CATE SPENDS THE rest of that morning with a cold shiver of dread trapped in her spine, making her shudder over and over again.
She’s done nothing with the scrunched-up carrier bag and its contents, merely rolled it up and stuffed it behind the linen basket again.
Cate is supposed to be submitting a first draft of this latest manual to her publishers by the end of the month, and she’s nowhere near ready. She sits at her laptop and words an email carefully, explaining that she will be late. She sighs as she presses send; being late is not something she makes a habit of. But she’s too distracted to rush it out; every time she looks at the screen her mind goes blank.
Instead she switches to her browser and googles “sex attacks NW3.” She opens a notepad and takes the cap off a pen.
The first attack in this spate now assumed to have been carried out by the same balaclava-clad man was on 4 January, on Pond Street.
A young woman of twenty-two had her breasts roughly fondled at eleven thirty in the morning by a young man dressed in black who then escaped very quickly on a hired bicycle when someone approached.
She writes: “11.30 a.m., 4 January.”
The next attack was three days later. A sixty-year-old woman, who also had her breasts grabbed by a young man dressed in black. The attack had left her with bruises. It was at about four o’clock in the afternoon, near the leisure center, near the school.
She writes it down.
The next was on 16 January. This was the one that she and Roan had read about in the papers. A twenty-three-year-old woman grabbed from behind, sexually assaulted through her clothes; she never saw the man who attacked her but described him as smelling of laundry detergent and having small hands.
She writes that down too.
She knows the next two, both on roads very close to here. Both daytime. Both involving grabbing and bruising. And then the latest one, 24 February, at dusk, on the other side of the Finchley Road. Near the cinema. This one the most serious so far, a woman in hospital with injuries.
She breathes in hard and goes to her online calendar. Here she compares the dates and times with her own activities, desperately searching for something that does not correlate, for proof that nobody in this house could possibly be responsible for the terrible things that have been happening to women in the area.
She remembers the smell on Roan’s running clothes she’d found in Josh’s bedroom: not washing detergent at all, but sour, musky, ugly.
She thinks of the boys that Roan treats at his clinic, the boys not yet men who are already fantasizing about hurting women.
She thinks of Josh, his hugs, his unknowability, his silence.
The shiver goes down her spine again.
But they are not Josh’s clothes, they are Roan’s clothes, and Roan too has his empty spaces. He is out all day and makes himself uncontactable. At night he runs in black Lycra; sometimes he runs for two hours, sometimes more. He comes back electrified and gleaming. He has secrets. Even if there wasn’t an affair last year, there was something. And there is the Valentine’s card from the child, which is the wrong size for the envelope. And the missing girl who used to be his patient, who had been seen outside their house the night she disappeared.
There is so much. So much that is wrong. And now there is a bag full of foul-smelling Lycra. Now there is a balaclava.
But she cannot find a date that doesn’t correlate with either her husband or son being the attacker. On every single occasion her husband and her son might possibly have been out of the house.
She looks at the time. It’s nearly eleven. She imagines Josh at school, Roan at work. Those spaces. The cracks and the gaps where things can get in.
She picks up her phone and searches her contacts for Elona’s number, Tilly’s mum. She lets her finger hover over the call button for a moment but loses her nerve. She presses the message icon instead and types a text. Dear Elona. Hope you and Tilly are both well. I just wanted to talk to you about something. Wondered if you were free for a coffee anytime soon. Let me know!
Elona replies thirty seconds later. Sure. I’m free now if that’s any good?
They meet at the Caffè Nero on the Finchley Road. Elona is very groomed: black hair pulled back into a sculpted ponytail, a black cape with a fur trim, black jeans, and high-heeled boots. Cate can’t understand how people can be bothered to be so glamorous. The effort, every day, the attention, the time, the money. Elona hugs her, enveloping her in a miasma of honey-sweet perfume.
“It’s so lovely to see you, Cate,” she says in her singsong Kosovar accent. “You look well.”
“Thank you,” Cate says, although she knows she does not.
“Let me get you a coffee. What would you like?”
Cate doesn’t have the energy to argue about who should be buying the coffee, so she just smiles and says, “A small Americano, please. With warm milk.”
She settles into an armchair and glances at her phone. There’s a message from Georgia. Mum?
Then another one: Mum. Can I make a cake tonight? Can you buy flour? And eggs?
Then two minutes later: And soft brown sugar. Love u.
Cate replies with a thumbs-up emoji and puts her phone away.
If anyone had told her a few years ago that one day Georgia would be the least of her problems, she would not have believed them.
Elona returns with an Americano for Cate and a mint tea for herself. “So,” she says, “how’ve you been?”
“Oh, God, you know,” Cate begins. “All a bit high drama. As you may know?”
Elona nods effusively. “I heard, yes.”
It occurs to Cate that Elona probably cleared her diary in the thirty seconds after receiving Cate’s message.
“So, what’s been going on?” Elona asks.
“Well, you know they’ve arrested the guy? The one who lives opposite us?”
“Yes. I read that. Wow. And what do you think? Do you think it was him?”
“Well, it certainly looks that way, doesn’t it? Though I read somewhere that it was him who told the police about seeing Saffyre there. Why would he have done that if he did it? If he hadn’t said anything, they’d never have known she was on our street. They’d never have looked in that building plot; they’d never have found her phone case and the blood. It all seems a bit strange.”
“Unless he wanted to get caught?”
“Well, yes, I guess that’s possible. But still, something doesn’t seem quite right to me.”
“So, what’s your theory?”
Cate laughs nervously. “I don’t have one. I just have an anti-theory.”
Elona smiles, blankly, clearly hoping for more.
Cate changes the subject. “So how’s Tilly? I haven’t seen her for quite a while.”
“No,” says Elona, her eyes dropping to the leaves in her tea. “No. She’s become a bit of a homebody. Doesn’t really like going out. Probably the weather. You know. The dark nights.”
“When did this start?” she asks. “The not going out?”
“Gosh, I don’t know. A few weeks ago, I suppose. Since the New Year. She’s just…” She pauses. “She just seems happier at home.”
“Does it seem…?” Cate begins and then pauses to find the right words. “Do you think maybe it had anything to do with that night? The night she was leaving ours. When she said the man had grabbed her.”
Elona looks up at Cate. “You know, the thought did occur to me.”
“And?”
Elona shrugs. “She swears blind that nothing happened. That she made it up.”
“It’s weird, though, isn’t it? The timing of it? And now it turns out that all the sex attacks in the area this year were kind of similar to what she originally said happened to her?”
“They are?”
“Yes. It was in the papers. Six since the New Year. All carried out by a young man in black. All involved rough grabbing and groping.”
Elona looks vaguely appalled.
“I mean, can you see any reason why she might have taken back the claim? Maybe she was scared to go to the police?”
“I honestly don’t know. I mean, we’ve barely spoken about it. I was so so cross with her for wasting everyone’s time like that, for lying. I was so embarrassed by her behavior, you know, and I’m a single mum, and everything she does feels like such a reflection on me, you know, and she thinks so highly of Georgia and of you and your family.”
“She does?”
“Yes. Oh God, yes. So much. She never had a real friend before Georgia. She’s in awe of her. And I think both of us were just a bit, you know, thrown by what happened that night.”
“Oh, honestly, no! She must never worry what we think. Or what Georgia thinks. Georgia is rock-solid. Nothing throws her. She’s really thick-skinned. You must tell Tilly that whatever it was that happened that night, whether it was real or not, she can tell Georgia. Georgia would never judge her. No one in our family would judge her. I promise.”
Elona smiles and puts her hand over Cate’s. She has a heavy gold chain around her narrow wrist; her nails are painted taupe. “Thank you, Cate,” she says. “Thank you so much. I will talk to her tonight and see if there’s anything she’s not telling me. You’re very kind to take such an interest.”
Cate smiles tightly. She’s not being kind. She’s being desperate and scared.
She walks home via the supermarket where she buys all the cake-making ingredients on Georgia’s list. At the checkout she glances across the street again at the entrance to the tube station, subconsciously looking out for her husband, as if the echo of his appearance there two weeks ago might still be playing out infinitely.
She walks home circuitously, via a couple of the places the newspaper report mentioned, to the estate agent just past the cinema where she sees police tape up around the back entrance, a police car still parked on the street outside. Then to the dogleg in the next road down from her road, the place she sometimes goes to post letters. She doesn’t know the precise location of this attack, but it makes her shudder nonetheless, looking at the hidden places here where a woman could easily be grabbed without anyone seeing.
She walks home quickly after that, all her nerves on end, her breathing coming slightly too hard. As she turns the next corner onto her street, she sees someone sitting on the wall outside her house. It’s a young man, well built. He’s wearing a gray coat with a bright green hoodie underneath. As she gets closer she sees that he is mixed race, very nice-looking. He gets to his feet when he sees Cate turning onto her pathway. He says, “Hi, do you live here?”
“Yes,” she replies, thinking that she should be nervous, especially in the light of what she’s just been doing, but she isn’t. “Can I help you?”
“I… I guess. I don’t know. My niece. Saffyre. She was here. I think. You know, Saffyre Maddox? She disappeared… I…” He pulls at his chin as he talks, as if trying to massage out the right words.
“You’re Saffyre’s uncle?” she asks.
“Yes, I am. Aaron Maddox. Are you Mrs. Fours?”
“Yes.”
“Roan Fours’s wife?”
She nods.
“Would it be OK if I asked you a few questions?”
She knows she should say no. She should say I’ve said everything that needs to be said to the police and send him on his way. But there’s something in his body language that suggests he’s carrying something with him, and not just the pain of his missing niece.
She says, “What sort of questions?”
“I’ve found something,” he says. “In her room. And I know I should take it to the police. But I just kind of wanted to check in with you first. Because… I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense. Could I come in?”
She looks across the street at Owen Pick’s house. It’s blank and quiet. She looks up at her neighbors’ windows. “Sure,” she says. “Of course. Come in.”
In her kitchen, Aaron Maddox sits for a moment in his big gray coat before Cate says, “Here, let me hang that up for you.”
“Thanks, that’s great. Cheers.”
Underneath the coat his hoodie has the Marvel logo and a picture of Spider-Man on it. She finds this strangely reassuring.
“Can I get you something to drink? Tea? Something cold?”
“Water would be great. Thank you.”
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. I was at Saffyre’s first couple of sessions. 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.” His 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 of snapped 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.