He shrugs. ‘No reason.’ Then he picks up his milk and his schoolbag and heads to his room. ‘What’s for dinner?’ he says, turning back halfway down the hallway.

‘Chicken curry,’ she says.

‘Cool,’ he says. ‘I’m in the mood for something spicy.’

And then it is quiet again, just Cate and the dark shadows through the window, her unfocused thoughts passing silently through the back tunnels of her mind.

5

Later that night it happens. A sort of coalescence of all of Cate’s weird, unformed fears about this place.

Georgia’s friend Tilly is assaulted moments after leaving their flat.

Cate had invited Tilly to stay for supper and she’d said, No, thank you, Mum’s expecting me, and Cate had thought, Maybe she just doesn’t like curry. Then a few minutes after she left there was a knock at the door and the doorbell rang and Cate went to answer it and there was Tilly, her face white, her huge eyes wide with shock saying, ‘Someone touched me. He touched me.’

Now Cate hustles her into the kitchen and pulls her out a chair, gets her a glass of water, asks her exactly what happened.

‘I’d just crossed the road. I was just over there. By the building site. And there was someone behind me. And he just sort of grabbed me. Here.’ She gestures at her hips. ‘And he was trying to pull me.’

‘Pull you where?’

‘Not anywhere. Just kind of against him.’

Georgia sits Tilly down at the table and holds her arm. ‘Oh my God, did you see him? Did you see his face?’

Tilly’s hands tremble in her lap. ‘Not really. Sort of. I don’t think … It was all just … quick. Really, really quick.’

‘Are you hurt?’ says Georgia.

‘No?’ says Tilly, with a slight question mark, as though she might be. ‘No,’ she says again. ‘I’m OK. I’m just …’ She stares down at her hands. ‘Freaked out. He was … It was horrible.’

‘Age?’ asks Cate. ‘Roughly?’

Tilly shrugs. ‘I don’t know.’ She sniffs. ‘He was wearing a hood and had a scarf around his face.’

‘Height?’

‘Kind of tall, I guess. And slim.’

‘Should I call the police?’ asks Cate and then wonders why she’s asking a sixteen-year-old girl who’s just been assaulted whether or not she should call the police.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Georgia. ‘Of course you should call them.’ Then before anyone else has a chance to pick up their phone, she’s calling 999.

And then the police arrive, and Tilly’s mum arrives and the night takes a strange tangent off into a place that Cate has never been before, a place of policemen in her kitchen, and a tearful mother she’s never met , and a nervous energy that keeps her awake for hours after the police leave and Tilly and her mother disappear in an Uber and the house is quiet yet she knows that no one can be sleeping peacefully because a bad thing happened and it is something to do with them and something to do with this place and something else, some indefinable thing to do with her, some badness, some mistake she’s made because she’s not a good person. She has been trying so hard to stop thinking of herself as a bad person, but as she lies in bed that night, the sudden awful knowledge of it gnaws at her consciousness until she feels raw and unpeeled.

Cate awakes just before her alarm goes off the following morning, having slept for only three and a half hours. She turns and looks at Roan, lying peacefully on his back, his arms tucked neatly under the duvet. He is a pleasant-looking man, her husband. He has lost most of his hair and shaves it now, revealing the strange contours of his skull that she had not known existed when she’d first met him thirty years ago. She’d presumed his skull to be a smooth thing, the underside of a pottery urn. Instead it is a landscape with hills and valleys, a tiny puckered scar. Raised veins run across his temples to his brow. His nose is large. His eyes are heavy-lidded. He is her husband. He hates her. She knows he does. And it’s her fault.

She slips out of bed and goes to the front window, a large bay overlooking the street. The just-risen sun shines through the trees, on to the building site across the road. It looks innocuous. Then she looks further to the right, to the house with the armchair on the driveway. She thinks of the man who lives there, the creepy man who’d followed Georgia home from the Tube station, who’d thrown her and Tilly dirty looks last night as he put out his bins – the man who matches the description that Tilly gave of the man who assaulted her.

Cate locates the card the policeman gave her last night. Detective Inspector Robert Burdett. She calls him, but he doesn’t answer so she leaves a message for him.

‘I’m calling about the assault on Tilly Krasniqi last night,’ she begins. ‘I don’t know if it’s anything but there’s a man, across the street. At number twelve. My daughter says he followed her home the other night. And she says he was staring at her and Tilly strangely on their way home from school last night. I don’t know his name, I’m afraid. He’s about thirty or forty. That’s all I know. Sorry. Just a thought. Number twelve. Thank you.’

‘Have you spoken to Tilly today?’ Cate asks Georgia as her daughter spins around the flat readying herself to leave for school later that morning.

‘No,’ says Georgia. ‘She’s not been answering my messages or taking my calls. I think maybe her phone’s switched off.’

‘Oh God.’ Cate sighs. She can’t bear the sense of guilt, the feeling that she somehow made this happen. She imagines Georgia, her beautiful guileless girl, a man’s hands on her in the dark on her way home from a friend’s house. It’s unbearable. Then she imagines tiny Tilly, too traumatised even to take messages from her best friend. She finds the number that Tilly’s mum put into her phone last night and presses it.

Tilly’s mum finally answers her phone the sixth time Cate calls her.

‘Oh, Elona, hi, it’s Cate. How is she? How’s Tilly?’

There is a long silence, then the sound of the phone being handled and muted voices in the background. Then a voice says, ‘Hello?’

‘Elona?’

‘No. It’s Tilly.’

‘Oh,’ says Cate. ‘Tilly. Hello, sweetheart. How are you doing?’

There’s another strange silence. Cate hears Elona’s voice in the background. Then Tilly says, ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’

‘Oh?’

‘About last night. The thing that happened.’

‘Yes.’

‘It didn’t happen.’

‘What?’

‘A man didn’t touch me. He just walked quite close to me, and Georgia had got me so freaked out about that man who lives opposite you, you know, and I thought it was him, but it wasn’t him, it was someone completely different and – and I came rushing back to yours and I …’

There’re more shuffling sounds and then Elona comes on the line again. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says. ‘So, so sorry. I said she’d have to tell you herself. I just don’t understand. I mean, I know they’re all under a lot of stress, these girls, these days – exams, social media, everything, you know. But still, that’s no excuse.’

Cate blinks slowly. ‘So, there was no assault?’ This doesn’t make any sense. Tilly’s pale skin, her wide eyes, her shaking hands, her tears.

‘There was no assault,’ Elona confirms in a flat tone, and Cate wonders if maybe she doesn’t quite believe it either.

Outside Cate sees DI Robert Burdett climbing into a car parked across the street. She remembers the message she left on his phone early this morning, about the strange man across the road. A wave of guilt passes through her stomach.

‘Have you told the police?’ she asks Elona.

‘Yes. Absolutely. Just now. Can’t have them wasting their resources. Not with all these cuts they’re having. But anyway, I’m sending her into school now. Tail between her legs. And again, I am so, so sorry.’

Cate turns off her phone and watches the back end of DI Burdett’s car as it reaches the junction at the bottom of the road.

Why would Tilly have lied? It makes no sense whatsoever.

Cate works from home. She’s a trained physiotherapist, but she gave up her practice fifteen years ago when Georgia was born and never really got back into treating patients. These days she occasionally writes about physiotherapy for medical publications and industry magazines, and every now and then she rents a room in her friend’s practice in St Johns Wood to treat people she knows, but most of the time she is at home, freelancing (or being ‘a housewife with a laptop’ as Georgia puts it). In Kilburn she has a small office area on the mezzanine, but in this temporary set-up she writes at the kitchen table; her paperwork sits in a filing tray by her laptop, and it’s a struggle to keep everything organised and to stop her work stuff being absorbed into the general family silt. She can never find a pen and people scrawl things on the back of her business correspondence, yet another thing she hadn’t thought through properly before making the move to a small flat.