‘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.
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.