He closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. He can feel the supressed rage from his meeting earlier start to rise through his body like mercury. He thinks of Monique and Maisy; they’re not even particularly good-looking yet they act as though he should be so grateful to them for the warped attention they pay him. Maisy’s actually fat (though no doubt thinks of herself as ‘curvy’ in the modern parlance. A curve only exists where a body goes in at the middle as far as Owen’s concerned, not when it sticks out).

Then he thinks about the previous evening, about that stupid girl who’d got off the Tube at the same time as him, who’d crossed the Finchley Road at the same time as him, who’d taken the same turning off the Finchley Road as him and then acted like he was about to jump on her just because he dared to live on the same street as her. He’d seen her take out her phone and call someone, the breathlessness of her voice, the little turns of her head over her shoulder every few minutes. She’d honestly thought he was deliberately following her. As if he’d have any interest in her. She was just a child. Owen has no interest in children. Owen likes proper women, mature women who grew up when he grew up, women who have good jobs and wear nice clothes and don’t dress like vagrants as teenage girls seem to these days.

The girl’s mother had been waiting in the doorway for her, her face all screwed up with nerves as she ushered her inside, safe and sound.

No nasty men in here, darling.

Owen feels his nails dig into the flesh of his palm and loosens his fist. He stares at the red half-moons and rubs them absentmindedly with his thumb. Then he turns his attention back to the screen and scrolls to the bottom of the article, to the comments. Owen loves the comments, the grey places where the dusty trolls live; he loves to see how low some people will stoop to get the endorphin rush of a reaction. He’s been known to do it himself on occasion. It can feel like sport at the time, though afterwards he feels a sort of pathetic remorse. What has he contributed to the great vibrant soup of humanity? Nothing whatsoever.

There are some angry men in the comments section of this particular article, but one in particular catches Owen’s eye. His user name is YourLoss and he seems articulate and well informed. He has been through this himself, he says:

My colleague, who, might I say, was no oil painting, decided that my attempts to offer her advice about her love life (and I can tell you, all this woman ever talked about was her love life. I was locked in a small office with her and another woman who literally talked about men all day long) were actually meant as sexual overtures. And no, of course she did not say this to my face. Of course not, because that would just be civilised and human. No. Straight to Human Resources. They offered her counselling. They offered me nothing but dirty looks and assumptions of guilt. They never proved anything and I kept my job. But this woman asked to be moved to another area of the business, while her colleague swapped offices with someone across the landing and was replaced by a man. This man has a beard and looks at me in disdain. He puts soya milk in his coffee and refers to homosexuals as LGBTABCDXYZs or what the fuck EVER. He has clearly been radicalised by some rampant feminazi in his life. The stupid thing is that I genuinely believe in women’s rights. I believe women should earn the same as men (providing they work as hard as men). I believe they should be allowed to go off and have babies and then come back to work (providing they don’t keep taking time off to go and see little Sally in her nativity play, leaving all their colleagues knee-deep in the shit). I believe they should be free to go out at night and get drunk and wear short skirts without being raped. So yeah, I’m a feminist too. But I’m also a realist. The pendulum has swung waaaay too far imo. It’s time to throw a spanner into the pendulum, stop its trajectory, send it back a little our way. No wonder men want to be women these days. What teenage boy seeing what the future has in store for him wouldn’t prefer to be a lady, to have all the rights and all the protection? Who’s protecting the men? Nobody. Nobody gives a shit about us. It’s time, people, it’s time …

YourLoss’s comment ends there, on something of a cliffhanger. Time for what? Owen wonders. Time for what?

Owen goes to the kitchen to get himself a cup of tea. He stands with his back against the counter as he waits for the kettle to boil. The tiled floor is icy cold beneath his socked feet. There’s a huge curtain of thick cobweb hanging across the top of the kitchen window. Tessie used to have a cleaner but she died three years ago and was never replaced. Owen does what he can, but that doesn’t extend to climbing up stepladders with a feather duster.

He thinks about YourLoss’s post as he waits. He feels strangely energised by it. He senses a connection with the author: a man of a similar age to him, living somewhere bourgeois in the south, dealing with the aftermath of being wrongly and unfairly accused of sexual misconduct by a vile-sounding woman. The kettle clicks off and he makes his tea. He opens a cupboard and takes out a packet of Tessie’s special Italian biscuits. She’s not due back for a week; they’ll be stale by then. She’ll probably have a little dig about it, but he doesn’t care. He’s got bigger things to worry about right now than Tessie’s precious biscuits.

Early on Tuesday morning, five days after his suspension from work, a man appears at Owen’s door.

He is tall, six feet four or so. He towers over Owen and Owen immediately feels threatened.

‘Good morning, sir, I’m DI Robert Burdett. I’m investigating an incident, last night.’

An incident. That word again.

‘Are you, Mr Owen …’ He examines his notepad. ‘Pick?’

‘Yes.’

‘Great, thank you. Yes. A young girl, a teenage girl, was sexually assaulted last night. Here.’ He turns and gestures towards the crossroads. ‘Just outside the wasteland. I wondered if you heard anything? Saw anything?’

Owen flushes red. He feels immediately guilty. Not because he’s done anything, but because he might have done something. He’s spent his whole life feeling like he might have done something wrong.

He breathes in hard to try to bring down the colour in his cheeks but it makes it worse. He blows the air back out and says, ‘No. No. I heard nothing.’

‘Your living room.’ The policeman nods his head towards the front window to the left of the door. ‘It overlooks the street. Maybe you noticed something without quite realising what it was?’

‘I wasn’t in my living room last night. I mean, it’s not even my living room.’

‘Ah, you live with someone else?’

‘Yes. My aunt. Tessie McDonald. It’s her living room. I never go in there.’

‘Might she have seen something?’

‘No. She’s in Tuscany. She has another property. She’s often there. She’s there now.’

He’s burbling. Tall men make him feel this way. Policemen make him feel this way.

‘Right,’ says DI Burdett. ‘Anyway. It was at about eight thirty p.m. Maybe you were watching something on the TV about that time? Maybe that would jog your memory? Something untoward you noticed? A strange noise? Someone walking down the street who made you feel alarmed in some way?’

‘No. Honestly. I was in my room all day yesterday. It’s at the back of the house. I haven’t seen anything or heard anything.’

‘A neighbour claims …’ DI Burdett glances down at his notebook again, ‘to have seen you, on your driveway, at approximately four thirty p.m. yesterday.’

Owen clamps his hand to his forehead. He has barely processed the accusations he’s suffered at work and now there are anonymous neighbours spying on him and reporting his movements to the police in relation to a sex attack.

‘What?’

‘Would that have been you? At four thirty p.m.?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says. Then he remembers that today is bin collection day and that yes, he had put the rubbish out yesterday. ‘I put the rubbish out at some point,’ he says. ‘But I can’t tell you when.’ As he says this, he remembers the girls that had walked past. Two schoolgirls. One was the girl who’d acted like he was going to jump her when he was walking home from work the other night; the other was a tiny girl with black hair. They’d looked over at him and said something to each other; then they’d picked up their pace before disappearing into the house across the road.

He’d thought he was being paranoid at the time, that he’d imagined them talking about him. Now he can only assume that they had been. He sighs.

‘But roughly?’

‘Roughly the afternoon. It was dark, I remember.’

‘And you haven’t left the house apart from that?’

‘No. I have not.’

DI Burdett folds his notepad in half and tucks it in to his pocket. ‘Thank you, Mr Pick. I appreciate your time.’

‘That’s fine,’ he replies. And then, just as the policeman turns to leave, he adds, ‘Is she all right? The girl?’

DI Burdett smiles slightly. ‘She’s fine,’ he says. ‘But thank you for asking.’

‘Good,’ says Owen. ‘Good.’

14