A little while later Cate goes to the bay window in her bedroom at the front of the house and pulls back the curtain again. The shadows of bare trees whip across the high wall opposite. Beyond the high wall is an empty plot of land where an old house has been ripped down to make way for something new. Cate sees pickup trucks reverse through a gate between the wooden construction panels sometimes and then reappear an hour later filled with soil and rubble. They’ve been living here for a year and so far there has been no sign of a foundation being dug or a hardhatted architect on site. It is that rarest of things in central London: a space with no discernible function, a gap.

She thinks of her girl turning that corner, the fear in her voice, the footsteps too close behind her, the audible breath of a 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 Pond Street.’

Cate closes her eyes briefly. ‘That’s a mile away.’

Roan says nothing.

‘I’ll tell Georgia to be careful,’ she says. ‘I’ll tell her to call me when she’s walking home at night.’

‘Good,’ says Roan. ‘Thank you.’

4

‘I know who it was!’ says Georgia, who has just burst into the kitchen with Tilly in tow. It’s just turned four thirty and they’re both in their school uniforms. They bring a blast of winter cold and an air of panic into the flat with them.

Cate turns and gazes at her daughter. ‘Who what was?’ she says.

‘The creepy guy!’ she replies. ‘The one who followed me the other night. We saw him just now. He lives in that weird house across the street. You know, the one with the gross armchair in the driveway.’

‘How do you know it was him?’

‘It just totally was. He was putting something out in the bins. And he looked at us.’

‘Looked at you how?’

‘Like, weirdly.’

Tilly stands behind Georgia nodding her agreement.

‘Hi, Tilly,’ says Cate belatedly.

‘Hi.’

Tilly is a tiny thing, with gobstopper eyes and shiny black hair; she looks like a Pixar girl. She and Georgia have only recently become friends after being at the same school for nearly five years. She is the first really decent friend Georgia has acquired since she left primary school and while Cate can’t quite work Tilly out, she is very keen for the friendship to flourish.

‘He knew it was me,’ Georgia continues. ‘When he looked at me. I could tell he knew it was me, from the other night. It was a really dirty look.’

‘Did you see it?’ Cate asks Tilly.

Tilly nods again. ‘Yeah. He was definitely not happy with Georgia. I could tell.’

Georgia opens a brand-new packet of Leibniz biscuits even though there’s a half-empty packet in the cupboard and offers it to Tilly. Tilly says no thank you and then they disappear to her bedroom.

The front door goes again and Josh appears. Cate’s heart lifts a little. While Georgia always arrives with news and moods and announcements and atmospheres, her little brother arrives as though he’d never left. He doesn’t bring things in with him, his issues unfurl gently and in good time.

‘Hello, darling.’

‘Hi, Mum.’ He crosses the kitchen and hugs her. Josh hugs her every time he comes home, before he goes to bed, when he sees her in the morning, and when he goes out for longer than a couple of hours. He’s done this since he was a tiny boy and she keeps expecting it to stop, or to peter out, but he’s fourteen now and he shows no sign of abandoning the habit. In a strange way, Cate sometimes thinks, it’s Josh who’s kept her at home all these years, way beyond her children’s need to have a stay-at-home mother. He still feels so vulnerable for some reason, still feels like the small boy crying into the heels of his hands on his first day of nursery and still crying four hours later when she came to collect him.

‘How was school?’

He shrugs and says, ‘It was good. I got my Physics test back. I got sixty out of sixty-five. I was second top.’

‘Oh,’ she says, squeezing him again quickly. ‘Josh, that’s amazing! Well done you! Physics! Of all the things to be good at. I don’t know where you get it from.’

Josh helps himself to a banana and an apple and a glass of milk and sits with her for a while at the kitchen table.

‘Are you OK?’ he asks her after a short silence.

She looks at him with surprise. ‘Yes,’ she says.

‘Are you sure you’re OK?’

‘Yes,’ she says again, with a laugh. ‘Why?’