Day Minus Eight, 08:00

Day Minus Eight, 08:00

The email didn’t work. The cut she made with the knife is gone.

And, for the first time, Jen has skipped back more than one day. She’s moved four days. It is the twenty-first. She sits up in bed and thinks about Andy. It seems he was right.

Or perhaps it’s speeding up and, soon, she will leap back years at a time, and then cease to exist entirely.

No. Don’t think this way. Concentrate on Todd.

As if on cue, she hears him slam his bedroom door. ‘Where are you going?’ she calls out to him.

She hears him ascend the stairs to the top floor where Jen and Kelly’s bedroom is, and then he appears, a wide smile across his face. He looks full of the lols, as he would say. ‘Dad is making me come running,’ he says. ‘Pray for me.’

‘You’re in my thoughts,’ Jen says as she listens to them go. She’s glad to see him like this. Pink-cheeked and happy.

Within minutes, still in her dressing gown, she’s back in Todd’s room. Searching his desk drawers again, the ones in his bedside tables, under his mattress. Under his bed.

As she searches, she recites to herself what she knows. ‘Todd meets Clio in late summer. Kelly said, He’s still seeing Clio? I thought he said he wasn’t, in the days before the crime. Todd confirmed a few days earlier that they broke up and got back together.’

Plates, cups, reams and reams of school stuff printed from the internet. Behind the wardrobe, a piece of paper about astrophysics.

‘Clio is frightened to speak to me,’ she adds, thinking it must be significant. ‘Plus – that weird circling police car.’

Finally, finally, finally, after twenty minutes, she finds something that feels a lot more tangible than listening to her own ramblings.

It’s on top of his wardrobe, right at the back, but not covered in dust, so not old.

Itis a small grey oblong bundle held together by an elastic band. Jen climbs down from his desk chair and holds it in the flat of her hand. Drugs – she thinks it might be drugs. Her hands shake as she undoes the elastic, then peels open the bubble wrap.

It isn’t drugs.

The package contains three items.

A Merseyside Police badge. Not the full ID, just the leather wallet with the Merseyside crest on. On it is embroidered a number and a name: Ryan Hiles, 2648.

Jen fingers it. It’s cool in her hands. She holds it up to the light. How does a teenage boy come to have a police badge? She doesn’t chase that thought down the alley it wants to go down, though it’s obvious that it’s nothing good.

Next, folded into four neat squares, is a dog-eared A4 poster with a photograph of a baby on it, maybe four months old. Above him or her is written MISSING in red, blocky letters. There is a pinhole in the corner.

Jen blinks in shock. Missing. Missing babies? Police IDs? What is this dark world Todd’s been plunged into?

The final item is what looks like a pay-as-you-go phone. It’s off. Jen’s finger trembles as she presses the on button and watches it spring to life, its screen a neon green. No passcode. It’s an old-style flip phone, not a smartphone. It was clearly never meant to be discovered. She looks at the contacts. There are three: Joseph Jones, Ezra Michaels, and somebody called Nicola Williams.

She goes to the text messages, listening out for Todd and Kelly.

Times for meetings with Joseph and Ezra. 11 p.m. here, 9 a.m. there.

But, with Nicola, it’s different:

Burner phone 15/10: Nice to chat. See you on 16th?

Nicola W 15/10: I can be there.

Burner phone 15/10: Happy to help tomorrow?

Nicola W 15/10: Happy to help.

Burner phone 17/10: Call me.

Nicola W 17/10: PS. It’s in place but see you tonight.

Nicola W 17/10: Nice to meet. Happy to do it, but you need to work for it. Given what’s happened.

Burner phone 17/10: Yep. Understood.

Nicola W 17/10: Get back in there.

Burner phone 17/10: Baby or no baby.

Nicola W 18/10: All in place. When we have enough, we can move in.

Jen stares at them. A goldmine. Actual, date-stamped messages arranging something. Jen must be able to work out what. She must be able to follow her son on these days, to insert herself into proceedings.

She turns the rest of the items over, looking for more, but there’s nothing.

She sits back on Todd’s desk chair. Catastrophes crowd into Jen’s mind. Dead policemen. Dead kids. Kidnaps. Ransoms. Is he some sort of foot soldier, a minion sent to undertake a gang’s bidding?

She stands on the chair and puts the bundle back, exactly where it was, then sits in her son’s ransacked bedroom. Her knees tremble. She watches them, shivering just slightly, thinking that it’s all her fault. It must be.

Nicola Williams. Why is that name familiar to her?

She looks up Joseph, Clio, Ezra and Nicola on Facebook. All are there except Nicola, and all three are friends with the other. Joseph’s profile is new, but he looks like a perfectly ordinary man. An interest in horse-racing and opinions on Brexit. Ezra’s is more established, his profile pictures dating back ten years, but it’s otherwise locked.

She tidies up, then makes Todd’s bed, her hand smoothing over his pillow, but it’s lumpy, something underneath it. She never checked there. Checked only under the mattress, like in the movies. She reaches for the bulge, hoping to find information, but actually, she just finds Science Bear. The teddy Todd’s had since he was two, the one who holds a blue fluffy Bunsen burner and a test tube. He must still sleep with it. Her heart cracks for him, here in his bedroom, thinking of that night with the norovirus and wiping his mouth with that hot flannel, and the other night, the one with the murder. Her son, the half child, half man.

Crosby police station foyer looks the same, as it did that first night, tired, smelling of canteen dinners and coffee. Jen arrives at six, looking for Ryan Hiles. It seems to her that this is the next logical step. Todd and Kelly think she’s at the supermarket.

She is told to wait and she sits on one of the metal chairs, staring at the white door to the left of the reception desk. At the end of a long corridor behind it, she can see a tall, slim police officer moving around, on the phone, laughing at something, pacing slowly this way and that.

The receptionist is blonde. She has chapped lips, the line between skin and mouth blurred and sore-looking in that way it is when people have a habit of wetting their lips.

The automatic doors open, but nobody comes in.

The receptionist ignores the doors. She’s typing quickly, her gaze not moving from the screen.

It’s twilight outside; to anybody else, it looks like a normal day at six o’clock in October. Woodsmoke comes in on the breeze as the glitchy automatic doors open and close for nobody again. Jen folds her hands in her lap and thinks about normal life. The continuity of one day following another. She stares at the doors sliding open, hesitating, and then closing, and tries not to wonder if Todd is proceeding somewhere, in the future, without her. Facing life in prison. Not even the best lawyer would be able to get him off.

‘Can I just take your name?’ the receptionist says. She seems content to conduct this conversation across the foyer.

‘Alison,’ Jen says, not yet ready to reveal her identity without knowing where Ryan Hiles is and why Todd has his badge. The last thing she wants to do is make things worse for Todd in the future. ‘Alison Bland,’ she invents.

‘Okay. And what’s the …’

‘I’m looking for a police officer. I have his name and badge number.’

‘Why is it you want to see him?’ The receptionist dials a number on the desk phone.

Jen doesn’t say she has the badge itself – doesn’t want to hand over evidence, link Todd’s fingerprints to something heinous. To something else heinous.

‘I just want to speak to him.’

‘Sorry, we can’t have civilians coming in to give names and ask to speak to coppers,’ the receptionist says.

‘It isn’t – it isn’t a bad thing. I just want to talk to him.’

‘We really can’t do that. Do you need to report a crime?’

‘I mean …’ Jen says. She goes to say no, but then hesitates. Maybe the police can help her. Just because the murder hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean that no crimes at all have been committed. The knife … buying a knife is a crime. It’s a gamble – he might not yet have bought it – but it’s one she is prepared to take. If Todd is investigated for something smaller, perhaps that would stop the larger crime?

Something ignites in Jen. All she needs is change. To blow out one match in a whole line of them. To keep a domino standing that would otherwise fall. And then, perhaps, she will wake up, and it will be tomorrow.

‘Yes,’ she says, to the receptionist’s obvious surprise. ‘Yes, I’d like to report a crime.’

Twenty-five minutes later, Jen is in a meeting room with a police officer. He’s young, with pale blue eyes like a wolf. Each time they meet hers, Jen is struck by how unusual they are, a dark blue rim, light blue pools in the centre, tiny pupils. Something about the colour makes them look vacant. He’s freshly shaven, his uniform a little too big for him.

‘Right, tell me,’ he says. They have two white plastic cups of water in front of them. The room smells of photocopier toner and stale coffee. The setting seems so mundane for the reaction Jen hopes to set off.

‘I’ll just keep a note,’ he adds. She doesn’t want this. A young officer who takes meticulous notes and won’t answer questions. Jen wants a maverick. Someone who goes off the record, who has a dead wife and an alcohol problem: someone who can help her.

‘I’m pretty sure my son is involved in something,’ she says simply. She skims over the alias she gave, hoping he won’t question this, and goes to the heart of the matter: ‘His name is Todd Brotherhood.’

And that’s when it happens. Recognition: Jen is sure of it. It passes across his features like a ghost.

‘What makes you say that he’s involved in something?’

She tells the officer about the cutting and sewing business, about her son meeting Joseph Jones, and about the knife. She hopes that, if Todd has armed himself already, they will find that weapon, arrest him and stop the crime.

The police officer’s pen stalls, just slightly, at the mention of the knife. His iced eyes flick to hers, the colour of a gas fire on low, then back down again. Jen can feel it in the air, the change, even in here. She has lit the touchpaper. The butterfly has flapped its wings.

‘Right – where is the knife? How do you know he bought one?’

‘I’m not sure right now, but I have seen it in his school bag once,’ she says, omitting that this happens in the future.

‘Has he ever left the house with it?’

‘I assume so.’

‘Okay then …’ the officer says, upending the pen. ‘All right. Looks like we need to speak to your son.’

‘Today?’ Jen asks.

The policeman finishes writing and looks at her. He glances at the clock on the wall.

‘We’ll make enquiries with Todd.’

She shivers, there in the warm police interviewing room. What if there is some unintended consequence of this action she’s just taken? Maybe Joseph Jones should die, if he’s got something to do with something terrible, and she only needs to help Todd get away with it. How is she supposed to know which it is?

‘Okay – well, I can go and get Todd for you,’ she says, wondering quite how she’s coming across. How strange it must sound. Even now, in this chaos, Jen still worries about being judged as a parent.

‘Just your address is enough,’ the officer says. He stands up and extends the flat of his palm towards the door. An instant dismissal. Just arrest him, please arrest him, so he can’t do anything more, Jen thinks.

‘Nothing you can do today?’ she probes again. She needs him taken in tonight, before she sleeps, if she has even a chance of stopping the crime. Tomorrow doesn’t exist, not to her, anyway.

The policeman pauses, looking at his feet, that palm still extended. ‘I’ll try my best. You know – usually, young men carry knives because of gangs.’

‘I know,’ Jen whispers.

‘We’ll talk to your son, but in order to get kids out of this you have to work out the why.’

‘I’m trying,’ Jen says. She stops just there, on the threshold of the meeting room, then decides to just ask. ‘Have any babies gone missing in the area? Recently?’

‘Sorry?’ the officer says. ‘Missing babies?’

‘Yes. Recently.’

‘I can’t discuss other cases,’ he says, giving nothing away.

She leaves then, and as she exits through the glass doors etched with a finely threaded grid and steps outside, she smells it. Not what she was expecting: petrichor. Rain on pavements. Summer’s coming back. That smell, that intangible smell – lawns being mowed, cow parsley, hot, packed earth – always reminds her of the house they had in the valley, the little white bungalow. How happy they were there, away from the city. Before.

On the way home, she thinks about Ryan Hiles, and about the missing baby. She can still see the poster. There is something she recognizes about that baby. An instinctive familiarity, as though they may be a distant relative, someone she now knows as an adult … someone she has perhaps met, but she can’t think. Jen has never been good with babies.

She got pregnant with Todd accidentally, only eight months after she met Kelly. It was a shock, but he used to joke they’d had a decade’s worth of sex in that year, which is true. The little camper van and their clothes strewn across the floor are her only memories of that time. His hips against hers, how he’d said to her wryly one night that everybody would be able to see their van rocking. How she didn’t care.

They’d been in their early twenties. She’d been on the pill, and most of the time they used condoms. Something about the impossibility of the pregnancy was what made her keep the baby. That, and a single sentence Kelly had said: ‘I hope the baby has your eyes.’ Right away, as with millions of women before her, she had thought, But I hope he has yours. Sperm had met egg, and each of their thoughts had met the other’s, and she felt immediately ready. Like she’d grown up in the space of a two-minute pregnancy test, looking to a future generation instead of to herself.

But she hadn’t been ready, not at all.

Nobody had warned her of the car crash that was labour. At one point she had been sure she was going to die, and that conviction never really left her, even after she was fine. She couldn’t believe women went through that. That they chose to do it again and again. She couldn’t believe pain like that actually existed.

She had begun her motherhood journey with pain, but also in fear: of the judgement of health visitors, of GPs, and of other mothers.

Todd hadn’t been what anybody would call a difficult baby. He’d always slept well. But an easy baby is still difficult, and Jen – a fan of self-recrimination anyway – was thrust into something that would in other circumstances have been described as torture. And yet to describe it as such was taboo. She’d looked down at him one night, and thought, How do I know if I love you?

Jen can see that she was susceptible to wanting it all. A woman working in a job that took as much as you were able to give. Having a repressed father. Vulnerable to people’s judgement, to reading huge amounts into the small things people say. That vein of inadequacy running through her that led her to say yes to banal networking events and taking on more cases than she could realistically run led – in parenthood – to misery.

She’d wanted to sleep in the same room as Todd, for him to hear her breathing, she’d wanted to breastfeed, she’d wanted, wanted, wanted to do it perfectly, and maybe that was compensation for what she should have felt but didn’t.

She’d tried to tell a health visitor about all this, but they had only looked uncomfortable and asked if she wanted to kill herself.

‘No,’ Jen had said dully. She hadn’t wanted to kill herself. She had wanted to take it back. She’d driven to work to see her father, walked around the office like a zombie. In the foyer, her father had hugged her extra tightly, but hadn’t said anything. Hadn’t been able to say anything: that she was doing a good job, did she need help? A typical man of his generation, but it had still hurt.

Like all disasters, it ebbed away, and the love bloomed, big and beautiful, when Todd started to do things: to sit up, to talk, to smear Bourbon biscuits over his entire head. And, until recently, when his friends had descended into teenage sullenness, he hadn’t. Still full of puns, of laughs, of facts, just for her. At the beginning, the love she had felt for him had been eclipsed by how hard it had been in the early days, and it wasn’t any longer. That was all. An explanation as big and as small as that.

But she’d been too afraid to have any more children. She looks at the road unfolding in front of her, now, and thinks that the baby in the poster is a girl. She finds a little hard stone of regret in her stomach that she didn’t have that other child. A sibling for Todd, somebody he could confide in, somebody who could help him now, more than she can.

She can’t let it happen. She can’t let the murder play out. She can’t have him lose everything. Her easy little baby who unknowingly witnessed his mother crying so often, she can’t bear for this to be his end. She can’t bear for him to be bad. Let him, let him, let him – and her – be good.