Fifteen years later they owned a flat with a Surrey postcode (admittedly one in need of a lot of work), Vicky had made senior nurse, and he had his own (not exactly thriving) business. Yet it felt like they had so much less. Sometimes he grew nostalgic for that lumpy single bed, for the stains on the ceiling that they would discuss as if they were constellations.

“Isn’t your student waiting?”

Vicky was already walking back toward her dressing table. He watched her squirt a blob of eczema lotion into her palms and wind her hands around and around each other, the ritual absorbing all of her attention. She was so introspective these days that she hadn’t yet realized their teenage neighbor was missing. Thirty-six hours now. And Chris hadn’t brought it up, hadn’t wanted to make a thing of the fact that he’d taken her for a lesson on the day she’d vanished. With luck he could keep the police on their doorstep, keep the visit brief.

He steeled himself to go back out. The sick feeling that had kept him awake most of the night squirmed again. The police were murmuring to one another, peering at the upper flats, but when he returned to the door their focus snapped back to him.

“Would you come down to the station, Mr. Watson? We need to ask you a few questions about your neighbor and student, Freya Harlow.”

The station. Chris hadn’t been expecting that. They gestured up toward their car, which shimmered with drizzle behind the Harlows’ his-and-hers BMWs. Chris silently fetched his coat. Outside, the street was quiet but the woman with the twins emerged from the large house opposite, gawping at him as she threw nappies into her wheelie-bin, and a wooden blind twitched in a bay window further down. He hoped Steph and Paul weren’t staring down from their flat—he didn’t dare lift his chin to see.

As he walked past his own car, he glanced inside. His eyes rested briefly on the glove box before he followed the police onward.

—

They insisted he wasn’t being interrogated. But the marooned desk in the stark white interview room didn’t exactly say “cozy chat.” The woman and the man sitting opposite were not the two officers who’d come to collect him. They wore black suits and introduced themselves as Detective Ford and Detective Johnson. Ford had quick feline eyes and a prominent collarbone, like something trapped beneath her skin. Johnson was fresh-faced, handsome, but there was a petulant downturn to his mouth.

“How well do you know Freya Harlow?” Ford began.

Chris could feel himself slipping into a familiar mode. Censoring his words before he said them. He did it with Vicky these days, he realized unhappily. Skirted around certain topics, no longer told her everything that was on his mind.