It was about nine o’clock when I left Jasmin’s. The sky was darkening but it was still warm, so I decided to walk home via Roan’s house. I wasn’t intending to hang around, just pass by, take a look, carry on home. It was such a part of my make-up by this point, I was like a dog or a pigeon: it was like a homing thing.

I came from the other direction because of being at Jasmin’s, past the side of the building site that backs on to another road. Even before I got to the site, I could smell it, the sickly-strong smell of weed. I stuck my head through a gap in the foliage and peered around the plot. Couldn’t see anything at first, but then I saw the glow of a phone and the burning red tip of a fat zoot. I saw a face, a boy’s face. He was alone. He looked young. The red tip grew bigger and brighter as he inhaled. The light of the phone died when he switched it off. And then I saw him turn and look behind him. I heard him make a noise under his breath and saw him put his hand into his pocket. He brought something out of his pocket and then turned again, making the same noise.

And then there he was: the fox. He stopped for a moment and just stared at the boy. I thought he would just run away eventually, like every fox I’d ever met on the street always did. But this fox did not. This fox started to creep forward, very slowly, an inch at a time, his head down, his shoulders back. He looked behind himself every few seconds. But eventually he was side by side with the boy. I heard the boy say, ‘Good evening, sir,’ to the fox and I saw him hand the fox something to eat. The fox took it a few feet from the boy, let it drop from his mouth and ate it slowly and methodically from the ground. The boy held out another piece of food, between his finger and thumb. The fox came back and took it gently.

Then, crazily, the boy touched the fox’s head and the fox let him.

My jaw fell open. I had never seen such a thing in my life. I took a photo: boy and fox, side by side. I took it just as the fox turned to look up at the boy. Almost like a faithful dog looking at his master.

The boy finished smoking his zoot and ground it out at his feet. The fox heard a sound from somewhere far off and scampered away from him. I saw the boy get to his feet, pick up a rucksack, wipe down his trouser legs and backside with his hand. I turned away sharply so he wouldn’t see me. I got out my phone and pretended like I was just standing about looking at SnapChat and then he peered out of the foliage by the corner, climbed up on the top of the wall and jumped down on to the pavement. He turned the corner and I saw him saunter towards Roan’s house and it was only then that I clocked who it was: it was Roan’s boy. Old gangly legs.

And I thought: Every family has its black sheep, its shady character. I’m that one in my family, that’s without a doubt. Now it looked like I’d found the shady one in Roan’s family. Who was this young boy picking up his draw from? Why was he smoking it all alone on a building site? And how was he hanging out with a fox? What kind of Dr Dolittle weirdness was that?

I zoomed in on that photo when I got home. I loved it. The boy had a good face, like his dad’s but not quite formed. In the dark, colourless shadows of the photograph with his harsh haircut, his raw, over-developed features, his earnest expression, he looked almost Victorian. And then I zoomed in on the fox, its eyes fixed on the boy, the light from the street just glinting off one white whisker. So beautiful. So calm. It was a photo that could have won a prize in a competition.

I saved it into my favourites.

Then I put down my phone, closed my laptop and, while Jasmin headed into town with her boobs popping out of her Boohoo top and a hip flask of vodka in her tiny bag, while Roan did whatever Roan did with that beautiful pre-Raphaelite girl with the PhD after work on a Friday, while his son sat in his room stoned and with his pockets full of meat, I sat on my bed and opened a book.

26

The following morning Cate’s road is cordoned off. Two squad cars are parked diagonally across the street, their blue lights slowly revolving, casting patterns across the walls of Cate’s bedroom. There’s an unmarked van parked in the middle of the road and two uniformed policemen standing by the ribbon telling people to go the other way. Across the road curtains are twitching, people are peering through front doors in their dressing gowns.

Georgia appears behind Cate and says, ‘What the hell is going on?’

‘I have no idea. I assume it must be something to do with that girl. Saffyre Maddox.’

‘Oh my God.’ Georgia claps her hands to her cheeks. ‘Do you think they’ve found her? Her body?’

‘Oh, God, Georgia. Don’t. That’s …’ Cate trails off, but it had already occurred to her. The big wooden gate into the building site across the road is wide open and there are plain-clothes officers going in and out.

‘I’m going to ask,’ says Georgia, turning on her heel and leaving the room.

‘Georgia, don’t,’ says Cate. ‘Leave them, they’re trying to get on with their …’ She hears the front door go, then sees Georgia, still in her pyjamas with her hoodie thrown on over the top and just the fronts of her feet wedged into trainers which she is still trying to put on properly as she hops along towards the uniformed policemen. Cate watches through the curtains as her daughter stands in front of them, her hands in the front pocket of her hoodie, nodding, shaking her head, pointing to the building site, pointing back towards their house. After a moment she turns and heads back. Cate meets her at the front door.

‘What did they say?’

Georgia kicks off the unfastened trainers and heads into the kitchen, talking to Cate over her shoulder. ‘They said they’ve found something in that building site. They’ve got forensics in there. I asked if it was a body. They said no, it wasn’t a body. I asked if it was to do with Saffyre Maddox. They said they weren’t at liberty to tell us. They said they’re going to be in there all day, maybe tomorrow, too.’

Cate nods. Her stomach turns. She looks at the time; it’s just after 9 a.m. Roan had left early for work this morning at 7 a.m. She wonders if the police were already here when he left. She wonders how that would have made him feel. She sends him a WhatsApp message: Police cordon on our street, forensics in the building site over the road. Any idea what’s happening?

The tick stays grey. She puts down her phone and fills the kettle. ‘Want a cup of tea?’ she asks Georgia.

Georgia is halfway through a Cadbury’s Mini Roll. She says, ‘No thank you, I’m going back to bed,’ then tugs off her hoodie and drapes it over the back of a chair. She drops the Mini Roll wrapper in the vague area of the bin, but it misses and lands on the floor. Cate is about to call her back to pick it up, but she can’t find the will, so sighs and picks it up herself.

Tiny shocks pass through her nervous system as she moves.

She goes to the drawer where the tea towels live and pulls out Roan’s mysterious Valentine’s card again.

As she does so, something occurs to her: Molly’s card is not the same shape as the envelope. It is slightly too tall, not quite wide enough. The card did not come with this envelope. She pulls it out again, opens it, reads it. Little Molly. What a strange little girl she must be, sending Valentine’s cards to old men.

She turns the card over in her hands, examining it for something, some tiny thing, that might make more sense of it. But there’s nothing. Roan’s job, after all, is the care of strange children; why should she be surprised that one would behave strangely towards him?

She sighs and puts the card back in the drawer.

Then she turns and jumps. Josh is standing in the doorway. He is wrapped up in a towelling dressing gown; his hair is rumpled. ‘Why are there loads of police outside?’ he says.

‘Don’t really know,’ she replies. ‘Something to do with that missing girl, maybe. They’ve found something in the building site, got forensics in there.’

‘Really?’ he says, wandering back to the hallway, into Cate’s room, peering through the window. She follows him. The back of his neck is raw from a fearsome haircut the day before, the Peaky Blinders haircut all the boys seem to be getting these days that makes their heads look too big for their bodies.

She stands behind him at the window. They both watch as a man and woman in plain clothes exit the entrance to the site holding plastic boxes. The police manning the cordon pull it back for another police vehicle to pull in. Two more people get out. One of them Cate immediately recognises as the detective who’d sat on her sofa the day before, the one who’d asked so very specifically about where she’d been at midnight on Valentine’s night. There are fifty streets between Alfred Road, where Saffyre lives, and the village, where she told her family she was going. A thousand houses. Tens of thousands of people. Yet the police chose her doorbell to ring, her sofa to sit on, her whereabouts to ask after and now the building site opposite her house to investigate. Not to mention the fact of her husband’s relationship to the girl they’re trying to find.