‘Oh?’
‘About last night. The thing that happened.’
‘Yes.’
‘It didn’t happen.’
‘What?’
‘A man didn’t touch me. He just walked quite close to me, and Georgia had got me so freaked out about that man who lives opposite you, you know, and I thought it was him, but it wasn’t him, it was someone completely different and – and I came rushing back to yours and I …’
There’re more shuffling sounds and then Elona comes on the line again. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says. ‘So, so sorry. I said she’d have to tell you herself. I just don’t understand. I mean, I know they’re all under a lot of stress, these girls, these days – exams, social media, everything, you know. But still, that’s no excuse.’
Cate blinks slowly. ‘So, there was no assault?’ This doesn’t make any sense. Tilly’s pale skin, her wide eyes, her shaking hands, her tears.
‘There was no assault,’ Elona confirms in a flat tone, and Cate wonders if maybe she doesn’t quite believe it either.
Outside Cate sees DI Robert Burdett climbing into a car parked across the street. She remembers the message she left on his phone early this morning, about the strange man across the road. A wave of guilt passes through her stomach.
‘Have you told the police?’ she asks Elona.
‘Yes. Absolutely. Just now. Can’t have them wasting their resources. Not with all these cuts they’re having. But anyway, I’m sending her into school now. Tail between her legs. And again, I am so, so sorry.’
Cate turns off her phone and watches the back end of DI Burdett’s car as it reaches the junction at the bottom of the road.
Why would Tilly have lied? It makes no sense whatsoever.
Cate works from home. She’s a trained physiotherapist, but she gave up her practice fifteen years ago when Georgia was born and never really got back into treating patients. These days she occasionally writes about physiotherapy for medical publications and industry magazines, and every now and then she rents a room in her friend’s practice in St Johns Wood to treat people she knows, but most of the time she is at home, freelancing (or being ‘a housewife with a laptop’ as Georgia puts it). In Kilburn she has a small office area on the mezzanine, but in this temporary set-up she writes at the kitchen table; her paperwork sits in a filing tray by her laptop, and it’s a struggle to keep everything organised and to stop her work stuff being absorbed into the general family silt. She can never find a pen and people scrawl things on theback of her business correspondence, yet another thing she hadn’t thought through properly before making the move to a small flat.
Cate peers through the front window again at the house across the road. Then she goes back to her laptop and googles it.
She finds that the last time a flat was bought or sold at number twelve was ten years ago, which is extraordinary for an eminent address such as this. The freehold to the building is owned by a company in Scotland called BG Properties. She can find nothing else about the address or anyone who lives there. It is a house of mystery, she decides, a house where people come and never move out again, where people hang thick curtains and never open them and leave their furniture to rot on the driveway.
Then she googles ley lines at the address. She doesn’t quite know what a ley line is but she thinks there might be some strange ones at this junction, where there are no voices in the street late at night, where empty plots of land stay undeveloped, where the foxes scream every night, where teenage girls are followed home and assaulted in the dark, where she feels uncomfortable, where she does not belong.
6
In the wake of the events of the night that Tilly claimed to have been assaulted, Cate stops walking past the house with the armchair in the driveway.
The position of her house is such that she can turn either left or right to get to the main road or up into the village and she chooses now to turn left. She does not want to risk crossing paths with the man she’d inadvertently sent the police to question three days ago about an attack on a young girl that apparently hadn’t really happened. He wouldn’t know it was her, but she would know it was him.
She tries not to even look in the direction of the man’s house, but her eyes track quickly towards it now as she heads into thevillage with a bag full of website returns to drop at the post office. A woman is standing at a right angle to the front door, around Cate’s age, maybe ten years older. She is eye-catching in a long grey coat, a selection of patterned scarves, ankle boots, hair steely-grey and held up in a bun very high on her head, almost to the point of tipping over her hairline and on to her forehead. She wears black eyeliner under her eyes and is clutching a small suitcase and a selection of airport carrier bags. Cate watches her going through her handbag before removing a set of keys and turning to face the front door. She sees her stop for a moment in the hallway to riffle through some mail on a console table before the door closes behind her.
Cate realises she is standing in the street staring at a closed door. She turns quickly and heads up the hill towards the village.
After dropping the parcels in at the post office, Cate takes the scenic route back to the flat. If she made a mistake choosing this location for her family’s temporary accommodation, she wants to make up for it by enjoying Hampstead village as much as possible while she’s here. Kilburn is bustling and loud and grimy and real and Cate loves it with a passion. But Kilburn has no heart, no centre, it’s just a ladder of small roads set perpendicularly off a big road. Hampstead on the other hand has alleys and crannies and turnstiles and cottages and paths and hidden graveyards and it spreads out in this way in every direction for a mile or more, all the way to the Heath in the north and back down to the wide stately avenues in the south and west. It is the ultimate Londonvillage and every new corner Cate discovers on her walks up here colours her day in some way.
Today Cate finds herself walking further than before, across a small section of the Heath grooved with footpaths, through a whispering copse of trees and then down a winding lane lined with interesting old houses, mainly Georgian, until suddenly she finds herself in a different landscape altogether: flat and low, with white James Bond-style houses layered together like roof tiles, attached with concrete walkways and spiral staircases. Each house has a wide terrace overlooking the woods and the Heath beyond. She gets out her phone and she does what she always does when she finds herself somewhere new in this village: she googles it. She discovers that she is in the most expensive council estate ever built, possibly anywhere in the world, part of an idealistic Labour government experiment in the 1970s to house the poor as though they were rich. The land cost nearly half a million pounds to buy. Each house cost £72,000 to build. The project turned sour when the government tried to recoup their investment by charging tenants well over the odds for social housing. The experiment was a resounding failure.
Now these houses are an architect’s delight. Cate finds a two-bedroom flat on an estate agent’s website for over a million pounds. Who would have thought, she wonders, who would have guessed that this futuristic little world would be hidden away here behind an Edwardian mansion?
She looks behind her and is suddenly aware that she is entirely alone. There is not a soul around. She hears the wind talking to her through the leaves of the trees that surround this strangeenclave. They are telling her to go. Now. That she should not be here. She walks faster, and then faster still, until she is almost running across the grassland, past the houses, down the hill, back to the high street, to the beauty salons and the boutiques and the shops that sell nonsense for far too much money.
As she passes the Tube station her eye is caught by a poster for the local news-sheet, theHampstead Voice; ‘SEX ATTACK IN BROAD DAYLIGHT’.
She stops, stares at the words, the adrenaline still fizzing through her veins. She wonders for a moment if the headline is from a parallel reality, where she stayed too long in the place that was telling her to go, whether if she reads the article she will discover that it was her, Cate Fours, fifty-year-old mother of two, brutalised on a desolate 1970s council estate, unable to explain what she had been doing wandering there alone in the middle of the day.
Then she thinks of Tilly again, as she has done nearly every minute of every day since she first saw her standing in the doorway four nights ago and she wonders if there is maybe some connection between the spate of sex attacks in the local area and what Tilly claimed didn’t really happen on Monday night.
