‘But not if you were drunk, Owen. Because that seems to be a unifying feature here, doesn’t it? This incident’ – DI Currie touches the photo of Jessica Beer – ‘at a party, while, according to Jessica’s statement, not sober. Then the girls at college who complained about you – about your behaviour, while at another party, again, not sober. Your unpleasant exchange with Nancy Wade on the street, when you deliberately blocked her path—’
‘Or so sheclaims,’ Barry interjected. ‘We only have her word for that, remember?’
‘When sheclaimsyou deliberately blocked her path and called her a bitch. That was on Valentine’s night when you, by your own admission, were not sober. So my theory is that maybe, Owen, you are one of those people who behaves extremely out of character when they’ve been drinking, that in normal circumstances you are not the sort of man to approach women or flirt with young girls or touch them inappropriately or toss verbal abuse at women you pass in the street, but that maybe after a few drinks, your guard lowers and this other side of you comes out, this different personality. And that maybe that other side of you, as abhorrent as it might seem to you now, is in fact capable of taking a younggirl off the street and bringing them to some kind of harm. And it’s been eleven days now, Owen, eleven days since Valentine’s night and it’s long enough. Don’t you think? Long enough to make everyone suffer. To prevent Saffyre’s family from getting some kind of closure. So, Owen, please, please just think back to that night, when you weren’t sober, when you might have behaved out of character and done something you didn’t mean to do, something that had some kind of momentum of its own. Please, Owen. Tell us what happened. Tell us what you did to Saffyre Maddox.’
‘I did not do anything to Saffyre Maddox,’ Owen says, softly, but even as he says it, he feels something small but persistent pushing at the periphery of his consciousness. Like a tiny fruit fly, hovering by his nose. The girl, in the hood. The nameClive. He feels an echo in the soles of his feet. An echo of his footsteps, following the girl in a hoodie, calling to her in the darkness, heading after her into his garden.
43
Cate spends the rest of that morning with a cold shiver of dread trapped in her spine, making her shudder over and over again.
She’s done nothing with the scrunched-up carrier bag and its contents, merely rolled it up and stuffed it behind the linen basket again.
Cate is supposed to be submitting a first draft of this latest manual to her publishers by the end of the month and she’s nowhere near ready. She sits at her laptop and words an email carefully, explaining that she will be late. She sighs as she pressessend; being late is not something she makes a habit of. But she’s too distracted to rush it out; every time she looks at the screen her mind goes blank.
Instead she switches to her browser and googles ‘sex attacks NW3’. She opens a notepad and takes the cap off a biro.
The first attack in this spate now assumed to be have been carried out by the same balaclava-clad man was on 4 January, in Pond Street.
A young woman of twenty-two had her breasts roughly fondled at eleven thirty in the morning by a young man dressed in black who then escaped very quickly on a hired bicycle when someone approached.
She writes: ‘11.30 a.m., 4 January’.
The next attack was three days later. A sixty-year-old woman, who also had her breasts grabbed by a young man dressed in black. The attack had left her with bruises. It was at about four o’clock in the afternoon, near the leisure centre, near the school.
She writes it down.
The next was on 16 January. This was the one that she and Roan had read about in the papers. A Twenty-three-year-old woman grabbed from behind, sexually assaulted through her clothes; she never saw the man who attacked her but described him as smelling of laundry detergent and having small hands.
She writes that down too.
She knows the next two, both on roads very close to here. Both daytime. Both involving grabbing and bruising. And then the latest one, 24 February, at dusk, on the other side of the Finchley Road. Near the cinema. This one the most serious so far, a woman in hospital with injuries.
She breathes in hard and goes to her online calendar. Here she compares the dates and times with her own activities, desperatelysearching for something that does not correlate, for proof that nobody in this house could possibly be responsible for the terrible things that have been happening to women in the area.
She remembers the smell on Roan’s running clothes she’d found in Josh’s bedroom: not washing detergent at all, but sour, musky, ugly.
She thinks of the boys that Roan treats at his clinic, the boys not yet men who are already fantasising about hurting women.
She thinks of Josh, his hugs, his unknowability, his silence.
The shiver goes down her spine again.
But they are not Josh’s clothes, they are Roan’s clothes, and Roan too has his empty spaces. He is out all day and makes himself uncontactable. At night he runs in black Lycra; sometimes he runs for two hours, sometimes more. He comes back electrified and gleaming. He has secrets. Even if there wasn’t an affair last year, there was something. And there is the Valentine’s card from the child that is the wrong size for the envelope. And the missing girl who used to be his patient, who had been seen outside their house the night she disappeared.
There is so much. So much that is wrong. And now there is a bag full of foul-smelling Lycra. Now there is a balaclava.
But she cannot find a date that doesn’t correlate with either her husband or son being the attacker. On every single occasion her husband and her son might possibly have been out of the house.
She looks at the time. It’s nearly eleven. She imagines Josh at school, Roan at work. Those spaces. The cracks and the gaps where things can get in.
She picks up her phone and searches her contacts for Elona’s number, Tilly’s mum. She lets her finger hover over the call button for a moment, but loses her nerve. She presses the message icon instead and types a text.Dear Elona. Hope you and Tilly are both well. I just wanted to talk to you about something. Wondered if you were free for a coffee any time soon. Let me know!
Elona replies thirty seconds later.Sure. I’m free now if that’s any good?
They meet at the Caffè Nero on the Finchley Road. Elona is very groomed: black hair pulled back into a sculpted ponytail, a black cape with a fur trim, black jeans and high-heeled boots. Cate can’t understand how people can be bothered to be so glamorous. The effort, every day, the attention, the time, the money. Elona hugs her, enveloping her in a miasma of honey-sweet perfume.
‘It’s so lovely to see you, Cate,’ she says in her sing-song Kosovan accent. ‘You look well.’
