He continues: ‘I don’t know. I stood guard. I don’t know how long. I didn’t talk to her. Then she jumped down. She jumped down. She saidow. And that—!’ He starts as something occurs to him. ‘That must have been when she cut herself! On my wall.And dropped her phone. She dropped her phone and then she picked it up again. And she ran. She said, “Thanks, Clive,” and she ran.’
‘Clive?’ says Angela.
‘Yes. I don’t know. I don’t know why she called me Clive. She must have thought I was someone else.’
He sees DI’s Currie and Henry exchange a look.
‘She ran?’ says DI Currie.
‘Yes!’ he says, his voice full of elation. ‘She jumped down. She saidow. She dropped her phone. She picked it up. She said, “Thanks, Clive.” And she ran.’
He feels a burst of euphoria at recovering the weird chunk of time missing between seeing her outside Lycra Man’s house and seeing her run down the street, the sound of her rubber soles against the cold, dry pavement.
‘And the woman across the street?’
‘I don’t remember. I don’t … She was …’
And there it was, retrieved like an old photo dropped down the back of a sofa: the missing piece.
‘She was talking to the man across the road. The man who goes running. The, you know, the psychologist. She was talking to him. She was shouting. She was crying. And that’s it,’ he says. ‘That’s as much as I remember.’
The room falls silent. DI Currie writes something on a piece of paper. She clears her throat.
‘Well, thank you for remembering, Owen. I must say, it strikes me as rather odd, after all these days, all this time.’
‘It was when you said about the woman. I knew – I kind of knew there’d been something missing. But I couldn’t find the memories until you said about that other woman.’
‘It’s called a fragmentary blackout,’ says Barry, sitting upright. ‘Common after episodes of heavy drinking. And the lost memories can be triggered by someone filling in a missing detail.’
Owen throws a look at Barry. There’s something different about him. About his demeanour, the tone of his voice. A new softness. A new care. It’s almost, Owen thinks, as if Barry believes him.
DI Currie is going through her paperwork. ‘Did we send someone up on to the garage roof?’ she asks DI Henry.
DI Henry consults his own paperwork, flicks through it blindly. ‘I’m not sure,’ he says. ‘I’ll check it out.’
DI Currie slowly rests her hands on top of her paperwork and looks at Owen. She says, ‘Excuse us, please, we’ll be right back.’
As they leave the room Barry turns to Owen and, for the first time since Owen was brought in on Friday morning, he smiles.
‘Good work,’ he says. ‘Very good work. Now let’s see what they come back with.’
49
Cate’s phone vibrates on the kitchen table. She picks it up and looks at the screen. It’s Elona, Tilly’s mum.
‘Cate?’
‘Yes,’ she answers. ‘Hi!’
‘Hi. It’s Elona. I wondered if you had time to talk?’
‘Yes,’ she replies. ‘Yes. Totally.’
‘I spoke to Tilly. Last night. About the thing that happened. She got very upset. I think she was shocked, in a way, that I was mentioning it again. I think she thought it was over. She kept saying, Why are you asking me this, why are you asking? But Cate, she started to cry and then she said, I can’t tell you, I can’t tell you. And I said what? And she said, It’s bad. I can’t. She said – andhere I am reading between the lines somewhat because she was not making much sense – but I think she was telling me that it did happen, that it happened and that she knows the person who did it, but she seemed scared, Cate, too scared to tell me who it was.’
Cate’s thoughts spiral dizzyingly back to the night of the twenty-first. Tilly in the kitchen. Curry on the hob. Josh saying, ‘I’m in the mood for something spicy.’ Tilly leaving. The four of them sitting down to eat. It had been four, hadn’t it? She squints to bring the image into focus: curry, table, Georgia, Roan, Josh. Had they sat down to eat when Tilly came back? No, it was too soon. She must still have been laying the table or serving up the food. She can’t remember who was in the kitchen then. She knows Georgia was there. And Roan and Josh must have been there too. She’s quite sure.
But even as she thinks this, she feels doubts crawl in and start to cloud her memory.