I let a beat of silence pass. Then I talked.

‘When I was ten years old, this boy in the year above groomed me. He was the tallest boy in the year. He had two younger sisters in the school who he was really protective of. He was naughty but the teachers all loved him. And he kind of picked me out. When we played dodgeball at breaktime he’d tell the other year sixes to get out my way. To let me have my turn. And he’d give me these looks like: Don’t worry, I’ve got your back. He made me feel really special. And then one day …’ I stopped briefly to step back from a wave of emotion. ‘One day he beckoned me into this little section of the playground where the receptions usually played, but they were all in their classroom or something and he said, Do you want to see something magic? And I said, Yes, yes and I followed him in and he said, You need to squat down, like this, and he squatted down to show me and I did what he said and I was looking up at him like, yes! I’m squatting! Now show me the magic! And then he … It was so quick. He inserted his fingers inside me and it hurt, it really hurt and I said, Ow! And he said, It’s OK. It only hurts the first time. After that the magic happens. He stroked my hair and then he took his hand away from me and he showed it to me and he smiled and he said, It’ll be better next time. I promise.’

It felt like a belt had been squeezed around my gut, and with every word I spoke, it was loosened a bit. By the time I got to the end I felt weirdly like I could breathe. Even though my eyes were full of tears and my head ached with the sadness of that little girl waiting for the magic that never ever came, I could breathe. Three times I let him do that to me. And then school finished for the summer and Harrison left and I never saw him again. But he stayed, inside my head, inside my DNA, my marrow, my breath, my blood, in every single part of me. He stayed. My tumour.

Josh licked the Rizla and stuck it down, twisted the tip, stuck in a tiny roll of cardboard to make a filter. He reached back into his coat pocket and brought out a lighter.

‘What a fucking bastard,’ he said. ‘That’s just so sick. So sick.’

‘Yeah. It was. But guess what? I saw him the other day. I saw the boy who did that to me.’

‘Oh my God,’ said Josh. ‘Shit. Where?’

‘There.’ I pointed down the hill. ‘He was just coming up from the Finchley Road. I was going down. He said my name. He recognised me and he said my name and it was like … It felt like the playground all over again. Like he had the right to me in some sort of way, like he was entitled to me, to my body, to my name. You know? And for a day or two I felt myself going backwards, like I’d climbed the top of a mountain and then lost my footing and started slipping back and was trying to find something to grab hold of to stop me slipping but there was nothing there. And then I found something.’

Josh looked at me wide-eyed, his face lit with orange shadows from the flame of the lighter he was using to light the spliff. ‘What?’

‘Revenge. I found revenge.’

‘Oh my God. What did you do?’

‘Nothing. Not yet. But I just know that that’s the only way for me now. The only way to get him out of my DNA. I need to hurt him.’

Josh brought the spliff to his lips and inhaled. He narrowed his eyes and he nodded. ‘You really do,’ he said.

I glanced at him quickly. I’d just put something into words that had been buried away so far inside me that I hadn’t even known what it was until I’d actually said it. I needed to know what it looked like to another person.

‘You think?’

‘Yeah. Totally. He’s probably still out there abusing people to this day. If he was doing this when he was eleven, getting away with it, then …’

I looked at Josh again. He offered me the spliff. I shook my head.

And then we both turned at a sound from the undergrowth. Two amber dots of light. The shimmer of red pelt. A snout held to the air. I put my hand into the outside pocket of my rucksack for the dog treats I now kept in there all the time. I opened up the packet towards the fox and he came.

I laid the treats out around us and we watched as he picked each one up in turn, never once looking at us.

‘I want to help you,’ said Josh. ‘Help you get your revenge. Please. Can I help you?’

The fox sat down and looked at my bag expectantly. His tongue darted out and he licked his lips.

I looked at Josh.

I said, ‘Yes. Please.’

45

‘How much longer can they keep me here?’

Barry shuffles some paperwork out of his briefcase. ‘Now they’ve charged you, as long as they like.’

‘But they haven’t found any new evidence. I mean, they can’t take this to court based on what little they’ve got.’

‘No. But they can keep trying, and believe you me, Owen, they are raking up every single strand of your life, every filament, until they find the thing they’re looking for. And meanwhile they’re going to keep dragging you back into that room and asking you questions until you crack.’

‘Crack?’ says Owen, incredulously. ‘But I’m not going to crack. How can I crack when I didn’t do it?’

But as he says the words, a curtain of doubt falls across his consciousness. His mind keeps taking him back to a moment he’s not even sure actually happened. The moment just after he saw the person across the street. The moment just before he thought he’d turned and gone indoors and gone to bed.

Because he cannot actually remember turning and going back indoors.

And since this morning’s interview, Owen’s turned over every night of his life when he’s been out drinking and realised that frequently all he can remember are flashes of action, but none of the bits in between.

He can’t remember journeys home. He can’t remember folding up his clothes. He can’t remember who ‘Bill’ was whose phone number he found in his pocket the night after a leaving drinks a couple of years ago. He can’t remember buying the bottle of whisky he’d found in a carrier bag on his bedroom floor once with a paper receipt with his card details on it, proving that he’d been into a branch of Tesco Metro and carried out the full transaction in person. He can’t remember stroking girls’ hair on the dance floor. Flicking sweat at them.

He can’t remember telling a girl called Jessica with soft skin that she was pretty. And he definitely can’t remember going to bed on Valentine’s night. He knows he woke up in his bed wearing his shirt and one sock. He knows he slept late. He knows he had a hangover. He remembers the girl who’d called him a creep, he remembers the man with the white dog and he remembers the girl in the hoodie. But he can’t remember the rest.

And that picture keeps flashing in and out of his head: a figure, passing by him outside his door, heading towards the back of the house. It could have been her, the girl in the hoodie. It could have been someone else. Or it could be just a ridiculous fragment of his imagination, something his psyche has conjured up to deal with the trauma of his situation. You read about it all the time, about people confessing to things they haven’t done. Is this how it happens? he wonders. Is it your own brain that does it to you, that plants things there to frame you, like a bent copper?

He stares down at his hands. They look alien to him, someone else’s hands attached to his arms. He’s starting to lose any sense of himself or who he should be or what he’s meant to be doing or who he ever was. He tries to place himself back in that Italian restaurant with Deanna, tries to imprint the way she looked at him that night, over the way DI Currie looks at him in the interview room. If only he could hold on to that, then maybe this nightmare would end.

Barry strokes his fat silk tie and says, ‘There’s a girl missing. You’re all they’ve got. And you’re looking like a good bet to them. It’s irrelevant whether or not you did it at this point. They’re not letting you go anywhere until they have to.’

‘I didn’t do it, you know.’

Barry doesn’t reply.

‘I didn’t do it.’

Barry narrows his eyes at Owen. ‘Do what?’ he says. ‘What didn’t you do?’

‘Hurt that girl. I did not hurt that girl.’

Barry doesn’t speak for a while. Then he looks Owen hard in the eye and he says, ‘Well, Owen, the time for you to prove that is right now. Prove it, Owen. Tell me something incontrovertible. Tell me something that’ll get you out of here. Please. For both our sakes.’

‘So,’ says DI Currie, who is beginning to lose her fresh-faced glow as the investigation drags out. ‘Owen. Please, I know we’ve been over all of this. But it’s worth going over it again. The more we talk about it the higher the chance of you regaining some kind of memory. Please, tell us again about the night of the fourteenth of February.’

Owen exhales loudly. He can’t go through all of this again, he simply cannot. ‘What about Bryn,’ he says. ‘Have you still not found him?’