‘Oh,’ he says. ‘What did they say?’

‘Said they were doing door-to-doors. But I didn’t see them going to anyone else’s door. Just ours. I suspect they’ll probably be on your trail soon, too.’

‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Yes. They came to see me this morning.’

He says this nonchalantly, as though the police coming to talk to him about a missing girl was a day-to-day occurrence. Cate almost gets the feeling that if she hadn’t asked him about it, he wouldn’t have brought it up.

‘What did they say?’

He shrugs, goes through the mail on the kitchen table, unties his woollen scarf. ‘They wanted an insight, I suppose. An idea of what sort of person she is, why she might have run away.’

‘Run away?’

‘Yes. Although I had to tell them that I haven’t seen her for months. So I’m not sure really what sort of state she’ll have been in recently.’

‘But I thought she was missing. Not run away?’

He looks at her blankly. ‘Well, it’s kind of the same thing really, isn’t it? Until you know what’s happened.’

‘But a runaway would take a bag, surely?’

He shrugs. ‘Maybe she did?’

‘She did. But there was nothing in it. Look.’ Cate points firmly at the flyer. ‘That’s exactly what it says. Surely that’s what they said to you?’

She’s being overzealous, but she’s feeling some kind of bizarre complicity with the whole thing, as if it is oddly connected to her in some way.

‘They didn’t say, no. They gave me very little information at all. They were much keener to understand her condition while she was under my care.’

‘And what was it? What was her condition?’

He looks at her again. ‘You know I can’t tell you that.’

‘But she’s not even your patient any more, surely you can—’

‘No,’ he snaps. ‘You know I can’t. I can’t believe you’re asking me.’

And there he is again, that man from last year, the brittle, righteous man she’d nearly left because of all her misgivings about him. The man who’d made her feel mad and bad and toxic. But this time round it’s different; this isn’t her feeling that something’s amiss and hunting desperately for evidence to back up her feelings; this time something is amiss: a young girl is missing.

‘But was it something that could make her behave like this? I mean, you don’t have to tell me exactly what it was, but do you think she was unstable?’

She’s pushing him but she doesn’t care.

He puts his hands palm down on the kitchen table, raises his eyes to her and says, ‘I signed her off because she was doing well. She’d stopped certain harmful patterns of behaviour. Beyond that I have no idea. I don’t know what was happening in her life before she disappeared.’

‘You didn’t see her again?’

He sighs, audibly, for her benefit, so she can see how far she is pushing him. ‘No. I didn’t see her again.’

‘So, what’s your theory? What do you think’s happened to her?’

‘I have absolutely no idea. She’s seventeen. Rocky upbringing. Buried trauma. Who knows?’

He sounds as if he finds the whole concept of Saffyre’s disappearance bothersome in some way. He sounds almost glib.

She looks at him and says, ‘You sound like you don’t care.’

He rolls his eyes. ‘Of course I care.’

‘But you don’t sound like you do.’

‘My professional duty of care is one thing and Saffyre no longer comes under that. But of course I care about her and her outcome. Of course I care that she’s disappeared. I just don’t really see what I can do about it.’

Cate pauses. She collects two used mugs from the table and slowly takes them to the sink. She rests her hands on the edge of the counter and stares out of the window. ‘They asked what we were doing at midnight that night,’ she says. ‘You know, Valentine’s.’

He doesn’t respond.

‘I said we were in bed.’

‘Well, we were, weren’t we?’

‘Well, I was. You were … I don’t know. I lay there for quite some time waiting for you to come. And when you did, I asked you what you’d been doing and you said you hadn’t been doing anything and then we had sex.’

‘And?’

‘Well, what had you been doing?’

And there it is. A question too far. Immediately they are back in the same place where they’d spent all those hellish weeks last year.

‘Cate,’ he says, in that tone of voice she’d got so used to back then, that patient, do-I-really-have-to-put-up-with-this-nonsense tone of voice, ‘what on earth are you talking about?’

She unpeels her fingers from the kitchen counter and turns again, puts a smile on her face. She doesn’t want to go there.

‘Nothing,’ she says lightly. ‘Absolutely nothing.’

25

SAFFYRE

I watched Roan Fours’s adulterous affair with the girl with the red hair unfurl over the summer months.

Her name was Alicia. I knew that from overhearing him calling to her across the car park at the clinic. They went to the scruffy pub on the corner quite a lot. They’d press themselves into the tightest corners of the beer garden and talk like they were gonna die of each other. They looked quite good together, despite the age gap. A better match than him and his wife, in some ways. His wife looked like life had got to her, whereas Roan had this box-fresh look about him; he never looked tired or worn down, always looked like he’d just had a shower, just had a holiday, was ready to get up and go. He had a glow. I don’t know how old he was, but around fifty I’d say. Alicia was much younger, but somehow they matched.

I did some googling and found a junior psychotherapist at the Portman called Alicia Mathers. There was a biography for her on the website. She had a degree and a masters in psychology from UCL and a PhD. Clever girl. I followed Alicia home one night after one of their early-doors dates (they rarely said goodbye to each other later than about eight, nine o’clock). She lived in a flat in a small block off Willesden Lane. Kind of nondescript. I saw a light go on on the fourth floor after she got home. So that was where she lived, then. Useful to know. I took some photos and I found my way home.

Of course, Granddad and Aaron were getting a bit worried about the amount of time I was spending away from home. I just said vague things like: I’m seventeen now, I’m nearly an adult, give me some space. I could tell Aaron was particularly worried about me. He even said at one point, ‘You seem anxious, Saff, maybe I should get in touch with Dr Fours?’ (Aaron loved Roan, was virtually reverential towards him. If Aaron had had a cap, he’d have doffed it, that sort of thing.)

I said, ‘Don’t be stupid. What for?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘maybe you’re stressed about your exams? Maybe there’s something else going on in your life. I mean, is there a … like a boy?’

I laughed. There’d never been a boy and I couldn’t imagine for a moment there ever would be. That part of me had shrivelled and died when Harrison John did what he did to me when I was ten years old. I could look at a boy and see nice eyes, or a good face, or even a fit body, but that never translated to feelings. I never wanted them or their attention. I said, ‘No, there’s no boy. I’m just walking a lot. Clearing my head. You know.’

Sometimes if I had a free period during the day I might come down and look at Roan’s wife. I felt so bad for her. There she was in her Fat Face jeans and her flowery tops, trundling about the place, obliviously buying stuff to cook for her family, fluffing out duvets, filling in forms, clearing out the fridge, wiping down floors, all that stuff I imagine middle-class housewives do. And for what? For her husband to walk through the door one day and say, ‘I’ve met someone. She’s younger than you and prettier and I want to have sex with her whenever I like.’

And then what? What happens to a woman like that with a pretend job and children just about to leave home? Where would Cate Fours end up? I honestly really ached for her. I truly did. It’s horrible when you know something that someone else doesn’t know; it makes you feel somehow responsible for their predicament.

Then, towards the end of that summer, the day after I got my GCSE results in fact (I got six A’s and three A*’s, in case you were wondering), a strange thing happened.

It was late on a Friday night; I’d been at my friend Jasmin’s for a takeaway and to listen to music. She was getting ready to go out to a club or something. I didn’t want to go. Not my scene, not my thing. But I like watching my friends get ready, I like listening to music, I like chicken tikka and paratha, I like Jasmin, so you know, I hung out for a while.