His thoughts begin to curl back on themselves, beyond the sunny cell, beyond cutting his fringe in Tessie’s bathroom, beyond the steamed-up windows of his classroom at Ealing College, beyond Tessie’s hand on his shoulder at his mother’s funeral, beyond his mother slumped over the kitchen table, looking as though she was drunk but actually being dead. They curl back to the other version of himself: the pretty little boy who wouldn’t smile for the camera in the modelling agency studio. Who was that little fellow? he wonders now. Who was he and how did he end up here?

  He tries to remember moments of pain that might have brought him to this point. He thinks about the build-up to his parents’ divorce when he was eleven years old. Divorce, he thinks, is damaging for children; everyone knows that. But was there something in particular about the way his parents broke apart that might have led, of all the myriad possible versions of himself, to this one?

  He thinks of the house they once lived in, in Winchmore Hill. A post-war thing with pebble-dashed walls and small windows, a porch full of spider plants, a dark dresser with a phone on it and notepad, a small chandelier. His mother had a thing about chandeliers. He remembers his mother on the bottom step, the phone in her hand, talking to a friend, a crumpled tissue at her nose, saying, ‘I think it’s over this time, Jen, I really do.’

  He remembers the smell of cigarette smoke curling up the stairs to where he sat on the landing. He remembers coming down a minute after the phone call ended and saying, ‘What’s over, Mum?’ and her smiling and stubbing out her cigarette and saying, ‘Nothing, Owen. Nothing at all. Now get back to bed. School tomorrow.’

  But he’d been on high alert after that, watching his parents like a hawk for the thing that would show him what was really happening.

  Suddenly Owen’s flesh crawls as a memory returns to him, something he used to think about all the time but hasn’t thought about for years, not since his mother died, because it sickens him so much.

  He remembers his father coming home from work one night, late, the smell of London pubs about him. Owen saw him from the top of the landing, dropping his keys on to the dark dresser. Unzipping his jacket. He saw him sigh and then pull back his shoulders as if bracing himself for something.

  ‘Ricky?’ His mother’s voice from the front room. ‘Ricky?’

  His father sighing again and then moving towards the door. ‘Hi, love.’

  And then the sound, as his father opened the door of the front room, of music, not TV music, but strange, dreamy music, an American man singing something about a wicked game. His mother saying, ‘Hello, darling, come into my boudoir.’ And Owen tiptoeing down the stairs and peering through the banisters and seeing his mother standing in a room full of candles wearing strange items: underwear with holes cut out, something around her neck, heels four inches high, lips painted red and Owen’s father walking in, his mother grabbing his tie and pulling him towards her saying, ‘I want you to fuck me like I’m a whore.’

  And then the door closing and noises – grunts, bangs, muffled wails – before they stop, very suddenly, and his mother is sobbing and his father walks out of the room, doing up his trousers, his face red and says, ‘Act like a whore, I’ll treat you like a whore.’

  His mother crying, ‘Ricky. Please. Please. I want you. I need you. Please. I’ll do anything!’

  Her mascara running down her cheeks. One breast loose of the cut-out bra. Drooping. Puckered.

  ‘Ricky. Please.’

  His father picking up his coat in the hallway. Picking up his keys. Leaving.

  The man singing about his wicked game.

  The front door shutting.

  Two weeks later Owen’s father left for good. The house was sold. The flat was bought. His mother died. His father hated him. His father’s wife hated him. His aunt hated him. Girls hated him. He lost his job. He got arrested for killing a girl. He developed a taste for prison food.

  Could it be that simple? he wonders. The sight of his mother whoring herself to his father? The rejection by his father of his mother? Was that at the root of everything that had gone wrong since? His fear of women? Of rejection? And if it was that simple, then surely it could be blotted out? Redacted from the story of his life? And then it could start over again. But how? How can he excise that moment? He realises there’s only one way to erase it and that’s to go to the heart of it. To his father.

  He goes to the door of his cell and he bangs on it.

  Willy opens the window flap. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I need to make a phone call,’ he says. ‘Please. It’s very urgent.’

  Willy blinks slowly. ‘I will have to find out.’

  ‘Please. I haven’t made a call yet. I’m allowed one call. And I haven’t had one yet.’

  Willy lets the window flap close and says, ‘I’ll find out. Wait.’

  A moment later Willy is back. He says, ‘Pick up your things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Your clothing and your toiletries. Apparently you are being allowed to leave.’

  ‘What? I don’t …?’

  ‘I don’t know either; I’m just saying what I’ve been told. Please pack up your things. Now. It’s time to go.’

  ‘I don’t understand. What’s happened? Have they found her?’

  ‘Now.’

  Owen packs up his things. He looks at the golden shadows on the cell wall, the dent in the mattress, the neatly folded blanket. He looks at the square of blue sky through the cell window. He thinks of the hours he has spent in this room that feels so much like the only place he has ever known. And yet now, somehow, he is free of it.

  But he knows one thing with a blinding certainty: he is not going back to the other life. He is not going back to Tessie’s flat with the locked doors. He is not going back to being the sort of person that people would think capable of rape and murder. He’s not going back to the incel forums and seedy drinks with raging women-haters.

  Willy opens the door and Owen silently follows him through the corridors, through rooms of people who return things to him and ask him to sign things. Then he is out. On a pavement in Kentish Town. The sun is bright today, a warm sun, a portent of spring, a portent of new beginnings.

  He checks his wallet for a debit card and cash, then puts out his arm and hails a taxi.

  54

  Cate is at Kentish Town police station with Josh. She hasn’t told Roan that they are here. She hasn’t told Georgia. She phoned Josh’s school this morning and told them that he had an emergency medical appointment.

  She perches her bag on her lap and clears her throat nervously, watching the swinging doors in front of her open and shut every few seconds, uniformed and non-uniformed police passing through holding files, bags, coffees, phones.

  She turns to Josh. ‘Are you OK?’

  He nods nervously. He looks like every fibre of his being is resisting the urge to jump to his feet and run.

  Finally, fifteen minutes after they arrive, DI Currie appears.

  ‘Hi, Mrs Fours,’ she says. ‘Thank you so much for coming in. And you are Josh?’

  Josh nods and shakes her hand.

  ‘Follow me this way, if you would. I think I’ve managed to get us an interview room, fingers crossed; we’re crazy busy in here today for some reason.’

  They follow her through a corridor to a door. She knocks and someone answers. ‘This is my partner DI Jack Henry. We’ve been working together on the Saffyre Maddox case. Please, take a seat. Coffee? Tea?’

  Someone goes to get them water and then DI Currie smiles at them each in turn and says, ‘So, Josh. Your mum says you might have some information about the whereabouts of Saffyre Maddox.’

  Cate looks at Josh. He shakes his head, then nods. He says, ‘I don’t know where she is. I just know what happened. That’s all.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Yeah. On Valentine’s night. And I know it was nothing to do with that guy over the road. I know that. But I don’t know where she is. I don’t know where Saffyre is.’

  Cate sees the two detectives exchange a look. DI Currie turns and smiles kindly at Josh. ‘So, were you there? On Valentine’s night?’

  Cate catches her breath because Josh has already told her this and she knows what is coming and it will be worse, she thinks, the second time round.

  He’d come to her this morning, in her room. He’d perched on the end of her bed and said, ‘I have to tell you something. Something really bad.’

  She’d dropped the facecloth she’d just squeezed out to wash her face with and sat down next to him on the bed.

  ‘Tell me,’ she’d said.

  And then he’d told her.

  And her world had fallen into shreds.

  DI Currie continues: ‘And what did you see happen?’

  Josh looks up at her. ‘I didn’t just see it,’ he says. ‘I was part of it. Me and Saffyre. We were trying to stop something happening. And it all went wrong. And then she just ran. She ran away. And I don’t know where she went. And she won’t reply to my messages and I’m scared something bad’s happened to her. I’m so scared.’

  DI Currie inhales slowly. She smiles that slightly wooden smile again and she says, ‘OK, Josh, I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. I think it might be best if you start from the very beginning. From when you first met Saffyre. How you knew her. That kind of thing.’

  Josh throws Cate a quick look and places his hands carefully on top of the table. ‘She was sleeping in the building plot. Across the way. I used to go in there sometimes. Just for some privacy. For some space. You know. And there was a fox.’

  ‘A fox?’

  ‘Yeah. A semi-tame fox. I used to like to sit with it. And then one night I went in there to see the fox and she was there. Saffyre. And she told me she was a former patient of my dad’s.’

  ‘Did she tell you why she was there?’

  Josh looks at Cate. She squeezes his hand encouragingly.

  ‘She was there because she’d been watching my dad. Watching my family. I don’t really know why. And I think she had issues. Like, claustrophobia, or something? She couldn’t sleep in her own bed. So she slept outdoors, under the stars.’

  ‘And why the fascination with your father, do you think?’

  Cate squeezes his hand once more.

  ‘I think, at first, it was because she felt abandoned by him? She was in his care for, like, three years or something? From when she was a child? And then she felt like he let her go before he’d fixed her. And she wasn’t ready to let go. So she kind of followed him about a bit, and watched him. Wanted to still be part of his life. And then, while she was watching him, she worked out that he was …’ Josh gulps. ‘He was having an affair.’

  Cate feels the encouraging smile fix hard on her face.

  She remembers the sickening thump of it to her chest when Josh had told her earlier this morning. Followed rapidly by the sickening draining-away feeling of the inevitability of it. Of course Roan was having an affair. Roan had probably always been having an affair. For all three decades of their lives together. A continuous succession of interleaving affairs from Marie right through to Alicia. Of course, she’d thought. Of course.

  ‘And then,’ Josh continues, ‘I think she became fixated on him, on what he was doing, and on us, on his family. I think it was almost like she was watching over all of us. But that night, the first night we met, we got talking. It was really weird. We just kind of opened up to each other. We talked for ages. She had all these issues, about something that happened to her when she was a child. And she had this idea of how she could cure herself. And I said I’d help her. And that was when it all started kind of … going wrong …’

  ‘Going wrong?’

  ‘Yes. Kind of really wrong.’

  55

  Owen’s dad’s house looks just like the house they lived in in Winchmore Hill: post-war, small leaded windows, a front garden, a porch, a stained-glass sunray above the front door. Owen’s never been here before. Just written the address on birthday cards and Christmas cards. He pays the taxi driver and he heads up the path. His dad used to work in the civil service but is retired now.

  The doorbell chimes electronically when he presses it. He clears his throat and he waits. A shadow appears through the dimpled glass of the front door. Owen breathes in, hoping it’s his dad and not his dad’s wife. The door opens and yes, it’s his dad. He watches his face splinter into a hundred different pieces, sees it go from surprise, to fear, to horror.

  ‘Owen, my God, what are you doing here?’

  His dad looks older than he remembers. He only retired last year but he seems to have aged five years since then. His hair had once been a mass of different shades of brown and silver and white, but now it’s nearly all white.

  ‘They let me go,’ he says.

  ‘The police?’

  ‘Yes. Just now. They let me go.’

  ‘So … what? You didn’t do it, then?’

  ‘No, Dad. No. God. Of course I didn’t do it.’ Owen peers over his father’s shoulder. ‘Can I come in?’

  His dad sighs. ‘It’s not really a good time, Owen, to be honest.’

  ‘Dad, let’s face it, it’s never a good time for you. It never, ever is. But I tell you what, I’ve just spent nearly a week in a police holding cell being interrogated about a crime I had nothing to do with. I’ve had my face slapped all across the front pages of all the papers and been defamed by people who don’t even know me. And now I’ve been exonerated, been told I’m a free man, that I’ve done nothing wrong and allowed out into the world to get on with my life. So maybe, just maybe, now is a good time for me.’

  His dad drops his head slightly. When he lifts it again, his eyes look watery. He says, ‘Come on then. But I don’t have long. I’m really very sorry.’

  The house is warm. Every wall is painted a different colour. There are neon signs on the walls: ‘GIN THIS WAY’, ‘LOVE’, ‘OUR HOUSE’. A rainbow. A rearing unicorn that changes colour as it rears.

  ‘Gina loves her colour,’ says his dad, leading him into the front room. This has a small bow window, plantation shutters, pink velvet sofas scattered with cushions embroidered with jungle animals and more slogans. ‘Sit down,’ he says. ‘Please.’

  He doesn’t offer Owen a drink. But Owen doesn’t care.

  ‘Dad,’ he says. ‘I’ve been doing a lot of thinking while I’ve been locked up. About how I got myself into that position. How I am the way I am. You know?’

  His dad shrugs. He’s wearing a grey jumper and navy trousers and with his silver hair he looks like a glitch in the relentless colour of the room.

  ‘You know what I’m talking about, Dad. You know I’ve never been quite right. Since being a little boy. But I’m not a little boy any more. I’m a man. I’m thirty-three. Nearly thirty-four. The worst thing that could ever happen to an innocent man just happened to me, because of the way I am. And you abandoned me. You let me leave your flat that night, eighteen years old, just buried my mother, you let me leave. Why did you let me leave?’

  His father shuffles slightly on the pink velvet. ‘It seemed for the best,’ he said. ‘You know. That flat was too small for all of us. We had a young child. You weren’t happy there …’

  ‘I wasn’t happy there because I was made to feel unwelcome. So unwelcome.’

  ‘Well, there might be a shred of truth in that. But it wasn’t personal. It was the situation we all found ourselves in. And when Tessie said she’d take you—’

  ‘You know what Tessie’s like, though, Dad. You know she never liked me. She doesn’t let me in her living room. Did you know that? I’m not allowed in her living room. And I’m her nephew. Why? Why didn’t you want me?’

  ‘I told you, Owen. It was nothing personal.’

  ‘Yes, Dad, yes, it was. It’s all been personal. All of it. Everything that ever happened to me has been personal. Because people don’t like me.’

  ‘Oh, now, Owen, that’s nonsense. I like you. I like you very much.’

  ‘Dad. Tell me what happened between you and Mum. Why did you split up? Was it because of me?’

  ‘What? No! Goodness, no. Nothing to do with you. We were just … we were mismatched. That was all. She wasn’t … enough. In some ways. She was too much in others. She wanted another baby. But it didn’t happen. She went very into herself. Very deeply into herself.’

  ‘You know,’ Owen begins slowly, ‘I saw something once. When I was about eleven. I saw Mum, in the living room, wearing sexy lingerie. There were candles. She pulled you in. And then …’

  Owen’s dad sighs. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I did tell her. I told her you might walk in. I told her it was stupid.’

  ‘You called her a whore. And then you split up after that. Was she a whore? My mum? Is that why you left us?’ He knows the answer, of course he does, but he needs to hear his dad say it.

  ‘Your mother? Oh, God, no, of course not!’

  ‘So why did you call her a whore?’

  ‘Oh, Owen. God. I don’t even remember saying it.’

  ‘You said, Act like a whore, I’ll treat you like a whore.’

  Owen feels a muscle twitch in his cheek as he waits for his dad to respond.

  ‘Did I say that?’

  ‘Yes. You did.’

  ‘Well. It was a bad time for us. You know. We were drifting apart. She knew I’d met someone. She was … I suppose she was desperate. Trying anything to keep me. And there’s something so dreadful about a desperate woman, Owen. So dreadful.’

  They both fall silent for a moment. Then his dad says, ‘You know I loved your mum, Owen. I loved her very much. And you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes. Leaving you behind killed me.’

  ‘Did it?’

  ‘Of course it did. You were my boy. Just on the cusp of it all. Just about to blossom. But I was under pressure. Gina wasn’t getting any younger. She wanted to start trying for a family immediately. She pulled me, really pulled me very hard, away from you both. And I can see now that that wasn’t easy for you.’