He passes the empty tray to the policeman on the other side of the door. His name is Willy. He’s Bulgarian. He’s utterly humourless, which isn’t a great state of affairs for someone called Willy.

It’s just gone eight o’clock. It looks like a sunny day. Is it possible, Owen wonders, to become institutionalised in under a week? He’s lost any real sense of what life used to feel like. The guy in Tessie’s bathroom about to trim his fringe feels like a distant memory. The guy who used to go to work every day and teach teenagers how to code also feels like a dream. The guy in the papers, the incel with a taste for impregnating comatose women is a fictional version of himself. The only version of himself that feels real is this one, here, sitting alone in his cell in Kentish Town. He sits for a few moments, staring at the sunny angles painted on to the walls of his cell. He feels a strange moment of hopefulness. Deanna doesn’t think he’s a monster. That’s enough. That’s all he needs to go about the rest of his life.

His thoughts begin to curl back on themselves, beyond the sunny cell, beyond cutting his fringe in Tessie’s bathroom, beyond the steamed-up windows of his classroom at Ealing College, beyond Tessie’s hand on his shoulder at his mother’s funeral, beyond his mother slumped over the kitchen table, looking as though she was drunk but actually being dead. They curl back to the other version of himself: the pretty little boy who wouldn’t smile for the camera in the modelling agency studio. Who was that little fellow? he wonders now. Who was he and how did he end up here?

He tries to remember moments of pain that might have brought him to this point. He thinks about the build-up to his parents’ divorce when he was eleven years old. Divorce, he thinks, is damaging for children; everyone knows that. But was there something in particular about the way his parents broke apart that might have led, of all the myriad possible versions of himself, to this one?

He thinks of the house they once lived in, in Winchmore Hill. A post-war thing with pebble-dashed walls and small windows, a porch full of spider plants, a dark dresser with a phone on it and notepad, a small chandelier. His mother had a thing about chandeliers. He remembers his mother on the bottom step, the phone in her hand, talking to a friend, a crumpled tissue at her nose, saying, ‘I think it’s over this time, Jen, I really do.’

He remembers the smell of cigarette smoke curling up the stairs to where he sat on the landing. He remembers coming down a minute after the phone call ended and saying, ‘What’s over, Mum?’ and her smiling and stubbing out her cigarette and saying, ‘Nothing, Owen. Nothing at all. Now get back to bed. School tomorrow.’

But he’d been on high alert after that, watching his parents like a hawk for the thing that would show him what was really happening.

Suddenly Owen’s flesh crawls as a memory returns to him, something he used to think about all the time but hasn’t thought about for years, not since his mother died, because it sickens him so much.

He remembers his father coming home from work one night, late, the smell of London pubs about him. Owen saw him from the top of the landing, dropping his keys on to the dark dresser. Unzipping his jacket. He saw him sigh and then pull back his shoulders as if bracing himself for something.

‘Ricky?’ His mother’s voice from the front room. ‘Ricky?’

His father sighing again and then moving towards the door. ‘Hi, love.’

And then the sound, as his father opened the door of the front room, of music, not TV music, but strange, dreamy music, an American man singing something about a wicked game. His mother saying, ‘Hello, darling, come into my boudoir.’ And Owen tiptoeing down the stairs and peering through the banisters and seeing his mother standing in a room full of candles wearing strange items: underwear with holes cut out, something around her neck, heels four inches high, lips painted red and Owen’s father walking in, his mother grabbing his tie and pulling him towards her saying, ‘I want you to fuck me like I’m a whore.’

And then the door closing and noises – grunts, bangs, muffled wails – before they stop, very suddenly, and his mother is sobbing and his father walks out of the room, doing up his trousers, his face red and says, ‘Act like a whore, I’ll treat you like a whore.’

His mother crying, ‘Ricky. Please. Please. I want you. I need you. Please. I’ll do anything!’

Her mascara running down her cheeks. One breast loose of the cut-out bra. Drooping. Puckered.

‘Ricky. Please.’

His father picking up his coat in the hallway. Picking up his keys. Leaving.

The man singing about his wicked game.

The front door shutting.

Two weeks later Owen’s father left for good. The house was sold. The flat was bought. His mother died. His father hated him. His father’s wife hated him. His aunt hated him. Girls hated him. He lost his job. He got arrested for killing a girl. He developed a taste for prison food.

Could it be that simple? he wonders. The sight of his mother whoring herself to his father? The rejection by his father of his mother? Was that at the root of everything that had gone wrong since? His fear of women? Of rejection? And if it was that simple, then surely it could be blotted out? Redacted from the story of his life? And then it could start over again. But how? How can he excise that moment? He realises there’s only one way to erase it and that’s to go to the heart of it. To his father.

He goes to the door of his cell and he bangs on it.

Willy opens the window flap. ‘Yes.’

‘I need to make a phone call,’ he says. ‘Please. It’s very urgent.’

Willy blinks slowly. ‘I will have to find out.’

‘Please. I haven’t made a call yet. I’m allowed one call. And I haven’t had one yet.’

Willy lets the window flap close and says, ‘I’ll find out. Wait.’

A moment later Willy is back. He says, ‘Pick up your things.’

‘What things?’

‘Your clothing and your toiletries. Apparently you are being allowed to leave.’

‘What? I don’t …?’

‘I don’t know either; I’m just saying what I’ve been told. Please pack up your things. Now. It’s time to go.’

‘I don’t understand. What’s happened? Have they found her?’

‘Now.’

Owen packs up his things. He looks at the golden shadows on the cell wall, the dent in the mattress, the neatly folded blanket. He looks at the square of blue sky through the cell window. He thinks of the hours he has spent in this room that feels so much like the only place he has ever known. And yet now, somehow, he is free of it.

But he knows one thing with a blinding certainty: he is not going back to the other life. He is not going back to Tessie’s flat with the locked doors. He is not going back to being the sort of person that people would think capable of rape and murder. He’s not going back to the incel forums and seedy drinks with raging women-haters.

Willy opens the door and Owen silently follows him through the corridors, through rooms of people who return things to him and ask him to sign things. Then he is out. On a pavement in Kentish Town. The sun is bright today, a warm sun, a portent of spring, a portent of new beginnings.

He checks his wallet for a debit card and cash, then puts out his arm and hails a taxi.

54

Cate is at Kentish Town police station with Josh. She hasn’t told Roan that they are here. She hasn’t told Georgia. She phoned Josh’s school this morning and told them that he had an emergency medical appointment.

She perches her bag on her lap and clears her throat nervously, watching the swinging doors in front of her open and shut every few seconds, uniformed and non-uniformed police passing through holding files, bags, coffees, phones.

She turns to Josh. ‘Are you OK?’

He nods nervously. He looks like every fibre of his being is resisting the urge to jump to his feet and run.

Finally, fifteen minutes after they arrive, DI Currie appears.

‘Hi, Mrs Fours,’ she says. ‘Thank you so much for coming in. And you are Josh?’

Josh nods and shakes her hand.

‘Follow me this way, if you would. I think I’ve managed to get us an interview room, fingers crossed; we’re crazy busy in here today for some reason.’

They follow her through a corridor to a door. She knocks and someone answers. ‘This is my partner DI Jack Henry. We’ve been working together on the Saffyre Maddox case. Please, take a seat. Coffee? Tea?’

Someone goes to get them water and then DI Currie smiles at them each in turn and says, ‘So, Josh. Your mum says you might have some information about the whereabouts of Saffyre Maddox.’

Cate looks at Josh. He shakes his head, then nods. He says, ‘I don’t know where she is. I just know what happened. That’s all.’

‘What happened?’

‘Yeah. On Valentine’s night. And I know it was nothing to do with that guy over the road. I know that. But I don’t know where she is. I don’t know where Saffyre is.’