I nodded but I felt a lurch in the pit of my stomach. Aaron would be thirty-one by the time I left university. And then what? I thought of Clive, or Owen, or whatever his name was, and his sad little bedroom and his sad little stripy dressing gown and I thought he looked like he was probably about thirty-one and I didn’t want that for Aaron.

‘I might not even go to university,’ I said.

‘ ’Course you will,’ he said.

‘Why? Just because I’m clever, there’s no law about it. I can do whatever I want to after I’ve left school. I could get a job and get my own place and then you could have this flat to yourself.’

He laughed. ‘I don’t want this flat to myself! Why would I want this flat to myself?’

‘So you can start a family.’

He laughed again, loud and hard. ‘I don’t want a family, fam! You’re my family!’

I laughed too, but inside I was starting to feel panicky. Aaron was such a good man. He’d worked hard at school, like me, and got good exam results, but here he was working in a betting shop and doing people’s gardens and then coming home and having to worry about me, wasting the prime years of his life, and I thought, you know, maybe it would be better if I wasn’t there.

After dinner I told Aaron I was going to Jasmin’s and he said have fun and I said will do and I headed out with a heart full of strangeness about everything. I sat on one of the outdoor gym bikes on the plaza and idly wheeled the pedals round and round with my hands inside my pockets, my hood up against the chill night air. I put some music on my phone and listened for a while, watching people come and go. No one looked at me. No one saw me. When you wear a hood, you’re invisible.

And then after a while Roan and Alicia left the restaurant, and I waited to see what they would do and you want to know what they did? Those dirty devils? They checked into a hotel, the Best Western by the drama school.

My jaw fell open. I don’t know why I was surprised. It had all been leading to this moment. But it still shocked me. Roan was going to have sex with a woman he wasn’t married to. About half a mile away from the woman he was married to. He was going to lay her down on a bed and do things to her.

I shuddered slightly, pulled down my hood, showing my pink hair to the world, and I went to see Jasmin.

31

Owen and Deanna had spent two hours messaging the night before. She’d been trying to persuade him to think about getting his job back at the college. She’d made some good points, some compelling points. Mostly to do with the fact that the girls who’d reported him would be gone in a few months, there’d be a whole new intake, no one to remember what had happened, he could have a clean slate. Also to do with the fact that he’d quite enjoyed his job. And the longer he left it without having a job, the harder it would be to explain to a potential employer what he’d been doing.

Her concern had made him realise that up until now he’d not had one person in his life to offer him proper, empathetic, sensible, caring advice about his life, his choices, not ever. Not since his mother had died.

They’d said goodnight at eleven o’clock; Owen could have gone on talking for hours, but Deanna of course had to be up early for work. Owen had fallen asleep with his phone on his chest, a smile on his face.

He gets out of bed now and goes to his bedroom window. The police are back. They’re still picking around in the back garden. They’d cordoned the whole garden off last night before they left, spoken to all the residents, asked them not to cross the cordons. There’d been a solitary policeman stationed outside the building site all night long.

Owen peers down to the spot in the grass that the police had been examining yesterday, where they’d found the phone case. Something flashes through his thoughts as he stares at the grass.

A movement of some kind, a cry of pain.

He shakes the thought from his head and heads to the bathroom where he showers and washes his hair. In the mirror in the bathroom he looks at his hair and decides that it is now officially too long. He’s not sure he can be bothered to go to the hairdresser’s just for a trim, so he takes a pair of scissors from the bathroom cabinet, smooths his hair down on to his forehead with his fingers, then trims it across the line of his eyebrows. He starts at the left side and watches the dark fronds fall into the sink where they look like tiny discarded moustaches. He is about to trim from the right-hand side and back to the middle when there is a loud, insistent thumping at the door. He jumps slightly and the tip of the scissors nicks his skin. A bead of blood appears and he rubs at it roughly and shouts out, ‘What!’

‘Owen,’ says Tessie. ‘The police are here. They need you to come out.’

He sighs. ‘I’ll be a few minutes.’

‘Sir’ – he hears a male voice – ‘we need you to come out now. Please.’

‘I just got out of the shower. You’ll have to wait.’

‘Sir, please just come out.’

‘Fuck’s sake,’ Owen mutters under his breath. He dries himself roughly with his towel and pulls on his old dressing gown. He opens the door and sees Tessie recoil slightly at the sight of him.

‘Can I at least get dressed?’ he says to the uniformed officer standing beside her.

The officer turns to a woman standing behind him. It’s DI Currie, the female detective. She nods. ‘But I’ll need PC Rodrigues to go in with you, I’m afraid.’

‘What?’

‘I’m so sorry. It’s just procedure.’

‘But what’s the issue here? What’s the urgency?’

‘The urgency, Mr Pick, is that we need to bring you into the station to question you regarding the disappearance of Saffyre Maddox. We also have a warrant to search your room.’ She holds up a piece of paper. Owen blinks at it. ‘I’m afraid that means that we need to ensure that you don’t touch anything in your room. I’m so sorry.’ She smiles at him. It’s an unnerving smile. It looks almost soft, but there’s something cold and hard at the very far corners of it.

He starts to say something, but then realises he can’t find any words. He’s also aware on some level that whatever is going on here is something that he could make infinitely worse by saying or doing the wrong thing. So he nods, firmly, and heads for his room, the male PC following close behind. His eye goes around his room as he dresses; he tries to think what might be here, what they might find that could connect him in any way to the disappearance of a girl he’d never heard of until two days ago, a girl he may have imagined seeing entirely.

‘Faster, Mr Pick, if you wouldn’t mind.’

He throws on yesterday’s outfit. He’d put it on his washing pile, intending to wear something fresh today, but he can’t think straight enough now to put together another outfit. He pulls on his old, glued-together shoes and runs his fingers through his wet hair. Something on his forehead comes away under his fingertip; it’s the dried blood from the nick from the scissors. Blood follows and he goes to pull a tissue from the box by his bedside table but the PC says, ‘Sir. Please do not touch anything.’

‘But I’m bleeding.’

‘We can sort you out once we have you in the car. Just leave that for now, please, sir.’

Owen tuts. Then he takes one more look around the bedroom, grabs his jacket from the hook on the back of the door and follows the policeman back down the hallway.

Tessie stands by the door. She is wearing a silk kimono over green pyjamas. Her hair is down. She looks tired and sad. As Owen passes her, she touches his arm and says, ‘What did you do, Owen? What did you do?’

‘I didn’t do anything, for God’s sake. You know I didn’t do anything.’

Tessie turns and walks away.

‘For God’s sake, Tessie,’ he shouts after her. ‘You know I didn’t!’

She walks into her bedroom and pulls the door quietly shut behind her.

He feels a hand on his shoulder. ‘Mr Pick, please, we need to leave.’

He shrugs the hand off, anger beginning to replace the shock and awe. ‘I’m coming,’ he says. ‘I’m coming, OK?’

As he leaves the house, he is suddenly aware that the proportions of the street outside are all off, that there’s something not right, a feeling of impending chaos, and then they appear: a flock, a pack; a dozen men and women with cameras, with microphones, pressing towards them. The PC and the detective both cover him instinctively with their arms and hustle him onwards, through the throng.

‘Mr Pick, Mr Pick!’

They know his name. How do they know his name? How did they know this was going to happen? How did they know?

He glances up and straight into the lens of a camera. He opens his eyes wide and is dazzled by a burning white flash. Something forces his head down again. He is in a car. The car door is closed. There are faces at the window, faces and lenses. The car moves quickly; people touch it; they are so close Owen doesn’t understand why their feet aren’t being crushed by the tyres. And then he is not on his street any more, he is on the main road and there are no more people with cameras, just normal people going about their business. Owen sits back in the seat. He exhales.

‘Who told them?’ he asks the backs of the heads of the two people sitting in the front.

‘The press?’ says the woman.