CATE SPOTS IT late in the day, a small piece in a copy of the Times she picked up for free in the supermarket the day before. She often picks up the complimentary paper but rarely reads it, and she only reads it today because she’s looking for an article advertised on the front page about how to have sex in your fifties.
She turns the pages quickly, but her eye is caught first by the word “Camden” halfway down page eight.
The headline reads: “CAMDEN SCHOOLGIRL STILL MISSING. POLICE QUESTIONING LOCALS.”
And there, beneath the headline, is a photo of a young girl with exquisite, symmetrical features, an enigmatic smile, large hoop earrings, dark curly hair held back on one side in a single tight braid, pale green eyes. Cate doesn’t immediately recognize her. But then she reads on and her eye is drawn back to the girl in the photograph and then she knows it is her.
Camden schoolgirl Saffyre Maddox, 17, has not been seen since she left home on the evening of 14 February to visit a friend in Hampstead. Saffyre, who lives with her uncle, Aaron Maddox, 27, in Alfred Road NW3, is studying for A levels at Havelock School, NW3. Teachers at her school describe her as a good student and a sociable member of the school community. According to Aaron Maddox, she left home at roughly eleven o’clock on the night of her disappearance, wearing dark jogging bottoms, a black hoodie, and white trainers.
Cate gasps and looks around her as though there might be someone here to share this with. The children are both off school for the half-term holiday, but neither of them is in, and Roan is at work.
She picks up her phone, photographs the story, and before she’s had a chance to think about what she’s doing has WhatsApped it to Roan.
For obvious reasons, Saffyre’s name has not been mentioned for months, but there’s no reason why Cate shouldn’t still recognize it when she sees it printed in a national newspaper.
The tick remains gray. Roan always has his phone in flight mode when he’s with patients. That was one of the (many) things that had fanned the flames of her madness the year before: that he always forgot to take it out of flight mode afterward, would walk around completely uncontactable, long into the evening. She’d never been able to work out how he could go around with a dead phone without automatically feeling the need to turn it back on.
She reads through the article again.
Six days ago. Valentine’s night. The night she and Roan walked into Hampstead and had champagne in a murky, fire-crackly pub and then shared a red beef curry at a Thai restaurant on the way home, the night they’d got on really well and found lots to talk about and laugh about and been not like one of those long-married couples trying to hold it together in public on Valentine’s night, but like a real, compatible, happy couple.
And meanwhile Saffyre had been somewhere between Swiss Cottage and Hampstead wearing not enough clothes for what was a very cold night. Maybe they’d walked past her? Maybe they’d even seen something? Was it possible?
She shakes the thought from her head. Of course it wasn’t possible. There would have been thousands of people between Swiss Cottage and Hampstead on Valentine’s night, thousands of places she could have been. And maybe Saffyre hadn’t been going to Hampstead at all, had just said that to cover her tracks, had left her home and walked in totally the opposite direction, her uncle none the wiser.
Cate pulls open her laptop and googles “Saffyre Maddox.”
The papers all run a story about her disappearance; they all use the same photograph of her. None of them has any extra detail.
At around 2:00 p.m. she gets a reply from Roan.
It reads, simply: Oh my God.
She replies: I know.
But the ticks remain gray.
He’s gone already.
The card that arrived on Valentine’s Day for Roan still sits in the kitchen drawer in its ripped envelope. Cate had tucked it firmly away between a pile of tea towels, hidden from prying teenage fingers. She had categorically not looked at it after their lovely Valentine’s night in Hampstead, and then not the following day either. Then it had been the weekend, and now it was the half-term holiday and, strange as it sounds, she has stopped thinking about the card. It bears no relationship to the harmonious atmosphere in their home, to the soft exchanges between them, the sex they’ve had twice since then, both times initiated by her. The card has become metaphorical dust, of no consequence or interest to her.
But now.
She claps her hands to her ears as something passes through her thoughts, a high-speed train of a notion. The feeling takes her back to last year, to when her whole life had felt like this, when every minute of every day had been spent potholing through doubt and paranoia and distrust. She had not been happy in that place and she does not want to go back there. She is happy here, right here, in this rose-hued world of Valentine’s cards and snatched hugs.
She decides to strip the beds. Cate is not usually the type of person to use domestic drudgery to take her mind off things, but now she sweeps through the three bedrooms of the flat, trying to put as much space between herself and the drawer in the kitchen as possible.
In Georgia’s room she pulls off the crystal-white sheets that her daughter insists upon; long gone are the days of pink and lilac fairies. White sheets, white lamps, white sheepskin rug. When Georgia was younger, thirteen, fourteen, Cate would find it virtually impossible not to rifle though her daughter’s things when she was in her bedroom, desperate for clues to the person she was turning into. Now she has no need; Georgia shows herself to Cate crystal clear, every minute of every day. She hides nothing.
Cate moves efficiently around her bed, balls the sheets together, and leaves them on the floor in the hallway. Then she goes to Josh’s room.
Josh is a tidy boy; he always has been. She pulls the blue chambray sheets from his bed, then puts on a fresh green sheet. His laptop is tucked underneath his bed, plugged in and charging. She is half tempted to open it, to see what her mysterious son does when he’s alone in here, but for some reason her son’s privacy seems more sacred, more fragile than her daughter’s. She doesn’t ponder for too long on why she might feel like this; she just does.
Then she goes to her bedroom, her marital quarters, where, for the last five days at least, marital things have been happening. She snatches up the gray bedding and creates another ball, adds it to the pile in the hallway, stretches a pale blue sheet over their mattress, puffs up the duvet inside a fresh cover.
The curtains in here are still drawn; at this time of the year it sometimes seems futile to open the curtains in a room that was dark when you awoke and will be dark once more when you return.
She pulls them apart and is startled by the reminder of the world beyond. There is her street, there is the man with the white dog, there is the bin on the corner that only gets emptied once a fortnight when its contents are spilling onto the street, there is a Sainsbury’s delivery van, an Amazon delivery van, there is the house across the street with the armchair on the driveway and…
She stops. She remembers. Remembers standing right here. It was nighttime. There was something… What was it? When?
She shakes her head slightly, trying to locate the source of the half-formed memory.
Was it that night? Was it Valentine’s night? Drawing the curtains, readying herself for the possibility of sex with Roan, a figure, out there? Movement. Muted voices. A sense of being under surveillance? Or was she imagining that?
She had not been sober, after all. There had been champagne, followed by beer, followed by more beer in the Thai restaurant. No, she had not been sober, not at all.
She turns, as if someone has just called her name.
But they haven’t of course; she is alone.
It’s the card in the kitchen drawer calling her. The card telling her that there is something she’s not seeing, that maybe she’s not mad or bad or wrong.
Before she can check herself or think herself down, she strides back into the kitchen, pulls open the drawer, flips through the tea towels, and pulls it out.
Her hands shake as she takes the card from the envelope.
The card has a pink bird of some description on the front, a watercolor, rather insipid. Inside, in a very childish script, are the words:
Dear Roan
Thank You for being my therpist.
Please be my Valntine.
Love
Molly
xxx
She shuts the card and collapses against the edge of the kitchen counter.
A card from a child.
Molly.
Little Molly who still writes phonetically.
Little Molly who wants a bald fifty-year-old man to be her Valentine.
Little Molly who knows his home address.
She stuffs the card back into the envelope and tucks it inside the tea towels again, her heart racing lightly.
A couple of hours later Georgia appears with Tilly.
“Oh,” says Cate, looking up from her work. “Hello, Tilly. Haven’t seen you for ages.”
It’s the first time Tilly’s been here since the night back in January when she claimed to have been sexually accosted.
“How are you?” asks Cate.
“Good,” says Tilly, eyeing her own feet awkwardly. “I’m good.”
Georgia is plundering the drawers and cupboards for food. She is starving, apparently, having not eaten breakfast and only having had “like, a few nuggets” for lunch. She finds some sweet-and-salty popcorn and pours herself and Tilly each a large glass of juice, then they disappear.
“Thanks for changing my bedding!” Cate hears her daughter call from down the hallway.
“You’re welcome!” she calls back.
Cate sits down again and tries to focus on her work but finds there are now too many other things needing to be put in order in her head: the card from a child (whose handwriting is that on the envelope? Who bought and licked the stamp? Who put it in a letter box?); the lingering strangeness of Tilly lying about being accosted that night (something must have instigated it, surely?); the disappearance of Saffyre Maddox (somewhere between her own home and here); the figure outside the window on Valentine’s night (or was it a figment of her drunken imagination?); the weird guy across the road (every time she sees him, he gives her an odd look that chills her to the bone); the increasing number of daylight sexual assaults in the vicinity.
But they refuse to be put into any sort of order; they refuse to line up and make sense of themselves.
Tilly leaves a couple of hours later.
Georgia appears in the kitchen.
“How’s Tilly?” asks Cate.
“She’s all right.”
“Did you ever… Has she ever explained? About that night?”
“Kind of. Not really.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, I think something did happen. But it wasn’t what she said it was.”
“So, something like what?”
“Don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me.”
“What do you think it might have been?”
“Don’t know.”
“But—”
“Really, really don’t know, OK? You’ll have to ask her yourself.”
“I—”
“Look, Tilly’s just weird, all right. She’s weird. Whatever it was, it was probably something really boring.” She pauses for a second, then looks at Cate curiously. “If she says anything, I’ll tell you. OK?”
“OK,” says Cate. “Thank you.”