‘Yes. You did.’
‘Well. It was a bad time for us. You know. We were drifting apart. She knew I’d met someone. She was … I suppose she was desperate. Trying anything to keep me. And there’s something so dreadful about a desperate woman, Owen. So dreadful.’
They both fall silent for a moment. Then his dad says, ‘You know I loved your mum, Owen. I loved her very much. And you.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes. Leaving you behind killed me.’
‘Did it?’
‘Of course it did. You were my boy. Just on the cusp of it all. Just about to blossom. But I was under pressure. Gina wasn’t getting any younger. She wanted to start trying for a family immediately. She pulled me, really pulled me very hard, away from you both. And I can see now that that wasn’t easy for you.’
‘So you didn’t leave because Mum was a whore. You left because Gina wanted you all to herself.’
His dad nods. ‘Essentially. Yes.’
Owen pauses to absorb this.
‘And you let me leave when I was eighteen because Gina wanted her family to herself?’
‘Again, there were other factors at play. But yes. There was some … pressure there.’
Another silence falls; then Owen says, ‘Dad. What do you think about women? Do you like them?’
‘Like them?’
‘Yes.’
‘Of course I like them! Goodness. Yes. Women are remarkable. And I’ve been blessed that two of them have let me share their lives with them. I mean, look at me …’ He gestures at himself. ‘I’m not exactly catch of the day, am I? I’ve been punching above my weight all my life. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.’
There’s a sound at the door and Owen turns and there’s Gina. She’s wearing a black satin blouse with dark flowers printed on it and tight blue jeans. Her hair is dyed a shiny mahogany and up in a ponytail. She’s pushing sixty but still looks youthful.
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I thought I heard voices. Ricky’ – she looks at Owen’s dad –‘what’s going on?’
‘They let him out, Gina. This morning. Dropped all charges. He’s a free man.’
‘Oh.’ She clearly doesn’t know what to say. ‘That’s good then?’
‘Of course it’s good! It’s wonderful.’
‘And everything else?’ she asks, still standing in the doorway. ‘The girls at college? The date-rape drugs …?’
‘Gina—’
‘No, Ricky. It’s important. Sorry, Owen, but it is. Look. I don’t know you very well, and I’m sorry about that. I’ve – we’ve – had a lot on our plates over the years with Jackson, as you know. But there’s no smoke without fire, Owen. And even if you’ve been cleared of that girl’s disappearance, there is still an awful lot of smoke around you. An awful lot.’
Owen feels a familiar tug of anger in his chest. But he quells it, breathes in hard. He turns and he engages Gina properly, in a way in which he has rarely engaged a woman, with clear eyes and an open heart and he says, ‘You’re right, Gina. I totally understand what you’re saying. I’ve been far from the best version of myself over the years and I take my share of the blame for everything that’s happened to me. But this, what I’ve just been through, it’s changed me. I don’t want to be that person any more. I’m going to work on myself.’
He sees a chink in Gina’s defences. A slight tip of her chin. ‘Well, that’s good,’ she says. ‘And you could probably start by apologising to those girls. The ones you made feel uncomfortable at the college disco.’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes. I’m going to sort it all out. All of it. I swear.’
Gina nods and says, ‘Good boy.’ Then she looks serious for a moment. ‘But if it wasn’t you who abducted that girl, then who was it?’
Owen blinks. He didn’t ask. He’d been so shell-shocked by the unexpected sequence of events that he’d just walked out without even wondering.
56
‘My dad got a Valentine’s card,’ Josh explains to DI Currie. ‘My sister opened it, my mum snatched it away from her, told her it was private and that she wasn’t to open it. And there was a bit of a row between my mum and my sister, my sister telling my mum that she should want to know who was sending Valentine’s cards to my dad. And then my mum hid it away in a drawer. I snuck in when she wasn’t looking and read it. It was from her. The woman. Alicia.’
‘And what did it say?’ asks DI Henry.
‘Oh, just all this desperate stuff. Like how she needed him and couldn’t live without him.’
‘So it looked like he was going to leave your mother for her?’
Josh shrugs. ‘Yeah, I guess. And I just … I was so angry with my dad when I saw that card, that what he was doing with that woman had somehow found its way into my home. And I ended up confronting him.’
‘When was this?’
‘That night. Valentine’s night. He went out for a run and I ran out after him and stopped him on the corner. I had the card in my hand. I said, Dad, what the fuck are you doing? You’re going to kill mum if you do this. You’re going to kill her!
‘But then Dad told me he’d taken Alicia out for lunch that day, to tell her that he wasn’t going to leave Mum for her. That their affair was over. And me and Dad hugged and I was crying and he said he was sorry, he was so so sorry. I said, What are we going to do about this card. I said, We can’t get rid of it because Mum knows it’s in the house. If it disappears, she’ll know there was something fishy going on. She’ll know. He said, Leave it with me. I’ll sort it out. Leave it with me. And then he and Mum went out for dinner and me and Georgia were at home and at about eleven o’clock the doorbell rang and I thought it was going to be Mum and Dad, forgotten their keys, but it wasn’t, it was her. It was Alicia. And she was really drunk. Crying, saying, Let me in, let me in. I want to see him. Let me in! And I said, He’s not here. He’s out with Mum. I told her to fuck off. To leave us alone.’
‘And where was your sister when all of this was happening?’
‘She was in her room, it’s at the other end of the hallway and she was watching a movie with her AirPods in so she didn’t hear anything.’
DI Currie writes this down and then nods at Josh to continue.
‘I called Saffyre then, to tell her what was happening. She said she’d come over.’
‘Why did she say that?’
Josh shrugs. ‘Like I said, we just kind of look out for each other. We’re friends. I was helping her. She was helping me.’ He picks up his water cup and puts it down again. ‘She got to our street at about eleven fifteen. She messaged me to say that she was outside and the coast was clear, no sign of Alicia. She said she’d stay and keep an eye on the place. And then I heard Mum and Dad get back about fifteen minutes later and I thought that was it. That it was all over. But a few minutes later I heard voices outside my bedroom window and I saw Dad in the front garden and then I saw him pulling someone out on to the pavement. Her. Alicia.
‘I didn’t know where Saffyre was then. I thought maybe she’d just gone home. A few seconds later I saw Alicia running past our house; she looked like she was crying. And then out of nowhere I saw Saffyre, running behind her. And that was the last time I saw Saffyre. Running after Alicia.’
Josh clears his throat and takes a sip of his water.
‘And where did Saffyre and Alicia go? Do you know?’ asks DI Currie.
Josh shakes his head. ‘I have no idea. But Saffyre called me later that night, about one in the morning. She said she couldn’t tell me where she was but that she’d done something, something really bad, and that she needed to go into hiding for a while because she was scared. She told me not to tell anyone, not the police, not even her uncle. She turned her phone off after that. I couldn’t contact her. But …’ Josh wrings his hands together, and Cate strokes them. ‘Saffyre was hunting someone. She was hunting a guy who did something to her when she was a child. She’d found out where he lived and had been following him and she was convinced – we were both convinced that he had something to do with all the sex attacks in the area. You know, the guy who’s been grabbing women?’
DI Currie looks at Josh in surprise. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘OK. And do you have any idea who that might have been?’
‘She told me never to tell anyone. She told me not to. But now I’m really worried he’s done something to her. Because she should be back by now. If she was safe, she’d be back, wouldn’t she?’
‘Who, Joshua? Who do you and Saffyre think has been attacking women in the area?’ DI Currie asks gently.
Josh sighs and there is a moment of weighty silence while he forms his response.
Cate stares at him.
Finally he replies. ‘It’s a guy called Harrison John. He lives on Alfred Road, up the Chalk Farm end. He’s about eighteen. He hurt Saffyre when she was a child and now she thinks he’s hurting other women.’