The boy who wiped out the girl with the pink lampshades.
He looked at me. I looked at him.
I saw that he saw me. He smiled. He said, ‘Saffyre Maddox.’
I said nothing, walked past him fast as I could, looking for the bright lights of early-morning traffic coming down the Finchley Road.
‘Saffyre Maddox!’ he called after me. ‘Not going to say hello?’
I wanted to turn and walk back up the hill, square up to him, breathe into his face, sayyou filthy, disgusting piece of shit, I hope you die.
But I didn’t. I kept walking. Kept walking. My heart pounding. My stomach swirling.
I got home and I scrambled through all the drawers in the kitchen until I found a paper clip. I untwisted it into a small hook and I rolled down my socks. I touched the tip of the hook against my skin. I pulled it back and forth until finally a bead of red appeared, and then another, and another, until finally I felt something stronger than the power of Harrison John.
41
February half-term is over. The flat is quiet. Not the same quiet as when the kids are still in bed, not the spring-loaded quietness of bedroom doors yet to be opened, breakfasts and showers yet to be had, but the proper, pure silence of an empty house: coats taken from hooks, bags collected from chairs, empty beds, wet bathmats, children at school, Roan at work, a day ahead of nothing but her.
Cate should be working but her focus is splintered.
There was another sex attack the day before. It’s been all over the news because the police have taken the step of issuing safety guidelines to women in the area. The victim this time was a middle-aged woman, walking back from lunch with friends on WestEnd Lane as dusk fell, pulled into the area behind an estate agent’s office just off the main road and ‘subjected to a serious sexual assault’. The attacker was described as white, slim, twenty to forty years old, much of his face covered by a stretchy black covering of the sort that motorcyclists wear under their helmets. The attacker said no words at all during the attack and left the woman in need of medical attention.
Dusk.
That was the word in the news article which had jumped out at her. Such a very specific word for such a fleeting part of the day. Immediately, she’d thought about dusk yesterday, when she was prowling around the building plot with her torch on, looking for her missing son. Her missing son who’d returned moments later, starving hungry and with a story of seeing a Dwayne Johnson movie on his own.
Dusk.
She goes to the door of her son’s bedroom. Her hand grips the doorknob.
She pushes the door open. The curtains are drawn, the bed is made, his pyjamas are folded on the pillow. She pulls open the curtains and lets in the weak morning light. She turns on the overhead light. You wouldn’t think anyone lived in this room. Josh has no stuff. While Georgia always has three cups half-filled with stale water on her bedside table, handfuls of jewellery, a book or two, numerous chargers snaked into each other, a sock, a balled-up tissue, a chapstick with the lid missing and a pile of coins on her bedside table, Josh has nothing. Just a coaster.
Dusk…
She falls to her knees and peers under his bed. There’s his laptop, plugged into the wall to charge, the wires all neatly tucked away. She pulls it out and rests it on her knees; she won’t sit on his bed as she worries she won’t be able to get his covers as neat as he’s left them and he’ll know she was in here.
She opens it and switches it on and knows already that the password he used for everything when he was small and she was allowed to know his password (donkey321) will no longer be his password and she will have to find some other way to access his computer. But she got quite good at codebreaking last year when she thought Roan was having an affair. She’d even managed to access his work login. She waits for the screen to wake up and then she types indonkey321. She waits for the error message but instead the computer switches screens and she is in.
She blinks in surprise and feels a surge of relief. If there was something on his computer that he didn’t want anyone to see he would for sure have changed his password to one his mum didn’t know.
She clicks through his windows. Worksheets for maths, iTunes, an essay onAnimal Farmand a browser with ten tabs open, nearly all schoolwork related. The last tab is for Vue Cinemas and shows the films currently showing at the cinema on the Finchley Road.
She feels her heartstrings loosen a little.
There, she thinks, there. Just as he’d said. Gone to the movies.
She scrolls through the timings.Fighting With My Family. Three twenty p.m. That would have finished well after dusk.
Then she clicks on his browsing history (she’d done this once on Georgia’s laptop a year or so ago and been flabbergasted by the eclectic range of pornography her then fourteen-year-old daughter had been watching).
The most recent search term is ‘vue finchley road films today’. She vaguely registers the fact that he hasn’t used his laptop to browse since yesterday morning. The search before that is ‘Owen pick arrest’.
The search before that is for ‘Owen pick’.
The search before that is for ‘Owen pick saffyre maddox’.
The search before that is ‘saffyre Maddox missing’.
