‘Fuck you, creep.’
He stops. ‘What?’
‘I said,Fuck you, creep.’
He rocks slightly.
He closes his eyes and draws in his breath. He pictures himself turning now, turning and running at her and pushing her over. He exhales, counts to three. He carries on walking.
‘Bitch,’ he calls out over his shoulder as he walks.
He hears her call something out to him, the fading urgent echo of her heels against the paving stones, the ringing in his ears of adrenaline pumping through his system; he feels the wine in his stomach curdle slightly and his legs turn to jelly. He stops for amoment and holds a wall to steady himself. His head spins and for a moment he thinks he might be about to throw up.
And then he feels his phone vibrate and he takes it out of his pocket and there is a message from Deanna.
Dear Owen, I really enjoyed myself tonight. Thank you for being such good company and making me feel good about myself for the first time in a very long time. I hope you sleep well and I look forward to seeing you next week. My treat this time! Deanna x.
All the rage and nervous energy leaves his body immediately.
Smiling, he turns the last corner of the block and arrives outside his house. The lights are all off and the moon shines blue off the lead on the roof. He stops to peer through the hole carved into the wooden gate of the building site next door where he sees two amber dots glowing in the dark. A fox, staring at him.
‘Hello, foxy,’ he says into the darkness. ‘Hello, beautiful!’
He glances across the street. There is a light still shining in one of the windows. He sees the suggestion of movement behind it. He hears raised voices coming from somewhere out of sight. Then he sees a person standing outside the house: tall, slender, in a black hoodie, tips of angular elbows protruding from their sides like wings. The person stands for just a moment, watching the light in the window, just as he does. Then the person turns and in profile he can see it is a young girl, her hands stuffed into the pockets of a hoodie, her jaw set hard.
As he watches her, she turns and looks at him.
I know you, he thinks,I know you.
After
20
Cate spots it late in the day, a small piece in a copy ofThe Timesshe picked up for free in the supermarket the day before. She often picks up the complimentary paper but rarely reads it, and she only reads it today because she’s looking for an article advertised on the front page about how to have sex in your fifties.
She turns the pages quickly but her eye is caught first by the word ‘Camden’ halfway down page eight.
The headline says: ‘Camden schoolgirl still missing. Police questioning locals’.
And there, beneath the headline, is a photo of a young girl with exquisite, symmetrical features, an enigmatic smile, large hoop earrings, dark curly hair held back on one side in a singletight braid, pale green eyes. Cate doesn’t immediately recognise her. But then she reads on and her eye is drawn back to the girl in the photograph and then she knows it is her.
Camden schoolgirl Saffyre Maddox, 17, has not been seen since she left home on the evening of 14 February to visit a friend in Hampstead. Saffyre, who lives with her uncle, Aaron Maddox, 27, in Alfred Road NW3, is studying for A-Levels at Havelock School, NW3. The school describe her as a good student and a sociable member of the school community. According to Aaron Maddox, she left home at roughly eleven o’clock on the night of her disappearance, wearing dark jogging bottoms, a black hoodie and white trainers.
Cate gasps and looks around her as though there might be someone here to share this with. The children are both off school for half-term but neither of them is in, and Roan is at work.
She picks up her phone, photographs the story and before she’s had a chance to think about what she’s doing, has WhatsApped it to Roan.
For obvious reasons, Saffyre’s name has not been mentioned by either of them, but there’s no reason why Cate shouldn’t still recognise it when she sees it printed in a national newspaper.
The tick remains grey. Roan always has his phone in flight mode when he’s with patients. That was one of the (many) things that had fanned the flames of her madness the year before: that he always forgot to take it out of flight mode afterwards, wouldwalk around completely uncontactable, long into the evening. She’d never been able to work out how he could go around with a dead phone without automatically feeling the need to turn it back on.
She reads through the article again.
Six days ago. Valentine’s night. The night she and Roan walked into Hampstead and had champagne in a murky, fire-crackly pub and then shared a red beef curry at a Thai restaurant on the way home, the night they’d got on really well and found lots to talk about and laugh about and not been like one of those long-married couples trying to hold it together in public on Valentine’s night, but like a real, compatible, happy couple.
And meanwhile Saffyre had been somewhere between Swiss Cottage and Hampstead wearing not enough clothes for what was a very cold night. Maybe they’d walked past her? Maybe they’d even seen something? Was it possible?
She shakes the thought from her head. Of course it wasn’t possible. There would have been thousands of people between Swiss Cottage and Hampstead on Valentine’s night, thousands of places she could have been. And maybe Saffyre hadn’t been going to Hampstead at all, had just said that to cover her tracks, had left her home and walked in totally the opposite direction, her uncle none the wiser.