Day Minus Twenty-two, 18:30

Day Minus Twenty-two, 18:30

Jen is in her sanctuary, the office. She wanted to be here, at work, in this calm, organized environment she is fully in control of, or at least can pretend that she is. The knowledge that Kelly is involved keeps repeating on her. She feels like she’s on a boat, the ground underfoot uncertain and slippery. Kelly. Her Kelly. The man she can tell anything to. But, evidently, that doesn’t work both ways. How could he have pretended to work this through with her on that night that he believed her?

The street down below is dotted with people shopping, enjoying the last of the summer warmth. Early October looks different to late. Gingerbread light outside. Honey-coloured leaves. The last gasp of summer. She opens the window. Only the tiniest bite of cold laces the air: like a single drop of dye in water that will soon spread.

She sighs and wanders down the corridor. She renovated the premises after her father died last spring. What was once his office – the plaque said Managing Partner, like he wanted – is now the kitchenette, a decision she made so she didn’t have to look at his old door or, worse, work in there herself.

Her father had been a good lawyer. Incisive, cautious, able to accept and confront bad news without kidding himself. Tough, she’d describe him as, with the hindsight of grief. Stoic, too. At the end of a working week, once, she’d found out that he had slept there two nights, to get the job done, and had never said.

She is now much further back than she anticipated. Jen thinks her biggest fear is that she is going to pass the inception of the crime. She wishes she could ask her father what to do. Kenneth Charles Eagles. He’d gone by the name KC. If Jen and Kelly had had a daughter, they would have called her Kacie. KC. He’d have liked that.

He’d died alone, eighteen months ago. An aneurysm, sometime in the evening. He’d sat in his armchair, a bag of peanuts and a bottle of half-drunk beer by his side. Jen, in the early days, had to turn her mind away from his last moments, like trying to steer a ship with a preference for one way only. She is more able to look at it, now, to stand here in the spot where he once did. But, today more than ever, she misses him. He’d have no sympathy for time-travel theories – she’d have been too afraid to tell him, she thinks, fearing judgement – but she still misses him in the way that children will always miss their parents’ guiding hands, the way they can hold your problems away from you, if only temporarily.

She makes a cup of tea then leaves the kitchenette. Rakesh walks by her office with another lawyer, Sara.

‘The husband asked us to halve her maintenance budget to account for the fact that she only ever wears sweatpants. He’s crossed off any allowance for clothing. Plus haircuts, and bras. He’s annotated it to say she wears old, greying underwear,’ Sara is saying.

Rakesh’s disbelieving laughter rings out like a church bell.

Jen smiles wanly. She’s always felt so at home here with the workaholics and the gallows humour.

She sends a few emails, happily passing on pieces of information, giving advice. The stuff she could do with her eyes closed, the things she’s done for two decades.

The soon-to-be-ex-husband of one of Jen’s clients couriers over twenty-five boxes of his accounts at seven o’clock in the evening. Jen receives them from a jaded DPD driver with a T-shirt tan. Last time, she’d stayed to start going through them, indexing their contents and stacking the boxes neatly in her office. Rakesh had poked his head around the door and asked if she was building a fort.

He passes now, at the exact same time. But, today, not wanting to sort boxes, but not wanting to go home either, she asks if he fancies a drink.

‘For sure,’ he says, chewing gum. ‘What’s all this? You building a fort?’

Jen smiles to herself. It’s getting harder and harder to remember each day, the further she goes back. It’s nice to hear her predictions come true, in a funny kind of way.

‘I will be on Monday,’ she says. ‘Disclosure from the other side. The husband’s accounts.’

‘What does he do, work for the Bank of fucking England?’

‘Classic tactics,’ Jen says, shifting a box just so she can find a path to him. ‘Send so many boxes he hopes nobody will ever look.’

‘I’ll make sure you’re not buried alive under it, on Monday. I need wine in an IV,’ Rakesh says, grabbing her coat for her.

‘Bad day?’

‘I sent a petition off to my client today. To sign – nothing more. Next to count four of unreasonable behaviour she’s written – in pen – also wanked into socks all the time. Like this was some urgent addition. I need to re-send them to her now. We can’t file that at court.’

‘A fair complaint,’ Jen says. ‘Nice detail on the socks.’

‘You’re not the one who has to see him at the trial.’

‘Don’t follow him into the bathroom.’

As they leave, coats slung on arms in the now very, very early autumn, it’s so nice to be back here, at work, where people spend some of the most intimate hours of their lives. She’s worked with Rakesh for over a decade. She knows he eats potatoes most lunchtimes and gets bogged down in the Daily Mail website during his three o’clock slump. She knows he mouths Fuck off whenever his phone rings and that he once sweated through his own trousers during a particularly tricky hearing, says he left a mark on the chair.

And so it’s nice, too, tonight, to step out of the detritus of her family life. To leave the mystery, and to innocently anticipate a glass of wine with her old friend, to discuss their clients warring over who fucked someone else first, to drink two glasses – no, three – to smoke cigarettes out in the beer garden and laugh about it. It’s so, so very nice to pretend.

Jen has had too much wine to drive and so she walks home. It’s just after nine o’clock. She is weaving along the pavement, looking up at her lit-up house just ahead, and thinking about her husband, who she has told she is working late.

She’s a divorce lawyer, she is thinking morosely, and yet she missed her own betrayal. Didn’t see it coming whatsoever. Not a bit.

She tries to re-jig the events into shape, knowing what she knows now. The wine has helped to loosen her mind. It feels elastic and free in the chilly night. For once, she feels broad-minded and open, not neurotic and closed.

The burner phone belongs to Kelly. So the missing baby poster and the police ID must belong to him, too. But why were they in Todd’s room?

She hears voices as she approaches her house. They’re coming from outside, somewhere in the open air. They’re too loud to be inside. She stops by Kelly’s car. It gives off some heat. She places a hand on the bonnet: just been driven.

The voices belong to her husband and son, the very subject of her thoughts, and they’re yelling, urgent.

They’re in the back garden. Jen hurries as quietly as she can to the gate. She stops there, a finger on the cool black latch, immediately absolutely stone-cold sober.

‘Why have you told me this?’ Todd says. Jen is disturbed to hear that his voice is laced with panicked tears.

‘Because I have to ask something of you,’ Kelly says. ‘All right? I wouldn’t tell you otherwise.’

‘What?’

‘You have to break up with Clio.’

‘What?’

‘You have to,’ Kelly says. ‘I can ask Nicola for help, but you cannot continue to see Clio. Given everything.’

Jen’s stomach rolls over. She is suddenly nauseous, and it has nothing to do with the drink.

‘That will arouse even more suspicion,’ Todd says. ‘Let alone fucking break my fucking heart.’

Jen feels like her knees are going to give way. The pain, the pain, the pain in her baby boy’s voice.

‘I’m sorry,’ Kelly says. ‘I’m sorry – I’m sorry. I’m sorry. How many times can I say it?’

‘This is the most fucked-up thing that has ever happened to me,’ Todd says. Only he doesn’t merely say it: it’s a scream. A scream of anguish.

Something thumps, a fist on a table, maybe. ‘I tried!’ Kelly says. His voice is hoarse, ragged at the edges with emotion. Jen has heard this side of him only a handful of times. Once in the station, after Todd’s arrest. No wonder. He’s trying to stop it. And – clearly – doesn’t manage. ‘I tried so hard. Joseph either knows or is about to find out, Todd, and we’ve got to extract ourselves from him. Without him knowing why.’

‘Collateral be damned, right?’ Todd says. ‘Me.’ Jen thinks of how Clio wouldn’t discuss the break-up with her, and wonders if, somehow, Todd has told Clio something about this conversation. Something he shouldn’t have.

‘Right,’ Kelly says softly, and Jen wants to step away from her position at the gate, cold and alone, and go and shake her husband. That was rhetorical, she’d say. Todd was not offering that up to you, you complete idiot.

‘There is no indication that he knows,’ Todd says.

‘The second he does, he will come here, and he will …’

‘That’s a hypothetical. I can’t believe you have involved me in this. Lies? Kidnapped kids?’

Jen’s entire body goes still, covered in goosebumps. The baby.

‘It’s this or much, much worse,’ Kelly says, an inky-black note to his voice.

‘Oh yeah, keep it secret at all costs. Sail me and my first love up the river!’ Todd shouts. The back door slams. Feet on stairs inside.

Jen stays at the gate, trying to breathe.

It’s pointless asking them. Clearly, they will lie. And clearly, too, there is a secret at the heart of their relationship that they will do anything to keep. They will do anything, except tell Jen.

In the cool night air, three weeks before her son becomes a murderer, Jen hears her husband begin to cry in their garden, his sobs becoming quieter and quieter, like a wounded animal slowly dying.