‘Do you want me to bring you some soap? Some nice shampoo?’

He nods again. ‘Yes,’ he says in a small voice. ‘Please. And, Tessie, can you do something else for me? Please. Can you contact someone for me? The woman I went out with on Valentine’s night? We’d been chatting a lot since. Messaging. And we were supposed to be going out again next week. I just don’t want her to think, you know, that I’ve forgotten about her.’

‘Oh Owen. Dear Owen. You’re all over the papers, all over the news. I can guarantee she knows why you haven’t been in touch.’

He swallows down another burst of anger, closes his eyes and then slowly opens them. ‘Please, though, Tessie. Would you mind? Whether she knows where I am or not, I’d like her to know that I’m thinking about her. That I wish … I wish I wasn’t here, that this wasn’t happening, that things were just … you know. Please, Tessie.’

She rolls her eyes and takes a notepad from her bag and a pen.

He gives her Deanna’s email address as it’s the only one of her contact details he can remember off by heart.

‘Tell her I think she’s amazing, please, Tessie. Tell her I’m not that person, the person in the papers. Tell her that if she comes to see me, I can explain everything. Tell her to come and see me, Tessie. Please. If you don’t do anything else. Just that one thing. Yes?’

He watches her close her eyes; he sees the hollows of her cheeks form and then disappear again. ‘Fine,’ she says. ‘Fine. Though I’m not lying on your behalf, Owen. I’m not going to say anything I don’t believe is true.’

‘No.’ He shakes his head. ‘Don’t say anything apart from just what I said. Promise me.’

She sighs and says, ‘Yes. Yes, fine.’ Then she glances at her wristwatch and sighs again. ‘I have to go. It’s my afternoon at the shop. Good God’ – she gets to her feet and grinds her jaw – ‘what on earth am I going to say to people? Because they’ll ask, Owen, they’ll ask.’

Tessie works one afternoon a week at the Oxfam bookshop in the village. It makes her feel good about herself and her indulgent life. He watches her leave. She doesn’t touch him or attempt any sort of farewell. She just goes.

The police officer standing in the corner opens the door and leads her out.

The other police officer, sitting at the end of the table, clears her throat.

‘Ready?’ she says to Owen.

He gets to his feet and follows her to the door.

The room still smells of Tessie, of dusty velvet and cheap fabric conditioner and Penhaligon’s iris perfume.

40

SAFFYRE

I got home at 6 a.m. on New Year’s Day. Aaron was asleep and Angelo was in the little bed I kept by the side of mine. He got up lazily when he saw me walk in and I picked him up and smelled him and sat him down on the bed next to me. I felt empty. Blank. It was so quiet. All night long I’d fallen in and out of sleep to the sounds of revellers, the wind through the tall branches of the trees, cars going past every few minutes, the chipboard gates creaking, birds twitching. Every time I fell asleep, I’d dream that the fox was there, licking my face, breathing into my ear, and I’d wake up and find myself alone. It was electric; it was cold; I was alive out there in the black of night.

Now I stared at the dirty white of my bedroom ceiling, the pink paper shade with the cut-out heart shapes that I’d chosen when I was eight years old from Homebase. It came with a matching duvet set and table lamp. I didn’t know who that child was or the person she might have been if Harrison John hadn’t done what he’d done to her when she was ten years old.

It was silent apart from the thrum of the sleeping building. I thought, I don’t belong here. I belong out there. And once again the other part of me, the part that does her homework and paints her nails and watches The Great British Bake Off, that part of me whispered in my ear and said: ‘Are you sure you’re not mad?’ But I knew I was not mad. I knew I was changing. Becoming. Unfurling.

I took my things again that night, and slept across the street from Roan Fours. I told Aaron I was sleeping over at Jasmin’s. He just gave me a look, a look that said, ‘I kind of don’t believe you but you’re nearly an adult and you’re close to breaking and I don’t want to be the one to push you over the edge.’

The night after that I slept at home, just for Aaron’s sake, not for my own, but my soul ached at being trapped indoors, I felt swallowed up by my mattress, my duvet, the warm air swirling around me. I felt claustrophobic, anxious; the sheets were twisted around my legs when I woke up the next morning and for a minute I thought I was paralysed. I felt a sharp feeling of panic right in the pit of my gut. I untwisted my legs from the sheet and sat up panting. I knew I couldn’t spend another night indoors. I knew then that my change was nearly complete. At night I would wait for Aaron to go to bed and then I would leave.

I didn’t sleep those nights. Barely. I just lay there in the dark feeling my soul fill, my head vibrating, my blood flowing through my veins, warm and vital. I didn’t need to sleep. I was operating on some other level, using some weird energy pumped into me from the moon above me, from the soil beneath.

At dawn I’d go back to the flat and get ready for school. Aaron had no idea and if he did, he never said anything. He probably thought I had a boyfriend. He treated me like blown glass, like he couldn’t say anything to me. It worked in my favour.

Then, halfway through January, it happened. It was a moment, I think, that I’d known would happen one day. A moment that had sat just out of my line of sight since I was ten years old. Because in any community, even a community set on the edges of a major arterial junction where six lanes of traffic thunder past morning, noon and night, a community of double-decker buses and high-rise buildings and billboards and banks, there is still a small world in small streets where people’s paths cross and uncross and cross again, where you know people from the schools they went to, from the places their mums shop, from walking the same lines to the same places at the same times, and you know that, even in a community like mine, at some point you will see the person who stuck their fingers inside you when you were ten years old. You just will.

And there he was, in the cold cloak of early dawn as I turned the corner from Roan’s road on to the Finchley Road. There he was, dressed in black, with his hood up just like mine, a Puffa coat just like mine, a bag slung over his shoulder just like me. There was no other soul around; sodium light from the lamp in between us shone off particles of gauzy morning mist. At first I felt nervous because he was a man and it was dark and we were alone. But then I caught the shape of his face, the heavy brow, the slight dip in his nose as if someone had pressed it in with their thumb.

Harrison John.

The boy who wiped out the girl with the pink lampshades.

He looked at me. I looked at him.

I saw that he saw me. He smiled. He said, ‘Saffyre Maddox.’

I said nothing, walked past him fast as I could, looking for the bright lights of early-morning traffic coming down the Finchley Road.

‘Saffyre Maddox!’ he called after me. ‘Not going to say hello?’

I wanted to turn and walk back up the hill, square up to him, breathe into his face, say you filthy, disgusting piece of shit, I hope you die.

But I didn’t. I kept walking. Kept walking. My heart pounding. My stomach swirling.

I got home and I scrambled through all the drawers in the kitchen until I found a paper clip. I untwisted it into a small hook and I rolled down my socks. I touched the tip of the hook against my skin. I pulled it back and forth until finally a bead of red appeared, and then another, and another, until finally I felt something stronger than the power of Harrison John.

41

February half-term is over. The flat is quiet. Not the same quiet as when the kids are still in bed, not the spring-loaded quietness of bedroom doors yet to be opened, breakfasts and showers yet to be had, but the proper, pure silence of an empty house: coats taken from hooks, bags collected from chairs, empty beds, wet bathmats, children at school, Roan at work, a day ahead of nothing but her.

Cate should be working but her focus is splintered.

There was another sex attack the day before. It’s been all over the news because the police have taken the step of issuing safety guidelines to women in the area. The victim this time was a middle-aged woman, walking back from lunch with friends on West End Lane as dusk fell, pulled into the area behind an estate agent’s office just off the main road and ‘subjected to a serious sexual assault’. The attacker was described as white, slim, twenty to forty years old, much of his face covered by a stretchy black covering of the sort that motorcyclists wear under their helmets. The attacker said no words at all during the attack and left the woman in need of medical attention.