‘You’ve got a visitor.’

Owen sits up with a start. It’s been three hours since his last interview with the detectives and he’s been sitting in his cell with no idea what’s happening next. He was given lunch in his cell: some kind of meat in breadcrumbs with potatoes and green beans. And then a beige pudding with a jam sauce. He’s almost embarrassed by how much he enjoyed it; it’s the sort of meal his mother used to cook for him, bland and salty and safe. He scraped his tray absolutely clean.

‘Who is it?’ he asks now.

‘I have no idea,’ says the police officer drily.

‘Am I going to them, or are they …?’

‘I’m taking you to an interview room. Can you stand back from the door, please?’

He stands back from the cell door and the officer opens it and leads him through three sets of locked gates to a small blue room. Tessie is sitting there, wearing a green velvet wrap around her shoulders and huge silver earrings with matching green stones at their centres. Her mouth is already pursed with disapproval.

She starts talking before he’s even sat down. ‘I’m not staying long, Owen. But I brought you some things. Your phone. Though you’re probably not allowed it. And some underwear and a change of clothing, etc. I bought it new. I didn’t want to go rifling through your things. Especially not after what the police found in your drawers. Good God, Owen. And that girl, Owen! What on earth has happened to that lovely girl?’

Tessie covers her face with her fingers, mismatched rings overlapping into a kind of armour. She stares down at the table for a long moment and then looks up and her eyes are full of tears.

‘Owen. Please. You can tell me. Where is she? What have you done with her?’

Owen smiles. He can’t help it. It’s just too ridiculous.

‘Tessie,’ he says, his hands clutching the edge of the table. ‘Really? You really think I had something to do with it?’

‘Well, what on earth else do you expect me to think? Her blood! Outside your wall! Her phone cover outside your bedroom window. Date-rape drugs in your sock drawer. And all those things, those terrible things you wrote on the internet. My goodness, Owen. You don’t have to be Miss Marple to work it out. But for the sake of that poor girl’s family, you have to tell the police what happened.’

‘Oh my God!’ Owen tugs at his hair and then bangs the table. ‘I did not do anything to that girl! I’m not even sure I saw that girl! I just saw a girl! And it might not even have been a girl. It might have been a boy. And the only reason, literally the only reason I said anything was because I was trying to be helpful. I mean, Tessie, seriously, if I had killed that girl or done something dreadful to her, why would I have told the police that I’d seen her? Why? Think about it, for God’s sake. Just think about it. It doesn’t make any sense!’

Tessie pushes down her lower lip and shrugs. ‘No,’ she says. ‘It does not make sense. But then, Owen, nothing about you makes any sense. Nothing. I mean, what are you, thirty-four …?’

Owen sighs. ‘I’m thirty-three, Tessie. Thirty-three.’

She continues. ‘Thirty-three, yet you’ve never had a girlfriend. You rarely go out. You dress like …’ She gestures at him vaguely. ‘Well, you dress very strangely for a man of your age. You only eat white food. I mean, Owen, let’s face it, you’re very odd.’

‘And that means I killed a teenage girl, does it?’

She narrows her eyes at him. But she doesn’t reply. Instead she says, ‘I’ve spoken to your father. He’s very worried.’

Owen rolls his eyes. ‘I’m sure he is.’

‘Yes,’ she says firmly. ‘He is. I suggested he come and see you but he’ll need some persuading, he’s slightly … overwhelmed.’

‘Don’t bother, please, Tessie. I have no desire whatsoever to see him. Certainly not in these circumstances.’ Owen lets his head drop so that his gaze falls between his kneecaps to the scuffed linoleum on the floor. He’s tired. He has had two nights on a horrible bed in a cell. He has had hours in the interview room with a rotating group of detectives trying harder and harder to get him to tell them where Saffyre Maddox is and Owen has seen enough police dramas to know how these things are orchestrated, layering on different approaches until the interviewee doesn’t know their left from their right. But it doesn’t matter how much they try to befuddle and confound him, the one constant, the one thing he knows for sure, is that he has nothing to do with Saffyre Maddox or her disappearance.

Barry told him something interesting yesterday.

Apparently Saffyre Maddox was once under the professional care of the Lycra man across the road, the jogger. Apparently, Lycra Man is a child psychologist at the Portman. Apparently Saffyre Maddox was under his care for over three years and apparently Lycra Man has a rock-solid alibi. He was in bed with his wife.

Owen can hardly believe that the police would take such a flimsy alibi on face value. It’s typical of course, typical to give credence to married people, to assume that of course married people would be in bed together on Valentine’s night, that married people would have no reason to lie about their whereabouts.

He’d told the police yesterday about Bryn. He’d been unable to think of any other reasonable explanation to offer them for the presence of Rohypnol in his bedroom.

‘Bryn who?’ they’d asked.

‘I don’t know his surname.’

‘Address?’

‘I don’t know where he lives. Somewhere just outside London. His train comes into Euston, that’s all I know. And he’s thirty-three. Like me. Oh. He’s got a website! www.yourloss.net.’

‘Bryn someone. Outside London. Thirty-three. Got a website.’

Sceptical was an understatement. But they’d gone away and looked for Bryn and come to him this morning and told him that no such person existed. That his website didn’t exist, that the only people in the UK who were thirty-three and called Bryn lived in Chester, Aberdeen, Cardigan, Cardiff, London, Bangor, Newport and Dartmouth. There was, apparently, nobody in the Home Counties called Bryn who was currently thirty-three years old.

‘Well,’ Owen said. ‘There you go. Thanks to the British press and my face plastered all over the papers, he’s had time to disappear. But he’s there, in all the forums you found me on. Run searches for him, for YourLoss. You’ll see. He’s a leader. An influencer. People kind of look up to him.’

‘And you?’ said a detective whose name Owen hadn’t quite caught. ‘Did you look up to him?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘In a way. But not,’ he quickly countered, ‘not in that way. When he gave me those drugs, when he told me what he wanted me to do, what he wanted all of us to do …’

‘All of us?’

‘Yes, us on the forums.’

‘Incels, you mean?’

He hadn’t liked the sound of that. It had made them sound like Masons or Ku Klux Klan, giraffes, even, something other. Something not quite human.

‘So you would call yourself an incel, would you, Owen?’

He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘No. Going on those forums – it was a phase. It was a response to what happened with my job. I was cross and frustrated. I felt impotent. I needed to vent and the forums gave me a place to vent. But I never thought I was one of them. I never felt I belonged. And Bryn …’

‘Yes, tell us about Bryn.’ They’d said his name as if it was in italics, as if he was a character in a book.

‘Bryn was just funny, I suppose. A lot of those guys on the forums were just dark and humourless, took it all so seriously. Bryn was funny. And charismatic. People liked him. I liked him. But then when I finally met him in person, I saw him for what he really was.’

‘And what was that, Owen?’

‘Well,’ he said, after a moment’s consideration. ‘Mad. I suppose.’

But now as he sits opposite his aunt and thinks about the cruel injustices being played out against him as a single man, an ‘odd’ man, a lonely man, a man who is clearly not decent or honest enough to have found a mate to give him alibis for his heinous crimes against young girls, he feels a yearning for Bryn and his view of the world. Not the stuff about impregnating women against their will, but the stuff about how imbalanced the world was, how it was all geared towards favouring the wrong people for the wrong reasons. He would like to discuss that now with someone who saw the truth. But Bryn has gone – Bryn, or whatever his real name was. He’s disappeared like one of those little felt rabbits in a sleight-of-hand trick. Pouf! And now no one will ever believe him about how he ended up with date-rape drugs in his drawer, that he’d never had any intention of using them.

He looks back up at Tessie. She’s staring at the top of his head. She says, ‘Do they let you wash in here?’

He nods.