He’d scoffed at that, as if it was somehow irrelevant. And she’d allowed him to scoff because she’d been so ashamed of her own actions.
But in retrospect she could see that he’d been clawing back the moral high ground from her after twenty-five years, expunging his own memories of the crying, pathetic, desperate man in the scruffy flat in Kilburn claiming he’d kill himself if she left him. Maybe he’d known that Cate had questioned her own love for him in that moment. Maybe he’d been waiting for a moment to suggest that he too was capable of questioning his. Redressing the balance.
Theirs is a strong marriage. It has survived a lot. And still they are able to find a way to feel good about each other.
But as Cate walks to her patient appointment that morning, a watery sun playing on the flush on her skin, she thinks of DI Currie’s very particular question, and she thinks again of the figure outside her window and she wonders again where Roan was and what he was doing at midnight on Valentine’s night.
24
‘The police came this morning,’ Cate tells Roan that evening. ‘They were asking about Saffyre Maddox.
Roan’s phone has been switched off all day and this is the first chance she’s had to discuss the day’s events with him.
‘Oh,’ he says. ‘What did they say?’
‘Said they were doing door-to-doors. But I didn’t see them going to anyone else’s door. Just ours. I suspect they’ll probably be on your trail soon, too.’
‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Yes. They came to see me this morning.’
He says this nonchalantly, as though the police coming to talk to him about a missing girl was a day-to-day occurrence. Catealmost gets the feeling that if she hadn’t asked him about it, he wouldn’t have brought it up.
‘What did they say?’
He shrugs, goes through the mail on the kitchen table, unties his woollen scarf. ‘They wanted an insight, I suppose. An idea of what sort of person she is, why she might have run away.’
‘Run away?’
‘Yes. Although I had to tell them that I haven’t seen her for months. So I’m not sure really what sort of state she’ll have been in recently.’
‘But I thought she was missing. Not run away?’
He looks at her blankly. ‘Well, it’s kind of the same thing really, isn’t it? Until you know what’s happened.’
‘But a runaway would take a bag, surely?’
He shrugs. ‘Maybe she did?’
‘She did. But there was nothing in it. Look.’ Cate points firmly at the flyer. ‘That’s exactly what it says. Surely that’s what they said to you?’
She’s being overzealous, but she’s feeling some kind of bizarre complicity with the whole thing, as if it is oddly connected to her in some way.
‘They didn’t say, no. They gave me very little information at all. They were much keener to understand her condition while she was under my care.’
‘And what was it? What was her condition?’
He looks at her again. ‘You know I can’t tell you that.’
‘But she’s not even your patient any more, surely you can—’
‘No,’ he snaps. ‘You know I can’t. I can’t believe you’re asking me.’
And there he is again, that man from last year, the brittle, righteous man she’d nearly left because of all her misgivings about him. The man who’d made her feel mad and bad and toxic. But this time round it’s different; this isn’t her feeling that something’s amiss and hunting desperately for evidence to back up her feelings; this time somethingisamiss: a young girl is missing.
‘But was it something that could make her behave like this? I mean, you don’t have to tell me exactly what it was, but do you think she was unstable?’
She’s pushing him but she doesn’t care.
He puts his hands palm down on the kitchen table, raises his eyes to her and says, ‘I signed her off because she was doing well. She’d stopped certain harmful patterns of behaviour. Beyond that I have no idea. I don’t know what was happening in her life before she disappeared.’