Saskia closes her front door and leans against the wooden frame. She never cries, at least hardly ever, so she’s not sure why she feels the urge now. She was scared, she realises, arguing with Kat in the street. For all Saskia’s lofty beliefs about championing mental health awareness, when she comes across someone who is clearly unwell, she becomes a frightened animal and goes on the attack. When did she become such a bitch?

Saskia wonders where Kat is now. Whoever she was talking to on the phone clearly upset her – she was staggering so blindly that Saskia thought she might fall over – but then she righted herself and ran off towards Wandsworth Common. It was a relief at first, the sense of a threat diminishing – especially with Kat being so physically intimidating too – but now that the adrenalin has worn off, Saskia can’t help feeling worried about the strange woman, and what she might do. She seemed so out of control.

Saskia pulls the unfamiliar phone out of her pocket and stares at the blank screen. It’s an old iPhone, a 5 or 6 maybe, and looks tiny compared to her own. It must have slipped out of Kat’s hands when she reached for the wall, but Saskia was too wired to notice at the time. It was only once Kat disappeared that she’d seen it lying on the pavement. She taps on the glass now and the screen comes to life with the photo of a weird-looking dog, a skinny Alsatian with rabbit ears. Saskia taps it again, and sighs when the usual grid of numbers comes up. Enter passcode. She tuts and puts it back in her pocket.

Not that she wants to spy on Kat. But if she could get into the phone, she’d be able to check Kat’s call history, work out who had upset her, and possibly even where she disappeared to. She needs to return the handset somehow. And if it also provides some intel on who Kat really is, that can’t be a bad thing. Like whether there’s any truth to Kat’s claims that she and Beth knew each other when they were growing up. The two of them being friends is so hard to imagine that Saskia jumped on the first hole in Kat’s story and accused her of lying. But Kat not reacting to Reading doesn’t mean anything – the only evidence Saskia has that Beth spent time in the town was the fact she visited a shitty house there the day before, and that’s weak even by Saskia’s standards. It’s harder to explain Kat not knowing about Beth’s parents’ car accident, but Beth was 17 when that happened, so it’s possible that they’d lost touch by then.