‘Something like that happened to me,’ I said. ‘Someone took something from me. And I let them.’

  ‘What was it?’

  I let a beat of silence pass. Then I talked.

  ‘When I was ten years old, this boy in the year above groomed me. He was the tallest boy in the year. He had two younger sisters in the school who he was really protective of. He was naughty but the teachers all loved him. And he kind of picked me out. When we played dodgeball at breaktime he’d tell the other year sixes to get out my way. To let me have my turn. And he’d give me these looks like: Don’t worry, I’ve got your back. He made me feel really special. And then one day …’ I stopped briefly to step back from a wave of emotion. ‘One day he beckoned me into this little section of the playground where the receptions usually played, but they were all in their classroom or something and he said, Do you want to see something magic? And I said, Yes, yes and I followed him in and he said, You need to squat down, like this, and he squatted down to show me and I did what he said and I was looking up at him like, yes! I’m squatting! Now show me the magic! And then he … It was so quick. He inserted his fingers inside me and it hurt, it really hurt and I said, Ow! And he said, It’s OK. It only hurts the first time. After that the magic happens. He stroked my hair and then he took his hand away from me and he showed it to me and he smiled and he said, It’ll be better next time. I promise.’

  It felt like a belt had been squeezed around my gut, and with every word I spoke, it was loosened a bit. By the time I got to the end I felt weirdly like I could breathe. Even though my eyes were full of tears and my head ached with the sadness of that little girl waiting for the magic that never ever came, I could breathe. Three times I let him do that to me. And then school finished for the summer and Harrison left and I never saw him again. But he stayed, inside my head, inside my DNA, my marrow, my breath, my blood, in every single part of me. He stayed. My tumour.

  Josh licked the Rizla and stuck it down, twisted the tip, stuck in a tiny roll of cardboard to make a filter. He reached back into his coat pocket and brought out a lighter.

  ‘What a fucking bastard,’ he said. ‘That’s just so sick. So sick.’

  ‘Yeah. It was. But guess what? I saw him the other day. I saw the boy who did that to me.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Josh. ‘Shit. Where?’

  ‘There.’ I pointed down the hill. ‘He was just coming up from the Finchley Road. I was going down. He said my name. He recognised me and he said my name and it was like … It felt like the playground all over again. Like he had the right to me in some sort of way, like he was entitled to me, to my body, to my name. You know? And for a day or two I felt myself going backwards, like I’d climbed the top of a mountain and then lost my footing and started slipping back and was trying to find something to grab hold of to stop me slipping but there was nothing there. And then I found something.’

  Josh looked at me wide-eyed, his face lit with orange shadows from the flame of the lighter he was using to light the spliff. ‘What?’

  ‘Revenge. I found revenge.’

  ‘Oh my God. What did you do?’

  ‘Nothing. Not yet. But I just know that that’s the only way for me now. The only way to get him out of my DNA. I need to hurt him.’

  Josh brought the spliff to his lips and inhaled. He narrowed his eyes and he nodded. ‘You really do,’ he said.

  I glanced at him quickly. I’d just put something into words that had been buried away so far inside me that I hadn’t even known what it was until I’d actually said it. I needed to know what it looked like to another person.

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Yeah. Totally. He’s probably still out there abusing people to this day. If he was doing this when he was eleven, getting away with it, then …’

  I looked at Josh again. He offered me the spliff. I shook my head.

  And then we both turned at a sound from the undergrowth. Two amber dots of light. The shimmer of red pelt. A snout held to the air. I put my hand into the outside pocket of my rucksack for the dog treats I now kept in there all the time. I opened up the packet towards the fox and he came.

  I laid the treats out around us and we watched as he picked each one up in turn, never once looking at us.

  ‘I want to help you,’ said Josh. ‘Help you get your revenge. Please. Can I help you?’

  The fox sat down and looked at my bag expectantly. His tongue darted out and he licked his lips.

  I looked at Josh.

  I said, ‘Yes. Please.’

  45

  ‘How much longer can they keep me here?’

  Barry shuffles some paperwork out of his briefcase. ‘Now they’ve charged you, as long as they like.’

  ‘But they haven’t found any new evidence. I mean, they can’t take this to court based on what little they’ve got.’

  ‘No. But they can keep trying, and believe you me, Owen, they are raking up every single strand of your life, every filament, until they find the thing they’re looking for. And meanwhile they’re going to keep dragging you back into that room and asking you questions until you crack.’

  ‘Crack?’ says Owen, incredulously. ‘But I’m not going to crack. How can I crack when I didn’t do it?’

  But as he says the words, a curtain of doubt falls across his consciousness. His mind keeps taking him back to a moment he’s not even sure actually happened. The moment just after he saw the person across the street. The moment just before he thought he’d turned and gone indoors and gone to bed.

  Because he cannot actually remember turning and going back indoors.

  And since this morning’s interview, Owen’s turned over every night of his life when he’s been out drinking and realised that frequently all he can remember are flashes of action, but none of the bits in between.

  He can’t remember journeys home. He can’t remember folding up his clothes. He can’t remember who ‘Bill’ was whose phone number he found in his pocket the night after a leaving drinks a couple of years ago. He can’t remember buying the bottle of whisky he’d found in a carrier bag on his bedroom floor once with a paper receipt with his card details on it, proving that he’d been into a branch of Tesco Metro and carried out the full transaction in person. He can’t remember stroking girls’ hair on the dance floor. Flicking sweat at them.

  He can’t remember telling a girl called Jessica with soft skin that she was pretty. And he definitely can’t remember going to bed on Valentine’s night. He knows he woke up in his bed wearing his shirt and one sock. He knows he slept late. He knows he had a hangover. He remembers the girl who’d called him a creep, he remembers the man with the white dog and he remembers the girl in the hoodie. But he can’t remember the rest.

  And that picture keeps flashing in and out of his head: a figure, passing by him outside his door, heading towards the back of the house. It could have been her, the girl in the hoodie. It could have been someone else. Or it could be just a ridiculous fragment of his imagination, something his psyche has conjured up to deal with the trauma of his situation. You read about it all the time, about people confessing to things they haven’t done. Is this how it happens? he wonders. Is it your own brain that does it to you, that plants things there to frame you, like a bent copper?

  He stares down at his hands. They look alien to him, someone else’s hands attached to his arms. He’s starting to lose any sense of himself or who he should be or what he’s meant to be doing or who he ever was. He tries to place himself back in that Italian restaurant with Deanna, tries to imprint the way she looked at him that night, over the way DI Currie looks at him in the interview room. If only he could hold on to that, then maybe this nightmare would end.

  Barry strokes his fat silk tie and says, ‘There’s a girl missing. You’re all they’ve got. And you’re looking like a good bet to them. It’s irrelevant whether or not you did it at this point. They’re not letting you go anywhere until they have to.’

  ‘I didn’t do it, you know.’

  Barry doesn’t reply.

  ‘I didn’t do it.’

  Barry narrows his eyes at Owen. ‘Do what?’ he says. ‘What didn’t you do?’

  ‘Hurt that girl. I did not hurt that girl.’

  Barry doesn’t speak for a while. Then he looks Owen hard in the eye and he says, ‘Well, Owen, the time for you to prove that is right now. Prove it, Owen. Tell me something incontrovertible. Tell me something that’ll get you out of here. Please. For both our sakes.’

  ‘So,’ says DI Currie, who is beginning to lose her fresh-faced glow as the investigation drags out. ‘Owen. Please, I know we’ve been over all of this. But it’s worth going over it again. The more we talk about it the higher the chance of you regaining some kind of memory. Please, tell us again about the night of the fourteenth of February.’

  Owen exhales loudly. He can’t go through all of this again, he simply cannot. ‘What about Bryn,’ he says. ‘Have you still not found him?’

  She smiles crisply at him. ‘No,’ she says. ‘We have not.’

  ‘Well, I wish you would. He should be in here. Not me. He’s the sicko. He’s the weirdo. He’s probably out there raping women right now, while you’re sitting here asking me the same questions, over and over and over again.’

  DI Currie pauses. She looks at Owen through narrowed eyes and then she says, ‘Fine, Owen. Fine. If you can tell us one thing about “Bryn” that will help us to locate him, then please, do feel free to do that. Whenever you’re ready. Please.’ She leans back in her chair and appraises him frostily.

  Owen sighs. He rubs at his face and tries to recall something, anything that Bryn might have said to out himself. He thinks back to the details of that first blog post he read. Bryn sitting in a pub on a snowy day watching the Chads and Stacys. He squeezes at his consciousness to remember more. The Dickensian outline of the pub in the swirling snow, the glow of the old lamps hanging outside and the carriage driveway where the horses were once tethered and the name of the pub had been changed when it was gentrified and before that it was the …

  The Hunters’ Inn.

  He grabs the edge of the table and says. ‘The town where he lives. It has a gastropub. A new gastropub. It used to be called the Hunters’ Inn. It’s on a common. Opposite a pond. With ducks. It’s his local. He goes there all the time. If you could find the pub, you’ll find him. He’s got big curly hair. He’s really small. He wears a blue jacket with a stain on the front. Ask anyone in there who he is. They’ll know. He’s very distinctive.’

  He sees DI Currie roll her eyes very slightly. She had not expected him to supply any useful information and she’s annoyed that he has.

  ‘We’ll look into that, Owen. Leave that with us. But, Owen, even if we find this “Bryn” character somehow – him having deleted his blog and his presence on every forum you claim he used to frequent – even if we find him and we ask him about the Rohypnol, what do you think he’s going to say? Do you think he’s likely to tell us what you want him to tell us, that he gave it to you against your will, that you had no intention of using it? Owen, if this man exists and if we find him, he will deny all knowledge of knowing you at all.’

  ‘But his fingerprints. They’ll be on the jar. And have you asked the pub? The pub in Euston? Have you asked to see their CCTV yet? For that night? That will prove that he knows me. And it might show him giving me the drugs.’

  ‘Yes, but what you don’t seem to understand, Owen, is that none of that makes any difference. The fact of the matter is that you had date-rape drugs hidden in your bedroom and frankly we really don’t care where you got them from or what you got them for. If you want to prove to us that you didn’t abduct Saffyre Maddox and cause some harm to come to her on the night of February the fourteenth, then I’m afraid you’re going to need to try another tack entirely.’

  Owen glances at Barry who looks at him as if to say, ‘What did I tell you?’

  He draws in his breath and blinks. Then he looks straight at DI Currie and he says, ‘Please tell me what you think happened to Saffyre? I would really like to know. What do you think I did to her? How did I get this girl, this quite tall girl, to wherever it is you think I took her? Me, on my own. How did I drag her through the streets of Hampstead at midnight without being noticed? On Valentine’s night, the streets full of people? I don’t have a car. I’m not particularly strong. I’d really like you to share your theories with me. Because honestly, from where I’m sitting, you’re grabbing at straws.’

  DI Currie purses her lips. ‘Owen,’ she says. ‘We are doing our jobs. We are exploring many, many avenues of inquiry. Trust us. And we have many theories about what happened to Saffyre and I can assure you we would not be paying thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money to keep you here if we did not have a strong case to prove that you know what happened to Saffyre. So, Owen, once again, from the top, please talk us through the events of the night of the fourteenth of February as far as you recollect them. Starting with leaving the house to meet a woman called Deanna Wurth at a restaurant in Covent Garden.’

  Owen lets his head drop into his chest. Then he lifts it and says, ‘At around six p.m. I left the house and walked down the hill towards Finchley Road Tube station …’

  46

  Cate sits waiting for Roan to return. The piece of paper sits in front of her. Aaron had left it. She still wasn’t sure why he hadn’t taken it straight to the police. Some kind of misguided, misplaced loyalty to Roan, she suspected. It was as if he’d been hoping she’d offer him a palatable explanation.

  She places it side by side with her own piece of paper, pulled from the pad she’d been making notes on earlier. Her eyes cast back and forth between them, taking in the similarities, and the one big difference. Her hands shake slightly as she smooths the pages out.

  She glances at the kitchen clock. Seven eighteen. Where is he?

  She’s almost 100 per cent sure now, almost positive that something unthinkable has been happening. She’d felt her flesh crawl slightly when her son had hugged her this afternoon when he got back from school.

  ‘Are you OK, Mum?’ he’d asked, his blue eyes full of concern.

  ‘I’m fine. Just think I might be coming down with something. Don’t want to pass my germs to you.’

  He had a copy of Metro with him. He waved it in front of her and pointed at the headline. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘they still don’t know what happened to Saffyre.’

  There was a strange intimacy, Cate noticed, in the way he said Saffyre’s name.

  ‘Did you ever meet her?’ she’d asked, casually.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Saffyre. Did you ever meet her? I mean, she lived over the road from your school. And apparently she did classes at that martial-arts place you go to. It’s possible you might have met her?’

  He’d shaken his head. Said, ‘No. Definitely not.’ Then, ‘What’s for dinner?’

  Now she looks again at the piece of paper in front of her. The piece of paper with her son’s name on it. Found in Saffyre’s joggers. And not just her son’s name, but the dates and locations of all the sex attacks in the area since the New Year. The same as the dates on her own sheet of paper. With one difference: Saffyre’s list includes 21 January. The papers have not reported a sex attack on 21 January. But according to Cate’s diary, 21 January was the day Tilly claimed to have been attacked outside their house.

  In a neat cursive script underneath the dates are several seemingly random names.

  Clive.

  Roan.

  Josh.

  Alicia.

  ‘I just thought,’ Aaron had said, ‘that maybe it meant something. I saw in the papers that you had a son called Josh. I mean, I know it’s a popular name. But still. Would you be able to ask your son? Ask him if he knows what it means? If he knows her?’

  The significance of the dates had hit her immediately. She’d said, ‘Sure, I’ll ask him,’ and tried to keep the breathlessness from her voice. The moment he’d gone she’d torn the page from her notepad and compared them. Her hand had gone to her throat.

  She’d walked straight into Josh’s bedroom and pulled the linen basket out of his wardrobe. The plastic bag was gone. She’d taken Josh’s schoolbooks from the shelves and flicked through them, frantically, with no idea what she was looking for. Who were Clive, and Alicia? Why did Saffyre have Roan and Josh’s names written on a piece of paper with the dates of the sex attacks? What was Saffyre doing outside their house on the night she disappeared?

  She’d found nothing in her son’s bedroom. Nothing new on his browsing history. Georgia had got home from school first, gone straight to her room to strip off her uniform, tied an apron on over joggers and a sweatshirt, opened up a recipe on the iPad, propped it up in the kitchen and started to bake. Cate had circled her distractedly, clearing things away, loading them into the dishwasher, interjecting occasionally into her daughter’s high-octane monologue about how she wanted her bedroom decorated at the house, how maybe it should be dark, like, darkdark, maybe even black, or off black, or, like, totally the other way, shades of white, like her bedroom here, but dark is cosier, isn’t it?

  Josh had got home an hour later and gone straight to his room after greeting Cate.

  The cake is on the counter now, iced in a chocolate buttercream and decorated with crushed Flake bars. It gapes open on one side where Georgia has already cut herself a slice, showing the vanilla insides.

  There’s a pasta bake in the oven. The smell makes Cate feel slightly nauseous.

  She glances at the clock again.

  Seven thirty-one.

  ‘Mum!’ It’s Georgia. ‘When’s dinner ready?’

  ‘Soon,’ she calls back. ‘When Dad gets back!’