Day Minus Two, 19:00

Day Minus Two, 19:00

Jen is two cars behind Todd, and is paradoxically relieved to find that he is an incompetent driver: not once, so far as she can tell, has he checked his rear-view mirror and spotted her.

He slows down on a road called Eshe Road North. It would be described by an estate agent as leafy, as though plants don’t grow on housing estates. There are pumpkins on some of the steps to the houses, carved early, lit up, grotesque reminders of everything that’s to come.

Todd parks his car carefully. Jen drives to a side-street, a few houses down, unlit, so she is hopefully unseen, and gets out, drawing her trench coat around her. The night air has that early-autumn spooky feel to it. Damp spiderwebs, the feeling of something coming to an end before you’re truly ready to leave it.

Todd walks purposefully down the road, white trainers kicking up the leaves. It is so strange for Jen to witness this; the things that happened while she was lawyering, while she was busy caring too much about work and – clearly – not enough about home.

She stands at the junction of the side-street and Eshe Road North until Todd disappears abruptly inside a house. It is large, set back from the road, with a wide porch and a loft conversion. These kinds of places still intimidate Jen, who grew up in a two-bed terrace that had windows so rickety the breeze wafted her hair around in the evenings. Her father, widowed, didn’t notice the draught, and anyway took on too much legal aid work and not enough private to fix it even if he did.

She rounds her shoulders against the cold, a woman in a too-thin coat on a rainy street, looking at the trees covered in their burnt-orange jackets, just thinking. About Todd and about her father and about today, tomorrow and yesterday.

She paces down the street. Todd’s inside number 32. She googles the address while she waits, her fingers so cold she can’t type easily. It’s listed as the registered office of Cutting & Sewing Ltd, which is owned by Ezra Michaels and Joseph Jones. It was set up recently and has never submitted any accounts.

As Todd is swallowed up into the house, someone else leaves.

She’s right in the way.

The figure comes through the garden gate just as she passes and, suddenly, she is face to face with a dead man. No, that’s not right. A man who dies in two days’ time. The victim.