‘So, Owen. Today is Monday the twenty-fifth of February. It’s now been eleven days since Saffyre went missing. The blood we found on your bedroom wall—’

‘It’s not my client’s bedroom wall,’ Barry says stiffly. He has to correct them every single time. ‘It’s a wall that is part of a house that has lots of other people in it. It does not belong uniquely to my client’s bedroom.’

‘No, sorry, let me rephrase that. The blood we found on the wall beneath your bedroom window … it was at least a week old.’

‘Possibly older,’ Barry says. This is all being recorded and he’s not going to let them get away with sloppy wording that might incriminate Owen. ‘As my client has mentioned on many occasions now, we have no idea exactly how old that blood is and he was aware of teenagers habitually using the plot on the other side of that wall as a place to gather to take drugs. This girl, who we now know had an association with the family opposite the plot, might well have been using the space herself to hang out in. She might have been high and behaving stupidly one night and injured herself. The blood on that wall proves nothing. Nothing at all other than that Saffyre Maddox was in the vicinity of my client’s house at some point over the past couple of weeks.’

DI Angela Currie sighs. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Indeed. But the fact remains that Saffyre’s blood was found on a wall beneath your bedroom window and the fact that she was in the vicinity of your home at roughly the time of her disappearance is significant enough for us to pursue the issue, relentlessly if need be. We would not be doing our jobs properly if we didn’t. So, Owen, it’s been eleven days since she was last seen, by you, outside the house opposite yours.’

‘It wasn’t her,’ he says. ‘I know that now. I keep replaying it and replaying it and the more I think about it the more I know it wasn’t her. It was a boy.’

He sees DIs Currie and Henry exhale heavily. ‘It was a person, according to your previous statement, matching the description of the missing girl.’

‘Yes,’ says Owen, ‘exactly. Which doesn’t mean it was her. It could have been anyone matching the description of the girl. Everyone looks the same with a hood up.’

DI Currie doesn’t respond to this. Instead she slowly, deliberately, pulls a sheaf of papers from a folder on the table in front of her. She spends a moment looking at the papers, an act of pure, blatant theatre. Owen knows this now.

‘Owen,’ she says, showing him the papers. ‘Do you remember telling us that you weren’t sexually attracted to teenage girls?’

He feels a flush of blood to his face. He can sense something bad coming his way. He clears his throat and says, ‘Yes.’

‘Do you remember a girl called Jessica Beer?’

‘No.’

‘The name doesn’t ring a bell?’

‘No,’ he says again, more forcefully.

‘Well, Jessica Beer remembers you, Owen. She was one of your students back in’ – she refers to the paper in her hand – ‘back in 2012. She was seventeen years old. She’s twenty-three now and yesterday I went to see her. We chatted. And she told me about a very worrying incident.’

‘What? Sorry? Jessica who?’ He peers at the paper but can’t see anything to explain what’s about to happen here.

‘Jessica Beer. She claims …’ DI Currie leaves a dramatic pause – she would not be winning any Oscars any time soon: ‘… that you forced yourself on her during a Christmas party on college premises and told her that you’d been watching her in your lessons and that she was pretty. That she was … perfect. She claims you touched her face and told her that her skin was radiant. That you breathed in her ear.’

‘What! No! That never happened!’

DI Currie pulls a photograph from her folder and turns it to show to him. It’s a very pretty mixed-race girl with soft brown curls, a freckled nose, full rose-pink lips. She looks familiar. But Owen can’t recall her entirely. It’s possible she’d been a student of his, but then this was six or more years ago and he’s had hundreds of students in the intervening years, hundreds of pretty girls. He might well have taught this girl, but one thing was for sure, he had never, ever said those things to her.

‘This never happened,’ he said definitively. ‘I may well have taught her, and that I can’t remember, but I did not talk to this girl, or any girl, ever, in such a fashion. I just wouldn’t.’

‘Were you drunk on the night of the Christmas party in 2012, Owen?’

‘Oh my God, how am I supposed to remember. It was seven years ago!’

‘Just over six years ago, to be more accurate, Owen.’

‘Six, seven, whichever, how can I possibly be expected to remember? I do not remember this girl; I do not remember this party.’

But Owen does remember this party. He remembers it very well. This party was the reason why he hadn’t gone to a Christmas party for years afterwards. He had got horribly drunk that year. Some boys who’d been quite friendly to him all term long had plied him with tequila shots. The room had started spinning at one point; he remembered standing in the middle of the dance floor staring up at a rotating disco ball and then realising that the whole room was rotating and he was rotating and he’d run to the toilets and thrown up in a cubicle. Luckily no one had seen him or heard him and he’d emerged half an hour later slightly grey and clammy and immediately gone home. But there’d been no incident with a girl. There simply hadn’t. He hadn’t done that. He wouldn’t and he didn’t.

‘This girl’s lying,’ he says. ‘Whoever she is. She’s lying. Just like those other girls.’

‘Looks a bit like Saffyre, doesn’t she?’ says DI Currie, turning the photo back to face her and pulling a really annoying face, as though this was the first time she’d noticed the similarity.

‘I don’t know,’ Owen replies. ‘I barely know what Saffyre looks like.’

‘Here.’ She turns a photo of Saffyre to face him.

‘Similar colouring,’ he says. ‘That’s about all.’

‘Same age. Both very pretty.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ says Owen, banging his hands down on the table. ‘I literally don’t know who this girl is. I have never seen her before. I’ve never seen this girl before either.’ He touches the photo of Saffyre. ‘I don’t like hurting people. I don’t like touching people. I don’t approach women sexually, ever, which is the exact reason why I’m thirty-three and I’ve never had sex. I can’t look at women. Women terrify me. Girls terrify me. The last thing I would do is go anywhere near a pretty girl at a party and start saying slimy things to them. I wouldn’t want to do it and even if I did want to do it, I’d be too scared!’

‘But not if you were drunk, Owen. Because that seems to be a unifying feature here, doesn’t it? This incident’ – DI Currie touches the photo of Jessica Beer – ‘at a party, while, according to Jessica’s statement, not sober. Then the girls at college who complained about you – about your behaviour, while at another party, again, not sober. Your unpleasant exchange with Nancy Wade on the street, when you deliberately blocked her path—’

‘Or so she claims,’ Barry interjected. ‘We only have her word for that, remember?’

‘When she claims you deliberately blocked her path and called her a bitch. That was on Valentine’s night when you, by your own admission, were not sober. So my theory is that maybe, Owen, you are one of those people who behaves extremely out of character when they’ve been drinking, that in normal circumstances you are not the sort of man to approach women or flirt with young girls or touch them inappropriately or toss verbal abuse at women you pass in the street, but that maybe after a few drinks, your guard lowers and this other side of you comes out, this different personality. And that maybe that other side of you, as abhorrent as it might seem to you now, is in fact capable of taking a young girl off the street and bringing them to some kind of harm. And it’s been eleven days now, Owen, eleven days since Valentine’s night and it’s long enough. Don’t you think? Long enough to make everyone suffer. To prevent Saffyre’s family from getting some kind of closure. So, Owen, please, please just think back to that night, when you weren’t sober, when you might have behaved out of character and done something you didn’t mean to do, something that had some kind of momentum of its own. Please, Owen. Tell us what happened. Tell us what you did to Saffyre Maddox.’

‘I did not do anything to Saffyre Maddox,’ Owen says, softly, but even as he says it, he feels something small but persistent pushing at the periphery of his consciousness. Like a tiny fruit fly, hovering by his nose. The girl, in the hood. The name Clive. He feels an echo in the soles of his feet. An echo of his footsteps, following the girl in a hoodie, calling to her in the darkness, heading after her into his garden.

43

Cate spends the rest of that morning with a cold shiver of dread trapped in her spine, making her shudder over and over again.