Cate peers through the front window again at the house across the road. Then she goes back to her laptop and googles it.

She finds that the last time a flat was bought or sold at number twelve was ten years ago, which is extraordinary for an eminent address such as this. The freehold to the building is owned by a company in Scotland called BG Properties. She can find nothing else about the address or anyone who lives there. It is a house of mystery, she decides, a house where people come and never move out again, where people hang thick curtains and never open them and leave their furniture to rot on the driveway.

Then she googles ley lines at the address. She doesn’t quite know what a ley line is but she thinks there might be some strange ones at this junction, where there are no voices in the street late at night, where empty plots of land stay undeveloped, where the foxes scream every night, where teenage girls are followed home and assaulted in the dark, where she feels uncomfortable, where she does not belong.

6

In the wake of the events of the night that Tilly claimed to have been assaulted, Cate stops walking past the house with the armchair in the driveway.

The position of her house is such that she can turn either left or right to get to the main road or up into the village and she chooses now to turn left. She does not want to risk crossing paths with the man she’d inadvertently sent the police to question three days ago about an attack on a young girl that apparently hadn’t really happened. He wouldn’t know it was her, but she would know it was him.

She tries not to even look in the direction of the man’s house, but her eyes track quickly towards it now as she heads into the village with a bag full of website returns to drop at the post office. A woman is standing at a right angle to the front door, around Cate’s age, maybe ten years older. She is eye-catching in a long grey coat, a selection of patterned scarves, ankle boots, hair steely-grey and held up in a bun very high on her head, almost to the point of tipping over her hairline and on to her forehead. She wears black eyeliner under her eyes and is clutching a small suitcase and a selection of airport carrier bags. Cate watches her going through her handbag before removing a set of keys and turning to face the front door. She sees her stop for a moment in the hallway to riffle through some mail on a console table before the door closes behind her.

Cate realises she is standing in the street staring at a closed door. She turns quickly and heads up the hill towards the village.

After dropping the parcels in at the post office, Cate takes the scenic route back to the flat. If she made a mistake choosing this location for her family’s temporary accommodation, she wants to make up for it by enjoying Hampstead village as much as possible while she’s here. Kilburn is bustling and loud and grimy and real and Cate loves it with a passion. But Kilburn has no heart, no centre, it’s just a ladder of small roads set perpendicularly off a big road. Hampstead on the other hand has alleys and crannies and turnstiles and cottages and paths and hidden graveyards and it spreads out in this way in every direction for a mile or more, all the way to the Heath in the north and back down to the wide stately avenues in the south and west. It is the ultimate London village and every new corner Cate discovers on her walks up here colours her day in some way.

Today Cate finds herself walking further than before, across a small section of the Heath grooved with footpaths, through a whispering copse of trees and then down a winding lane lined with interesting old houses, mainly Georgian, until suddenly she finds herself in a different landscape altogether: flat and low, with white James Bond-style houses layered together like roof tiles, attached with concrete walkways and spiral staircases. Each house has a wide terrace overlooking the woods and the Heath beyond. She gets out her phone and she does what she always does when she finds herself somewhere new in this village: she googles it. She discovers that she is in the most expensive council estate ever built, possibly anywhere in the world, part of an idealistic Labour government experiment in the 1970s to house the poor as though they were rich. The land cost nearly half a million pounds to buy. Each house cost ￡72,000 to build. The project turned sour when the government tried to recoup their investment by charging tenants well over the odds for social housing. The experiment was a resounding failure.

Now these houses are an architect’s delight. Cate finds a two-bedroom flat on an estate agent’s website for over a million pounds. Who would have thought, she wonders, who would have guessed that this futuristic little world would be hidden away here behind an Edwardian mansion?

She looks behind her and is suddenly aware that she is entirely alone. There is not a soul around. She hears the wind talking to her through the leaves of the trees that surround this strange enclave. They are telling her to go. Now. That she should not be here. She walks faster, and then faster still, until she is almost running across the grassland, past the houses, down the hill, back to the high street, to the beauty salons and the boutiques and the shops that sell nonsense for far too much money.

As she passes the Tube station her eye is caught by a poster for the local news-sheet, the Hampstead Voice; ‘SEX ATTACK IN BROAD DAYLIGHT’.

She stops, stares at the words, the adrenaline still fizzing through her veins. She wonders for a moment if the headline is from a parallel reality, where she stayed too long in the place that was telling her to go, whether if she reads the article she will discover that it was her, Cate Fours, fifty-year-old mother of two, brutalised on a desolate 1970s council estate, unable to explain what she had been doing wandering there alone in the middle of the day.

Then she thinks of Tilly again, as she has done nearly every minute of every day since she first saw her standing in the doorway four nights ago and she wonders if there is maybe some connection between the spate of sex attacks in the local area and what Tilly claimed didn’t really happen on Monday night.

Further down the hill she passes the local newsagent. Here she buys a copy of the Hampstead Voice and heads back home.

Roan is late back again that night. Roan is a child psychologist and works at the Portman Centre in Belsize Park. Having a husband who is a child psychologist is not as useful as it sounds. Her husband is, it would seem, only capable of empathising with children who have sociopathic tendencies (sociopathy in children is his specialism). Children like their own who are a bit odd in some ways, but perfectly and utterly normal in most of the other ways, seem to confound him entirely and he reacts as though he has never before encountered a teenage child or, indeed, had any personal experience of being a teenager himself whenever either of them does something that could only be described as the stereotypical behaviour of a teenager.

This infuriates Cate, who has never felt more in touch with her own teenage self than she has since her children became teenagers, as if she has walked through a door at the far end of parenting and somehow met herself coming the other way.

‘How was your day?’ she calls out to him now, in the tone of voice she uses to lay out her intent to be pleasant. If she can start the evening’s discourse on a high note, then it can’t possibly be her fault if it all goes downhill later on. She has no idea if Roan can detect the hint of theatre in this particular tone but he responds from the hallway with a hearty:

‘Not at all bad. How was yours?’

And then he is there, in the kitchen, her husband, his shaved head covered with a beanie, wrapped up against the January chill in a padded black jacket and gloves. He pulls off the beanie and puts it on the table. Then he pulls off his gloves, revealing long angular hands. He takes the cross-body bag off his shoulder and puts it on a chair. He doesn’t look at her. They don’t really look at each other any more. It’s fine. Cate isn’t in great need of being seen by him.

His hand goes to the Hampstead Voice on the table. He looks at the headline. ‘Another one?’

‘Another one,’ she replies. ‘Next road down this time.’

He nods, just once, carries on reading. Then he says, ‘Daylight.’

‘I know,’ she says. ‘Horrific. That poor woman. Just going about her business. Thought it was going to be a normal day. Some sick little fuck decides he can do what he wants, decides he has the right to touch her body.’ She shudders as she thinks again of tiny Tilly, her wide eyes on her doorstep.

Georgia walks in.