‘How tall was this girl?’

‘It might not have been a girl. It might have been … I wasn’t sober. I’d had some wine. Quite a lot of wine. I can’t be sure.’

‘This person, how tall? Roughly.’

‘I genuinely can’t remember.’

‘And roughly what time was this?’

‘Just as I got to my front door. Midnight. Ish. Maybe later.’

‘And it wasn’t’ – she taps the printout with her fingertip – ‘it wasn’t this girl?’

‘I really, really don’t … It was dark and, like I say, I’d had some wine. I really don’t …’ He’s started to talk very fast now. He’s aware that he sounds panicked. He’s wishing he hadn’t said anything now about the strange girl in the hoodie. The police would be gone now and he could be safely back in his room.

‘Well, actually, that’s very useful, thank you so much. I’m glad you were able to remember that for us. And if you don’t mind, we’d like to be in touch again. Once we’ve had a chance to talk to people who live across the street.’

The people across the street.

The people who give him dirty looks whenever they pass.

The skinny blonde woman with the annoying face.

Her thunder-thighed daughter.

The ridiculous father with the leggings, running up and down that hill in the dark as though seeking oblivion.

23

Cate has her bag on her shoulder and is opening her front door about to head to her borrowed room in St John’s Wood to treat a patient when she jumps at the sight of a small blonde woman dressed in black, accompanied by a man in police uniform. She stops and stares at them for a moment. Immediately she knows that they are here to talk about Saffyre Maddox.

‘Hi,’ she says. ‘Sorry. I was just on my way out.’

‘That’s OK. We can come back.’

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘no. It’s fine. I can spare a few minutes.’

‘If you’re sure?’

She shows them into the living room, freshly tidied, thank goodness, cushions all in a neat row.

‘Nice flat,’ says the woman.

‘Oh,’ says Cate. ‘It’s not mine. I mean, it’s a rental. Just temporary.’

‘Well, it’s lovely. I love the high ceilings. DI Currie.’ She extends a small hand. ‘And PC Rodrigues.’

‘Can I get you anything?’

‘No, we’re fine. But thank you.’

They all sit down and DI Currie takes out a notepad and sheaf of paper.

‘We’re looking into the disappearance of a local schoolgirl.’ She passes a sheet of paper to Cate who stares blankly at the familiar photograph of Saffyre Maddox.

‘Ah,’ she says. ‘Yes. I saw this in the papers.’

‘Good, then you know a little about the case?’

Cate nods. She waits for the DI to say something about Roan, about his connection to Saffyre Maddox, but is surprised when the DI says, ‘Valentine’s night. Can you remember where you were?’

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Right. Yes. I was in Hampstead, having drinks and dinner with my husband.’

‘And what time did you get home?’

‘Roughly eleven thirty.’

‘And did you see anything? Anyone? When you returned?’

Cate stops. She’s about to say something about the figure she glimpsed through the curtains. But something stops her. ‘Not that I can remember,’ she says.

‘Around midnight? Maybe?’

‘No.’ She shakes her head. ‘No. I was in bed by midnight.’

‘And your husband?’

‘My husband?’

‘Was he also in bed? At midnight?’

She can’t remember. She cannot remember. ‘Yes,’ Cate replies firmly. ‘I’m pretty sure he was.’ She looks at the time on her phone. ‘I’m really sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m going to have to go now. I have a patient in St John’s Wood in twenty minutes.’

‘Oh, a patient. Are you a doctor?’

‘No. I’m a physiotherapist.’

‘Oh. I’m so sorry,’ says DI Currie, getting to her feet. ‘Please don’t let us keep you another minute.’

They all leave together in a slightly awkward huddle. DI Currie and PC Rodrigues stand by the front door and examine the doorbells. ‘Anyone else in?’ DI Currie asks.

‘Sorry, no idea.’ Cate smiles at them apologetically; then she says, ‘Bye, then,’ and turns and heads down the street, her heart racing painfully hard under her ribs.

Roan did have an affair once. It was in the very early days of their marriage, when they were still very young and getting used to the fact of being married when none of their friends were.

Cate had kind of guessed it was happening. Roan had been pretty bad at covering his steps. Condoms had started disappearing at a rate that was incommensurate with the amount of sex that they’d been having – still quite a lot back then, pre-babies. Cate had been responsible for picking up the condoms from the family-planning clinic so she was more aware than most women about how many condoms should be in the box.

Roan had still been a student then, that had been part of the problem, while Cate had graduated three years earlier and was working full-time at a sports rehab gym. There’d been a disconnect for a year or two; Cate was bringing in money, spending her days with people older than her, tired by ten o’clock. Roan was bringing in no money, spending his days with other students and usually in the pub at 10 p.m.

He’d been having sex with another student. Her name was Marie; she was the same age as Cate and she had very long hair. Roan ended the affair – though refused to acknowledge that it was an affair, said it was just ‘basic sex’ – the moment Cate confronted him with her suspicions. Marie came to their flat an hour later and Cate ended up holding her on the pavement outside while she cried and rocked and wailed.

When Cate went back indoors a moment later, she found one of Marie’s hairs on her cardigan. She pulled it off and stared at it for a moment before discarding it on the floor. Roan sat with his head hanging, his shoulder blades two pointed peaks of contrition, sniffing in some kind of approximation of tears.

‘Has she gone?’ he said.

She nodded and poured herself a glass of wine.

‘Are we over?’

‘Over?’ she asked facetiously. ‘We’re married. What do you mean, over?’

‘I mean, is that the end of our marriage?’

She remembers staring at Marie’s solitary hair, no longer a part of Marie, a foot and a half long, an S-shape on the carpet. S for sex. S for shame. S for slut. She remembers imagining Roan’s fist around her hair in bed while they did ‘basic sex’. She’d had to stifle a laugh. The whole thing was so pathetic.

‘I can’t live without you. You know that, don’t you? I can’t live without us.’

Then he’d started to cry, properly, contrite shoulder blades heaving up and down like pistons. The horror of it, she recalled now, the shock. For a moment she’d wondered if she even loved him, if she’d ever loved him.

‘I’d die without you,’ he’d said as she passed him a tissue. ‘I’d literally just die.’

Roan had graduated a year later, quickly found his way to the Portman and become a serious, grown-up man, widely respected, superb at his job. They’d even been able to crack a joke about Marie eventually, about her appearing with her red-rimmed eyes that evening, ending up in Cate’s arms on the pavement. The fact they’d been able to joke about it had put a stake in its path, a definitive sign that what had happened had been an aberration, a one-off, something unconnected to them and the couple they were to become, the parents they were to become, the life they would go on to build for themselves.

Nobody knew about it.

Cate hadn’t even told her closest friends.

It was theirs and theirs alone.

So, she hadn’t been totally mad to think the worst a year ago. She’d said as much to Roan. ‘It’s not as if’, she said, ‘it hasn’t happened before.’

He’d scoffed at that, as if it was somehow irrelevant. And she’d allowed him to scoff because she’d been so ashamed of her own actions.

But in retrospect she could see that he’d been clawing back the moral high ground from her after twenty-five years, expunging his own memories of the crying, pathetic, desperate man in the scruffy flat in Kilburn claiming he’d kill himself if she left him. Maybe he’d known that Cate had questioned her own love for him in that moment. Maybe he’d been waiting for a moment to suggest that he too was capable of questioning his. Redressing the balance.

Theirs is a strong marriage. It has survived a lot. And still they are able to find a way to feel good about each other.

But as Cate walks to her patient appointment that morning, a watery sun playing on the flush on her skin, she thinks of DI Currie’s very particular question, and she thinks again of the figure outside her window and she wonders again where Roan was and what he was doing at midnight on Valentine’s night.

24

‘The police came this morning,’ Cate tells Roan that evening. ‘They were asking about Saffyre Maddox.

Roan’s phone has been switched off all day and this is the first chance she’s had to discuss the day’s events with him.