‘Yes. Who told them you were coming to get me?’

‘I’m afraid I have no idea. They knew we’d been searching the area. People talk. I’m sorry you had to experience that.’

‘But … it’ll be in the papers,’ he says. ‘People will think I did it.’

‘Did what, Mr Pick?’

He peers at her face in the rear-view mirror. She’s looking right at him. There’s that chilling smile again.

‘The thing!’ he says. ‘Whatever the thing is that you’re arresting me for.’

‘You’re not under arrest, Mr Pick. Not yet.’

‘Then why?’ He stares out of the window, watches a small girl from a dog-walking company trying to load a giant bloodhound into the back of a van. ‘Why am I here?’

He looks at himself in the rear-view mirror. His hair has started to dry. It’s shorter on one side than the other and sticking up on the top. The blood from his cut has dried into a kind of huge tear shape, dripping into his eyebrow. He looks horrendous. Absolutely horrendous. And the nation’s press has just photographed him like this, being placed into the back of a police car to be questioned about a missing teenage girl. He doesn’t even like teenage girls. And he’s not even under arrest. He’s left his phone at home. What if Deanna is trying to message him? What if she thinks he’s ignoring her?

And then an even worse thought hits him. What if he’s in the papers tomorrow? With his crooked hair and blood-encrusted eyebrow and yesterday’s clothes looking like a horrible pervert, with a headline screeching something like ‘IS THIS SAFFYRE’S KILLER?’ He groans out loud.

‘Are you OK, Mr Pick?’

‘No!’ he replies. ‘God. No. Of course I’m not OK. I’m going to be in the papers and I’m not even under arrest! Is that even legal?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid it is legal, Mr Pick. I’m afraid it is.’

‘But everyone will have seen my face and then you’ll let me go and no one will care that I didn’t do it, they’ll just remember my face. I’ll never get a job, I’ll—’ He envisages Deanna peeling open the Evening Standard on the Tube tonight. ‘Oh God!’

‘Mr Pick. Let’s just take this one step at a time, shall we? Hopefully we’ll be able to let you go within an hour or two. We’ll notify the press. They’ll have no interest in running the story if there’s nothing to it. So, let’s just see how we get on, shall we?’ She smiles again.

Owen sits back, folds his arms around his stomach and rocks slightly. The world feels like a straitjacket, sucking all the air out of his chest cavity, squeezing his bones. He looks at people out of the window: normal people doing normal things. Walking to the shops. Going to work. Being normal suddenly looks like the most alien concept in the world, something he can barely conceive of.

‘Do I need a lawyer?’ he asks.

‘That’ll be up to you. Do you have one?’

Tessie’s friend Barry is a lawyer. But he’s not Owen’s lawyer. ‘No,’ he says.

‘Well, we can assign you one if necessary.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘No. I’m sure I’ll be fine.’

‘Let’s see how we go, shall we?’

Owen nods.

And then, like a house falling on him from the sky, its shadow getting bigger and bigger, faster and faster, he suddenly remembers something.

In his underwear drawer. Shoved in in a slightly shameful rush after his night out with Bryn, with the intention of putting them in the public bin on the street corner next time he was out, and then completely forgotten about.

The date-rape drugs.

A terrible overdose of adrenaline hits the pit of Owen’s stomach. His head spins. His heart stops and then races, sickeningly. ‘Oh my God,’ he whispers.

‘Everything OK?’ says DI Currie, peering at him in her mirror.

‘I think I’m going to …’ He puts his hand over his mouth. He suddenly realises he’s going to be sick. ‘I’m going to …’

DI Currie tells the PC to stop the car. They pull over by a grass verge and DI Currie exits and opens his door just as Owen tips forward and throws up, noisily, painfully. His skin ripples with goosebumps and his head throbs with the force of it. He gasps and throws up again. DI Currie appears in front of him, a tissue in her hand. She looks down at him. Owen can’t tell if it’s pity in her face, or disgust. He takes the tissue and dabs his mouth with it.

‘All OK?’ she asks him.

He nods.

‘Ready to keep going?’

He nods again.

She smiles and waits for him to put his legs back into the car before closing the door and going back to the passenger seat.

‘Something you ate?’ she asks a moment later, looking at him in the mirror.

He nods, his fist balled against his mouth. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Must be.’

She smiles, but she doesn’t look as though she believes him.

32

‘Mum,’ says Georgia, walking into the bathroom without knocking. ‘They just arrested him!’

‘Who?’

‘The policewoman detective person. She just went into the house over the road with another cop. Came out with the creepy guy. Put him in a car and drove him away! There’s journalists and all sorts out there, taking pictures! Come and see!’

Cate dries her hands on the backs of her jeans. It’s been two hours since DI Currie was here talking to them, since Roan left for work. She’d thought things might be winding down, but apparently not. She goes to the front door with Georgia.

There are people hanging around, a couple of small film crews packing their things away. Cate goes outside and wanders over to a young woman in a yellow anorak with a furry hood and says, ‘What’s been going on? Where have they taken that guy?’

‘Owen Pick, you mean?’ The woman, whom Cate assumes to be a journalist, shoves some wires into a black bag and zips it up.

‘I don’t know his name – the guy who lives in that house? Youngish, with dark hair?’

‘Yeah. Owen Pick. They’ve taken him in for questioning.’

‘About Saffyre Maddox?’

‘Yes. Apparently they found some of her stuff outside his bedroom window and traces of blood on the wall and in the grass.’

‘Oh my God.’ Cate brings her hands to her mouth. She hears Georgia gasping beside her.

‘Oh my God, is she dead?’ asks Georgia.

The woman shrugs. ‘No body found yet, but it’s looking increasingly likely.’

‘God, that’s so sad,’ says Georgia. Then she says, ‘That guy is weird. It doesn’t surprise me much that he could do something like that.’

The journalist stops and looks at Georgia. ‘They don’t know for sure yet that he did. So probably best not to start spreading that about.’ She pauses, looks at Owen Pick’s house and then back at Georgia and says, ‘Although, you know …’

Cate follows her gaze towards the house. She thinks about that night weeks ago when Georgia thought she’d been followed home by Owen Pick. She thinks about that night a few days later when Tilly appeared on her doorstep to say she’d been accosted on the other side of the street. She thinks of the string of sex attacks in the area. She thinks about Roan seeing Owen Pick on Valentine’s night, staring at their house.

She feels a weight lift from her gut, a weight she had barely acknowledged until now: the weight of doubt, the weight of suspicion, of thinking that at any moment now the world could collapse on her head.

She and Georgia make a cake. It’s nearly the end of the half-term holiday. Georgia’s been revising all week, or out with friends, and Cate’s barely seen her. It’s one of those grey, muffled days where everything feels fuzzy and unformed. The focus of weighing and measuring and counting and stirring is exactly what the day calls for.

Georgia has one of her playlists on Spotify, a mixture of music that Cate once danced to in nightclubs and modern music that sounds meaningless and empty to her ears. They’re making something they found on the internet called a Choca-Mocha cake. Cate gets an espresso from the coffee maker and leaves it on the side to cool. Georgia is creaming sugar and butter together. The oven hums as it heats up.

Owen Pick’s face keeps passing in and out of Cate’s consciousness. That vaguely displeased look he has about him, as though he’s constantly thinking about unsavoury things. His hair with that slightly defeated, second-hand look about it. The worn-down shoes, incongruous in contrast with strangely smart clothes that look as though they don’t come naturally to him. He looks the type, she thinks. He seems the type: a single guy, living alone with an eccentric landlady in a grubby-looking house with tatty curtains at the windows.

And now there is blood under his bedroom window.

She glances up at Georgia. Georgia’s cheeks are pink from the heat of the oven, from the effort of getting the butter and sugar to combine. She has a hank of hair hanging across her face which she blows out of the way from the side of her mouth.

Cate leans towards her and pushes the hair behind her ear for her. Georgia drops a kiss on to Cate’s hand and says, ‘Thank you, Mum.’

They exchange a look. Cate knows they’re both thinking the same thing.