‘Bitch,’ he calls out over his shoulder as he walks.

He hears her call something out to him, the fading urgent echo of her heels against the paving stones, the ringing in his ears of adrenaline pumping through his system; he feels the wine in his stomach curdle slightly and his legs turn to jelly. He stops for a moment and holds a wall to steady himself. His head spins and for a moment he thinks he might be about to throw up.

And then he feels his phone vibrate and he takes it out of his pocket and there is a message from Deanna.

Dear Owen, I really enjoyed myself tonight. Thank you for being such good company and making me feel good about myself for the first time in a very long time. I hope you sleep well and I look forward to seeing you next week. My treat this time! Deanna x.

All the rage and nervous energy leaves his body immediately.

Smiling, he turns the last corner of the block and arrives outside his house. The lights are all off and the moon shines blue off the lead on the roof. He stops to peer through the hole carved into the wooden gate of the building site next door where he sees two amber dots glowing in the dark. A fox, staring at him.

‘Hello, foxy,’ he says into the darkness. ‘Hello, beautiful!’

He glances across the street. There is a light still shining in one of the windows. He sees the suggestion of movement behind it. He hears raised voices coming from somewhere out of sight. Then he sees a person standing outside the house: tall, slender, in a black hoodie, tips of angular elbows protruding from their sides like wings. The person stands for just a moment, watching the light in the window, just as he does. Then the person turns and in profile he can see it is a young girl, her hands stuffed into the pockets of a hoodie, her jaw set hard.

As he watches her, she turns and looks at him.

I know you, he thinks, I know you.

After

* * *

20

Cate spots it late in the day, a small piece in a copy of The Times she picked up for free in the supermarket the day before. She often picks up the complimentary paper but rarely reads it, and she only reads it today because she’s looking for an article advertised on the front page about how to have sex in your fifties.

She turns the pages quickly but her eye is caught first by the word ‘Camden’ halfway down page eight.

The headline says: ‘Camden schoolgirl still missing. Police questioning locals’.

And there, beneath the headline, is a photo of a young girl with exquisite, symmetrical features, an enigmatic smile, large hoop earrings, dark curly hair held back on one side in a single tight braid, pale green eyes. Cate doesn’t immediately recognise her. But then she reads on and her eye is drawn back to the girl in the photograph and then she knows it is her.

Camden schoolgirl Saffyre Maddox, 17, has not been seen since she left home on the evening of 14 February to visit a friend in Hampstead. Saffyre, who lives with her uncle, Aaron Maddox, 27, in Alfred Road NW3, is studying for A-Levels at Havelock School, NW3. The school describe her as a good student and a sociable member of the school community. According to Aaron Maddox, she left home at roughly eleven o’clock on the night of her disappearance, wearing dark jogging bottoms, a black hoodie and white trainers.

Cate gasps and looks around her as though there might be someone here to share this with. The children are both off school for half-term but neither of them is in, and Roan is at work.

She picks up her phone, photographs the story and before she’s had a chance to think about what she’s doing, has WhatsApped it to Roan.

For obvious reasons, Saffyre’s name has not been mentioned by either of them, but there’s no reason why Cate shouldn’t still recognise it when she sees it printed in a national newspaper.

The tick remains grey. Roan always has his phone in flight mode when he’s with patients. That was one of the (many) things that had fanned the flames of her madness the year before: that he always forgot to take it out of flight mode afterwards, would walk around completely uncontactable, long into the evening. She’d never been able to work out how he could go around with a dead phone without automatically feeling the need to turn it back on.

She reads through the article again.

Six days ago. Valentine’s night. The night she and Roan walked into Hampstead and had champagne in a murky, fire-crackly pub and then shared a red beef curry at a Thai restaurant on the way home, the night they’d got on really well and found lots to talk about and laugh about and not been like one of those long-married couples trying to hold it together in public on Valentine’s night, but like a real, compatible, happy couple.

And meanwhile Saffyre had been somewhere between Swiss Cottage and Hampstead wearing not enough clothes for what was a very cold night. Maybe they’d walked past her? Maybe they’d even seen something? Was it possible?

She shakes the thought from her head. Of course it wasn’t possible. There would have been thousands of people between Swiss Cottage and Hampstead on Valentine’s night, thousands of places she could have been. And maybe Saffyre hadn’t been going to Hampstead at all, had just said that to cover her tracks, had left her home and walked in totally the opposite direction, her uncle none the wiser.

She pulls open her laptop and googles ‘Saffyre Maddox’.

The papers all run a story about her disappearance, they all use the same photograph of her. None of them has any extra detail.

At around 2 p.m. she gets a reply from Roan.

It says, simply: Oh my God.

She replies: I know.

But the ticks remain grey.

He’s gone already.

The card that arrived on Valentine’s Day for Roan still sits in the kitchen drawer in its ripped envelope. Cate had tucked it firmly away between a pile of tea towels, hidden from prying teenage fingers. She had categorically not looked at it after their lovely Valentine’s night in Hampstead, and then not the following day either. Then it had been the weekend and now it was half-term and, strange as it sounds, she has stopped thinking about the card. It bears no relationship to the harmonious atmosphere in their home, to the soft exchanges between them, the sex they’ve had twice since then, both times initiated by her. The card has become metaphorical dust, of no consequence or interest to her.

But now.

She claps her hands to her ears as something passes through her thoughts, a high-speed train of a notion. The feeling takes her back to last year, to when her whole life had felt like this, when every minute of every day had been spent potholing through doubt and paranoia and distrust. She had not been happy in that place and she does not want to go back there. She is happy here, right here, in this rose-hued world of Valentine’s cards and snatched hugs.

She decides to strip the beds. Cate is not usually the type of person to use domestic drudgery to take her mind off things, but now she sweeps through the three bedrooms of the flat, trying to put as much space between herself and the drawer in the kitchen as possible.

In Georgia’s room she pulls off the crystal-white sheets that her daughter insists upon; long gone are the days of pink and lilac fairies. White sheets, white lamps, white sheepskin rug. When Georgia was younger, thirteen, fourteen, Cate would find it virtually impossible not to rifle though her daughter’s things when she was in her bedroom, desperate for clues to the person she was turning into. Now she has no need; Georgia shows herself to Cate crystal clear, every minute of every day. She hides nothing.

Cate moves efficiently around her bed, balls the sheets together and leaves them on the floor in the hallway. Then she goes to Josh’s room.

Josh is a tidy boy; he always has been. She pulls the blue chambray sheets from his bed, then puts on a fresh green sheet. His laptop is tucked underneath his bed, plugged in and charging. She is half tempted to open it, to see what her mysterious son does when he’s alone in here, but for some reason her son’s privacy seems more sacred, more fragile than her daughter’s. She doesn’t ponder for too long on why she might feel like this, she just does.

Then she goes to her bedroom, her marital quarters, where, for the last five days at least, marital things have been happening. She snatches up the grey bedding and creates another ball, adds it to the pile in the hallway, stretches a pale blue sheet over their mattress, puffs up the duvet inside a fresh cover.