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.
It is 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:
Nicola W 15/10: I can be there.
Nicola W 15/10: Happy to help.
Burner phone 15/10: Nice to chat.
See you on 16th?
Burner phone 15/10: Happy to help
tomorrow?
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.
Nicola W 17/10: Get back in there.
Burner phone 17/10: Yep.
Understood.
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 slightly too big for him.
“Okay, let’s hear it,” he says. Two white plastic cups of water sit in front of them. The room smells of photocopier toner and stale coffee. The setting feels so mundane for the reaction Jen hopes to provoke.
“I’ll just take some notes,” he adds. Jen doesn’t want this. A young officer who takes meticulous notes and avoids answering questions isn’t what she needs. She wants a maverick—someone who operates off the record, someone with a tragic backstory and an alcohol problem: someone who can actually help her.
“I’m pretty sure my son is involved in something,” she says plainly. She skips over the alias she gave, hoping he won’t question it, and cuts to the heart of the matter: “His name is Todd Brotherhood.”
That’s when she sees it. Recognition. It flashes across his face like a ghost.
“What makes you think he’s involved in something?”
She tells the officer about the cutting and sewing business, her son meeting Joseph Jones, and the knife. She hopes that if Todd has already armed himself, they’ll find the weapon, arrest him, and stop the crime.
The officer’s pen pauses slightly at the mention of the knife. His icy blue eyes flick up to meet hers—briefly, the color like a gas flame on low—before returning to his notes. Jen can feel the change in the air, even in this sterile room. She’s set things in motion. The butterfly has flapped its wings.
“Right—where’s the knife? How do you know he bought one?”
“I’m not sure right now, but I saw 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, clicking his pen shut. “All right. Looks like we need to speak to your son.”
“Today?” Jen asks.
The officer finishes writing and looks at her, then glances at the clock on the wall.
“We’ll make inquiries with Todd.”
Jen shivers in the warm police interview room. What if there’s an unintended consequence of her actions? Maybe Joseph Jones should die if he’s involved in something terrible, and she only needs to help Todd get away with it. How is she supposed to know what’s right?
“Okay—well, I can go get Todd for you,” she says, wondering 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, extending his hand towards the door in an unmistakable gesture of 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’s going to have any chance of stopping the crime. Tomorrow doesn’t exist—not for her, anyway.
The officer hesitates, looking down at his feet, his hand still outstretched. “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 to get kids out of this, you have to figure out the why.”
“I’m trying,” Jen says. She stops at 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, his expression giving nothing away.
She leaves then, and as she steps outside through the glass doors etched with a fine grid, she smells something unexpected: petrichor. Rain on pavements. Summer is coming back. That 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 the missing baby. The poster is still clear in her mind. There’s something familiar about that baby. An instinctive recognition, as if they might be a distant relative, someone she now knows as an adult… someone she’s met but can’t quite place. Jen has never been good with babies.
She got pregnant with Todd accidentally, only eight months after meeting Kelly. It was a shock, but he used to joke that they’d had a decade’s worth of sex in that year, which was 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 wryly one night that everyone 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 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 instantly ready. Like she’d grown up in the two minutes it took for the pregnancy test to show positive, suddenly looking to a future generation instead of to herself.
But she hadn’t been ready, not at all.
No one had warned her about the car crash that is labor. At one point, she was 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 motherhood with pain, but also with fear: fear of judgment from health visitors, GPs, and other mothers.
Todd hadn’t been what anyone would call a difficult baby. He always slept well. But even an easy baby is hard, and Jen—a fan of self-recrimination anyway—was thrust into something that, in other circumstances, would have been described as torture. Yet to call it that was taboo. She had looked down at him one night and thought, *How do I know if I love you?*
Jen can see now that she was vulnerable to wanting it all. A woman working in a demanding job, having a repressed father, susceptible to judgment, to reading too much into small comments. That vein of inadequacy running through her led her to say yes to banal networking events and to take on more cases than she could realistically manage. In parenthood, this led 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—perhaps compensating for what she should have felt but didn’t.
She’d tried to talk to 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 didn’t want to kill herself. She 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. He couldn’t 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 all over his head. Until recently, when his friends became sullen teenagers, he hadn’t. He was still full of puns, of laughs, of facts, just for her. In the beginning, the love she felt for him had been eclipsed by how hard those early days were, but that wasn’t the case anymore. That’s all. An explanation as big and as small as that.
But she’d been too afraid to have any more children. Now, as she watches the road unfold in front of her, she thinks about that baby on the poster. She’s a girl. A small hard stone of regret forms in her stomach—that she didn’t have another child. A sibling for Todd, someone he could confide in, someone 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 let 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.
