‘Were you home? Or out in the local area? Might you have seen anything?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘No. I was out. I went for dinner. With a friend.’
‘Ah. OK. And what time did you get home? If you can remember?’
‘Eleven thirtyish. Maybe midnight.’
‘And how did you get home that night?’
‘I got the Tube. From Covent Garden to Finchley Road.’
‘And did you maybe see anything strange as you were walking back from the Tube station? Anything untoward?’
He draws his hand across his mouth and shakes his head. He thinks back to the strange episode on the street, when that pretty girl had called him a creep and he’d called her a bitch. It feels like the twisted remnant of a strange dream when he thinks about it now, as if it didn’t really happen. Everything about that night now feels dreamlike, faded in parts like an old photograph.
‘No.’ He shakes his head slowly. ‘No. Nothing.’
He sounds like he’s lying, because in a way he is.
‘And you said you live with your aunt? Is that …’ She looks at a list on a clipboard. ‘Tessa McDonald?’
He nods.
‘And where is Ms McDonald?’
‘I don’t know. She’s probably in the village. Shopping.’
‘Great, well, we’ll be back again, I’m sure, once we’ve built up a better picture of the situation. In the meantime, maybe you could pass my card on to your aunt when she gets home, ask her to give me a call if she can remember anything about that night.’ She peers up the staircase. ‘Anyone else in, do you know?’
He shakes his head. ‘No idea. You can ring on their doorbells, if you like?’
She smiles, clicks her ballpoint pen shut, slides it into her pocket and says, ‘No. I’m sure that will be fine. Maybe I could leave some more of these here?’ She points a couple of printouts towards the mailboxes above the bench. ‘And some more of my cards?’
‘Yes,’ he says, getting to his feet. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘Well,’ she says, hitching her leather bag up higher on to her shoulder, ‘thank you, Mr Pick, for your time. I really appreciate it. I’m just at the end of a line if you, or anyone else, remembers anything.’
‘You know,’ he says, suddenly, his eyes feeling suddenly too big for his head as a buried memory bursts through the clouds, ‘I did see something that night. I saw someone. Out there.’ He points through the front door to the house opposite. ‘Standing outside that house, in the dark, just sort of looking in. I thought it was a man at first. And then they turned around and it was a girl.’
‘A girl?’
‘Well, at least I think so. It was hard to tell, because they had a hood up.’
His eyes drop to the page in his hand; he reads the description of what the missing girl was wearing just as DI Currie says, ‘What sort of hood?’
‘Like, a hoodie? I think?’
‘How tall was this girl?’
‘It might not have been a girl. It might have been … I wasn’t sober. I’d had some wine. Quite a lot of wine. I can’t be sure.’
‘This person, how tall? Roughly.’
‘I genuinely can’t remember.’
‘And roughly what time was this?’
‘Just as I got to my front door. Midnight. Ish. Maybe later.’