She sighs. ‘Just to think,’ she says, ‘that time he was following Georgia last month …’
‘Well, thank God she had the common sense to call you.’
‘Yes. Absolutely. I can’t even …’
‘No,’ Roan says, shaking his head gently. ‘No. Neither can I.’
Cate watches from her bedroom window that night, to see if the police bring Owen Pick home. But the street is quiet. A fine drizzle falls from a black, clouded sky. She can see the silky filaments of it through the yellow street lights. The police ribbon has gone from the road, but is still taped across the gate into the building site. It’s the weekend tomorrow. Do police carry out forensic searches of crime scenes at the weekend? She has no idea. She hears a sound behind her and turns, expecting to see Roan, but it’s not, it’s Josh.
‘What’re you doing?’ he says.
‘Just seeing what’s happening over there.’
He puts a hand on to her shoulder and she covers it with hers.
‘I feel sorry for him,’ he says.
She turns and looks at him.
‘Who?’
‘Him,’ he says. ‘The guy over there. I feel bad. Everyone will just think he did it, whether he did or not.’
‘What makes you think he didn’t?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ he says. ‘It’s just, innocent until proven guilty and all that. But people, you know, they like having someone to blame, don’t they? They like knowing who the bad person is. Who to throw the eggs at. The rocks. I feel bad for him.’
Cate turns and looks at her boy. She puts a hand to the side of his face and cups his cheeks, feels the suggestion of three-day-old boy-stubble, soft as summer grass. ‘You’re such a lovely boy,’ she says. ‘Such a lovely boy.’
He smiles and rubs his face against her palm, then draws her towards him for a hug. She feels the bones of him, the sinew and the tendon. He smells of the fabric conditioner she uses. He smells of something else, too, a slightly tobaccoey smell. She wonders if he smokes. And if he does, she wonders if she minds. She smoked at fourteen. In fields and by railway tracks and behind walls and hedges. She smoked Silk Cuts. She stole them from her mother and then when her mother found out and started hiding her Silk Cuts, she smoked roll-ups instead. Can she be angry with him for doing what she herself had done?
She feels that in the current climate of murder and blood she does not mind that her son might be smoking. Maybe she will mind later on. She lets him go and smiles.
‘I’m sure justice will be served,’ she says reassuringly. ‘I’m sure the right person will be punished.’
36
It is nearly midnight. Owen is still sitting in a pale blue room with a long narrow window and a two-way mirror. DIs Currie and Henry are still sitting facing him. On the table on front of them are two empty paper cups, the wrappings of three Kit Kat bars, four empty sugar packets and three wooden stirrers. Owen drags his finger through the edges of a small puddle of tea and makes a tentacle out of it. He does this seven more times, until it is an octopus.
Apparently they are awaiting a report from the guys who’ve been ransacking his bedroom all day. Barry sits next to Owen, picking at his cuticles. He wears cufflinks with green stones in them and a lilac and green checked shirt. He looks incongruousin this room with the bland, identikit detectives, the peeling walls and Owen himself, who is starting to feel very stale and unfragrant.
Owen hasn’t told Barry about the Rohypnol in his sock drawer. When Barry walked in four hours ago, Owen had taken one look at him and realised the only reason he was here was to get paid. There was no smile of recognition or of empathy, no suggestion that Barry had ever seen Owen before in his life. He’d been businesslike to the point of cruelty.
The door opens and two more policemen enter. They look at Owen strangely as they walk in and Owen feels his stomach curl at the edges. He knows what that look means.
They take DI Currie out of the room for a few minutes; then she returns alone. She spreads some new paperwork on the table in front of her, clears her throat, says something into DI Henry’s ear, stares straight at Owen and says, ‘Well. Mr Pick. I think …’ She moves the paperwork around again. She’s clearly working out her next move, wants to make sure she pitches it just right. ‘I think, maybe, we need to back up a little here. I think we need to discuss, maybe, your activities over the past few weeks – since, in fact, the date of your suspension from Ealing College. Would you say, Mr Pick, that that experience has changed you at all? Made you view life differently?’
Barry leans forward, runs a finger down his exquisite silk tie and says, ‘Don’t answer that, Owen. It’s a ridiculous question.’
Owen closes his mouth.
DI Currie inhales and starts again. ‘Mr Pick, we have been through the browsing history of your laptop. We’ve foundsome quite disturbing entries in a number of what I believe are known asincelforums. Mr Blair, do you know what an incel forum is?’
‘Indeed I do,’ says Barry, taking Owen somewhat by surprise. Barry looks as though he came straight from 1960; Owen cannot imagine him owning a computer, let alone knowing what an incel forum is.
‘You have been frequenting these forums quite a lot lately, Mr Pick, would you say?’
He shrugs and says, ‘No. Not really.’