And there’d been a weird and rather unsettling postscript to the Harrison John story; it emerged, once he was under arrest for Tilly’s attack, that Roan had treated him at his clinic for a few weeks, back when he was eleven years old. In a strangely sickening quirk of fate, it turned out that Harrison John was the little boy who’d written the violent rape fantasies, the boy Roan had mentioned in passing only a few weeks before. The connectivity was unnerving.

Once Harrison had been charged by the police for his attack on Tilly and held on remand, just as Josh predicted, Saffyre reappeared. She never fully explained where she’d been, just told police that she’d been in fear for her life after being threatened by Harrison John and that she’d been ‘with a friend’. The day after Cate took Josh to the police station, Saffyre returned to her flat on the eighth floor of the block on Alfred Road, to her uncle and her kitten. That was the photo that accompanied all the articles in the papers, a smiling Saffyre Maddox and her kitten Angelo. A happy ending.

Except of course it wasn’t.

Nothing is perfect. Even this house, she thinks, her eyes casting about the clean lines of it, is not perfect. Even now, she sees, in this newly plastered and painted room, that there is a large crack running from the point where the corners meet. And the builders only left yesterday.

Nothing can ever be perfect. And that’s fine. Cate doesn’t want perfect. She just wants now, this, here, this moment as they walk around their empty, shiny, paint-smelling home, summer on its way, the garden furniture she ordered from Ikea in cardboard boxes waiting to be assembled, the barbecue party she dreamed of back in the winter months so close now she can almost smell the sweet hickory smoke.

61

SAFFYRE

There’re no such things as happy endings; we all know that.

You know, here I am safe back home with Aaron. I got over my claustrophobia and I sleep in my bed now, under a duvet, with my kitten. When I wake up in the mornings, my sheets are still attached to the bed and not knotted around my legs. I’m predicted to do really well in my mock A-levels in spite of missing two weeks of school. Oh, and I have a sort of boyfriend. Someone who’s been in love with me for years. It’s not quite the real deal but it’s nice, you know. And it’s just good that I can finally imagine letting someone in, you know, letting someone get close.

Alicia works in a different clinic now and has no idea what she ever saw in Roan. We’re still good friends and I go over once a week or so for a cup of tea and a chat.

I stayed in touch with Josh, too. He told me that his parents split up, which doesn’t surprise me too much. I’m glad for his mum; she looked like the sort of woman whose whole life had been moulded around a man and now she was free to find what shape she really wanted to be. Roan had some kind of mental breakdown and is currently on sabbatical from work and living with his parents down in Sussex somewhere.

And Harrison John is on remand for what he did to that little girl.

He’s also on remand for two of the other attacks on that list I made all those weeks ago. The victims came forward when they saw his photo in the papers and identified him as their attacker. CCTV footage showed him to be in the vicinity of the attacks and his fingerprints matched a print taken from one victim’s handbag. So, there, I got what I wanted, I got justice. I got a disgusting human being put away and now the whole country knows what he is.

And then there’s Owen Pick. Weirdly I bumped into him the other day. He was just coming out of the Tube station; I was going in. We stopped for a little while and I finally got the chance to apologise to him properly for not going to the police earlier to let them know he had nothing to do with my disappearance. I said, ‘My head was all over the place back then. I didn’t know right from wrong.’

He said, ‘Yeah, I know what you mean. My head was in the same place, too.’ He told me he’d asked for his job back at the college and they’d agreed. He told me he no longer lived in the house next to the building site, that he had his own place now, for the first time in his life. And he told me that he had a girlfriend. ‘Early days,’ he’d said. ‘But so far, so good.’

We hugged as we said goodbye and it felt like the last piece of the puzzle falling into place. I walked away from him thinking, There. It’s all done now. Everything’s back in one piece.

But.

Something doesn’t sit right. Something to do with Valentine’s night when I was sitting outside Roan’s old place.

That first night at Alicia’s I looked at the footage on my phone that I’d filmed from the top of Owen’s garage roof. I watched it over and over. I zoomed in on the look on Roan’s face as his hand came into contact with Alicia’s porcelain skin. The engorged rage of it. The fury. The darkness.

I know how the world works.

Men hit women.

Women hit men.

Girls break boys’ fingers in revenge for childhood abuse.

But there was something stone-cold terrifying about the look on Roan’s face as he hit Alicia, this man whose job it was to cure people. Just like Josh had said that night when we first got chatting: How did a man with a job like his reconcile himself to causing pain to people he loved on a daily basis?

I showed the footage to Alicia that night. She had a packet of peas held to the bruise on her cheekbone. She flinched when I showed it to her. I said, ‘Fuck, Alicia, what sort of man is this?’

She said, ‘I don’t want to dwell on that.’

I said, ‘What do you mean?’

She let the bag of peas drop to her lap. ‘It’s like he goes through life wearing a mask. Tonight, I saw it come off and I didn’t like it. It made me wonder,’ she said. ‘It made me wonder about things.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Just things he’d talk about. Things he wanted to do in bed. Things he’d say.’ ‘Like what?’

She brought the peas back to her cheek and shook her head lightly. ‘I caught him once,’ she said, her breath catching slightly on the words, ‘I caught him in his office. He was … pleasuring himself. I teased him, asked if he was thinking about me. He laughed it off, said of course he was thinking about me. But I saw, out of the corner of my eye, Saffyre, I saw an essay one of his patients had written. A rape fantasy.’

My eyes opened wide.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘He’s one of those guys, you know? One of those guys that nothing would surprise you about, not really, if you actually stopped and thought about it. If you looked behind the mask. That he might actually be the bad guy, not the good guy. That he might not be the saviour.’ She paused and looked up at me. ‘He might be the predator.’

For a moment after she said that, I kind of stopped breathing.

I went back to visit my little plot of land opposite Roan’s old place the other day, just for old times’ sake. Looks like the flats are finally going to be built. The foundations are being filled. The girders are ready to put in place. There are people there all day long, the gates are open, vehicles driving in and out.

My little place has gone now, and with it the peace and the stillness, and the little red fox.

And I sit on my bed now, on this bright April evening, and I stare up at my pink paper lampshade with the heart-shape cut-outs and I feel better about the eight-year-old girl who chose it, because she grew up to be a kick-ass, finger-breaking girl who got her revenge on the person who hurt her. I look down at Angelo, not a scrap any more, a proper little cat, my little bit of wild outdoors indoors, and I should be happy, but something’s buzzing and buzzing through my head. Despite Harrison being on remand for three of the sex attacks, he has alibis for all the others and it looks like maybe there was more than one predator at large all along.

I uncross my legs and go to my window and stare down into the plaza. And then I remember a night, earlier this year, one of the nights when Josh and I went out looking for Harrison John.

And the truth hits me like a dart in the chest.

‘Try and make yourself invisible,’ I’d said to him.

The next time we met up he’d arrived in Lycra running gear, a zip-up jacket, a black beanie hat. I didn’t know it was him at first because his face was covered by a balaclava. As he approached, he pulled it down and I saw his smiling face emerge.

He said, ‘What do you think? Invisible enough?’

I pointed at the balaclava and laughed and said, ‘Where’d you get that scary-assed shit from?’

He shrugged. ‘Found it in my dad’s drawer.’

He smiled again. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go hunting.’