‘About Saffyre Maddox?’
‘Yes. Apparently they found some of her stuff outside his bedroom window and traces of blood on the wall and in the grass.’
‘Oh my God.’ Cate brings her hands to her mouth. She hears Georgia gasping beside her.
‘Oh my God, is she dead?’ asks Georgia.
The woman shrugs. ‘No body found yet, but it’s looking increasingly likely.’
‘God, that’s so sad,’ says Georgia. Then she says, ‘That guy is weird. It doesn’t surprise me much that he could do something like that.’
The journalist stops and looks at Georgia. ‘They don’t know for sure yet that he did. So probably best not to start spreading that about.’ She pauses, looks at Owen Pick’s house and then back at Georgia and says, ‘Although, you know …’
Cate follows her gaze towards the house. She thinks about that night weeks ago when Georgia thought she’d been followed home by Owen Pick. She thinks about that night a few days laterwhen Tilly appeared on her doorstep to say she’d been accosted on the other side of the street. She thinks of the string of sex attacks in the area. She thinks about Roan seeing Owen Pick on Valentine’s night, staring at their house.
She feels a weight lift from her gut, a weight she had barely acknowledged until now: the weight of doubt, the weight of suspicion, of thinking that at any moment now the world could collapse on her head.
She and Georgia make a cake. It’s nearly the end of the half-term holiday. Georgia’s been revising all week, or out with friends, and Cate’s barely seen her. It’s one of those grey, muffled days where everything feels fuzzy and unformed. The focus of weighing and measuring and counting and stirring is exactly what the day calls for.
Georgia has one of her playlists on Spotify, a mixture of music that Cate once danced to in nightclubs and modern music that sounds meaningless and empty to her ears. They’re making something they found on the internet called a Choca-Mocha cake. Cate gets an espresso from the coffee maker and leaves it on the side to cool. Georgia is creaming sugar and butter together. The oven hums as it heats up.
Owen Pick’s face keeps passing in and out of Cate’s consciousness. That vaguely displeased look he has about him, as though he’s constantly thinking about unsavoury things. His hair with that slightly defeated, second-hand look about it. The worn-down shoes, incongruous in contrast with strangely smart clothes that look as though they don’t come naturally to him. He looksthe type, she thinks. He seems the type: a single guy, living alone with an eccentric landlady in a grubby-looking house with tatty curtains at the windows.
And now there is blood under his bedroom window.
She glances up at Georgia. Georgia’s cheeks are pink from the heat of the oven, from the effort of getting the butter and sugar to combine. She has a hank of hair hanging across her face which she blows out of the way from the side of her mouth.
Cate leans towards her and pushes the hair behind her ear for her. Georgia drops a kiss on to Cate’s hand and says, ‘Thank you, Mum.’
They exchange a look. Cate knows they’re both thinking the same thing.
Saffyre Maddox might be dead and their neighbour, who might have killed her, could have killed Georgia, too.
But now the police have him in custody and they are safe: they are making a cake.
33
SAFFYRE
Christmas Day last year was good.
Lee came over with the family, Aaron cooked amazing food, a mix of British Christmas fare and things I’ve been told my grandma used to cook for Christmas lunch: baked macaroni, sweet potato pie. We drank rum punch with umbrellas and tinsel in it and did karaoke with the machine Lee brought over and the tree looked amazing and we put a fake fire on the plasma screen and it really was, in spite of Granddad not being there, a proper Christmas Day.
I was so fat and tipsy and sleepy after that I didn’t even really want to go outdoors. I felt quite grounded that evening with my big belly in my comfy chair on the eighth floor. I just sat andrubbed my stomach and watched my little cousins playing with their new things. I’d spent months and months by then following Roan and his family and his lover around and to spend a day connecting to people in a real and proper way felt like magic. Maybe if I could have held on to that feeling, the sense that I belonged in that world, that I was meant to be there and not somewhere else, then maybe everything else would have been different.
But for one day at least, I was chilled, I was present. It was nice.
The day after Boxing Day I started getting really antsy again. The flat was so hot and there was this awful feeling of confinement in the block, like we were all gerbils locked up in tiny boxes. The sun was out and I put on my snow boots with my pyjama bottoms, tied back my hair and threw on my Puffa. I looked rough but I didn’t care, I just needed to get out.
I called in on Jasmin. She looked rough too. We both laughed about how shit we looked, how fat we were. She came out for a walk with me and we went to Starbucks on Finchley Road and sat on the sofa there just chatting. I had half an eye on the big plate-glass window on to the street, just in case I saw anyone I knew walk past. Then she said she had to get back because she had family staying and she was supposed to be around and I walked her home and then it was already starting to get dark, that stupid moment in the middle of winter when you’ve only been awake a few hours and the sky suddenly turns dirty yellow and the bare trees turn into black skeletons and night-time lands bang slap middle of the day.
I turned and looked back at the estate, at the top floors of my block. All the windows glowed different colours and flashed with Christmas lights. It looked warm up there. It looked pretty.
I shivered slightly and, instead of going home, I turned and walked up the hill towards the village.
Hampstead village looked like a life-size snow globe at this time of year with all the trees wrapped up in white lights. I liked walking up there for the exercise really; it’s uphill the whole way from my flat so it’s good aerobically. After two days sitting in my flat eating Ferrero Rocher it felt great to have the cold air passing in and out of my lungs, to feel my blood whooshing through my veins. I should have run it really, but I’m built for many things and running is not one of them.
It was busy in the village: the sales had started already and the shoppers were out in force. I peered into shop windows at things I couldn’t afford and didn’t need. The shop for yoga mummies with the hundred-pound leggings. Designer tile shops, designer paint shops, a shop selling just one brand of cooking pan in about twenty different colours: Le Creuset. I didn’t quite understand Hampstead, but I liked it.
