‘No, no, I’m sorry. You’re right. But I’m worried about him … it’s getting dark …’
‘He’s fourteen years old, Mum. He’s fine. Try looking in the plot across the road.’
Cate stiffens. ‘What?’
‘The building plot. You know. Where the police were. He used to hang out a lot there last summer. Him and Flynn sometimes too.’
‘Hang out doing what?’
‘How am I supposed to know? Do you think I care?’
‘No. But …’
‘Look, he’s your son. Your guess is as good as mine. He’s a mystery to me. All I know is that he used to hang out across the road sometimes.’
‘But how did he get in?’
‘There’s a gap,’ Georgia says dismissively, as if everyone should already know about the gap. ‘Around the corner. Where the wall is low.’
Georgia turns her attention back to the schoolbook in front of her and Cate heads down the hallway. She picks up her coat and her door keys and heads outside.
The sky is turning from grey to black in petrol tones. She switches on the torch on her phone and feels her way along the foliage around the corner until she locates the point where the trees are wide enough apart to allow her to squeeze through. She lands on the other side, on a patch of ragged grass. The plot looks vast from this angle. She throws the light from her phone across the space.
‘Josh,’ she calls out. ‘Josh?’
She shines her light into corners and behind machinery. There is nobody there.
Across the space she peers through the trees and into the back garden of Owen Pick’s house. There, facing the plot, is a sash window with drawn curtains. His bedroom. She pictures him there behind it, his face lit by the glow of his laptop, writing depraved things on incel forums, plotting his abduction of a beautiful,troubled young girl, fantasising about what he was going to do to her when he finally had her in his disgusting clutches.
She glances around as though maybe she is here, Saffyre Maddox, as though the dozen police officers who spent three days combing every inch of this space might just have missed her, that she might just rise up from the ground and walk towards her.
She feels her phone buzz inside her hand and switches it on. It’s a text from Josh.
On my way home, Mum. See u soon x.
Where’ve you been?she replies hastily.
Cinema, he replies.Phone on silent. Soz.
She turns off the phone and clutches it to her heart, gazing upwards into the petrol sky.On his way home. Her heart loosens. Her breathing steadies. The cinema. Her baby boy had been at the cinema.
She clambers back through the gap between the tree and lands in front of a surprised dog walker.
‘Oh,’ says the woman, clutching her heart.
‘Sorry,’ says Cate. ‘I was looking for my son. But now I’ve found him.’
The dog walker looks behind her as if the son might be about to appear.
‘He was at the cinema,’ she says breathlessly. ‘Not in there.’
The woman nods and carries on her way, the small dog skittering along behind her, throwing Cate a few bemused looks over his tail as he goes.
‘What did you see?’ she asks Josh when he walks in a few minutes later, cheeks red with the night cold.
‘That thing with Dwayne Johnson,’ he says. ‘About wrestlers. Can’t remember what it was called.’
‘Oh,’ she says, wondering at her son’s choice of film. ‘Was it any good?’