Day Minus One Hundred and Forty-Four, 18:30

Day Minus One Hundred and Forty-Four, 18:30

‘Oh, it was mad,’ Todd is saying animatedly to Jen, his words tripping over each other. Jen is sitting on the loveseat in their bay window, thinking that her husband is involved in organized crime. ‘Fractional distillation didn’t come up at all. We did all the prep on it – we thought it would be the main question, and it just totally wasn’t?’ He fiddles with Henry VIII’s collar, the cat lying contentedly on his lap on the sofa. ‘It never goes the way you’d expect, you know?’ He shifts, unable to keep still, and the cat jumps down on to the floor. Three candles are lit along the windowsill.

Jen nods, smiling at her son.

The first thing she noticed this morning was that her phone was different. Her hand closed clumsily around it. It was chunkier, bigger than the slimline one that she got in early July. Shit shit shit, she thought. She knew she’d jumped back further before she checked the date.

It was June. The rose bush in the front garden of the house opposite was in full bloom as she stared out of her bedroom window, fat bundles of fragrant flowers clutched together, about to fall. How could it be June? Where was this going to end? In nothingness? In birth, in death? And – an even darker thought – it’s too late for Jen to kill him herself, like Kelly suggested, all those days ago. He’s inside.

The first thing that Jen thought, getting dressed in different clothes, clothes she throws out in several months’ time, was who Kelly is to Joseph. And how it might have worked: Joseph gets out of prison, comes to the law firm to find his old friend Kelly, Todd gets involved with Clio, doesn’t like what he finds out Joseph and Kelly are doing, and kills Joseph? It was plausible, but unlikely, she concluded. It seems a weak motivation for murder. And it leaves a lot to be explained: Ryan Hiles, the missing baby, Nicola Williams, the veiled conversations between Kelly and Todd. The thing Joseph knows about Kelly.

She looks at Todd, now, sitting in the lamplight with cat hair all over his trousers. ‘You’ll have aced it,’ she says thickly.

‘Well, I did actually enjoy it! Jed said I’m mental.’ He’s giddy. With relief, with the endorphins that follow stress, and with something else, maybe, too. Something that is missing in the autumn. Some lightness. ‘I mean – am I some sadist? … What?’ he says, stopping, looking across the room at her.

‘You’re not a sadist,’ she says, but even she can hear her voice is imbued with sadness. She misses this. Just normality, not fractured days, everything backwards. She doesn’t even know why she’s woken up on today, the seventh of June. Todd hasn’t met Clio yet. Joseph is inside. So what is it? She leans her face in the palm of her hand.

‘I wonder if I’ll get an A,’ Todd says thoughtfully. ‘Maybe just a B.’

He gets an A.

Only recently, Todd came home talking so happily about making polymer bouncing balls. ‘Polymer what?’ Kelly had said. Todd had hesitated, then pulled one out of his rucksack. ‘Got you one,’ he’d said lightly, confident enough to steal from school. They hadn’t minded, thought it was funny. He was overly interested in chemistry, so what if he shouldn’t have been allowed to take it? Maybe it’s that sort of thing that causes Todd to go wayward. Jen never gave much thought to what sort of parent she’d be, but maybe she was too relaxed, favouring banter over discipline. Fooled, by his intellect, into thinking he’d never rebel. But all kids rebel, even the good ones: they just rebel differently.

Jen looks at her handsome son and thinks about everything that future-Todd will miss out on. University, marriage, some graduate scheme with other geniuses. But instead, what faces him? Remand, a trial, prison. Out by the time he’s thirty-five. The knowledge, for ever, that he has taken a life, for whatever misguided reason.

‘Are you going to order, or shall I?’ Todd says, waving the Domino’s app at her on his phone.

They must have agreed to get a takeaway. ‘Yeah – let’s just wait for Dad.’ Henry VIII pads over and leaps up on to Jen’s lap. He is slimmer, too, she thinks ruefully.

Todd makes an over-the-top puzzled face, a cartoon double-take. ‘Oh-kay,’ he says. ‘Dad’s away, but sure. You do that, Jen.’

‘Is he?’ she asks sharply. ‘At risk of being accused of being old,’ she adds, rictus grin in place, ‘remind me where he is?’

‘It’s Whitsun.’

‘Oh,’ Jen says. She can feel her mouth make the shape, a round, significant O. Kelly goes away every Whitsun weekend, camping with old friends from school. A long-standing arrangement. She’s never met them, something that she had wondered about but that Kelly had explained easily. ‘Oh, they’re not local, I just see them on that one weekend. Honestly, it’d bore you to tears.’

‘Pizza for two then,’ she says to Todd, but, in fact, she’s thinking: That’s why. That’s why today. Out of all of the days that have come before.

Thank God. Thank God she turned on Find My iPhone this morning on Kelly’s phone, the same way she does each morning now. When she checked earlier, he was in Liverpool, but she’ll look again.

‘Let me think,’ Jen says, getting her phone out, ostensibly ordering pizza but, really, looking at Find My iPhone. Kelly goes camping in the Lake District. Lake Windermere. Same spot every year.

But look. Here is his blue spot. Not in the Lake District at all. At a house in Salford.

Jen looks back up at her son, who is staring down at his phone, an expression of concentration on his face.

‘Todd,’ she says, cringing as she says it. Her baby, post exam, looking forward to pizza with his mother; he deserves better. He looks up at her in surprise. ‘How bad would it be if I had to pop to the office? Just quickly – we can have the pizza afterwards.’

Todd’s eyebrows rise in surprise, but then he waves a hand. ‘Yeah, fine,’ he says. ‘Don’t worry. I shall go immerse myself in H₂O. Also known as a bath to mere mortals.’

Jen laughs softly to herself, then rubs at her eyes as he stands and leaves the living room. Is this the right thing to be doing? More neglect of Todd, not less, in search of answers? But she’s got to know for sure.

She decides to get a taxi so that she can arrive incognito.

‘Won’t be long,’ she calls to Todd. She hears the sound of the bath running, doesn’t catch his reply. She hesitates at the bottom of the stairs, torn, torn between duties. But it’s all for him, she decides as the Uber app vibrates to say her car is a minute away. It’s all to save him, wonderful him.

‘Get extra bacon on mine,’ Todd calls.

‘Sure thing.’

She waits out on the street for the taxi.

It’s the height of summer. Geraniums, sweet peas, roses in her neighbours’ gardens. It smells like a perfumery. The air is soft. It’s raining lightly, warm drizzle, but Jen doesn’t mind. It’s humid, like a steam room.

She reaches to pluck off the petal of a peony at the very corner of her driveway, in the only tiny patch of soil they can be bothered to maintain. Once white, it’s now a deep brown around the edges, like an old newspaper, but it still smells of delicious, pungent vanilla.

She looks up at their sleeping house, one light on in the frosted bathroom window, thinking of her son and his pizza. He’ll understand one day.

As the Uber pulls up, she thinks suddenly of how much she trusted her husband. She trusted him so much. Camping with people she’s never met. She never thought, never thought once.

She tugs on the cool plastic handle of the Uber and is greeted by Eri, a middle-aged man with a beard wearing a baseball cap. The car smells of artificially sweet air-fresheners and chewing gum.

She hands him a clutch of twenties she got out of the emergency drawer in the kitchen, their paper as soft and dry as the peony petals. ‘I’m following someone,’ she says.

‘Oh.’ Eri considers the notes, then eventually takes them.

‘I’ll pay whatever I owe on the app, too. We need to keep an eye on this.’ She shows him the phone. ‘If the blue dot moves, we might need to … redirect.’

‘Okay then,’ he says. ‘Like in the movies,’ he adds, his eyes meeting hers in the rear-view mirror.

‘Mmm.’ Jen sits in the back, leaning her head against the cold window, watching her street rush by. A woman in a black cab following her husband. The oldest story in the book, with a twist. ‘Like in the movies,’ she repeats.

Call of Duty awaits you, Todd texts Jen.

God, isn’t it funny, Jen thinks, the lights of Merseyside rushing by like scattered colourful stars, how you can forget entire phases of your life? The PS5 phase, Call of Duty. Two controls they had to charge all the time, they’d played so much. They had been so addicted. When they weren’t playing it, they would shoot at each other around corners of the house. ‘This is Black Ops,’ Todd would say to her, walking into the kitchen, holding an imaginary walkie-talkie.

Jen wonders now, as they race down the motorway, lit-up blue signs passing above their heads like they’re flying, whether she had been irresponsible to let her son play that game, ignoring the warnings about violent computer games. It wouldn’t happen to them, she had thought. She had been too lax. She must have been. Raised by a lawyer, she’d wanted to teach a kid how to relax and have fun – but had she gone too far?

Kelly’s spot is at the end of a track road, just a little way off the motorway junction at Salford. Eri drives dutifully, not saying anything.

As Jen is considering whether this is a good idea, he says: ‘You don’t look very happy.’

‘No. I’m not.’

Eri turns the radio off completely. The air is warm, the car a lit-up cocoon. ‘Are you following your husband?’

‘How do you know?’

Eri catches her gaze in the mirror, then helps himself to a second stick of powdery Wrigley’s. He holds one up for her, and she declines. ‘Usually is,’ he says.

Jen turns her mouth down, pleading the fifth. She’d usually make small talk, try to make the taxi driver feel okay about being nosey, but she doesn’t today.

They come off at a roundabout, take the second exit, then head out into the country. The track road is unlit, not even tarmacked. Just mud. The hairs on Jen’s arms rise as they travel down it. The smells of the countryside in summer drift in through the air-con. Haybales. Rain on hot pavements after a long drought.

‘Maybe I should get a role in the films,’ Eri says cheerfully. ‘Following husbands.’

‘Maybe.’

They head up what looks like a private drive, an unmarked hairline fracture on Google Maps.

‘Should we go all the way up?’ Eri asks. He takes his baseball cap off. His hair was perhaps once thick but has now thinned out, fine strands still curling like a baby’s after a bath.

Eri brings the car to a stop when Jen doesn’t reply. They are about three hundred feet from Kelly’s dot. Jen should get out, but she hesitates. Wanting to enjoy these last few moments until … until something.

With Eri’s headlights now off, Jen’s eyes adjust to the twilit drive. It winds to the left, then to the right. The sky is a bright mother of pearl, close to the summer solstice. The trees are full, shaggy, the leaves of one meeting the other.

Headlights sweep the skies like laser beams. ‘He’s driving,’ Eri says. He reverses quickly backwards and out on to the main road. Jen glances at her phone as the blue dot begins to move.

Kelly drives past them and into the distance, not seeming to notice them. ‘Shall we follow?’ Eri asks.

‘No. Let’s … I want to see where he was, what’s at the end of this drive.’

Eri heads wordlessly all the way to the top. It winds this way and that, the bends obscuring what lies at the end of it. Jen is expecting to see a wedding venue, a castle, a stately home, but instead a small and shabby housing development slides into view, one building at a time. Seven houses dotted around a shingled driveway. Eri pulls the car to a stop. The houses are old stone. The windows are illuminated in four of them; the others in darkness.

One is untidier than the rest. Roof tiles missing. An old-fashioned wooden front door that looks rickety, near rotten. One bay window on the first storey is boarded up, QAnon looped on it in pink spray paint. Eri sits in silence while Jen gazes up at it. That’s the house. She’s sure of it. It’s the only one without a car outside.

‘I have no idea what this is,’ she says.

‘Looks dodgy.’

Jen’s mind is spinning in overtime. A place to deal. A hideaway. A place to cut drugs. A place to kill people. A place to keep missing children, dead policemen … it could be anything. Nothing good.

‘He said he was going camping,’ she whispers to Eri instead of all this.

‘Maybe he is. Looks pretty outdoorsy,’ he adds with a laugh.

‘In the Lake District.’

‘Oh.’

‘Will you wait here?’ she asks, easing the door handle open. ‘I need to go and look.’

‘’Course,’ he says, but his facial expression has become more wary. Her fleeting friend the Uber driver, the person she has confessed the most to. She glances back at him as she goes. He’s lit up by the interior light, a snow globe in the dimness.

She walks tentatively across the grey shingle. The air outside is holiday air. Summertime smells, the sound of crickets.

And suddenly, she wishes to be back there, on the landing with the pumpkin, watching Todd kill a man. She’d just let it happen. Accept it. He’d do his time. He’d be able to have a life afterwards. She wants, for the first time, to re-cover this wound she has discovered. Stop discovering its depths. Move on.

She walks through the darkness, up to the house, and tries the front door, but it’s locked. It sits slightly apart from the other houses. None of them are boundaried, no fences, no front or back gardens. The neighbour has manicured their lawn up to an arbitrary straight line. After it, the wildness of this garden begins – nettles, weeds, two giant pink lupins which nod and sway in the breeze.

Jen pushes the letterbox open. It reminds her of the one they had growing up. It’s stiff and cold underneath her fingertips, and she thinks of her father and the day he died and how she didn’t get there in time.

Through the letterbox she can see an old-fashioned hallway. Uneven quarry tiles. She presumes Kelly has picked up the post from the floor and stacked it on the hallway table there.

The sign on the render to the side of the door says Sandalwood. The next cottage along says Bay. It’s tiny, two rooms deep. Jen walks a clockwise loop around it. At the back are two old-fashioned sliding patio doors, the glass stained with a blush of moss.

A dark-wood dining table sits in a teal-carpeted room inside, like a doll’s house. No chairs. An empty kitchenette to the left, nothing out on the work surfaces, not even a kettle. She presses her hands around her forehead to lean against the patio doors, peering in, and her fingers come away green. It’s uncared for, but not derelict, maybe recently emptied.

She circles back around to the front. The windows to the living room are mullioned, every other square a distorted circle of blown glass. The living room is preserved, like a museum or a set. A pink three-piece suite sits in the centre, its arms covered in what were once white pieces of lace. A remote control rests on an empty coffee table at a diagonal angle. A full bookcase, nothing she can make out. Two dusty champagne flutes on the top. She’s about to stop looking when she notices something right in the front of her field of vision: the distinctive black velvet back of a double photo frame, right here on the windowsill that’s littered with dead flies on their backs. The distorted glass meant she almost missed it. She shifts against the window to get a closer look.

The air seems to soften and still as it comes into focus, the molecules of the universe settling around her. This is not a wild-goose chase. This is not madness.

Here it is.

It’s a photograph of Kelly – clearly Kelly – that guarded, small smile. He’s much younger, maybe twenty, standing next to somebody else. A man with a shaved head. Their arms around each other. The frame is thick with dust, and she’s a foot away from it, but she can see that they look like each other. Their eyes. And something intangible, too. The way families sometimes bear resemblances that aren’t obvious. Bone structure, the shape of their foreheads, the way they stand: the way they seem to hold potential in their bodies, like runners on the starting blocks.

So who is he? This stranger who looks like her husband? Kelly says he has no living relatives: another thing she’d always believed. She considers this as she stares at the figures in the photograph. It’s one thing to lie about knowing an acquaintance who’s been in prison. It’s quite another to lie about your family, about where you came from.

And why would her husband have a photo of himself if this house is in any way the site of something dodgy? He wouldn’t. Surely he wouldn’t. He’s not stupid.

She walks back to the Uber. He has Kelly’s eyes. He has Todd’s eyes. That’s all she keeps thinking. Three sets of navy-blue eyes. Her husband, her son, and somebody else. Somebody she doesn’t know, won’t be able to find. Even if she breaks in, takes the photograph with her, she won’t have it tomorrow.

Eri is playing some platform game on his phone, holding it horizontal, pressing at the screen as tinny music plays. ‘Sorry,’ he says, then locks the screen. Jen gets in the front, next to him.

‘What …’ he says, in the tone of voice of somebody who feels that they have to ask.

‘I don’t know. It’s empty.’

Jen opens the app and looks back at Find My iPhone. Kelly now looks to be heading to the Lake District, where he always said he was going. But via here, this abandoned house.

‘Who owns it?’

‘Hang on,’ Jen says. You can find out who owns any property from the Land Registry for three pounds.

She downloads the title and scrolls to the registry. The proprietor is the Duchy of Lancaster. That’s the Crown. Unclaimed property reverts to the Crown. The first thing any property lawyer learns. Jen holds her lit-up phone in her lap and stares up at the house.

‘Mind if I smoke?’ Eri says as he winds his window down.

‘Go ahead.’ He rasps at the lighter, two flares, and the car is briefly illuminated. He smokes, and she thinks. His cigarette smells of the past: summer evenings outside wine bars, standing at train stations, the docks at night.

‘We should go,’ Jen says.

‘Will you confront him?’ Eri says, his cheekbones jutting out as he sucks on the cigarette.

‘No. He’ll only lie.’

They travel in silence, Jen thinking about the two men in the photograph. Her husband, and somebody else. Somebody who looks like him. What does it all mean?

When Jen arrives home, two pizza boxes sit on the counter. One empty, one full. Todd had his without her. He must have ordered it himself, alone.