stranger. How easy it would be, she thinks, to break open that hoarding, to drag a girl from the street, to hurt her, kill her even and hide her body in that dark, private void. And how long would it take for it to be found?
3
‘Georgia had a scare last night.’
Roan looks up from his laptop. His pale blue eyes are immediately fearful. ‘What sort of scare?’
‘She got a bit spooked walking back from the Tube station. Thought someone was following her.’
Roan had been out late the night before and Cate had lain alone in bed listening to foxes screaming in the wasteland opposite, watching the shapes of the branches outside waving like a crowd of zombies through the thin fabric of the curtains, overthinking everything.
‘What did he look like, the man who followed you?’ she’d asked Georgia earlier that night.
‘Just normal.’
‘Normal, how? Was he tall? Fat? Thin? Black? White?’
‘White,’ she said. ‘Normal height. Normal size. Boring clothes. Boring hair.’
Somehow the blandness of this description had unnerved Cate more than if Georgia had said he was six feet seven with a face tattoo.
She can’t work out why she feels so unsafe in this area. The insurance company offered to pay up to £1,200 a week for replacement accommodation while their house is being repaired. With that they could have found a nice house on their street, with a garden, but for some reason they’d decided to use it as a chance to have an adventure, to live a different kind of a life.
Flicking though a property supplement, Cate had seen an advert for a grand apartment in a grand house in Hampstead. Both the kids were at school in Swiss Cottage and Roan worked in Belsize Park. Hampstead was closer to both places than their house in Kilburn, which meant they could walk instead of getting the Tube.
‘Look,’ she’d said, showing the advert to Roan. ‘Three-bed flat in Hampstead. With a terrace. Twelve-minute walk to the school. Five minutes to your clinic. And Sigmund Freud used to live up the road! Wouldn’t it be fun’, she’d said blithely, ‘to live in Hampstead for a little while?’
Neither Cate nor Roan is a native Londoner. Cate was born in Liverpool and raised in Hartlepool, while Roan was born and brought up in Rye near the Sussex coast. They both discovered London as adults, without any innate sense of its demographic geography. A friend of Cate’s who’d lived in north London all her life said of their temporary address, ‘Oh no, I’d hate to live round there. It’s so anonymous.’ But Cate hadn’t known that when she’d signed the contracts. She hadn’t thought beyond the poetry of the postcode, the proximity to Hampstead’s picturesque village centre, the illustriousness of the blue plaque on Sigmund Freud’s house around the corner.
‘Maybe you should go and meet her from now on?’ said Roan. ‘When she’s walking around at night?’
Cate imagines Georgia’s reaction to being told that her mother would now be accompanying her on all nocturnal journeys outside the house. ‘Roan, she’s fifteen! That’s the last thing she’d want.’
He throws her that look, the one he uses all the time, the look that says, Well, since you have put me in the position of conceding all decision-making to you, you will therefore have to take full responsibility for any bad things that happen as a result of those decisions. Including the potential rape/attack/murder of our daughter.
Cate sighs and turns to the window where she can see the reflection of her husband and herself, a hazy tableau of a marriage at its midpoint. Twenty-five years married, likely another twenty-five to come.
Beyond the reflection it’s snowing; fat swirls of flakes like TV interference over their image. Upstairs she can hear the soft feet of their neighbours, an American–Korean couple whose names she can’t quite remember though they smile and greet each other profusely whenever their paths cross. Somewhere there is the distant whine of police sirens. But apart from that, it is silent. This road is always so silent and the snow has made it quieter still.
‘Look,’ says Roan, turning the screen of his laptop slightly towards her.
Cate drops her reading glasses from her head to her nose.
‘Woman, 23, sexually assaulted on Hampstead Heath’.
She takes a breath. ‘Yes, well,’ she counters, ‘that’s the Heath. I wouldn’t want Georgia walking around the Heath alone at night. I wouldn’t want either of the children walking alone on the Heath.’
‘Apparently it’s the third attack in a month. The first was on