The two DIs exchange a look. The male DI leaves the room and DI Currie turns back to Josh. She says, ‘Thank you, Josh. Thank you so much. DI Henry’s going to follow that up right now.’

‘But there’s another thing. Just …’ Josh pulls his hands down his face. ‘… one more thing.’ He looks up at DI Currie. ‘I’ve been following him too.’

He glances at Cate. Cate widens her eyes at him, He hadn’t told her this earlier.

‘That was what Saffyre said to me when she called me at one o’clock that night. She said she couldn’t come back until the police had got him, Harrison John. She said she was scared he was going to kill her. She told me to keep watching him until I caught him in the act, until I had some definite evidence that it was him who’d been carrying out the attacks. So I’ve been out at night just following him about. Waiting for him to do something. Anything.’

Cate swallows hard. She’s overwhelmed by mixed emotions: pride, fear, horror, love; she feels as though she might drown in them all.

‘Then a few days ago I heard him on his phone telling someone he was meeting a girl on Sunday afternoon, that he was taking her to the O2 Centre to watch a movie. So I went along and I sat through the movie with them and watched him and he was all over this girl and I could tell she was finding him really annoying, she kept pushing him away, and then they left and I saw him pulling this girl along the road, towards the back end of the cinema and he was trying to make out like he was playfighting with her but I could tell she wasn’t enjoying herself and so I stayed really close. Really really close. Too close. Because he saw me and he got me against a wall like this.’ Josh mimes a fist around a collar. ‘He said he didn’t know who I was or what I wanted but if he saw me hanging around anywhere near him ever again, he’d shank me. He said, I’ve seen your face now, faggot, I’ve seen your face. Next time I see you, you’re dead.’

Josh pauses. He licks his lips. He turns to Cate. ‘And that was when I wet myself.’

Cate’s eyes fill with tears. The thought of her beautiful boy being held against a wall. The terrible, inevitable heat of a bladder emptied in fear. His shaking hands forcing the damp, stinking clothes into a carrier bag, shoving it into the corner of his wardrobe.

‘I said, What did you do to Saffyre? He said, Don’t mention that whore’s name to me. She’s a dirty little skank. I said, Where is she? Where the fuck is she? He said, I don’t fucking know. Getting whatever’s due to her, I hope. Now fuck off, stalker faggot.’

Josh’s shoulders slump. Then he looks up at the detective and he says, ‘I never caught him doing anything, Harrison John. I tried so, so hard. But can you get him, anyway? Get him off the streets, please? So that Saffyre can come back. Please.’

57

SAFFYRE

Every muscle in my body went hard, every sinew tensed, every hair stood on end. My heart, which was already thumping, started to race. I could see him closing in on Alicia, his pace picking up.

I thought, Oh no you don’t, Harrison John, oh no you don’t.

I stayed back in the shadows waiting for him to pass and then I ran up behind him, hooked my arm around his neck and brought him down on to the floor. His body made a satisfying cracking noise as it hit the pavement. I kept him pinned there for a while with his face ground into the pavement so he couldn’t see me.

‘What do you want?’ he said.

I brought my mouth close to his ear, close enough to smell his aftershave, the lingering aroma of a recently smoked cigarette.

I hissed into his ear. I said, ‘Want to see something magic, Harrison John?’

I took off my beanie hat and shoved it in his mouth to muffle his screams. And then I reached down for his hand.

His right hand.

I bent it back and brought it up to his face.

Then very slowly I took each of the three fingers he’d put inside me when I was ten years old and I snapped each one in turn.

Every time he cried out in pain I said, ‘It only hurts the first time, Harrison. It only hurts the first time. The next time it will be magic.’

‘Agh,’ he said, cupping his broken fingers, his face contorted with pain, ‘argh, fuck’s sake. What the fuck!’ He managed to overpower me then. He turned me over and looked straight into my eyes. He raised his arm as if he was going to hit me with it but then his vision blurred and he slumped on top of me in a dead faint.

I looked up and there was the face of an angel, backlit by a street lamp, a halo of red hair. It was Alicia.

‘Are you OK?’ she said. I saw the beginnings of a bruise on the edge of her cheekbone where Roan had hit her.

I pushed Harrison off me and he started to stir, clutching his broken fingers, moaning.

I looked at Alicia and said, ‘Are you OK?’

She looked at me blankly. ‘Who are you?’

I said, ‘Let’s get out of here. You got Uber?’

She nodded and pulled her phone out of her bag. Her hands were shaking.

Harrison was trying to get to his feet. He started to lumber after me but I grabbed Alicia’s hand and together we ran down the hill.

‘I’m going to kill you, Saffyre Maddox,’ I heard him yell after me. ‘Next time I see you, you’re fucking dead. Do you fucking hear me? Dead.’

The Uber took us to Alicia’s flat. I thought about telling her that I’d seen her block before, that I knew she lived on the fourth floor. But I thought, upon reflection, that the night had already been weird enough for both of us without adding that into the mix.

Her flat was really cute. Mint-green sofas with buttons on the backs and squat wooden feet, funky art in white frames, a lot of plants, a lot of books.

Alicia made us tea and opened some biscuits. As I picked up my mug I saw that my hands were shaking. I put the mug down again and breathed in hard. In my head I replayed the feeling of Harrison John’s bones snapping, the weird noise they made, like the noise when Angelo crunched his biscuits. And then I pictured him lumbering home to his flat on Alfred Road overlooking the railway track, clutching his broken fingers. I saw him sitting in the A & E department at the Royal Free Hospital and I pictured him leaving a while later with some kind of plastic covering over his hand, splints and bandages and whatnot holding his hand in place while it healed. I thought, How will he explain this to the world? And then I thought, Will he go to the police? I imagined him telling some fresh-faced, straight-out-of-Hendon cop that a girl called Saffyre had felled him in one blow and broken his fingers on a pavement in the dark for no good reason, and I could not see that happening.

‘Are you going to tell me who you are now?’ Alicia asked me.

‘I’m Saffyre Maddox,’ I said.

‘And you used to be a patient of Roan’s?’

‘Uh-huh.’

I watched everything processing through Alicia’s head, saw her big clever brain trying to compute everything, and failing.

‘And that guy?’

‘I used to know him. He hurt me. Now I’ve hurt him.’

‘He said he was going to kill you if he saw you again.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. And that was the problem. That was why my hands were shaking. I’d finally purged the childhood event that had destroyed me by inflicting pain on the perpetrator, but in doing so I’d opened myself up to yet more pain, more fear, more hurt.

‘Have you got anywhere you can stay?’

I stared at my fingers. ‘I live with my uncle,’ I said.

‘Are you safe there?’

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘It’s very close to where that guy lives. My school is just around the corner from his flat.’

‘You can stay here tonight, if you want?’

I glanced up at Alicia. Her eyes were still red from crying and the scuff on her cheek from where Roan had hit her was swelling up now. I thought, She needs me as much as I need her right now. So I nodded and said, ‘Thank you. I really appreciate that.’

I ended up staying at Alicia’s for a fortnight.

And for a fortnight I resisted the urge to contact Aaron. I can’t really explain it, how I could have done that to him. To someone who loved me and cared about me the way I knew he did. I knew he would be suffering, but each day that dawned I thought, Not today, not yet, he’ll be OK for a few more hours, I’ll go home soon. Each day I thought would be my last day in hiding. Each day felt like it was the day that Josh would track down Harrison John, that he would be detained by the police and that I would be safe.

Time didn’t have much form during those days. Without the punctuation of being the version of myself that puts on eyeliner and goes to school every day, I just stayed in a kind of sleep mode. My instincts didn’t work properly: Alicia had to remind me to eat; I would wake up at three in the morning and think it was daytime and that I was blind.