“HOW MUCH LONGER can they keep me here?”
Barry shuffles some paperwork out of his briefcase. “Now that they’ve charged you, as long as they like.”
“But they haven’t found any new evidence. I mean, they can’t take this to court based on what little they’ve got.”
“No. But they can keep trying, and believe you me, Owen, they are raking up every single strand of your life, every filament, until they find the thing they’re looking for. And meanwhile they’re going to keep dragging you back into that room and asking you questions until you crack.”
“Crack?” says Owen, incredulously. “But I’m not going to crack. How can I crack when I didn’t do it?”
But as he says the words, a curtain of doubt falls across his consciousness. His mind keeps taking him back to a moment he’s not even sure actually happened. The moment just after he saw the person across the street. The moment just before he thought he’d turned and gone indoors and gone to bed.
Because he cannot actually remember turning and going back indoors.
And since this morning’s interview, Owen’s turned over every night of his life when he’s been out drinking and realized that frequently all he can remember are flashes of action, but none of the bits in between.
He can’t remember journeys home. He can’t remember folding up his clothes. He can’t remember “Bill,” whose phone number he found in his pocket the night after leaving drinks a couple of years ago. He can’t remember buying the bottle of whiskey he’d found in a carrier bag on his bedroom floor once with a paper receipt with his card details on it, proving that he’d been into a branch of Tesco Metro and carried out the full transaction in person. He can’t remember stroking girls’ hair on the dance floor. Flicking sweat at them.
He can’t remember telling a girl called Jessica with soft skin that she was pretty. And he definitely can’t remember going to bed on Valentine’s night. He knows he woke up in his bed wearing his shirt and one sock. He knows he slept late. He knows he had a hangover. He remembers the girl who’d called him a creep, he remembers the man with the white dog, and he remembers the girl in the hoodie. But he can’t remember the rest.
And that picture keeps flashing in and out of his head: a figure, passing by him outside his door, heading toward the back of the house. It could have been her, the girl in the hoodie. It could have been someone else. Or it could be just a ridiculous fragment of his imagination, something his psyche has conjured up to deal with the trauma of his situation. You read about it all the time, about people confessing to things they haven’t done. Is this how it happens? he wonders. Is it your own brain that does it to you, that plants things there to frame you, like a bent copper?
He stares down at his hands. They look alien to him, someone else’s hands attached to his arms. He’s starting to lose any sense of himself or who he should be or what he’s meant to be doing or who he ever was. He tries to place himself back in that Italian restaurant with Deanna, tries to imprint the way she looked at him that night, over the way DI Currie looks at him in the interview room. If only he could hold on to that, then maybe this nightmare would end.
Barry strokes his fat silk tie and says, “There’s a girl missing. You’re all they’ve got. And you’re looking like a good bet to them. It’s irrelevant whether you did it at this point. They’re not letting you go anywhere until they have to.”
“I didn’t do it, you know.”
Barry doesn’t reply.
“I didn’t do it.”
Barry narrows his eyes at Owen. “Do what?” he says. “What didn’t you do?”
“Hurt that girl. I did not hurt that girl.”
Barry doesn’t speak for a while. Then he looks Owen hard in the eye and he says, “Well, Owen, the time for you to prove that is right now. Prove it, Owen. Tell me something incontrovertible. Tell me something that’ll get you out of here. Please. For both our sakes.”
“So,” says DI Currie, who is beginning to lose her fresh-faced glow as the investigation drags out. “Owen. Please, I know we’ve been over all of this. But it’s worth going over it again. The more we talk about it the higher the chance of you regaining some kind of memory. Please, tell us again about the night of the fourteenth of February.”
Owen exhales loudly. He can’t go through all of this again, he simply cannot. “What about Bryn,” he says. “Have you still not found him?”
She smiles crisply at him. “No,” she says. “We have not.”
“Well, I wish you would. He should be in here. Not me. He’s the sicko. He’s the weirdo. He’s probably out there raping women right now, while you’re sitting here asking me the same questions, over and over and over again.”
DI Currie pauses. She looks at Owen through narrowed eyes, and then she says, “Fine, Owen. Fine. If you can tell us one thing about ‘Bryn’ that will help us to locate him, then please, do feel free to do that. Whenever you’re ready. Please.” She leans back in her chair and appraises him frostily.
Owen sighs. He rubs at his face and tries to recall something, anything that Bryn might have said to out himself. He thinks back to the details of that first blog post he read. Bryn sitting in a pub on a snowy day watching the Chads and Stacys. He squeezes at his consciousness to remember more. The Dickensian outline of the pub in the swirling snow, the glow of the old lamps hanging outside and the carriage driveway where the horses were once tethered and the name of the pub had been changed when it was gentrified and before that it was the…
The Hunters’ Inn.
He grabs the edge of the table and says. “The town where he lives. It has a gastropub. A new gastropub. It used to be called the Hunters’ Inn. It’s on a common. Opposite a pond. With ducks. It’s his local. He goes there all the time. If you could find the pub, you’ll find him. He’s got big, curly hair. He’s really small. He wears a green jacket with a stain on the front. Ask anyone in there who he is. They’ll know. He’s very distinctive.”
He sees DI Currie roll her eyes very slightly. She had not expected him to supply any useful information and she’s annoyed that he has.
“We’ll look into that, Owen. Leave that with us. But, Owen, even if we find this ‘Bryn’ character somehow—him having deleted his blog and his presence on every forum you claim he used to frequent—even if we find him and we ask him about the Rohypnol, what do you think he’s going to say? Do you think he’s likely to tell us what you want him to tell us, that he gave it to you against your will, that you had no intention of using it? Owen, if this man exists and if we find him, he will deny all knowledge of knowing you at all.”
“But his fingerprints. They’ll be on the jar. And have you asked the pub? The pub in Euston? Have you asked to see their CCTV yet? For that night? That will prove that he knows me. And it might show him giving me the drugs.”
“Yes, but what you don’t seem to understand, Owen, is that none of that makes any difference. The fact of the matter is that you had date-rape drugs hidden in your bedroom, and frankly we really don’t care where you got them from or what you got them for. If you want to prove to us that you didn’t abduct Saffyre Maddox and cause some harm to come to her on the night of February the fourteenth, then I’m afraid you’re going to need to try another tack entirely.”
Owen glances at Barry who looks at him as if to say, “What did I tell you?”
He draws in his breath and blinks. Then he looks straight at DI Currie and he says, “Please tell me what you think happened to Saffyre. I would really like to know. What do you think I did to her? How did I get this girl, this quite tall girl, to wherever it is you think I took her? Me, on my own. How did I drag her through the streets of Hampstead at midnight without being noticed? On Valentine’s night, the streets full of people? I don’t have a car. I’m not particularly strong. I’d really like you to share your theories with me. Because honestly, from where I’m sitting, you’re grabbing at straws.”
DI Currie purses her lips. “Owen,” she says. “We are doing our jobs. We are exploring many, many avenues of inquiry. Trust us. And we have many theories about what happened to Saffyre, and I can assure you we would not be paying thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money to keep you here if we did not have a strong case to prove that you know what happened to Saffyre. So, Owen, once again, from the top, please talk us through the events of the night of the fourteenth of February as far as you recollect them. Starting with leaving the house to meet a woman called Deanna Wurth at a restaurant in Covent Garden.”
Owen lets his head drop into his chest. Then he lifts it and says, “At around six p.m. I left the house and walked down the hill toward Finchley Road tube station…”