Cate turns and gazes at her daughter. ‘Who what was?’ she says.

  ‘The creepy guy!’ she replies. ‘The one who followed me the other night. We saw him just now. He lives in that weird house across the street. You know, the one with the gross armchair in the driveway.’

  ‘How do you know it was him?’

  ‘It just totally was. He was putting something out in the bins. And he looked at us.’

  ‘Looked at you how?’

  ‘Like, weirdly.’

  Tilly stands behind Georgia nodding her agreement.

  ‘Hi, Tilly,’ says Cate belatedly.

  ‘Hi.’

  Tilly is a tiny thing, with gobstopper eyes and shiny black hair; she looks like a Pixar girl. She and Georgia have only recently become friends after being at the same school for nearly five years. She is the first really decent friend Georgia has acquired since she left primary school and while Cate can’t quite work Tilly out, she is very keen for the friendship to flourish.

  ‘He knew it was me,’ Georgia continues. ‘When he looked at me. I could tell he knew it was me, from the other night. It was a really dirty look.’

  ‘Did you see it?’ Cate asks Tilly.

  Tilly nods again. ‘Yeah. He was definitely not happy with Georgia. I could tell.’

  Georgia opens a brand-new packet of Leibniz biscuits even though there’s a half-empty packet in the cupboard and offers it to Tilly. Tilly says no thank you and then they disappear to her bedroom.

  The front door goes again and Josh appears. Cate’s heart lifts a little. While Georgia always arrives with news and moods and announcements and atmospheres, her little brother arrives as though he’d never left. He doesn’t bring things in with him, his issues unfurl gently and in good time.

  ‘Hello, darling.’

  ‘Hi, Mum.’ He crosses the kitchen and hugs her. Josh hugs her every time he comes home, before he goes to bed, when he sees her in the morning, and when he goes out for longer than a couple of hours. He’s done this since he was a tiny boy and she keeps expecting it to stop, or to peter out, but he’s fourteen now and he shows no sign of abandoning the habit. In a strange way, Cate sometimes thinks, it’s Josh who’s kept her at home all these years, way beyond her children’s need to have a stay-at-home mother. He still feels so vulnerable for some reason, still feels like the small boy crying into the heels of his hands on his first day of nursery and still crying four hours later when she came to collect him.

  ‘How was school?’

  He shrugs and says, ‘It was good. I got my Physics test back. I got sixty out of sixty-five. I was second top.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says, squeezing him again quickly. ‘Josh, that’s amazing! Well done you! Physics! Of all the things to be good at. I don’t know where you get it from.’

  Josh helps himself to a banana and an apple and a glass of milk and sits with her for a while at the kitchen table.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asks her after a short silence.

  She looks at him with surprise. ‘Yes,’ she says.

  ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says again, with a laugh. ‘Why?’

  He shrugs. ‘No reason.’ Then he picks up his milk and his schoolbag and heads to his room. ‘What’s for dinner?’ he says, turning back halfway down the hallway.

  ‘Chicken curry,’ she says.

  ‘Cool,’ he says. ‘I’m in the mood for something spicy.’

  And then it is quiet again, just Cate and the dark shadows through the window, her unfocused thoughts passing silently through the back tunnels of her mind.

  5

  Later that night it happens. A sort of coalescence of all of Cate’s weird, unformed fears about this place.

  Georgia’s friend Tilly is assaulted moments after leaving their flat.

  Cate had invited Tilly to stay for supper and she’d said, No, thank you, Mum’s expecting me, and Cate had thought, Maybe she just doesn’t like curry. Then a few minutes after she left there was a knock at the door and the doorbell rang and Cate went to answer it and there was Tilly, her face white, her huge eyes wide with shock saying, ‘Someone touched me. He touched me.’

  Now Cate hustles her into the kitchen and pulls her out a chair, gets her a glass of water, asks her exactly what happened.

  ‘I’d just crossed the road. I was just over there. By the building site. And there was someone behind me. And he just sort of grabbed me. Here.’ She gestures at her hips. ‘And he was trying to pull me.’

  ‘Pull you where?’

  ‘Not anywhere. Just kind of against him.’

  Georgia sits Tilly down at the table and holds her arm. ‘Oh my God, did you see him? Did you see his face?’

  Tilly’s hands tremble in her lap. ‘Not really. Sort of. I don’t think … It was all just … quick. Really, really quick.’

  ‘Are you hurt?’ says Georgia.

  ‘No?’ says Tilly, with a slight question mark, as though she might be. ‘No,’ she says again. ‘I’m OK. I’m just …’ She stares down at her hands. ‘Freaked out. He was … It was horrible.’

  ‘Age?’ asks Cate. ‘Roughly?’

  Tilly shrugs. ‘I don’t know.’ She sniffs. ‘He was wearing a hood and had a scarf around his face.’

  ‘Height?’

  ‘Kind of tall, I guess. And slim.’

  ‘Should I call the police?’ asks Cate and then wonders why she’s asking a sixteen-year-old girl who’s just been assaulted whether or not she should call the police.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Georgia. ‘Of course you should call them.’ Then before anyone else has a chance to pick up their phone, she’s calling 999.

  And then the police arrive, and Tilly’s mum arrives and the night takes a strange tangent off into a place that Cate has never been before, a place of policemen in her kitchen, and a tearful mother she’s never met , and a nervous energy that keeps her awake for hours after the police leave and Tilly and her mother disappear in an Uber and the house is quiet yet she knows that no one can be sleeping peacefully because a bad thing happened and it is something to do with them and something to do with this place and something else, some indefinable thing to do with her, some badness, some mistake she’s made because she’s not a good person. She has been trying so hard to stop thinking of herself as a bad person, but as she lies in bed that night, the sudden awful knowledge of it gnaws at her consciousness until she feels raw and unpeeled.

  Cate awakes just before her alarm goes off the following morning, having slept for only three and a half hours. She turns and looks at Roan, lying peacefully on his back, his arms tucked neatly under the duvet. He is a pleasant-looking man, her husband. He has lost most of his hair and shaves it now, revealing the strange contours of his skull that she had not known existed when she’d first met him thirty years ago. She’d presumed his skull to be a smooth thing, the underside of a pottery urn. Instead it is a landscape with hills and valleys, a tiny puckered scar. Raised veins run across his temples to his brow. His nose is large. His eyes are heavy-lidded. He is her husband. He hates her. She knows he does. And it’s her fault.

  She slips out of bed and goes to the front window, a large bay overlooking the street. The just-risen sun shines through the trees, on to the building site across the road. It looks innocuous. Then she looks further to the right, to the house with the armchair on the driveway. She thinks of the man who lives there, the creepy man who’d followed Georgia home from the Tube station, who’d thrown her and Tilly dirty looks last night as he put out his bins – the man who matches the description that Tilly gave of the man who assaulted her.

  Cate locates the card the policeman gave her last night. Detective Inspector Robert Burdett. She calls him, but he doesn’t answer so she leaves a message for him.

  ‘I’m calling about the assault on Tilly Krasniqi last night,’ she begins. ‘I don’t know if it’s anything but there’s a man, across the street. At number twelve. My daughter says he followed her home the other night. And she says he was staring at her and Tilly strangely on their way home from school last night. I don’t know his name, I’m afraid. He’s about thirty or forty. That’s all I know. Sorry. Just a thought. Number twelve. Thank you.’

  ‘Have you spoken to Tilly today?’ Cate asks Georgia as her daughter spins around the flat readying herself to leave for school later that morning.

  ‘No,’ says Georgia. ‘She’s not been answering my messages or taking my calls. I think maybe her phone’s switched off.’

  ‘Oh God.’ Cate sighs. She can’t bear the sense of guilt, the feeling that she somehow made this happen. She imagines Georgia, her beautiful guileless girl, a man’s hands on her in the dark on her way home from a friend’s house. It’s unbearable. Then she imagines tiny Tilly, too traumatised even to take messages from her best friend. She finds the number that Tilly’s mum put into her phone last night and presses it.

  Tilly’s mum finally answers her phone the sixth time Cate calls her.

  ‘Oh, Elona, hi, it’s Cate. How is she? How’s Tilly?’

  There is a long silence, then the sound of the phone being handled and muted voices in the background. Then a voice says, ‘Hello?’

  ‘Elona?’

  ‘No. It’s Tilly.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Cate. ‘Tilly. Hello, sweetheart. How are you doing?’

  There’s another strange silence. Cate hears Elona’s voice in the background. Then Tilly says, ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘About last night. The thing that happened.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It didn’t happen.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A man didn’t touch me. He just walked quite close to me, and Georgia had got me so freaked out about that man who lives opposite you, you know, and I thought it was him, but it wasn’t him, it was someone completely different and – and I came rushing back to yours and I …’

  There’re more shuffling sounds and then Elona comes on the line again. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says. ‘So, so sorry. I said she’d have to tell you herself. I just don’t understand. I mean, I know they’re all under a lot of stress, these girls, these days – exams, social media, everything, you know. But still, that’s no excuse.’

  Cate blinks slowly. ‘So, there was no assault?’ This doesn’t make any sense. Tilly’s pale skin, her wide eyes, her shaking hands, her tears.

  ‘There was no assault,’ Elona confirms in a flat tone, and Cate wonders if maybe she doesn’t quite believe it either.

  Outside Cate sees DI Robert Burdett climbing into a car parked across the street. She remembers the message she left on his phone early this morning, about the strange man across the road. A wave of guilt passes through her stomach.

  ‘Have you told the police?’ she asks Elona.

  ‘Yes. Absolutely. Just now. Can’t have them wasting their resources. Not with all these cuts they’re having. But anyway, I’m sending her into school now. Tail between her legs. And again, I am so, so sorry.’

  Cate turns off her phone and watches the back end of DI Burdett’s car as it reaches the junction at the bottom of the road.

  Why would Tilly have lied? It makes no sense whatsoever.

  Cate works from home. She’s a trained physiotherapist, but she gave up her practice fifteen years ago when Georgia was born and never really got back into treating patients. These days she occasionally writes about physiotherapy for medical publications and industry magazines, and every now and then she rents a room in her friend’s practice in St Johns Wood to treat people she knows, but most of the time she is at home, freelancing (or being ‘a housewife with a laptop’ as Georgia puts it). In Kilburn she has a small office area on the mezzanine, but in this temporary set-up she writes at the kitchen table; her paperwork sits in a filing tray by her laptop, and it’s a struggle to keep everything organised and to stop her work stuff being absorbed into the general family silt. She can never find a pen and people scrawl things on the back of her business correspondence, yet another thing she hadn’t thought through properly before making the move to a small flat.

  Cate peers through the front window again at the house across the road. Then she goes back to her laptop and googles it.

  She finds that the last time a flat was bought or sold at number twelve was ten years ago, which is extraordinary for an eminent address such as this. The freehold to the building is owned by a company in Scotland called BG Properties. She can find nothing else about the address or anyone who lives there. It is a house of mystery, she decides, a house where people come and never move out again, where people hang thick curtains and never open them and leave their furniture to rot on the driveway.

  Then she googles ley lines at the address. She doesn’t quite know what a ley line is but she thinks there might be some strange ones at this junction, where there are no voices in the street late at night, where empty plots of land stay undeveloped, where the foxes scream every night, where teenage girls are followed home and assaulted in the dark, where she feels uncomfortable, where she does not belong.

  6

  In the wake of the events of the night that Tilly claimed to have been assaulted, Cate stops walking past the house with the armchair in the driveway.

  The position of her house is such that she can turn either left or right to get to the main road or up into the village and she chooses now to turn left. She does not want to risk crossing paths with the man she’d inadvertently sent the police to question three days ago about an attack on a young girl that apparently hadn’t really happened. He wouldn’t know it was her, but she would know it was him.

  She tries not to even look in the direction of the man’s house, but her eyes track quickly towards it now as she heads into the village with a bag full of website returns to drop at the post office. A woman is standing at a right angle to the front door, around Cate’s age, maybe ten years older. She is eye-catching in a long grey coat, a selection of patterned scarves, ankle boots, hair steely-grey and held up in a bun very high on her head, almost to the point of tipping over her hairline and on to her forehead. She wears black eyeliner under her eyes and is clutching a small suitcase and a selection of airport carrier bags. Cate watches her going through her handbag before removing a set of keys and turning to face the front door. She sees her stop for a moment in the hallway to riffle through some mail on a console table before the door closes behind her.

  Cate realises she is standing in the street staring at a closed door. She turns quickly and heads up the hill towards the village.

  After dropping the parcels in at the post office, Cate takes the scenic route back to the flat. If she made a mistake choosing this location for her family’s temporary accommodation, she wants to make up for it by enjoying Hampstead village as much as possible while she’s here. Kilburn is bustling and loud and grimy and real and Cate loves it with a passion. But Kilburn has no heart, no centre, it’s just a ladder of small roads set perpendicularly off a big road. Hampstead on the other hand has alleys and crannies and turnstiles and cottages and paths and hidden graveyards and it spreads out in this way in every direction for a mile or more, all the way to the Heath in the north and back down to the wide stately avenues in the south and west. It is the ultimate London village and every new corner Cate discovers on her walks up here colours her day in some way.

  Today Cate finds herself walking further than before, across a small section of the Heath grooved with footpaths, through a whispering copse of trees and then down a winding lane lined with interesting old houses, mainly Georgian, until suddenly she finds herself in a different landscape altogether: flat and low, with white James Bond-style houses layered together like roof tiles, attached with concrete walkways and spiral staircases. Each house has a wide terrace overlooking the woods and the Heath beyond. She gets out her phone and she does what she always does when she finds herself somewhere new in this village: she googles it. She discovers that she is in the most expensive council estate ever built, possibly anywhere in the world, part of an idealistic Labour government experiment in the 1970s to house the poor as though they were rich. The land cost nearly half a million pounds to buy. Each house cost £72,000 to build. The project turned sour when the government tried to recoup their investment by charging tenants well over the odds for social housing. The experiment was a resounding failure.

  Now these houses are an architect’s delight. Cate finds a two-bedroom flat on an estate agent’s website for over a million pounds. Who would have thought, she wonders, who would have guessed that this futuristic little world would be hidden away here behind an Edwardian mansion?

  She looks behind her and is suddenly aware that she is entirely alone. There is not a soul around. She hears the wind talking to her through the leaves of the trees that surround this strange enclave. They are telling her to go. Now. That she should not be here. She walks faster, and then faster still, until she is almost running across the grassland, past the houses, down the hill, back to the high street, to the beauty salons and the boutiques and the shops that sell nonsense for far too much money.

  As she passes the Tube station her eye is caught by a poster for the local news-sheet, the Hampstead Voice; ‘SEX ATTACK IN BROAD DAYLIGHT’.

  She stops, stares at the words, the adrenaline still fizzing through her veins. She wonders for a moment if the headline is from a parallel reality, where she stayed too long in the place that was telling her to go, whether if she reads the article she will discover that it was her, Cate Fours, fifty-year-old mother of two, brutalised on a desolate 1970s council estate, unable to explain what she had been doing wandering there alone in the middle of the day.

  Then she thinks of Tilly again, as she has done nearly every minute of every day since she first saw her standing in the doorway four nights ago and she wonders if there is maybe some connection between the spate of sex attacks in the local area and what Tilly claimed didn’t really happen on Monday night.