A moment later Barry arrives. He smells overwhelmingly of aftershave, not the fresh sporty sort of stuff that comes in blue glass bottles from the airport, but the heady, dark sort of stuff that comes in brown bottles from ancient shops in Mayfair backstreets. He says, ‘Good morning, Owen,’ but doesn’t make eye contact with him.

  The interview is set up in the way with which Owen is becoming very familiar. He clears his throat, takes a sip of water from a polystyrene cup, puts it back on the table.

  ‘So, Owen. Today is Monday the twenty-fifth of February. It’s now been eleven days since Saffyre went missing. The blood we found on your bedroom wall—’

  ‘It’s not my client’s bedroom wall,’ Barry says stiffly. He has to correct them every single time. ‘It’s a wall that is part of a house that has lots of other people in it. It does not belong uniquely to my client’s bedroom.’

  ‘No, sorry, let me rephrase that. The blood we found on the wall beneath your bedroom window … it was at least a week old.’

  ‘Possibly older,’ Barry says. This is all being recorded and he’s not going to let them get away with sloppy wording that might incriminate Owen. ‘As my client has mentioned on many occasions now, we have no idea exactly how old that blood is and he was aware of teenagers habitually using the plot on the other side of that wall as a place to gather to take drugs. This girl, who we now know had an association with the family opposite the plot, might well have been using the space herself to hang out in. She might have been high and behaving stupidly one night and injured herself. The blood on that wall proves nothing. Nothing at all other than that Saffyre Maddox was in the vicinity of my client’s house at some point over the past couple of weeks.’

  DI Angela Currie sighs. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Indeed. But the fact remains that Saffyre’s blood was found on a wall beneath your bedroom window and the fact that she was in the vicinity of your home at roughly the time of her disappearance is significant enough for us to pursue the issue, relentlessly if need be. We would not be doing our jobs properly if we didn’t. So, Owen, it’s been eleven days since she was last seen, by you, outside the house opposite yours.’

  ‘It wasn’t her,’ he says. ‘I know that now. I keep replaying it and replaying it and the more I think about it the more I know it wasn’t her. It was a boy.’

  He sees DIs Currie and Henry exhale heavily. ‘It was a person, according to your previous statement, matching the description of the missing girl.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Owen, ‘exactly. Which doesn’t mean it was her. It could have been anyone matching the description of the girl. Everyone looks the same with a hood up.’

  DI Currie doesn’t respond to this. Instead she slowly, deliberately, pulls a sheaf of papers from a folder on the table in front of her. She spends a moment looking at the papers, an act of pure, blatant theatre. Owen knows this now.

  ‘Owen,’ she says, showing him the papers. ‘Do you remember telling us that you weren’t sexually attracted to teenage girls?’

  He feels a flush of blood to his face. He can sense something bad coming his way. He clears his throat and says, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you remember a girl called Jessica Beer?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The name doesn’t ring a bell?’

  ‘No,’ he says again, more forcefully.

  ‘Well, Jessica Beer remembers you, Owen. She was one of your students back in’ – she refers to the paper in her hand – ‘back in 2012. She was seventeen years old. She’s twenty-three now and yesterday I went to see her. We chatted. And she told me about a very worrying incident.’

  ‘What? Sorry? Jessica who?’ He peers at the paper but can’t see anything to explain what’s about to happen here.

  ‘Jessica Beer. She claims …’ DI Currie leaves a dramatic pause – she would not be winning any Oscars any time soon: ‘… that you forced yourself on her during a Christmas party on college premises and told her that you’d been watching her in your lessons and that she was pretty. That she was … perfect. She claims you touched her face and told her that her skin was radiant. That you breathed in her ear.’

  ‘What! No! That never happened!’

  DI Currie pulls a photograph from her folder and turns it to show to him. It’s a very pretty mixed-race girl with soft brown curls, a freckled nose, full rose-pink lips. She looks familiar. But Owen can’t recall her entirely. It’s possible she’d been a student of his, but then this was six or more years ago and he’s had hundreds of students in the intervening years, hundreds of pretty girls. He might well have taught this girl, but one thing was for sure, he had never, ever said those things to her.

  ‘This never happened,’ he said definitively. ‘I may well have taught her, and that I can’t remember, but I did not talk to this girl, or any girl, ever, in such a fashion. I just wouldn’t.’

  ‘Were you drunk on the night of the Christmas party in 2012, Owen?’

  ‘Oh my God, how am I supposed to remember. It was seven years ago!’

  ‘Just over six years ago, to be more accurate, Owen.’

  ‘Six, seven, whichever, how can I possibly be expected to remember? I do not remember this girl; I do not remember this party.’

  But Owen does remember this party. He remembers it very well. This party was the reason why he hadn’t gone to a Christmas party for years afterwards. He had got horribly drunk that year. Some boys who’d been quite friendly to him all term long had plied him with tequila shots. The room had started spinning at one point; he remembered standing in the middle of the dance floor staring up at a rotating disco ball and then realising that the whole room was rotating and he was rotating and he’d run to the toilets and thrown up in a cubicle. Luckily no one had seen him or heard him and he’d emerged half an hour later slightly grey and clammy and immediately gone home. But there’d been no incident with a girl. There simply hadn’t. He hadn’t done that. He wouldn’t and he didn’t.

  ‘This girl’s lying,’ he says. ‘Whoever she is. She’s lying. Just like those other girls.’

  ‘Looks a bit like Saffyre, doesn’t she?’ says DI Currie, turning the photo back to face her and pulling a really annoying face, as though this was the first time she’d noticed the similarity.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Owen replies. ‘I barely know what Saffyre looks like.’

  ‘Here.’ She turns a photo of Saffyre to face him.

  ‘Similar colouring,’ he says. ‘That’s about all.’

  ‘Same age. Both very pretty.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ says Owen, banging his hands down on the table. ‘I literally don’t know who this girl is. I have never seen her before. I’ve never seen this girl before either.’ He touches the photo of Saffyre. ‘I don’t like hurting people. I don’t like touching people. I don’t approach women sexually, ever, which is the exact reason why I’m thirty-three and I’ve never had sex. I can’t look at women. Women terrify me. Girls terrify me. The last thing I would do is go anywhere near a pretty girl at a party and start saying slimy things to them. I wouldn’t want to do it and even if I did want to do it, I’d be too scared!’

  ‘But not if you were drunk, Owen. Because that seems to be a unifying feature here, doesn’t it? This incident’ – DI Currie touches the photo of Jessica Beer – ‘at a party, while, according to Jessica’s statement, not sober. Then the girls at college who complained about you – about your behaviour, while at another party, again, not sober. Your unpleasant exchange with Nancy Wade on the street, when you deliberately blocked her path—’

  ‘Or so she claims,’ Barry interjected. ‘We only have her word for that, remember?’

  ‘When she claims you deliberately blocked her path and called her a bitch. That was on Valentine’s night when you, by your own admission, were not sober. So my theory is that maybe, Owen, you are one of those people who behaves extremely out of character when they’ve been drinking, that in normal circumstances you are not the sort of man to approach women or flirt with young girls or touch them inappropriately or toss verbal abuse at women you pass in the street, but that maybe after a few drinks, your guard lowers and this other side of you comes out, this different personality. And that maybe that other side of you, as abhorrent as it might seem to you now, is in fact capable of taking a young girl off the street and bringing them to some kind of harm. And it’s been eleven days now, Owen, eleven days since Valentine’s night and it’s long enough. Don’t you think? Long enough to make everyone suffer. To prevent Saffyre’s family from getting some kind of closure. So, Owen, please, please just think back to that night, when you weren’t sober, when you might have behaved out of character and done something you didn’t mean to do, something that had some kind of momentum of its own. Please, Owen. Tell us what happened. Tell us what you did to Saffyre Maddox.’

  ‘I did not do anything to Saffyre Maddox,’ Owen says, softly, but even as he says it, he feels something small but persistent pushing at the periphery of his consciousness. Like a tiny fruit fly, hovering by his nose. The girl, in the hood. The name Clive. He feels an echo in the soles of his feet. An echo of his footsteps, following the girl in a hoodie, calling to her in the darkness, heading after her into his garden.

  43

  Cate spends the rest of that morning with a cold shiver of dread trapped in her spine, making her shudder over and over again.

  She’s done nothing with the scrunched-up carrier bag and its contents, merely rolled it up and stuffed it behind the linen basket again.

  Cate is supposed to be submitting a first draft of this latest manual to her publishers by the end of the month and she’s nowhere near ready. She sits at her laptop and words an email carefully, explaining that she will be late. She sighs as she presses send; being late is not something she makes a habit of. But she’s too distracted to rush it out; every time she looks at the screen her mind goes blank.

  Instead she switches to her browser and googles ‘sex attacks NW3’. She opens a notepad and takes the cap off a biro.

  The first attack in this spate now assumed to be have been carried out by the same balaclava-clad man was on 4 January, in Pond Street.

  A young woman of twenty-two had her breasts roughly fondled at eleven thirty in the morning by a young man dressed in black who then escaped very quickly on a hired bicycle when someone approached.

  She writes: ‘11.30 a.m., 4 January’.

  The next attack was three days later. A sixty-year-old woman, who also had her breasts grabbed by a young man dressed in black. The attack had left her with bruises. It was at about four o’clock in the afternoon, near the leisure centre, near the school.

  She writes it down.

  The next was on 16 January. This was the one that she and Roan had read about in the papers. A Twenty-three-year-old woman grabbed from behind, sexually assaulted through her clothes; she never saw the man who attacked her but described him as smelling of laundry detergent and having small hands.

  She writes that down too.

  She knows the next two, both on roads very close to here. Both daytime. Both involving grabbing and bruising. And then the latest one, 24 February, at dusk, on the other side of the Finchley Road. Near the cinema. This one the most serious so far, a woman in hospital with injuries.

  She breathes in hard and goes to her online calendar. Here she compares the dates and times with her own activities, desperately searching for something that does not correlate, for proof that nobody in this house could possibly be responsible for the terrible things that have been happening to women in the area.

  She remembers the smell on Roan’s running clothes she’d found in Josh’s bedroom: not washing detergent at all, but sour, musky, ugly.

  She thinks of the boys that Roan treats at his clinic, the boys not yet men who are already fantasising about hurting women.

  She thinks of Josh, his hugs, his unknowability, his silence.

  The shiver goes down her spine again.

  But they are not Josh’s clothes, they are Roan’s clothes, and Roan too has his empty spaces. He is out all day and makes himself uncontactable. At night he runs in black Lycra; sometimes he runs for two hours, sometimes more. He comes back electrified and gleaming. He has secrets. Even if there wasn’t an affair last year, there was something. And there is the Valentine’s card from the child that is the wrong size for the envelope. And the missing girl who used to be his patient, who had been seen outside their house the night she disappeared.

  There is so much. So much that is wrong. And now there is a bag full of foul-smelling Lycra. Now there is a balaclava.

  But she cannot find a date that doesn’t correlate with either her husband or son being the attacker. On every single occasion her husband and her son might possibly have been out of the house.

  She looks at the time. It’s nearly eleven. She imagines Josh at school, Roan at work. Those spaces. The cracks and the gaps where things can get in.

  She picks up her phone and searches her contacts for Elona’s number, Tilly’s mum. She lets her finger hover over the call button for a moment, but loses her nerve. She presses the message icon instead and types a text. Dear Elona. Hope you and Tilly are both well. I just wanted to talk to you about something. Wondered if you were free for a coffee any time soon. Let me know!

  Elona replies thirty seconds later. Sure. I’m free now if that’s any good?

  They meet at the Caffè Nero on the Finchley Road. Elona is very groomed: black hair pulled back into a sculpted ponytail, a black cape with a fur trim, black jeans and high-heeled boots. Cate can’t understand how people can be bothered to be so glamorous. The effort, every day, the attention, the time, the money. Elona hugs her, enveloping her in a miasma of honey-sweet perfume.

  ‘It’s so lovely to see you, Cate,’ she says in her sing-song Kosovan accent. ‘You look well.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Cate says, although she knows she does not.

  ‘Let me get you a coffee. What would you like?’

  Cate doesn’t have the energy to argue about who should be buying the coffee so she just smiles and says, ‘A small Americano please. With warm milk.’

  She settles into an armchair and glances at her phone. There’s a message from Georgia. Mum?

  Then another one: Mum. Can I make a cake tonight? Can you buy flour? And eggs?

  Then two minutes later: And soft brown sugar. Love u.

  Cate replies with a thumbs-up emoji and puts her phone away.

  If anyone had told her a few years ago that one day Georgia would be the least of her problems, she would not have believed them.

  Elona returns with an Americano for Cate and a mint tea for herself. ‘So,’ she says, ‘how’ve you been?’

  ‘Oh, God, you know,’ Cate begins. ‘All a bit high drama. As you may know?’

  Elona nods effusively. ‘I heard, yes.’

  It occurs to Cate that Elona probably cleared her diary in the thirty seconds after receiving Cate’s message.

  ‘So, what’s been going on?’ Elona asks.

  ‘Well, you know they’ve arrested the guy? The one who lives opposite us?’

  ‘Yes. I read that. Wow. And what do you think? Do you think it was him?’

  ‘Well, it certainly looks that way, doesn’t it? Though I read somewhere that it was him who told the police about seeing Saffyre there. Why would he have done that if he did it? If he hadn’t said anything, they’d never have known she was on our street. They’d never have looked in that building plot; they’d never have found her phone case and the blood. It all seems a bit strange.’

  ‘Unless he wanted to get caught?’

  ‘Well, yes, I guess that’s possible. But still, something doesn’t seem quite right to me.’

  ‘So, what’s your theory?’

  Cate laughs nervously. ‘I don’t have one. I just have an anti-theory.’

  Elona smiles, blankly, clearly hoping for more.

  Cate changes the subject. ‘So, how’s Tilly. I haven’t seen her for quite a while.’

  ‘No,’ says Elona, her eyes dropping to the leaves in her tea. ‘No. She’s become a bit of a homebody. Doesn’t really like going out. Probably the weather. You know. The dark nights.’

  ‘When did this start?’ she asks. ‘The not going out?’

  ‘Gosh, I don’t know. A few weeks ago, I suppose. Since the New Year. She’s just …’ She pauses. ‘She just seems happier at home.’

  ‘Does it seem …?’ Cate begins and then pauses to find the right words. ‘Do you think maybe it had anything to do with that night? The night she was leaving ours. When she said the man had grabbed her.’

  Elona looks up at Cate. ‘You know, the thought did occur to me.’

  ‘And?’

  Elona shrugs. ‘She swears blind that nothing happened. That she made it up.’

  ‘It’s weird, though, isn’t it? The timing of it? And now it turns out that all the sex attacks in the area this year were kind of similar to what she originally said happened to her?’

  ‘They are?’

  ‘Yes. It was in the papers. Six since the New Year. All carried out by a young man in black. All involved rough grabbing and groping.’

  Elona looks vaguely appalled.

  ‘I mean, can you see any reason why she might have taken back the claim? Maybe she was scared to go to the police?’

  ‘I honestly don’t know. I mean, we’ve barely spoken about it. I was so so cross with her for wasting everyone’s time like that, for lying. I was so embarrassed by her behaviour, you know, and I’m a single mum and everything she does feels like such a reflection on me, you know, and she thinks so highly of Georgia and of you and your family.’

  ‘She does?’

  ‘Yes. Oh God, yes. So much. She never had a real friend before Georgia. She’s in awe of her. And I think both of us were just a bit, you know, thrown by what happened that night.’

  ‘Oh, honestly, no! She must never worry what we think. Or what Georgia thinks. Georgia is rock solid. Nothing throws her. She’s really thick-skinned. You must tell Tilly that whatever it was that happened that night, whether it was real or not, she can tell Georgia. Georgia would never judge her. No one in our family would judge her. I promise.’