Dusk.

That was the word in the news article which had jumped out at her. Such a very specific word for such a fleeting part of the day. Immediately, she’d thought about dusk yesterday, when she was prowling around the building plot with her torch on, looking for her missing son. Her missing son who’d returned moments later, starving hungry and with a story of seeing a Dwayne Johnson movie on his own.

Dusk.

She goes to the door of her son’s bedroom. Her hand grips the doorknob.

She pushes the door open. The curtains are drawn, the bed is made, his pyjamas are folded on the pillow. She pulls open the curtains and lets in the weak morning light. She turns on the overhead light. You wouldn’t think anyone lived in this room. Josh has no stuff. While Georgia always has three cups half-filled with stale water on her bedside table, handfuls of jewellery, a book or two, numerous chargers snaked into each other, a sock, a balled-up tissue, a chapstick with the lid missing and a pile of coins on her bedside table, Josh has nothing. Just a coaster.

Dusk …

She falls to her knees and peers under his bed. There’s his laptop, plugged into the wall to charge, the wires all neatly tucked away. She pulls it out and rests it on her knees; she won’t sit on his bed as she worries she won’t be able to get his covers as neat as he’s left them and he’ll know she was in here.

She opens it and switches it on and knows already that the password he used for everything when he was small and she was allowed to know his password (donkey321) will no longer be his password and she will have to find some other way to access his computer. But she got quite good at codebreaking last year when she thought Roan was having an affair. She’d even managed to access his work login. She waits for the screen to wake up and then she types in donkey321. She waits for the error message but instead the computer switches screens and she is in.

She blinks in surprise and feels a surge of relief. If there was something on his computer that he didn’t want anyone to see he would for sure have changed his password to one his mum didn’t know.

She clicks through his windows. Worksheets for maths, iTunes, an essay on Animal Farm and a browser with ten tabs open, nearly all schoolwork related. The last tab is for Vue Cinemas and shows the films currently showing at the cinema on the Finchley Road.

She feels her heartstrings loosen a little.

There, she thinks, there. Just as he’d said. Gone to the movies.

She scrolls through the timings. Fighting With My Family. Three twenty p.m. That would have finished well after dusk.

Then she clicks on his browsing history (she’d done this once on Georgia’s laptop a year or so ago and been flabbergasted by the eclectic range of pornography her then fourteen-year-old daughter had been watching).

The most recent search term is ‘vue finchley road films today’. She vaguely registers the fact that he hasn’t used his laptop to browse since yesterday morning. The search before that is ‘Owen pick arrest’.

The search before that is for ‘Owen pick’.

The search before that is for ‘Owen pick saffyre maddox’.

The search before that is ‘saffyre Maddox missing’.

The search before that is ‘saffyre Maddox missing teenager.’

This is totally understandable.

Cate has been obsessed with the story of Saffyre Maddox ever since it broke. Hardly surprising, given that Saffyre is a former patient of Roan and that the man who abducted her lives across the street from them. Cate should not be surprised in the least that her son is taking such a keen interest in the story. Her current browsing history, she is sure, would look very similar to his.

She closes the laptop and slides it carefully back under his bed. Then she goes to his cupboards. Here his clothes are folded into squares and piled neatly. This is also where he keeps schoolwork he doesn’t need to take to school, and his pens and stationery for doing homework on a table that clips flat to the wall when he’s not using it. Why on earth he bothers every day to clear the desktop, clip it to the wall and put everything back into the cupboard, Cate cannot begin to imagine. He is Roan’s child, not hers, in that respect. In the bottom of the cupboard is his linen basket. She decides, while she is here, to empty it. She pulls the basket out of the cupboard and sees, tucked behind it, a carrier bag.

A scrunched-up bag is not a normal thing to find in Josh’s domain so she takes it out, unties the knot and peers inside. Old sports kit. A strong smell of damp and something worse than damp. Not quite sweat, but something as animal as sweat. She pulls out Lycra leggings: they’re Roan’s. Then a shiny, long-sleeved top with neon orange stripes on the arms. Also Roan’s.

She pulls out a pair of black socks and a pair of grippy gloves. And then last of all she pulls out a piece of black jersey that she cannot at first identify. She holds it out and turns it this way and that, stretches it out and puts her hand through a hole in the middle of it.

And then finally she works out what it is.

It’s a balaclava.

42

Every bone in Owen’s body hurts. The mattress he sleeps on at Tessie’s is about a hundred years old. Its springs are gone, it sags in the middle, it’s soft and flaccid, but his body has adjusted to it over the years. The bed in his cell is basically a slab of concrete with a thin mattress on top of it. He can feel his hip bones grinding against it even when he’s sleeping.

He can’t remember his bed at home, the home where he lived with his mum before she died. He can’t remember if it was soft or hard. He remembered it was a single bed in a single room in the tiny flat that had been all that was left of the family home he’d shared with his parents until he was eleven years old, once it had been sold and split into two. It was in Manor House, a never-going-to-be-gentrified area of north London way out on the Piccadilly line. His mum had made it look really nice because she was good at that sort of thing, but it was essentially a horrible flat. She’d always said, ‘This is your inheritance, it’s all in your name if anything happens to me.’ And then something had happened to her. A brain aneurism, when she was forty-eight. Owen had got home from sixth-form college and found her slumped face down on the kitchen table.

He’d thought maybe she was drunk, which was a strange thing for him to have thought as she, like him, drank only on very rare occasions.

The flat hadn’t ended up being much of an inheritance. Once he’d paid off all his mum’s credit-card debts, of which there’d been a very surprising amount, there’d been nothing left. A few thousand pounds.

And then he’d ended up in Tessie’s spare room with the saggy mattress, which, like everything about his tragic existence, he’d grown used to and come to accept unquestioningly.

Breakfast is brought to him in his cell: leathery toast and cheap jam, a mug of tea and a hardboiled egg. He wolfs it down, hiding the toast crusts under the paper napkin so that the officer who takes his tray away again won’t see them.

A few minutes later DI Angela Currie appears outside his cell. She is wearing a fitted dress with big patch pockets on the front, thick tights and boots. She has her hands inside the pockets with her thumbs hanging over the top. She looks very jolly.

‘Morning, Owen. How are we today?’

‘I’m OK.’

‘Nice breakfast?’

‘It was OK.’

‘Ready to talk some more?’

Owen shrugs and sighs. ‘Is there anything left to talk about?’

She smiles. ‘Oh yes, Owen, oh yes. Plenty.’

The guard unlocks his door and he follows DI Currie through the byzantine corridors to the interview suites. He had a shampoo last night with the things that Tessie dropped off for him. His hair is now clean and his clothes are clean, but he still has a big scab on his forehead from where he accidentally stabbed himself with the scissors and he still has an asymmetric fringe that makes him look slightly psychotic.

In the interview room he sits himself down in front of DIs Currie and Henry. DI Henry is looking a little the worse for wear today. Apparently he has a newborn and is finding the sleepless nights quite painful. Not that Owen has been chatting to DI Henry about his personal life, but he picks things up when they’re talking between themselves.

A moment later Barry arrives. He smells overwhelmingly of aftershave, not the fresh sporty sort of stuff that comes in blue glass bottles from the airport, but the heady, dark sort of stuff that comes in brown bottles from ancient shops in Mayfair backstreets. He says, ‘Good morning, Owen,’ but doesn’t make eye contact with him.

The interview is set up in the way with which Owen is becoming very familiar. He clears his throat, takes a sip of water from a polystyrene cup, puts it back on the table.