FEBRUARY HALF-TERM IS over. The flat is quiet. Not the same quiet as when the kids are still in bed, not the spring-loaded quietness of bedroom doors yet to be opened, breakfasts and showers yet to be had, but the proper, pure silence of an empty house: coats taken from hooks, bags collected from chairs, empty beds, wet bath mats, children at school, Roan at work, a day ahead of nothing but her.
Cate should be working, but her focus is splintered.
There was another sex attack the day before. It’s been all over the news because the police have taken the step of issuing safety guidelines to women in the area. The victim this time was a middle-aged woman, walking back from lunch with friends on West End Lane as dusk fell, pulled into the area behind an estate agent’s office just off the main road and “subjected to a serious sexual assault.” The attacker was described as white, slim, twenty to forty years old, much of his face covered by a stretchy black covering of the sort that motorcyclists wear under their helmets. The attacker said no words at all during the attack and left the woman in need of medical attention.
Dusk.
That was the word in the news article that had jumped out at her. Such a very specific word for such a fleeting part of the day. Immediately, she’d thought about dusk yesterday, when she was prowling around the building plot with her phone light on, looking for her missing son. Her missing son who’d returned moments later, starving hungry and with a story of seeing a Dwayne Johnson movie on his own.
Dusk.
She goes to the door of her son’s bedroom. Her hand grips the doorknob.
She pushes the door open. The curtains are drawn, the bed is made, his pajamas are folded on the pillow. She pulls open the curtains and lets in the weak morning sun. She turns on the overhead light. You wouldn’t think anyone lived in this room. Josh has no stuff. While Georgia always has three cups half filled with stale water on her bedside table, handfuls of jewelry, a book or two, numerous chargers snaked into each other, a sock, a balled-up tissue, a ChapStick with the lid missing, and a pile of coins on her bedside table, Josh has nothing. Just a coaster.
Dusk…
She falls to her knees and peers under his bed. There’s his laptop, plugged into the wall to charge, the wires all neatly tucked away. She pulls it out and rests it on her knees; she won’t sit on his bed, as she worries she won’t be able to get his covers as neat as he’s left them and he’ll know she was in here.
She opens it and switches it on and knows already that the password he used for everything when he was small and she was allowed to know his password (donkey321) will no longer be his password and she will have to find some other way to access his computer. But she got quite good at code breaking last year when she thought Roan was having an affair. She’d even managed to access his work log-in. She waits for the screen to wake up and then she types in “donkey321.” She waits for the error message but instead the computer switches screens and she is in.
She blinks in surprise and feels a surge of relief. If there was anything on his computer that he didn’t want anyone to see he would for sure have changed his password to one his mum didn’t know.
She clicks through his windows. Worksheets for maths, iTunes, an essay on Animal Farm, and a browser with ten tabs open, nearly all schoolwork related. The last tab is for Vue Cinemas and shows the films currently showing at the cinema on the Finchley Road.
She feels her heartstrings loosen a little.
There, she thinks, there. Just as he’d said. Gone to the movies.
She scrolls through the timings. Fighting with My Family—3:20 p.m. That would have finished well after dusk.
Then she clicks on his browsing history (she’d done this once on Georgia’s laptop a year or so ago and been flabbergasted by the eclectic range of pornography her then fourteen-year-old daughter had been watching).
The most recent search term is “vue finchley road films today.” She vaguely registers the fact that he hasn’t used his laptop to browse since yesterday morning. The search before that is “Owen pick arrest.”
The search before that is for “Owen pick.”
The search before that is for “Owen pick saffyre maddox.”
The search before that is “saffyre Maddox missing.”
The search before that is “saffyre Maddox missing teenager.”
This is totally understandable.
Cate has been obsessed with the story of Saffyre Maddox ever since it broke. Hardly surprising, given that Saffyre is a former patient of Roan’s and that the man who abducted her lives across the street from them. Cate should not be surprised in the least that her son is taking such a keen interest in the story. Her current browsing history, she is sure, would look very similar to his.
She closes the laptop and slides it carefully back under his bed. Then she goes to his cupboards. Here his clothes are folded into squares and piled neatly. This is also where he keeps schoolwork he doesn’t need to take to school, and his pens and stationery for doing homework are on a table that clips flat to the wall when he’s not using it. Why on earth he bothers every day to clear the desktop, clip it to the wall, and put everything back into the cupboard, Cate cannot begin to imagine. He is Roan’s child, not hers, in that respect. In the bottom of the cupboard is his linen basket. She decides, while she is here, to empty it. She pulls the basket out of the cupboard and sees, tucked behind it, a carrier bag.
A scrunched-up bag is not a normal thing to find in Josh’s domain, so she takes it out, unties the knot, and peers inside. Old sports gear. A strong smell of damp and something worse than damp. Not quite sweat, but something as animal as sweat. She pulls out Lycra leggings: they’re Roan’s. Then a shiny, long-sleeved top with neon orange stripes on the arms. Also Roan’s.
She pulls out a pair of black socks and a pair of grippy gloves. And then last of all she pulls out a piece of black jersey that she cannot at first identify. She holds it out and turns it this way and that, stretches it out and puts her hand through a hole in the middle of it.
And then finally she works out what it is.
It’s a balaclava.