking it off. ‘Pretty bloody grim.’

  She knows there’s no point expecting him to expand. It usually means a suicidal patient, or some violence or something appalling involving bodily fluids. It also sometimes means a set-to with a colleague or a superior. Whichever is the case in this instance, Cate doesn’t ask. She merely raises her wine glass to his and says, ‘Here’s to Friday night.’

  He returns the gesture drily and gets out his phone, starts scrolling through something on his screen. Then he turns it to face her. ‘Have you seen this?’

  She takes the phone, puts on her reading glasses and looks at the screen.

  ‘Oh my God.’

  It’s a photo of the guy from across the street. His mouth is open and you can see his fillings and a grey tongue. He has blood encrusted on his forehead and his hair is greasy and slightly brutal-looking. It’s a shocking photograph. The headline above it says: ‘Is this Saffyre’s killer? Man taken in for questioning after “blood and phone case” found on his property’.

  ‘Did you see this happening?’ he asks her.

  ‘I didn’t no. But Georgia did.’

  ‘Did you know about the blood the detectives found?’

  ‘Yes. A journalist told us. Who told you?’ she asks.

  ‘A colleague. Well, many colleagues. It’s all anyone’s talked about today. It’s … fuck. It’s just awful.’

  She looks at the page on Roan’s phone again. She imagines a million phones in a million hands, a million people looking at this man’s face, right now. This man who lives across the road from her.

  She reads the story beneath:

  Earlier today, Owen Pick, a 33-year-old college lecturer, was brought in by north London police for questioning regarding the disappearance of 17-year-old Saffyre Maddox. Pick, who lives in Hampstead with his aunt, Tessa McDonald, was recently suspended from his job as a Computer Science lecturer at Ealing Tertiary College, after allegations of sexual misconduct from several students. One student, Maisy Driscoll, told reporters that Pick had a reputation amongst the female students at her college for ‘being creepy’. She said that he had stroked her hair at a college party and shaken sweat into her face a number of times. The college would give no comment about Mr Pick’s employment with them.

  Neighbours in his leafy Hampstead avenue describe Mr Pick as ‘odd’, ‘a loner’ and, one woman, Nancy Wade, 25, recalls being accosted by him on the street just before midnight on the night of Saffyre Maddox’s disappearance. She told reporters that Mr Pick ‘deliberately blocked my path. When I asked him to move out of my way, he turned nasty and abused me verbally. I was genuinely scared for my life.’

  Ernesto Bianco, 73, who lives in the flat above Mr Pick and Ms McDonald, told reporters that this is not the first time Mr Pick has been questioned by the police in recent weeks. According to Mr Bianco, Mr Pick had previously been visited by the police in relation to a string of serious sexual assaults in the area, including two in the immediate vicinity of his property. No one has yet been found or charged with these attacks. It is thought he will be questioned about these events too.

  Unsubstantiated reports suggest that while searching the area beneath Pick’s bedroom window, police officers uncovered possessions, including a phone case, that are suspected to belong to the missing teenager. It is also thought that they discovered bloodstains on the brickwork close to Pick’s bedroom and in the grass below. Forensic officers are still on site and the case is ongoing. No body has yet been found and the search for Saffyre Maddox continues.

  Cate hands the phone back to Roan. She thinks about how guilty she’d felt after sending the police to Owen Pick’s door those weeks earlier. But she’d been right, she thinks to herself now, she’d followed her instincts and her instincts had been absolutely spot on.

  ‘Did you read that bit?’ she asks him. ‘About the sexual misconduct at work. I mean, it looks pretty clear, doesn’t it? It must be him.’

  Roan takes his phone from her outstretched hand. ‘Looks like it. Yes.’

  Cate takes a sip of wine and looks at Roan thoughtfully. ‘But it’s still so odd, isn’t it? That she was here? On our street? I mean, why here? Of all the places? And why him and why her? It’s just …’ She shivers. ‘It’s unsettling.’

  Roan shrugs. ‘I guess she didn’t live that far from here. And this is one of the roads you’d walk up to get to the village. Maybe it’s not that weird after all.’

  ‘But where was she really going? No one says they’d made arrangements to meet her?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Roan, spreading his arms. ‘I don’t know anything about her or her private life.’

  She sighs. ‘Just to think,’ she says, ‘that time he was following Georgia last month …’

  ‘Well, thank God she had the common sense to call you.’

  ‘Yes. Absolutely. I can’t even …’

  ‘No,’ Roan says, shaking his head gently. ‘No. Neither can I.’

  Cate watches from her bedroom window that night, to see if the police bring Owen Pick home. But the street is quiet. A fine drizzle falls from a black, clouded sky. She can see the silky filaments of it through the yellow street lights. The police ribbon has gone from the road, but is still taped across the gate into the building site. It’s the weekend tomorrow. Do police carry out forensic searches of crime scenes at the weekend? She has no idea. She hears a sound behind her and turns, expecting to see Roan, but it’s not, it’s Josh.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ he says.

  ‘Just seeing what’s happening over there.’

  He puts a hand on to her shoulder and she covers it with hers.

  ‘I feel sorry for him,’ he says.

  She turns and looks at him.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Him,’ he says. ‘The guy over there. I feel bad. Everyone will just think he did it, whether he did or not.’

  ‘What makes you think he didn’t?’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ he says. ‘It’s just, innocent until proven guilty and all that. But people, you know, they like having someone to blame, don’t they? They like knowing who the bad person is. Who to throw the eggs at. The rocks. I feel bad for him.’

  Cate turns and looks at her boy. She puts a hand to the side of his face and cups his cheeks, feels the suggestion of three-day-old boy-stubble, soft as summer grass. ‘You’re such a lovely boy,’ she says. ‘Such a lovely boy.’

  He smiles and rubs his face against her palm, then draws her towards him for a hug. She feels the bones of him, the sinew and the tendon. He smells of the fabric conditioner she uses. He smells of something else, too, a slightly tobaccoey smell. She wonders if he smokes. And if he does, she wonders if she minds. She smoked at fourteen. In fields and by railway tracks and behind walls and hedges. She smoked Silk Cuts. She stole them from her mother and then when her mother found out and started hiding her Silk Cuts, she smoked roll-ups instead. Can she be angry with him for doing what she herself had done?

  She feels that in the current climate of murder and blood she does not mind that her son might be smoking. Maybe she will mind later on. She lets him go and smiles.

  ‘I’m sure justice will be served,’ she says reassuringly. ‘I’m sure the right person will be punished.’

  36

  It is nearly midnight. Owen is still sitting in a pale blue room with a long narrow window and a two-way mirror. DIs Currie and Henry are still sitting facing him. On the table on front of them are two empty paper cups, the wrappings of three Kit Kat bars, four empty sugar packets and three wooden stirrers. Owen drags his finger through the edges of a small puddle of tea and makes a tentacle out of it. He does this seven more times, until it is an octopus.

  Apparently they are awaiting a report from the guys who’ve been ransacking his bedroom all day. Barry sits next to Owen, picking at his cuticles. He wears cufflinks with green stones in them and a lilac and green checked shirt. He looks incongruous in this room with the bland, identikit detectives, the peeling walls and Owen himself, who is starting to feel very stale and unfragrant.

  Owen hasn’t told Barry about the Rohypnol in his sock drawer. When Barry walked in four hours ago, Owen had taken one look at him and realised the only reason he was here was to get paid. There was no smile of recognition or of empathy, no suggestion that Barry had ever seen Owen before in his life. He’d been businesslike to the point of cruelty.

  The door opens and two more policemen enter. They look at Owen strangely as they walk in and Owen feels his stomach curl at the edges. He knows what that look means.

  They take DI Currie out of the room for a few minutes; then she returns alone. She spreads some new paperwork on the table in front of her, clears her throat, says something into DI Henry’s ear, stares straight at Owen and says, ‘Well. Mr Pick. I think …’ She moves the paperwork around again. She’s clearly working out her next move, wants to make sure she pitches it just right. ‘I think, maybe, we need to back up a little here. I think we need to discuss, maybe, your activities over the past few weeks – since, in fact, the date of your suspension from Ealing College. Would you say, Mr Pick, that that experience has changed you at all? Made you view life differently?’

  Barry leans forward, runs a finger down his exquisite silk tie and says, ‘Don’t answer that, Owen. It’s a ridiculous question.’

  Owen closes his mouth.

  DI Currie inhales and starts again. ‘Mr Pick, we have been through the browsing history of your laptop. We’ve found some quite disturbing entries in a number of what I believe are known as incel forums. Mr Blair, do you know what an incel forum is?’

  ‘Indeed I do,’ says Barry, taking Owen somewhat by surprise. Barry looks as though he came straight from 1960; Owen cannot imagine him owning a computer, let alone knowing what an incel forum is.

  ‘You have been frequenting these forums quite a lot lately, Mr Pick, would you say?’

  He shrugs and says, ‘No. Not really.’

  ‘Well, I can tell you exactly how much time you’ve spent frequenting these forums, Mr Pick, because we have the data right here. Since Thursday January the seventeenth, the day you were suspended from your job at Ealing College, you have spent roughly four hours a day on these forums.’

  ‘Owen, you still don’t need to say anything. This is all complete nonsense.’

  ‘Owen, you’ve said some pretty dreadful things on these forums. You’ve joined in discussions on how to rape women, which sort of women deserve to be raped, and why. And you’ve referred to women in such derogatory terms that I can barely bring myself to repeat the terminology. You sit here, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, with your big, sad eyes, while thinking these things, expressing these vile, vile opinions about women.’

  Her voice is raised, her eyes flash. For the first time since Owen first set eyes on Angela Currie, she is showing some genuine personality. She turns the papers around so he can see the words he typed in a frenzy of euphoria at meeting people he could relate to.

  The words swim in front of his eyes.

  … Slag … Mouth …

  … Fist …

  … Whore … Hard …Face …

  … Slut …

  … Bitch … Bleed … Hole …

  He closes his eyes.

  He didn’t mean any of those words.

  He’d just been joining in. The new boy. Getting carried away.

  ‘Can you confirm that these were written by you?’

  He looks at Barry.

  Barry just blinks at him. He is disgusted.

  Owen nods his head.

  ‘Please affirm verbally, Mr Pick.’

  ‘Yes. I wrote these words. But I didn’t mean them.’

  ‘You didn’t mean them?’

  ‘No. Not really. I mean, I am, I was cross about a lot of things. I was cross about being reported for things I hadn’t done at work …’

  ‘Hadn’t done?’

  ‘Hadn’t done in the way those girls said I’d done them.’

  ‘You mean they misread your intentions?’

  ‘Yes. No. Yes. I don’t have the slightest interest in teenage girls. Not in that way. They look like children to me. So whatever it was they thought I’d done, it had to have been done entirely innocently, unintentionally.’

  DI Currie nods. ‘So you were cross about that, and you went to these places on the internet’ – she stabs a piece of paper with her fingertip – ‘and you said disgusting, violent things about women, because you were angry?’

  Owen nods. ‘Yes. That’s right. But I didn’t mean any of it.’

  ‘Just like you didn’t mean to flick sweat on those girls or ask them if they liked girls or boys?’

  ‘What? I didn’t say that …’

  ‘They say you did, Mr Pick. Nancy Wade says you made her fear for her life while she walked alone in the dark. Your neighbours identified you as a potential sex threat when their daughter’s friend said she’d been accosted close to their home last month and a police officer was sent to ask you about that. You have spent dozens of hours in chat rooms and on forums discussing the best way to rape women and we have found traces of Saffyre Maddox’s blood on the wall and in the grass beneath your bedroom window, Saffyre Maddox’s phone case also beneath your bedroom window, and now, Mr Pick, we have been told of the existence of a large amount of the prohibited drug, Rohypnol, in one of your bedroom drawers – Rohypnol being, as I’m sure we’re all aware, a very well-known example of what is known as a date-rape drug.

  ‘The time is currently twelve-oh-three a.m., the day is Saturday the twenty-third of February. Owen Michael Pick, I am placing you under arrest for the abduction of Saffyre Maddox. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Do you understand?’

  Owen looks at Barry as if there is something he should be saying or doing that could make this go away.

  But Barry just closes his eyes and nods.

  37

  SAFFYRE

  A few days before New Year’s Eve, I found Aaron standing at the door of our flat looking edgy and bouncy. I’d just got out of the lift. I said, ‘What’s up with you?’

  ‘I’ve got a surprise for you.’

  I smiled suspiciously at him. ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Take your coat off,’ he said. He took it from me as I slipped my arms out of the sleeves and hung it up for me. ‘Come. But be quiet. OK? Take your shoes off.’

  I kicked off my trainers and looked at him questioningly.

  Then I followed him into the living room. He led me towards the Christmas tree and said, ‘Oh look! There’s another present under the tree! Santa must have come back because you have been such a good girl!’

  I frowned at him and then knelt down next to the parcel. It was more of a box than a parcel, a shiny red box with a lid and a golden bow.

  ‘You’d better open it, don’t you think?’

  I slowly pulled the lid up. I looked in the box. And then I gasped. My hands went straight to my mouth. I looked at Aaron and I said, ‘No!’

  ‘Actually, yes.’ He smiled hard.

  Inside the box was a tiny cream kitten. It was like the sort of kitten you see on Instagram: big blue eyes, so much fluff. It opened its mouth like a lion about to roar, and made a tiny, pathetic mewling sound. I laughed and put my hands into the box to scoop it out. It barely weighed anything; it was all fluff and no physical mass, just a tiny breath of a thing. ‘Is it ours?’ I asked Aaron.

  He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He’s yours. He’s your cat.’

  I made some weird noise, like a squeal mixed with a groan. All my life, all my life I’d been asking for a pet and all my life I’d been told no, that it was too much work, we didn’t have enough space, that Granddad had allergies, too expensive, too much. And I’d finally given up asking a couple of years back and now here was my pet. Here he was. In my hands. I kissed his head and said, ‘For real?’

  And Aaron said, ‘Yes. For real.’

  ‘Oh my God. Oh my actual God. I can’t believe it. I really can’t believe it.’

  I put the kitten down on the floor and let him explore. He stood on his back legs and pawed at a low-hanging bauble. Aaron and I looked at each other and laughed.