‘Who?’
‘Saffyre. Did you ever meet her? I mean, she lived over the road from your school. And apparently she did classes at that martial-arts place you go to. It’s possible you might have met her?’
He’d shaken his head. Said, ‘No. Definitely not.’ Then, ‘What’s for dinner?’
Now she looks again at the piece of paper in front of her. The piece of paper with her son’s name on it. Found in Saffyre’s joggers. And not just her son’s name, but the dates and locations of all the sex attacks in the area since the New Year. The same as the dates on her own sheet of paper. With one difference: Saffyre’s list includes 21 January. The papers have not reported a sex attack on 21 January. But according to Cate’s diary, 21 January was the day Tilly claimed to have been attacked outside their house.
In a neat cursive script underneath the dates are several seemingly random names.
Clive.
Roan.
Josh.
Alicia.
‘I just thought,’ Aaron had said, ‘that maybe it meant something. I saw in the papers that you had a son called Josh. I mean, I know it’s a popular name. But still. Would you be able to ask your son? Ask him if he knows what it means? If he knows her?’
The significance of the dates had hit her immediately. She’d said, ‘Sure, I’ll ask him,’ and tried to keep the breathlessness from her voice. The moment he’d gone she’d torn the page from her notepad and compared them. Her hand had gone to her throat.
She’d walked straight into Josh’s bedroom and pulled the linen basket out of his wardrobe. The plastic bag was gone. She’d taken Josh’s schoolbooks from the shelves and flicked through them, frantically, with no idea what she was looking for. Who were Clive, and Alicia? Why did Saffyre have Roan and Josh’s names written on a piece of paper with the dates of the sex attacks?What was Saffyre doing outside their house on the night she disappeared?
She’d found nothing in her son’s bedroom. Nothing new on his browsing history. Georgia had got home from school first, gone straight to her room to strip off her uniform, tied an apron on over joggers and a sweatshirt, opened up a recipe on the iPad, propped it up in the kitchen and started to bake. Cate had circledher distractedly, clearing things away, loading them into the dishwasher, interjecting occasionally into her daughter’s high-octane monologue about how she wanted her bedroom decorated at the house, how maybe it should be dark, like, darkdark, maybe even black, or off black, or, like, totally the other way, shades of white, like her bedroom here, but dark is cosier, isn’t it?
Josh had got home an hour later and gone straight to his room after greeting Cate.
The cake is on the counter now, iced in a chocolate buttercream and decorated with crushed Flake bars. It gapes open on one side where Georgia has already cut herself a slice, showing the vanilla insides.
There’s a pasta bake in the oven. The smell makes Cate feel slightly nauseous.
She glances at the clock again.
Seven thirty-one.
‘Mum!’ It’s Georgia. ‘When’s dinner ready?’
‘Soon,’ she calls back. ‘When Dad gets back!’
She absent-mindedly lays the table, tips salad leaves into a bowl, cuts a baguette into ovals. They’ll eat without him if they have to.
But a minute later she hears the door bang and then Roan is in the kitchen, glowing, radiating the heat of aerobic exercise.
‘Oh,’ she says, ‘you’ve been for a run?’
‘Yes, straight from work.’ He’s still breathless as he pulls off his gloves, his snood, his beanie. ‘Had a lot of pent-up … stuff. Ran all the way up to the village and back. I found this place.’ He unzips his jacket and pulls it off. ‘Right up the other end of thevillage. Weirdest place. Like a kind of James Bond thing: crazy low-rise buildings, walkways, hidden away in this circle of trees.’ He drops the jacket on the back of a kitchen chair. ‘Anyway, I googled it, and apparently it’s what remains of the most expensive council estate ever built! Some failed socialist experiment under a Labour government in the 1970s. All owned privately now, of course – worth a fortune. But honestly. The weirdest place. Like something from the future. Like a sci-fi film set …’
Roan is burbling and Cate is aware on some level of what he’s talking about and on some level she would like to respond, would like to say,Yes, yes, I saw that place too!But the words stick halfway up her throat, because as he talks, her gaze goes to the angular outline of her husband’s torso, the way the Lycra clings to his long, sculpted arms and to the fluorescent orange pattern that works its way from wrist to shoulder up the sleeves.
‘Where did you find that top?’ she interrupts him.
‘What?’
‘That top? Where did you find it?’
‘I don’t know. My drawers, I think … why?’
‘I thought …’