She smiles crisply at him. ‘No,’ she says. ‘We have not.’

‘Well, I wish you would. He should be in here. Not me. He’s the sicko. He’s the weirdo. He’s probably out there raping women right now, while you’re sitting here asking me the same questions, over and over and over again.’

DI Currie pauses. She looks at Owen through narrowed eyes and then she says, ‘Fine, Owen. Fine. If you can tell us one thing about “Bryn” that will help us to locate him, then please, do feel free to do that. Whenever you’re ready. Please.’ She leans back in her chair and appraises him frostily.

Owen sighs. He rubs at his face and tries to recall something, anything that Bryn might have said to out himself. He thinks back to the details of that first blog post he read. Bryn sitting in a pub on a snowy day watching the Chads and Stacys. He squeezes at his consciousness to remember more. The Dickensian outline of the pub in the swirling snow, the glow of the old lamps hanging outside and the carriage driveway where the horses were once tethered and the name of the pub had been changed when it was gentrified and before that it was the …

The Hunters’ Inn.

He grabs the edge of the table and says. ‘The town where he lives. It has a gastropub. A new gastropub. It used to be called the Hunters’ Inn. It’s on a common. Opposite a pond. With ducks. It’s his local. He goes there all the time. If you could find the pub, you’ll find him. He’s got big curly hair. He’s really small. He wears a blue jacket with a stain on the front. Ask anyone in there who he is. They’ll know. He’s very distinctive.’

He sees DI Currie roll her eyes very slightly. She had not expected him to supply any useful information and she’s annoyed that he has.

‘We’ll look into that, Owen. Leave that with us. But, Owen, even if we find this “Bryn” character somehow – him having deleted his blog and his presence on every forum you claim he used to frequent – even if we find him and we ask him about the Rohypnol, what do you think he’s going to say? Do you think he’s likely to tell us what you want him to tell us, that he gave it to you against your will, that you had no intention of using it? Owen, if this man exists and if we find him, he will deny all knowledge of knowing you at all.’

‘But his fingerprints. They’ll be on the jar. And have you asked the pub? The pub in Euston? Have you asked to see their CCTV yet? For that night? That will prove that he knows me. And it might show him giving me the drugs.’

‘Yes, but what you don’t seem to understand, Owen, is that none of that makes any difference. The fact of the matter is that you had date-rape drugs hidden in your bedroom and frankly we really don’t care where you got them from or what you got them for. If you want to prove to us that you didn’t abduct Saffyre Maddox and cause some harm to come to her on the night of February the fourteenth, then I’m afraid you’re going to need to try another tack entirely.’

Owen glances at Barry who looks at him as if to say, ‘What did I tell you?’

He draws in his breath and blinks. Then he looks straight at DI Currie and he says, ‘Please tell me what you think happened to Saffyre? I would really like to know. What do you think I did to her? How did I get this girl, this quite tall girl, to wherever it is you think I took her? Me, on my own. How did I drag her through the streets of Hampstead at midnight without being noticed? On Valentine’s night, the streets full of people? I don’t have a car. I’m not particularly strong. I’d really like you to share your theories with me. Because honestly, from where I’m sitting, you’re grabbing at straws.’

DI Currie purses her lips. ‘Owen,’ she says. ‘We are doing our jobs. We are exploring many, many avenues of inquiry. Trust us. And we have many theories about what happened to Saffyre and I can assure you we would not be paying thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money to keep you here if we did not have a strong case to prove that you know what happened to Saffyre. So, Owen, once again, from the top, please talk us through the events of the night of the fourteenth of February as far as you recollect them. Starting with leaving the house to meet a woman called Deanna Wurth at a restaurant in Covent Garden.’

Owen lets his head drop into his chest. Then he lifts it and says, ‘At around six p.m. I left the house and walked down the hill towards Finchley Road Tube station …’

46

Cate sits waiting for Roan to return. The piece of paper sits in front of her. Aaron had left it. She still wasn’t sure why he hadn’t taken it straight to the police. Some kind of misguided, misplaced loyalty to Roan, she suspected. It was as if he’d been hoping she’d offer him a palatable explanation.

She places it side by side with her own piece of paper, pulled from the pad she’d been making notes on earlier. Her eyes cast back and forth between them, taking in the similarities, and the one big difference. Her hands shake slightly as she smooths the pages out.

She glances at the kitchen clock. Seven eighteen. Where is he?

She’s almost 100 per cent sure now, almost positive that something unthinkable has been happening. She’d felt her flesh crawl slightly when her son had hugged her this afternoon when he got back from school.

‘Are you OK, Mum?’ he’d asked, his blue eyes full of concern.

‘I’m fine. Just think I might be coming down with something. Don’t want to pass my germs to you.’

He had a copy of Metro with him. He waved it in front of her and pointed at the headline. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘they still don’t know what happened to Saffyre.’

There was a strange intimacy, Cate noticed, in the way he said Saffyre’s name.

‘Did you ever meet her?’ she’d asked, casually.

‘Who?’

‘Saffyre. Did you ever meet her? I mean, she lived over the road from your school. And apparently she did classes at that martial-arts place you go to. It’s possible you might have met her?’

He’d shaken his head. Said, ‘No. Definitely not.’ Then, ‘What’s for dinner?’

Now she looks again at the piece of paper in front of her. The piece of paper with her son’s name on it. Found in Saffyre’s joggers. And not just her son’s name, but the dates and locations of all the sex attacks in the area since the New Year. The same as the dates on her own sheet of paper. With one difference: Saffyre’s list includes 21 January. The papers have not reported a sex attack on 21 January. But according to Cate’s diary, 21 January was the day Tilly claimed to have been attacked outside their house.

In a neat cursive script underneath the dates are several seemingly random names.

Clive.

Roan.

Josh.

Alicia.

‘I just thought,’ Aaron had said, ‘that maybe it meant something. I saw in the papers that you had a son called Josh. I mean, I know it’s a popular name. But still. Would you be able to ask your son? Ask him if he knows what it means? If he knows her?’

The significance of the dates had hit her immediately. She’d said, ‘Sure, I’ll ask him,’ and tried to keep the breathlessness from her voice. The moment he’d gone she’d torn the page from her notepad and compared them. Her hand had gone to her throat.

She’d walked straight into Josh’s bedroom and pulled the linen basket out of his wardrobe. The plastic bag was gone. She’d taken Josh’s schoolbooks from the shelves and flicked through them, frantically, with no idea what she was looking for. Who were Clive, and Alicia? Why did Saffyre have Roan and Josh’s names written on a piece of paper with the dates of the sex attacks? What was Saffyre doing outside their house on the night she disappeared?

She’d found nothing in her son’s bedroom. Nothing new on his browsing history. Georgia had got home from school first, gone straight to her room to strip off her uniform, tied an apron on over joggers and a sweatshirt, opened up a recipe on the iPad, propped it up in the kitchen and started to bake. Cate had circled her distractedly, clearing things away, loading them into the dishwasher, interjecting occasionally into her daughter’s high-octane monologue about how she wanted her bedroom decorated at the house, how maybe it should be dark, like, darkdark, maybe even black, or off black, or, like, totally the other way, shades of white, like her bedroom here, but dark is cosier, isn’t it?

Josh had got home an hour later and gone straight to his room after greeting Cate.

The cake is on the counter now, iced in a chocolate buttercream and decorated with crushed Flake bars. It gapes open on one side where Georgia has already cut herself a slice, showing the vanilla insides.

There’s a pasta bake in the oven. The smell makes Cate feel slightly nauseous.

She glances at the clock again.

Seven thirty-one.

‘Mum!’ It’s Georgia. ‘When’s dinner ready?’

‘Soon,’ she calls back. ‘When Dad gets back!’