But now as he sits opposite his aunt and thinks about the cruel injustices being played out against him as a single man, an ‘odd’ man, a lonely man, a man who is clearly not decent or honest enough to have found a mate to give him alibis for his heinous crimes against young girls, he feels a yearning for Bryn and his view of the world. Not the stuff about impregnating women against their will, but the stuff about how imbalanced the world was, how it was all geared towards favouring the wrong people for the wrong reasons. He would like to discuss that now with someone who saw the truth. But Bryn has gone – Bryn, or whatever his real name was. He’s disappeared like one of those little felt rabbits in a sleight-of-hand trick. Pouf! And now no one will ever believe him about how he ended up with date-rape drugs in his drawer, that he’d never had any intention of using them.

  He looks back up at Tessie. She’s staring at the top of his head. She says, ‘Do they let you wash in here?’

  He nods.

  ‘Do you want me to bring you some soap? Some nice shampoo?’

  He nods again. ‘Yes,’ he says in a small voice. ‘Please. And, Tessie, can you do something else for me? Please. Can you contact someone for me? The woman I went out with on Valentine’s night? We’d been chatting a lot since. Messaging. And we were supposed to be going out again next week. I just don’t want her to think, you know, that I’ve forgotten about her.’

  ‘Oh Owen. Dear Owen. You’re all over the papers, all over the news. I can guarantee she knows why you haven’t been in touch.’

  He swallows down another burst of anger, closes his eyes and then slowly opens them. ‘Please, though, Tessie. Would you mind? Whether she knows where I am or not, I’d like her to know that I’m thinking about her. That I wish … I wish I wasn’t here, that this wasn’t happening, that things were just … you know. Please, Tessie.’

  She rolls her eyes and takes a notepad from her bag and a pen.

  He gives her Deanna’s email address as it’s the only one of her contact details he can remember off by heart.

  ‘Tell her I think she’s amazing, please, Tessie. Tell her I’m not that person, the person in the papers. Tell her that if she comes to see me, I can explain everything. Tell her to come and see me, Tessie. Please. If you don’t do anything else. Just that one thing. Yes?’

  He watches her close her eyes; he sees the hollows of her cheeks form and then disappear again. ‘Fine,’ she says. ‘Fine. Though I’m not lying on your behalf, Owen. I’m not going to say anything I don’t believe is true.’

  ‘No.’ He shakes his head. ‘Don’t say anything apart from just what I said. Promise me.’

  She sighs and says, ‘Yes. Yes, fine.’ Then she glances at her wristwatch and sighs again. ‘I have to go. It’s my afternoon at the shop. Good God’ – she gets to her feet and grinds her jaw – ‘what on earth am I going to say to people? Because they’ll ask, Owen, they’ll ask.’

  Tessie works one afternoon a week at the Oxfam bookshop in the village. It makes her feel good about herself and her indulgent life. He watches her leave. She doesn’t touch him or attempt any sort of farewell. She just goes.

  The police officer standing in the corner opens the door and leads her out.

  The other police officer, sitting at the end of the table, clears her throat.

  ‘Ready?’ she says to Owen.

  He gets to his feet and follows her to the door.

  The room still smells of Tessie, of dusty velvet and cheap fabric conditioner and Penhaligon’s iris perfume.

  40

  SAFFYRE

  I got home at 6 a.m. on New Year’s Day. Aaron was asleep and Angelo was in the little bed I kept by the side of mine. He got up lazily when he saw me walk in and I picked him up and smelled him and sat him down on the bed next to me. I felt empty. Blank. It was so quiet. All night long I’d fallen in and out of sleep to the sounds of revellers, the wind through the tall branches of the trees, cars going past every few minutes, the chipboard gates creaking, birds twitching. Every time I fell asleep, I’d dream that the fox was there, licking my face, breathing into my ear, and I’d wake up and find myself alone. It was electric; it was cold; I was alive out there in the black of night.

  Now I stared at the dirty white of my bedroom ceiling, the pink paper shade with the cut-out heart shapes that I’d chosen when I was eight years old from Homebase. It came with a matching duvet set and table lamp. I didn’t know who that child was or the person she might have been if Harrison John hadn’t done what he’d done to her when she was ten years old.

  It was silent apart from the thrum of the sleeping building. I thought, I don’t belong here. I belong out there. And once again the other part of me, the part that does her homework and paints her nails and watches The Great British Bake Off, that part of me whispered in my ear and said: ‘Are you sure you’re not mad?’ But I knew I was not mad. I knew I was changing. Becoming. Unfurling.

  I took my things again that night, and slept across the street from Roan Fours. I told Aaron I was sleeping over at Jasmin’s. He just gave me a look, a look that said, ‘I kind of don’t believe you but you’re nearly an adult and you’re close to breaking and I don’t want to be the one to push you over the edge.’

  The night after that I slept at home, just for Aaron’s sake, not for my own, but my soul ached at being trapped indoors, I felt swallowed up by my mattress, my duvet, the warm air swirling around me. I felt claustrophobic, anxious; the sheets were twisted around my legs when I woke up the next morning and for a minute I thought I was paralysed. I felt a sharp feeling of panic right in the pit of my gut. I untwisted my legs from the sheet and sat up panting. I knew I couldn’t spend another night indoors. I knew then that my change was nearly complete. At night I would wait for Aaron to go to bed and then I would leave.

  I didn’t sleep those nights. Barely. I just lay there in the dark feeling my soul fill, my head vibrating, my blood flowing through my veins, warm and vital. I didn’t need to sleep. I was operating on some other level, using some weird energy pumped into me from the moon above me, from the soil beneath.

  At dawn I’d go back to the flat and get ready for school. Aaron had no idea and if he did, he never said anything. He probably thought I had a boyfriend. He treated me like blown glass, like he couldn’t say anything to me. It worked in my favour.

  Then, halfway through January, it happened. It was a moment, I think, that I’d known would happen one day. A moment that had sat just out of my line of sight since I was ten years old. Because in any community, even a community set on the edges of a major arterial junction where six lanes of traffic thunder past morning, noon and night, a community of double-decker buses and high-rise buildings and billboards and banks, there is still a small world in small streets where people’s paths cross and uncross and cross again, where you know people from the schools they went to, from the places their mums shop, from walking the same lines to the same places at the same times, and you know that, even in a community like mine, at some point you will see the person who stuck their fingers inside you when you were ten years old. You just will.

  And there he was, in the cold cloak of early dawn as I turned the corner from Roan’s road on to the Finchley Road. There he was, dressed in black, with his hood up just like mine, a Puffa coat just like mine, a bag slung over his shoulder just like me. There was no other soul around; sodium light from the lamp in between us shone off particles of gauzy morning mist. At first I felt nervous because he was a man and it was dark and we were alone. But then I caught the shape of his face, the heavy brow, the slight dip in his nose as if someone had pressed it in with their thumb.

  Harrison John.

  The boy who wiped out the girl with the pink lampshades.

  He looked at me. I looked at him.

  I saw that he saw me. He smiled. He said, ‘Saffyre Maddox.’

  I said nothing, walked past him fast as I could, looking for the bright lights of early-morning traffic coming down the Finchley Road.

  ‘Saffyre Maddox!’ he called after me. ‘Not going to say hello?’

  I wanted to turn and walk back up the hill, square up to him, breathe into his face, say you filthy, disgusting piece of shit, I hope you die.

  But I didn’t. I kept walking. Kept walking. My heart pounding. My stomach swirling.

  I got home and I scrambled through all the drawers in the kitchen until I found a paper clip. I untwisted it into a small hook and I rolled down my socks. I touched the tip of the hook against my skin. I pulled it back and forth until finally a bead of red appeared, and then another, and another, until finally I felt something stronger than the power of Harrison John.

  41

  February half-term is over. The flat is quiet. Not the same quiet as when the kids are still in bed, not the spring-loaded quietness of bedroom doors yet to be opened, breakfasts and showers yet to be had, but the proper, pure silence of an empty house: coats taken from hooks, bags collected from chairs, empty beds, wet bathmats, children at school, Roan at work, a day ahead of nothing but her.

  Cate should be working but her focus is splintered.

  There was another sex attack the day before. It’s been all over the news because the police have taken the step of issuing safety guidelines to women in the area. The victim this time was a middle-aged woman, walking back from lunch with friends on West End Lane as dusk fell, pulled into the area behind an estate agent’s office just off the main road and ‘subjected to a serious sexual assault’. The attacker was described as white, slim, twenty to forty years old, much of his face covered by a stretchy black covering of the sort that motorcyclists wear under their helmets. The attacker said no words at all during the attack and left the woman in need of medical attention.

  Dusk.

  That was the word in the news article which had jumped out at her. Such a very specific word for such a fleeting part of the day. Immediately, she’d thought about dusk yesterday, when she was prowling around the building plot with her torch on, looking for her missing son. Her missing son who’d returned moments later, starving hungry and with a story of seeing a Dwayne Johnson movie on his own.

  Dusk.

  She goes to the door of her son’s bedroom. Her hand grips the doorknob.

  She pushes the door open. The curtains are drawn, the bed is made, his pyjamas are folded on the pillow. She pulls open the curtains and lets in the weak morning light. She turns on the overhead light. You wouldn’t think anyone lived in this room. Josh has no stuff. While Georgia always has three cups half-filled with stale water on her bedside table, handfuls of jewellery, a book or two, numerous chargers snaked into each other, a sock, a balled-up tissue, a chapstick with the lid missing and a pile of coins on her bedside table, Josh has nothing. Just a coaster.

  Dusk …

  She falls to her knees and peers under his bed. There’s his laptop, plugged into the wall to charge, the wires all neatly tucked away. She pulls it out and rests it on her knees; she won’t sit on his bed as she worries she won’t be able to get his covers as neat as he’s left them and he’ll know she was in here.

  She opens it and switches it on and knows already that the password he used for everything when he was small and she was allowed to know his password (donkey321) will no longer be his password and she will have to find some other way to access his computer. But she got quite good at codebreaking last year when she thought Roan was having an affair. She’d even managed to access his work login. She waits for the screen to wake up and then she types in donkey321. She waits for the error message but instead the computer switches screens and she is in.

  She blinks in surprise and feels a surge of relief. If there was something on his computer that he didn’t want anyone to see he would for sure have changed his password to one his mum didn’t know.

  She clicks through his windows. Worksheets for maths, iTunes, an essay on Animal Farm and a browser with ten tabs open, nearly all schoolwork related. The last tab is for Vue Cinemas and shows the films currently showing at the cinema on the Finchley Road.

  She feels her heartstrings loosen a little.

  There, she thinks, there. Just as he’d said. Gone to the movies.

  She scrolls through the timings. Fighting With My Family. Three twenty p.m. That would have finished well after dusk.

  Then she clicks on his browsing history (she’d done this once on Georgia’s laptop a year or so ago and been flabbergasted by the eclectic range of pornography her then fourteen-year-old daughter had been watching).

  The most recent search term is ‘vue finchley road films today’. She vaguely registers the fact that he hasn’t used his laptop to browse since yesterday morning. The search before that is ‘Owen pick arrest’.

  The search before that is for ‘Owen pick’.

  The search before that is for ‘Owen pick saffyre maddox’.

  The search before that is ‘saffyre Maddox missing’.

  The search before that is ‘saffyre Maddox missing teenager.’

  This is totally understandable.

  Cate has been obsessed with the story of Saffyre Maddox ever since it broke. Hardly surprising, given that Saffyre is a former patient of Roan and that the man who abducted her lives across the street from them. Cate should not be surprised in the least that her son is taking such a keen interest in the story. Her current browsing history, she is sure, would look very similar to his.

  She closes the laptop and slides it carefully back under his bed. Then she goes to his cupboards. Here his clothes are folded into squares and piled neatly. This is also where he keeps schoolwork he doesn’t need to take to school, and his pens and stationery for doing homework on a table that clips flat to the wall when he’s not using it. Why on earth he bothers every day to clear the desktop, clip it to the wall and put everything back into the cupboard, Cate cannot begin to imagine. He is Roan’s child, not hers, in that respect. In the bottom of the cupboard is his linen basket. She decides, while she is here, to empty it. She pulls the basket out of the cupboard and sees, tucked behind it, a carrier bag.

  A scrunched-up bag is not a normal thing to find in Josh’s domain so she takes it out, unties the knot and peers inside. Old sports kit. A strong smell of damp and something worse than damp. Not quite sweat, but something as animal as sweat. She pulls out Lycra leggings: they’re Roan’s. Then a shiny, long-sleeved top with neon orange stripes on the arms. Also Roan’s.

  She pulls out a pair of black socks and a pair of grippy gloves. And then last of all she pulls out a piece of black jersey that she cannot at first identify. She holds it out and turns it this way and that, stretches it out and puts her hand through a hole in the middle of it.

  And then finally she works out what it is.

  It’s a balaclava.

  42

  Every bone in Owen’s body hurts. The mattress he sleeps on at Tessie’s is about a hundred years old. Its springs are gone, it sags in the middle, it’s soft and flaccid, but his body has adjusted to it over the years. The bed in his cell is basically a slab of concrete with a thin mattress on top of it. He can feel his hip bones grinding against it even when he’s sleeping.

  He can’t remember his bed at home, the home where he lived with his mum before she died. He can’t remember if it was soft or hard. He remembered it was a single bed in a single room in the tiny flat that had been all that was left of the family home he’d shared with his parents until he was eleven years old, once it had been sold and split into two. It was in Manor House, a never-going-to-be-gentrified area of north London way out on the Piccadilly line. His mum had made it look really nice because she was good at that sort of thing, but it was essentially a horrible flat. She’d always said, ‘This is your inheritance, it’s all in your name if anything happens to me.’ And then something had happened to her. A brain aneurism, when she was forty-eight. Owen had got home from sixth-form college and found her slumped face down on the kitchen table.

  He’d thought maybe she was drunk, which was a strange thing for him to have thought as she, like him, drank only on very rare occasions.

  The flat hadn’t ended up being much of an inheritance. Once he’d paid off all his mum’s credit-card debts, of which there’d been a very surprising amount, there’d been nothing left. A few thousand pounds.

  And then he’d ended up in Tessie’s spare room with the saggy mattress, which, like everything about his tragic existence, he’d grown used to and come to accept unquestioningly.

  Breakfast is brought to him in his cell: leathery toast and cheap jam, a mug of tea and a hardboiled egg. He wolfs it down, hiding the toast crusts under the paper napkin so that the officer who takes his tray away again won’t see them.

  A few minutes later DI Angela Currie appears outside his cell. She is wearing a fitted dress with big patch pockets on the front, thick tights and boots. She has her hands inside the pockets with her thumbs hanging over the top. She looks very jolly.

  ‘Morning, Owen. How are we today?’

  ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘Nice breakfast?’

  ‘It was OK.’

  ‘Ready to talk some more?’

  Owen shrugs and sighs. ‘Is there anything left to talk about?’

  She smiles. ‘Oh yes, Owen, oh yes. Plenty.’

  The guard unlocks his door and he follows DI Currie through the byzantine corridors to the interview suites. He had a shampoo last night with the things that Tessie dropped off for him. His hair is now clean and his clothes are clean, but he still has a big scab on his forehead from where he accidentally stabbed himself with the scissors and he still has an asymmetric fringe that makes him look slightly psychotic.

  In the interview room he sits himself down in front of DIs Currie and Henry. DI Henry is looking a little the worse for wear today. Apparently he has a newborn and is finding the sleepless nights quite painful. Not that Owen has been chatting to DI Henry about his personal life, but he picks things up when they’re talking between themselves.