‘Great, thank you. Yes. A young girl, a teenage girl, was sexually assaulted last night. Here.’ He turns and gestures towards the crossroads. ‘Just outside the wasteland. I wondered if you heard anything? Saw anything?’
Owen flushes red. He feels immediately guilty. Not because he’s done anything, but because he might have done something. He’s spent his whole life feeling like he might have done something wrong.
He breathes in hard to try to bring down the colour in his cheeks but it makes it worse. He blows the air back out and says, ‘No. No. I heard nothing.’
‘Your living room.’ The policeman nods his head towards the front window to the left of the door. ‘It overlooks the street. Maybe you noticed something without quite realising what it was?’
‘I wasn’t in my living room last night. I mean, it’s not even my living room.’
‘Ah, you live with someone else?’
‘Yes. My aunt. Tessie McDonald. It’s her living room. I never go in there.’
‘Might she have seen something?’
‘No. She’s in Tuscany. She has another property. She’s often there. She’s there now.’
He’s burbling. Tall men make him feel this way. Policemen make him feel this way.
‘Right,’ says DI Burdett. ‘Anyway. It was at about eight thirty p.m. Maybe you were watching something on the TV about that time? Maybe that would jog your memory? Something untoward you noticed? A strange noise? Someone walking down the street who made you feel alarmed in some way?’
‘No. Honestly. I was in my room all day yesterday. It’s at the back of the house. I haven’t seen anything or heard anything.’
‘A neighbour claims …’ DI Burdett glances down at his notebook again, ‘to have seen you, on your driveway, at approximately four thirty p.m. yesterday.’
Owen clamps his hand to his forehead. He has barely processed the accusations he’s suffered at work and now there are anonymous neighbours spying on him and reporting his movements to the police in relation to a sex attack.
‘What?’
‘Would that have been you? At four thirty p.m.?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says. Then he remembers that today is bin collection day and that yes, he had put the rubbish out yesterday. ‘I put the rubbish out at some point,’ he says. ‘But I can’t tell you when.’ As he says this, he remembers the girls that had walked past. Two schoolgirls. One was the girl who’d acted like he was going to jump her when he was walking home from work the other night; the other was a tiny girl with black hair. They’d looked over at him and said something to each other; then they’d picked up their pace before disappearing into the house across the road.
He’d thought he was being paranoid at the time, that he’d imagined them talking about him. Now he can only assume that they had been. He sighs.
‘But roughly?’
‘Roughly the afternoon. It was dark, I remember.’
‘And you haven’t left the house apart from that?’
‘No. I have not.’
DI Burdett folds his notepad in half and tucks it in to his pocket. ‘Thank you, Mr Pick. I appreciate your time.’
‘That’s fine,’ he replies. And then, just as the policeman turns to leave, he adds, ‘Is she all right? The girl?’
DI Burdett smiles slightly. ‘She’s fine,’ he says. ‘But thank you for asking.’
‘Good,’ says Owen. ‘Good.’
14
Owen had been a beautiful child, oddly. His mother had put him in for modelling when he was about four. He hadn’t been taken on because he was awkward in front of a camera. But he’d had a cherubic face: dark eyes, red lips, a dimple.
But the face that had looked so beautiful on a small child had not translated into a good face for a teenager and he’d been a shockingly awkward-looking boy. To this day he cannot bear to look at photos of himself between the ages of eleven and eighteen.
But now, at thirty-three, he feels his features have settled again; he looks in the mirror and a relatively handsome guy looks back at him. He particularly likes his eyes; they are so brown thatthey are almost black. He inherited them from his maternal grandmother who was half Moroccan.