‘Just read it, Owen.’

Owen Pick, the disgraced college lecturer currently being held under arrest in a north London police station for the abduction and possible murder of missing teenager Saffyre Maddox, had a grand master plan, according to a friend on an incel forum he used to frequent. The friend, who wishes to remain anonymous, told us of a horrifying plan revealed to him by Pick during a pub session earlier this month. He said, ‘Part of the problem for the incel community is that we are being bred out of society. Women refuse to consider us as sexual partners, therefore we are not being given the opportunity to reproduce. Our genes are being phased out deliberately, by our governments, the media and by society. This is an issue that goes very deep into the psychology of the incel community. It’s something that Owen and I have discussed at great length. While I agree with the general theory and am myself active in the incel community in terms of trying to change the way we are viewed by society, I was very alarmed indeed the last time Owen Pick and I met up for a drink. He chose a shabby down-at-heel pub and I was surprised when I met him for the first time to see that he was quite well presented. He didn’t, to my eye, look like a classic incel. He looked like he could pass in society. I couldn’t see why he would have trouble attracting women. But there was something about him, something cold, an edge. He chilled me a little. I would say he had a lot of the traits of a psychopath. And then he told me he had a plan. He showed me a jar of pills. I had no idea what they were. He laid them on the table between us and he told me what his plan was. He was going to hook up with women on dating apps and then drug them and inseminate them while they were unconscious. He told me he was doing it for the good of the incel community, but I didn’t buy it. There was something about him, a narcissism, a lack of humanity, of compassion. I would say he had a personality disorder and was using the incel community and our beliefs to legitimise a sick personal agenda. In my opinion, Owen Pick was a rapist, masquerading as an incel.

A strange noise comes from Owen. He wasn’t expecting to make it. It comes from the deepest pit of his stomach, a curdled growl. He raises his fists, which had curled themselves up into rocks while he read the article, and then brings them down hard on to the table. Then he collects the newspaper between his hands, pushes it into a ball and hurls it across the room.

‘Fuck!’ he yells. ‘Fuck this. Fuck all of it!’

He sits down heavily, drops his face into the heels of his hands and begins to cry. When he looks up, Barry is sitting, adjusting the cuffs of his shirt. He sees Owen looking at him and passes him a handkerchief from inside his jacket.

‘It’s not looking good, Owen,’ he says quietly.

‘This is bullshit – you know that, don’t you? Bullshit. None of that is how it happened. He’s twisted the whole thing. He was the one. He gave me the drugs. He’s just pushing his agenda and throwing me under the wheels to do it. Fuck!’

Barry continues to look at him. ‘Well,’ he says. ‘We’ve still got a lot of work to do. But this’ – he points at the screwed-up newspaper – ‘is all hearsay and should have no bearing on the investigation. Let’s just put this behind us and see what our friends have got for us today, shall we?’

A few moments later DIs Currie and Henry walk into the room. Owen reads their energy. It’s been slowly depleting the past couple of days as all their so-called leads take them nowhere, as their case against Owen refuses to grow. But now there is a certain bristle about the pair of them as they take their seats, arrange themselves and their paperwork.

DI Currie gets straight to the point. ‘Owen. Do you know a woman called Alicia Mathers?’

Owen shakes his head. ‘Never heard of her.’

‘Well, Alicia Mathers claims to know you.’

Owen sighs. He’s down the rabbit hole. He’s in a world where people tell him that the sky is green, the grass is blue, two and two is five, black is white and white is black. And in this world, yes, of course a woman called Alicia Mathers would claim to know him.

‘Does she?’ he says.

‘Yes. She says she saw you that night. And that you were talking to a young girl in a hoodie.’

He rests his head on the table. The plastic feels cool against his forehead. His eyes are closed and he counts to five silently before raising his head again.

‘And she is coming forward only now, because …?’

‘It’s complicated,’ says DI Currie. ‘She has very good reason for not coming forward before now. Very sensitive reasons.’

‘And they are …?’

‘I’m not at liberty to share that with you.’

‘No,’ says Owen. ‘No. Of course you’re not. So, go on, what did this Alicia claim to have seen?’

‘Alicia says she saw you and a girl in a hoodie having a conversation. Outside your house.’

A bolt of light flashes through Owen’s head. It’s there again, that lost moment, the moment that keeps showing itself to him in fractured shards, over and again, whenever he closes his eyes. The girl in the hoodie, not in fact walking away, but walking towards him. Saying something. He thought it was false memory. But now he is being told that it wasn’t.

‘That might have happened,’ he says, feeling a surge of relief as the words leave his mouth. ‘I’ve been getting flashbacks the past day or so. It might have happened. But I have no idea what we talked about. I have no idea what she said. What I said. I have no idea.’

Owen hears Barry sighing heavily to his right and he notices the faces of the two detectives contort slightly, muscles and nerves under their skin reacting to his words.

‘Owen, Alicia Mathers claims she saw the girl in the hoodie talking to you, outside your house. She claims she saw you follow her into your back garden.’

‘Yes,’ says Owen, his head swimming with blurred images, his skin tingling with the uncertain memory of a girl’s hand on his arm. ‘Yes, that might have happened. Yes. She ran towards me. There was a woman walking towards the house opposite. The girl ran towards me. She ran across the road and she said …’ It’s there now, risen from the vaults of his mind: Clive! Is that you, Clive?

‘She called me Clive. She wanted to see something. She …’

What did she do? The room is entirely silent. He can see that Angela is not breathing. He looks down at his hands. The skin on his palms tingles as he feels another memory returning. ‘She asked me for a leg-up. To the roof of the garage. I put my hands out, like this.’ He demonstrates his hands linked together into a perch. ‘She was heavy. I’m not very strong. She almost fell back on to me, but she managed to grab hold of something. A gutter. Something. And pull herself up. And then …’

He pinches the bridge of his nose. Where had this been? All these days?

He continues: ‘I don’t know. I stood guard. I don’t know how long. I didn’t talk to her. Then she jumped down. She jumped down. She said ow. And that—!’ He starts as something occurs to him. ‘That must have been when she cut herself! On my wall. And dropped her phone. She dropped her phone and then she picked it up again. And she ran. She said, “Thanks, Clive,” and she ran.’

‘Clive?’ says Angela.

‘Yes. I don’t know. I don’t know why she called me Clive. She must have thought I was someone else.’

He sees DI’s Currie and Henry exchange a look.

‘She ran?’ says DI Currie.

‘Yes!’ he says, his voice full of elation. ‘She jumped down. She said ow. She dropped her phone. She picked it up. She said, “Thanks, Clive.” And she ran.’

He feels a burst of euphoria at recovering the weird chunk of time missing between seeing her outside Lycra Man’s house and seeing her run down the street, the sound of her rubber soles against the cold, dry pavement.

‘And the woman across the street?’

‘I don’t remember. I don’t … She was …’

And there it was, retrieved like an old photo dropped down the back of a sofa: the missing piece.

‘She was talking to the man across the road. The man who goes running. The, you know, the psychologist. She was talking to him. She was shouting. She was crying. And that’s it,’ he says. ‘That’s as much as I remember.’

The room falls silent. DI Currie writes something on a piece of paper. She clears her throat.

‘Well, thank you for remembering, Owen. I must say, it strikes me as rather odd, after all these days, all this time.’

‘It was when you said about the woman. I knew – I kind of knew there’d been something missing. But I couldn’t find the memories until you said about that other woman.’

‘It’s called a fragmentary blackout,’ says Barry, sitting upright. ‘Common after episodes of heavy drinking. And the lost memories can be triggered by someone filling in a missing detail.’