‘Hello, angel.’

  ‘Urgh,’ says Georgia. ‘I woke up at, like, eight o’clock or something and I couldn’t get back to sleep.’

  ‘Well,’ says Cate, ‘I came in and looked at you at about ten thirty and you were out cold.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I was kind of drifting in and out.’

  ‘Want something to eat?’

  Georgia yawns and shakes her head. ‘It’s nearly lunchtime. I’ll wait.’

  ‘I went to see the house earlier,’ Cate says, turning on her phone and bringing it to Georgia.

  ‘Oh,’ says Georgia, brightening. ‘House! House! Let me see!’

  Cate shows her the photos and then heads down the hallway to Josh’s bedroom to check in on him. He’s normally up earlier than Georgia. She would have heard the shower going by now, the sound through the wall of music coming from his phone which he props up against the tooth mug. But there’d been nothing.

  She knocks gently. ‘Joshy?’

  There’s no response.

  ‘Josh?’

  She pushes the door open.

  Josh’s bed is empty.

  She goes to the bathroom and finds Roan sitting on the toilet with his trousers round his ankles playing Candy Crush.

  ‘Seen Josh?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘He’s still in bed, isn’t he?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘He’s not. He must have gone out somewhere.’

  She goes back to the kitchen and takes her phone back from Georgia. ‘Any idea where Josh is?’ she asks her.

  Georgia shakes her head. ‘I think I heard the front door go half an hour ago?’

  Cate composes a message to Josh and sends it. Where are u? She watches the tick double, but not turn blue. She sighs.

  The ticks stay grey for another hour. She calls him. The call goes through to his voicemail. She leaves him a message. They have lunch – spaghetti with chilli and garlic and prawns. She scoops out the last portion into a bowl, covers it with cling film and puts it in the fridge.

  At two o’clock Georgia finally settles down at the kitchen table to do her homework. Roan and Cate sit side by side in the living room and try to watch a film on TV but Cate can’t concentrate. The room grows gloomy as the sun starts to slide down the horizon and Cate checks her phone every thirty seconds. She sends Josh five more messages and calls him three more times. As the credits roll on the film she turns to Roan and says, ‘I think we should call the police.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘It’s nearly four. He’s been gone about five hours.’

  ‘Cate. He’s fourteen years old. It’s daytime.’

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘But he’s not the sort of fourteen-year-old to just disappear. He always tells me when he’s going out. And why isn’t he answering his phone?’

  ‘Probably run out of charge, or maybe he’s on the Tube.’

  ‘Josh doesn’t go on the Tube,’ she replies with exasperation. Really, sometimes it felt like Roan didn’t actually know his children. ‘He gets panic attacks, remember?’

  ‘Well, whatever, I really think calling the police would be a bit over the top.’

  ‘But how long are we going to wait?’

  ‘Dinnertime?’ says Roan. ‘But even then, it won’t even have been twelve hours.’ He stands up and stretches. ‘I think’, he says, ‘that I might just go for a run. I can keep an eye out for him on the way.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Cate. ‘Yes. Brilliant. You do that. I’m going to try and find a number for Flynn.’

  Flynn is Josh’s only known friend.

  He’s never been inside their house; he skulks outside and texts Josh if they’re going out together. He has never been more than a flash of red hair and a name to Cate.

  ‘Georgia,’ she says, coming into the kitchen. ‘You don’t happen to have a number for Flynn, do you?’

  ‘Flynn?’

  ‘Yes, you know, Josh’s friend. With the red hair?’

  ‘Why on earth would I have a number for Flynn?’

  ‘I don’t know, darling. I just thought maybe you might. I mean, is he on any social media with you?’

  ‘Of course he isn’t. God.’

  ‘Do you know his surname?’

  ‘Oh my God, no. Of course I don’t. I don’t even know him. He’s just … he’s just Josh’s friend. He’s nothing to do with me.’

  ‘Do you …?’ Cate starts cautiously. ‘Do you have any theories about where Josh might be? He’s not answering his phone.’

  Georgia exhales heavily. ‘Mum,’ she says, ‘I’m trying to do my homework and you’re really not helping right now.’

  ‘No, no, I’m sorry. You’re right. But I’m worried about him … it’s getting dark …’

  ‘He’s fourteen years old, Mum. He’s fine. Try looking in the plot across the road.’

  Cate stiffens. ‘What?’

  ‘The building plot. You know. Where the police were. He used to hang out a lot there last summer. Him and Flynn sometimes too.’

  ‘Hang out doing what?’

  ‘How am I supposed to know? Do you think I care?’

  ‘No. But …’

  ‘Look, he’s your son. Your guess is as good as mine. He’s a mystery to me. All I know is that he used to hang out across the road sometimes.’

  ‘But how did he get in?’

  ‘There’s a gap,’ Georgia says dismissively, as if everyone should already know about the gap. ‘Around the corner. Where the wall is low.’

  Georgia turns her attention back to the schoolbook in front of her and Cate heads down the hallway. She picks up her coat and her door keys and heads outside.

  The sky is turning from grey to black in petrol tones. She switches on the torch on her phone and feels her way along the foliage around the corner until she locates the point where the trees are wide enough apart to allow her to squeeze through. She lands on the other side, on a patch of ragged grass. The plot looks vast from this angle. She throws the light from her phone across the space.

  ‘Josh,’ she calls out. ‘Josh?’

  She shines her light into corners and behind machinery. There is nobody there.

  Across the space she peers through the trees and into the back garden of Owen Pick’s house. There, facing the plot, is a sash window with drawn curtains. His bedroom. She pictures him there behind it, his face lit by the glow of his laptop, writing depraved things on incel forums, plotting his abduction of a beautiful, troubled young girl, fantasising about what he was going to do to her when he finally had her in his disgusting clutches.

  She glances around as though maybe she is here, Saffyre Maddox, as though the dozen police officers who spent three days combing every inch of this space might just have missed her, that she might just rise up from the ground and walk towards her.

  She feels her phone buzz inside her hand and switches it on. It’s a text from Josh.

  On my way home, Mum. See u soon x.

  Where’ve you been? she replies hastily.

  Cinema, he replies. Phone on silent. Soz.

  She turns off the phone and clutches it to her heart, gazing upwards into the petrol sky. On his way home. Her heart loosens. Her breathing steadies. The cinema. Her baby boy had been at the cinema.

  She clambers back through the gap between the tree and lands in front of a surprised dog walker.

  ‘Oh,’ says the woman, clutching her heart.

  ‘Sorry,’ says Cate. ‘I was looking for my son. But now I’ve found him.’

  The dog walker looks behind her as if the son might be about to appear.

  ‘He was at the cinema,’ she says breathlessly. ‘Not in there.’

  The woman nods and carries on her way, the small dog skittering along behind her, throwing Cate a few bemused looks over his tail as he goes.

  ‘What did you see?’ she asks Josh when he walks in a few minutes later, cheeks red with the night cold.

  ‘That thing with Dwayne Johnson,’ he says. ‘About wrestlers. Can’t remember what it was called.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says, wondering at her son’s choice of film. ‘Was it any good?’

  Josh shrugs. ‘It was OK. Can I eat something?’

  She pulls the pasta from the fridge and puts it in the microwave.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asks. ‘That you were going to the cinema? How come you just disappeared?’

  He shrugs. ‘Just a bit last minute.’

  ‘But I was in here.’ She points at the kitchen floor. ‘Like literally, standing right here. You could have just popped your head around the door and said goodbye.’

  He shrugs again. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think.’

  She’s been using her phone as she talks, to google the film her son says he’s just been to see. She finds something called Fighting With My Family. She turns the screen of her phone towards him and shows him the picture. ‘This?’ she says. ‘You went to see this?’

  He nods.

  ‘Have you been out on a date?’ she says, a smile forming on her lips, a warm glow going through her at the thought of her funny, lonely boy, sitting in the back row of the movies, watching a quirky comedy about female wrestlers with his arm around a girl.

  ‘No,’ he says.

  She thinks he’s lying.

  If it were Georgia standing in front of her blatantly lying, she would not waste a second before calling her out on it. She would say, ‘Bullshit, tell me what really happened,’ and Georgia would smile that smile she smiles when she knows she’s been backed into a corner and then tell her the truth.

  But she can’t bear to put her boy on the spot, to make him squirm, to make him suffer. He wouldn’t smile a smile. He would just look pained. So she just says, ‘OK,’ and takes his pasta out of the microwave.

  39

  ‘You’ve got a visitor.’

  Owen sits up with a start. It’s been three hours since his last interview with the detectives and he’s been sitting in his cell with no idea what’s happening next. He was given lunch in his cell: some kind of meat in breadcrumbs with potatoes and green beans. And then a beige pudding with a jam sauce. He’s almost embarrassed by how much he enjoyed it; it’s the sort of meal his mother used to cook for him, bland and salty and safe. He scraped his tray absolutely clean.

  ‘Who is it?’ he asks now.

  ‘I have no idea,’ says the police officer drily.

  ‘Am I going to them, or are they …?’

  ‘I’m taking you to an interview room. Can you stand back from the door, please?’

  He stands back from the cell door and the officer opens it and leads him through three sets of locked gates to a small blue room. Tessie is sitting there, wearing a green velvet wrap around her shoulders and huge silver earrings with matching green stones at their centres. Her mouth is already pursed with disapproval.

  She starts talking before he’s even sat down. ‘I’m not staying long, Owen. But I brought you some things. Your phone. Though you’re probably not allowed it. And some underwear and a change of clothing, etc. I bought it new. I didn’t want to go rifling through your things. Especially not after what the police found in your drawers. Good God, Owen. And that girl, Owen! What on earth has happened to that lovely girl?’

  Tessie covers her face with her fingers, mismatched rings overlapping into a kind of armour. She stares down at the table for a long moment and then looks up and her eyes are full of tears.

  ‘Owen. Please. You can tell me. Where is she? What have you done with her?’

  Owen smiles. He can’t help it. It’s just too ridiculous.

  ‘Tessie,’ he says, his hands clutching the edge of the table. ‘Really? You really think I had something to do with it?’

  ‘Well, what on earth else do you expect me to think? Her blood! Outside your wall! Her phone cover outside your bedroom window. Date-rape drugs in your sock drawer. And all those things, those terrible things you wrote on the internet. My goodness, Owen. You don’t have to be Miss Marple to work it out. But for the sake of that poor girl’s family, you have to tell the police what happened.’

  ‘Oh my God!’ Owen tugs at his hair and then bangs the table. ‘I did not do anything to that girl! I’m not even sure I saw that girl! I just saw a girl! And it might not even have been a girl. It might have been a boy. And the only reason, literally the only reason I said anything was because I was trying to be helpful. I mean, Tessie, seriously, if I had killed that girl or done something dreadful to her, why would I have told the police that I’d seen her? Why? Think about it, for God’s sake. Just think about it. It doesn’t make any sense!’

  Tessie pushes down her lower lip and shrugs. ‘No,’ she says. ‘It does not make sense. But then, Owen, nothing about you makes any sense. Nothing. I mean, what are you, thirty-four …?’

  Owen sighs. ‘I’m thirty-three, Tessie. Thirty-three.’

  She continues. ‘Thirty-three, yet you’ve never had a girlfriend. You rarely go out. You dress like …’ She gestures at him vaguely. ‘Well, you dress very strangely for a man of your age. You only eat white food. I mean, Owen, let’s face it, you’re very odd.’

  ‘And that means I killed a teenage girl, does it?’

  She narrows her eyes at him. But she doesn’t reply. Instead she says, ‘I’ve spoken to your father. He’s very worried.’

  Owen rolls his eyes. ‘I’m sure he is.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says firmly. ‘He is. I suggested he come and see you but he’ll need some persuading, he’s slightly … overwhelmed.’

  ‘Don’t bother, please, Tessie. I have no desire whatsoever to see him. Certainly not in these circumstances.’ Owen lets his head drop so that his gaze falls between his kneecaps to the scuffed linoleum on the floor. He’s tired. He has had two nights on a horrible bed in a cell. He has had hours in the interview room with a rotating group of detectives trying harder and harder to get him to tell them where Saffyre Maddox is and Owen has seen enough police dramas to know how these things are orchestrated, layering on different approaches until the interviewee doesn’t know their left from their right. But it doesn’t matter how much they try to befuddle and confound him, the one constant, the one thing he knows for sure, is that he has nothing to do with Saffyre Maddox or her disappearance.

  Barry told him something interesting yesterday.

  Apparently Saffyre Maddox was once under the professional care of the Lycra man across the road, the jogger. Apparently, Lycra Man is a child psychologist at the Portman. Apparently Saffyre Maddox was under his care for over three years and apparently Lycra Man has a rock-solid alibi. He was in bed with his wife.

  Owen can hardly believe that the police would take such a flimsy alibi on face value. It’s typical of course, typical to give credence to married people, to assume that of course married people would be in bed together on Valentine’s night, that married people would have no reason to lie about their whereabouts.

  He’d told the police yesterday about Bryn. He’d been unable to think of any other reasonable explanation to offer them for the presence of Rohypnol in his bedroom.

  ‘Bryn who?’ they’d asked.

  ‘I don’t know his surname.’

  ‘Address?’

  ‘I don’t know where he lives. Somewhere just outside London. His train comes into Euston, that’s all I know. And he’s thirty-three. Like me. Oh. He’s got a website! www.yourloss.net.’

  ‘Bryn someone. Outside London. Thirty-three. Got a website.’

  Sceptical was an understatement. But they’d gone away and looked for Bryn and come to him this morning and told him that no such person existed. That his website didn’t exist, that the only people in the UK who were thirty-three and called Bryn lived in Chester, Aberdeen, Cardigan, Cardiff, London, Bangor, Newport and Dartmouth. There was, apparently, nobody in the Home Counties called Bryn who was currently thirty-three years old.

  ‘Well,’ Owen said. ‘There you go. Thanks to the British press and my face plastered all over the papers, he’s had time to disappear. But he’s there, in all the forums you found me on. Run searches for him, for YourLoss. You’ll see. He’s a leader. An influencer. People kind of look up to him.’

  ‘And you?’ said a detective whose name Owen hadn’t quite caught. ‘Did you look up to him?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘In a way. But not,’ he quickly countered, ‘not in that way. When he gave me those drugs, when he told me what he wanted me to do, what he wanted all of us to do …’

  ‘All of us?’

  ‘Yes, us on the forums.’

  ‘Incels, you mean?’

  He hadn’t liked the sound of that. It had made them sound like Masons or Ku Klux Klan, giraffes, even, something other. Something not quite human.

  ‘So you would call yourself an incel, would you, Owen?’

  He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘No. Going on those forums – it was a phase. It was a response to what happened with my job. I was cross and frustrated. I felt impotent. I needed to vent and the forums gave me a place to vent. But I never thought I was one of them. I never felt I belonged. And Bryn …’

  ‘Yes, tell us about Bryn.’ They’d said his name as if it was in italics, as if he was a character in a book.

  ‘Bryn was just funny, I suppose. A lot of those guys on the forums were just dark and humourless, took it all so seriously. Bryn was funny. And charismatic. People liked him. I liked him. But then when I finally met him in person, I saw him for what he really was.’

  ‘And what was that, Owen?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, after a moment’s consideration. ‘Mad. I suppose.’