She pours him a glass of water and places it in front of him.
He clears his throat and smiles awkwardly.
‘You know,’ he begins, ‘I’ve met your husband, just before Saffyre started her sessions with him, back in 2014. He’s a good man.’
‘Yes,’ she agrees. ‘He is. He’s a great clinician.’
‘I put my faith in him. You know, a little girl like that, hurting herself as she was, well, you know that there’s something bad happening, something you don’t really want to have to face. But he just got in there with her. Made her feel safe. And stopped her hurting herself.’
‘She was self-harming?’
She does already know this, not because Roan told her, but because of hacking into his work files and reading his reports the previous year.
‘Yeah. Started when she was ten years old. So bad. She’s still got the scars. Like, here.’ He points at the cuffs of his joggers. ‘But your husband. He cured her. So amazing. And then to find out that she was here, you know, outside his house, when she went missing.’ He shakes his head. ‘Unreal. And it can’t just be a coincidence, can it? And, listen, I know’ – he puts his hand out, palm first – ‘I know it’s nothing to do with him. I know you were out that night; I know he was with you. But it’s still weird. And I can’t stop thinking about it. It spins round and round my head all the time. Because as far as I know, after she stopped her sessions with him, she never saw him again. And I don’t even know how she knew where he lived. That’s what gets me. How did she know where he lived?’
He leaves the question hanging, pendulously, between the two of them.
‘Well, it’s possible she saw it written down in his office one day, I suppose …?’
Aaron nods and says, ‘Yeah, I guess it could have been something like that. I’m probably overthinking it all. And that guy.’ He gestures behind him in the direction of the street. ‘The one they reckon abducted her.’ His voice cracks slightly on the words. ‘What do you know about him? Did you know him at all?’
She shakes her head. ‘No. I only saw him in passing. Not even on nodding terms. He talked to my husband once, a few weeks back; he was drunk apparently and asked my husband if he was married. Kind of weird. But with what we know now about his internet habits …’
‘Yeah,’ says Aaron. ‘That’s some sick stuff. I didn’t even know about all that, all that incel thing. God. Sad, sad men.’
‘Toxic masculinity,’ she says. ‘It’s everywhere.’
He nods. But then says, ‘Not in our house, it wasn’t. I just want to say that. Saffyre lived in a house with two men who were both good, who put girls equal to boys. I want you to know that. Whatever happened I know she wasn’t trying to get away from stuff at home. Her home was good. Is good.’
Cate nods. She believes this man, completely, every word he says. ‘I hear you lost your father?’
‘Yeah.’ He gaze drops to his water glass. ‘Back in October. She took it badly. Stopped eating. Stopped doing schoolwork. I said to her that she should come back and see Dr Fours. I offered to set that up for her. But she said she was fine. I got someone in to talk to her from the school, a pastoral teacher. Didn’t make much difference. And then early November she just sort ofsnapped out of it. Started eating. Got back into her studies. We had an amazing Christmas, just being together, you know, like a real family. And then, I don’t know, after Christmas she just sort of … drifted away again.’
‘In what way?’
‘Just wasn’t at home very much. Spent a lot of time at her best friend’s house. Or “going for walks”. Did a lot of sleepovers. And I suppose I just thought, you know, she’s seventeen, she’ll be an adult soon, I guess she’s spreading her wings. And she was a late bloomer in that way, kind of young for her age, never really had a social life, didn’t do parties, boyfriends, hanging out, nothing like that. So I thought, well, you know, good, it’s about time she found her feet in the world. And then …’
She sees a film of tears across his eyes and feels an instinctive urge to touch him, which she resists. He drags the back of his hand across them and smiles. ‘And yeah, so, I’m just left with all these questions. And I started going through her stuff. There wasn’t much, to be honest. The police have still got her laptop, but I don’t think they’ve found anything on there; they’d have said by now. Every night after work I just sit in her room, with her things, looking for something, anything that might explain what happened to her. Why she was here. What she was doing. And then last night, I found this in the pocket of some old joggers …’
He puts his hand into his back pocket and pulls out a piece of folded paper. He unfolds it and pushes it across the table to Cate.
She reads the words written on it and her blood runs cold and dark.
44
SAFFYRE
School had started back on 7 January and I had gone back to being the ‘other’ Saffyre Maddox, the one who showed up in the classroom every morning clean and fresh, hair neatly tied back, some mascara, some lip gloss. It wasn’t so much that I actively wanted to look nice, it was more that if I didn’t look nice, people would worry, they’d ask me questions, the pastoral-care woman would pull me into her office and expect me to tell her what was wrong with me. So I did my schoolwork. I traded in gossip. I smiled at boys but kept them at arms’ length. It was like I was Superman or something, with my two different personas. By day I was Saffyre Maddox, aloof but popular, mild-mannered A-grade student. By night I was a kind of nocturnal animal, like the humanequivalent of a fox. My superpower was invisibility. There in the playground at school, or in the sixth-form common room, all eyes were on me, but at night I did not exist, I was the Invisible Girl.
The confrontation with Harrison had been horrific on many levels. The sound of my name on his lips. The same lips he’d licked while he’d done what he’d done to me when I was a child. The size of him, no longer a child, but a man, an adult. The way he appeared in the half-darkness, dressed in black. The thought of him out there now, just being able to go where he wanted and do what he wanted. And that was the root of it really. That was what turned my head from self-harm to Harrison-harm. I felt like we were occupying the same territory, the same ground. We were both invisible but we’d seen each other, like two foxes facing off in the muted street light. I thought, I do not want to hurt myself any more because of what this person did to me. I thought, I want to hurthim.
Now, wherever I went, I looked for him.
I knew it would be only a matter of time until our paths crossed again.
Mid-January. Cold as cold can be. I had fallen asleep in the plot of land across from Roan that now felt very much like it was mine. I rarely slept and when I did it was fast and immediate and hard and deep, usually for ten minutes, maybe sometimes as much as half an hour. Noises always woke me. Every noise. But this noise didn’t wake me. The sound of a young man entering the empty plot at two o’clock in the morning and sitting behind the JCB just out of sight of me and my little campsite.
He didn’t know I was there. I didn’t know he was there. And then I was wide awake and, with that strange intake of breath that accompanies a sudden wakening, I was upright. I looked up and I saw a face and it was a face I knew.