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.
She’s in her lounging gear: silky jersey shorts and a hoodie. Cate didn’t have lounging gear when she was a teenager; she had her clothes and her pyjamas and nothing in between.
Roan puts the Hampstead Voice in front of her. ‘Look, Georgie,’ he says. ‘A sex attacker in the area. Last attack was just down the road. In the middle of the day. Please, please keep your wits about you. And try not to stumble about with your earbuds in.’
Georgia tuts. ‘My wits are totally about me,’ she says. ‘Remember my wits are young. Not old and shit like yours. And I bet you anything it’s that guy.’ She taps the front page of the paper. ‘The one over the road. The creep. He looks totally rapey.’
Cate shivers slightly at the mention of the man across the road and she flushes with shame. She hasn’t told Roan or the kids about calling the police and seeing them going to talk to him. She’s too embarrassed. It was such a middle class, meddling thing to have done.
‘How’s Tilly?’ she asks, moving the subject along. ‘Has she said any more to you about Monday night?’
Georgia shakes her head. ‘Nope. I’ve tried talking to her about it but she won’t. She just says she’s too embarrassed.’
‘And what do you think? Do you think she made it up?’
Her daughter considers the question. ‘In one way, yeah. I mean, it’s kind of the sort of thing she’d do? If you see what I mean? She’s lied about stuff before.’
‘What sort of stuff?’
‘Oh, just small things, like saying she knows the name of some, like, rapper, or someone on YouTube, and then when you ask her who it is you realise she hasn’t got a clue. So she says things sometimes just to fit in, to be one of the crowd. And she gets this, like, blind look in her eyes when she knows she’s been rumbled and then you feel really bad for putting her on the spot.’
‘But this, lying about something like this. Do you think she’s capable of a lie that big?’
‘I dunno,’ she says. Then she shrugs and says, ‘Yeah. Maybe. She overreacts to things. Maybe she just, you know, overreacted.’
Cate nods. It’s possible, she supposes. But then her eye is caught once more by the headline on the front page of the Hampstead Voice and she feels a dark shadow of doubt passing through her head.