That it is Day Minus Nine makes sense to Jen.
She has come to the school. She’s here, the day before parents’ evening, to see if she can get any insight into what was underneath Mr Sampson’s hesitation last night, in private. People are always more confessional in private.
‘He has mentioned a falling-out, I seem to remember,’ he is saying to Jen.
Mr Sampson teaches geography. Behind him there is a wall that seems to be a tribute to the features of the world he likes the most – the white desert in Egypt, a cave of crystals in Mexico. He is leaning back against his desk, facing Jen.
‘When? And with who?’ Jen says. She looks around this classroom which must greet Todd every morning but that she has never seen herself, never had time to, because of her job. Green speckled carpets. White desks that seat two students. Blue plastic chairs. She found out her mother died when she was in a classroom just like this. Called out by the head teacher. She hadn’t returned for several days afterwards. Her father had hardly talked about it. ‘Can’t change what’s happened,’ he’d said once. Repressed, unhappy at times, a very typical lawyer. Jen had been so determined to parent differently. Openly, honestly, humanely, but maybe she’d fucked it up as much as he had. Isn’t that what Larkin says?
Her phone rings in her handbag on the chair. Mr Sampson’s eyes stray to it. Jen checks it. ‘Just work,’ she says, declining the call. It instantly rings
again.
‘Do answer,’ he says with a wave of his hand.
Jen picks up reluctantly. This is not what she is here to do. ‘I’ve got someone here for you,’ Jen’s secretary, Shaz, says. Mr Sampson busies himself at his desk.
‘I’ll be in late,’ Jen says.
‘It’s Gina. What shall I tell her?’
Jen blinks. Gina. The client who doesn’t want her husband to have access to their children. Some memory is coming to Jen, some small detail of Gina’s life. ‘Uh,’ she stalls, trying to think. That’s it: the last time Jen saw Gina, she’d turned to Jen, on the threshold of her office, and said, ‘I
should’ve seen it coming. It’s literally what I do for a living. Personal investigator. For my sins.’ Jen had nodded slowly in recognition.
It cannot be a coincidence that Jen has woken up on this day, the day
Gina is in her office. Maybe this isn’t about seeing Mr Sampson at all. ‘I’ll come in,’ she says. ‘Tell her to wait.’ She hangs up and turns back to Mr Sampson. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ she says hurriedly. ‘When was this falling-out?’
‘A week ago, maybe? He said he’d had a domestic. That’s all …’ ‘With who?’
‘He didn’t say. He was talking to someone – I just overheard.’ ‘Who was he talking to?’
‘Connor.’
The same names. The same names keep coming up over and over.
Connor, Ezra, Clio, Joseph himself.
‘He also said something about a baby?’ ‘What?’
‘I’m not sure – it just came to me. Something about a baby.’
‘Right. It would have been good to know before now,’ Jen says, one of the very first times she has said exactly what she thinks to somebody like this, to somebody outside her immediate family or colleagues. How liberating it feels. Next, she will be telling clients to go fuck themselves.
‘Right …’ Mr Sampson says awkwardly.
She stares out of the window. It’s foggy out, but still mild. Summer still feels just within reach. She watches as the shallow mist moves like a tide back and forth over the playing fields.
She gives a friendly but helpless shrug, saying nothing, the kind of stony silence Kelly would impart. It is so therapeutic, not having to deal with the
consequences of her actions. This meeting is contextless, like a dream, like a conversation with a drunk person who will not remember.
‘I’ll check in with him tomorrow,’ Mr Sampson says, and Jen hopes maybe that’ll help, somewhere, in the future.
The mist becomes mizzle becomes rain as Jen heads to her car. She looks absent-mindedly for Todd’s and spots it immediately. As she watches, Connor arrives, too. He’s late. She stands there with one hand on her car door, looking, hoping to see something.
But nothing happens. He locks his car and smokes a cigarette on his way into the building. His tattoo is hidden, today, under a round-neck jumper. At the door, he turns to Jen, raises a hand in greeting. Jen waves back, but she’s surprised: she didn’t know he’d seen her.
The police badge, the missing-baby poster and the phone were not on Todd’s wardrobe when Jen went home just now. She searched and searched for them, but they were gone. She assumed at first that he has not yet acquired them, but the texts on the phone date back to the fifteenth of October. Nevertheless, they’re nowhere to be found, and so she has nothing to show Gina, who she is now well over an hour late to see.
Gina is sitting in the chair in the corner of Jen’s office wearing a beige trench coat and a muted expression.
‘I’m so sorry – I’m so sorry,’ Jen says. ‘I’m having a family drama.’
She puts down her umbrella, leaving damp droplets on the carpet. ‘That’s fine, don’t worry,’ Gina says cordially. Jen had been wary of crossing the boundary from professional to friend with clients, but she has, in these past few weeks, with Gina. They’ve even texted a bit. It doesn’t matter – Jen is
the business owner, after all – but Jen now wonders if all of that happened for a reason.
She tries to remember what she said in this meeting the last time. ‘Can I just ask,’ she says, removing her coat and powering up her computer, trying to step back into Jen the professional adviser, ‘what your plan is if you succeed in preventing your ex-husband’s access to the children?’
‘He’d come back to me, wouldn’t he?’ Gina says. ‘So he could see the kids.’
Jen bites her lip. ‘But – Gina. It doesn’t work like that.’
Gina looks around Jen’s office with panicked eyes. ‘I know I’m being mad.’ She drops her head. ‘You’ve helped me to see that.’
Jen feels choked up, despite herself. God, she relates to this, now. This desperation, this denial. This urge to exert some kind of crazy control,
somehow.
‘That’s what I’m here for,’ Jen says thickly. ‘But – you know. It’s better to move on, isn’t it? Forwards.’
‘God, I’m getting all anxious again,’ Gina says, wafting her hands at her eyes.
‘The reason I’m doing this for free,’ Jen says gently, ‘is, really, because I don’t plan on doing it.’
“Right,” Gina says, shifting in her chair, crossing and uncrossing her legs. Her clothes are wrinkled. “I know, I know. It hit me when we were talking about *Love Island*,” she wipes her eyes, “those girls would never beg. How pathetic is that, learning life lessons from a reality TV show?”
“It’s surprisingly educational,” Jen replies with a dry tone.
Gina looks down at her lap. “I just need… I don’t know. I just need some time. Okay?”
“Okay. Good,” Jen says. “Good.” This has gone better than their last conversation.
“Want to distract me with your family drama?” Gina asks with a weak smile.
“Maybe,” Jen says, returning the smile shakily, glancing at Gina as she straightens in her chair.
“Go ahead, hit me,” Gina says.
Jen hesitates. It feels both unethical and risky. Yet… it could be so helpful. Here she is, at this meeting, on this day. Surely, it’s for a reason.
Jen has already decided to ask Gina about the poster, the badge, and the texts on the burner phone. *Baby or no baby. What does that mean?* She isn’t supposed to know Gina’s occupation yet—she hasn’t been told—but she breezes past that, and Gina doesn’t seem to notice.
Jen explains how Todd has been acting strangely, and then she found the bundle with the police badge and the poster.
“And you don’t have them with you now?” Gina asks, her eyes now alert and focused on Jen.
“No, sorry. My son had them, but not anymore.” Jen licks her lips. “I’m pretty sure he’s involved in something dark. I need someone to find out what.”
Gina meets her eyes and blinks just once. Her mobile phone starts ringing, but she ignores it. “Alright. I’ll do it.”
“Yes.”
“So, to clarify—you want me to find out about the police officer, Ryan, and the missing baby? And Nicola Williams?”
“Exactly,” Jen says, marveling at Gina’s composed demeanor. *How different we are at work from how we feel inside*.
“Leave it to me,” Gina says, and Jen could kiss her. Finally, some help. Gina meets Jen’s eye. “And thank you. For, you know, *Love Island*.”
“No problem,” Jen says, her eyes moist. “Do you need the info ASAP?”
“Ideally today,” Jen says. “Is that okay? I’ll pay whatever you need to get it by this evening.”
Gina waves a hand dismissively. “What’s the saying… pro bono?”
“Right,” Jen says. “Yes, pro bono. For the public good.” After all, isn’t that what stopping a murder is?
Jen stays in the office, using various resources to dig up information.
She emails the firm’s librarian, asking for details of any recent missing babies in Liverpool. The librarian sends back a few articles: court cases, people lying about their children being kidnapped, a woman whose baby was snatched outside a supermarket and later returned to a doctor’s office.
Jen methodically goes through them. None of the babies look like the one on the poster. There’s something almost primal about her recognition—something familiar. It must be maternal instinct.
She looks up Nicola Williams next, but the name is too common, and she has nothing else to go on. She should have written down the number. Memorized it.
Nicola. Nicola Williams.
Wait. That first night in the police station. Was Nicola Williams the name she heard when Todd was arrested? The name of the person who had been stabbed two nights earlier?
Jen sinks her head into her hands at her desk. Was it? She feels certain it was, but she can’t go forward… only back. And there’s no point in Googling it: it hasn’t happened yet.
*If it was Nicola who was injured…* The thought chills Jen. Where was Todd? What did he do on Day Minus Two? Is he connected to that? She can’t remember. It’s all a blur.
She just doesn’t know.
Jen leaves the office and drives aimlessly. The rain has intensified. She doesn’t want to go home. She doesn’t want to return to the scene of the crime, doesn’t want to sit in the house failing to piece everything together. She drives slowly toward the coast. She knows it’s crazy to go to the beach in the rain, but then Jen feels crazy. She wants to stand there and feel it—the cold drops of water on her skin. She wants to remind herself that she’s still here, still alive, just not in the way she’s used to.
She parks at Crosby Beach. It’s deserted. Rain streams down the path leading to the sea, already a few inches deep. Jen’s hair is plastered to her scalp within seconds. It smells of cold brine. The wind whips the sand into her face.
She walks past a homeless man sitting by a parking meter. He’s soaked through, and Jen feels a pang of guilt as she hands him a wet five-pound note.
The beach has the Antony Gormley exhibition on it, *Another Place*. Dozens of bronze statues looking out to sea. Jen approaches one, the noise of the downpour around her as loud as a train. She is the only person on the beach.
Her feet sink into the pale sand, which compacts like snow.
She stands next to one of the metal figures, shoulder to shoulder, and looks at the blurred, rainy horizon, spending time with a statue instead of another person. *If only. If only I could figure this out with someone. I’d solve it so much more easily if I weren’t always alone.* The statue’s body is freezing against her palm, its mouth wordless.
Together, they look at every single metal figure, each alone, in a different time, in a different place, looking out to sea for answers.
That evening, late, Jen heads out, back to Eshe Road North, hoping to observe something. Bad, criminal things only happen at night, so she may as well sit and watch the house.
She still hasn’t heard from Gina.
At a quarter past ten, Ezra leaves the house and gets into his car, wearing a uniform—dark green trousers, green jacket, hi-vis vest.
Jen follows him, keeping well back, her headlights on, just a normal driver, just a coincidence. They drive like this for a while, down a track road and crossing a staggered junction.
She follows him all the way to Birkenhead Port. He gets out and takes a clipboard from another man, looping an ID around his neck with one hand and fumbling for a cigarette with the other. He takes up a position to check cars in and stands there, doing nothing but smoking.
Jen’s shoulders slump in disappointment. *So he just works here.*
She leaves the engine idling, watching as a Tesla pulls up. The port is windy, leaves swirling in the breeze. It’s busy, cars coming and going, but the Tesla does something different: it flashes its lights, then slowly disappears down a side street. Ezra follows on foot. She puts the car into gear and trails behind them. She parks on a random driveway, hoping to look like a resident, and switches off her lights.
A boy—only Todd’s age, but shorter and blond—gets out of the Tesla with an oblong-shaped package under his arm. Ezra greets him, shaking his hand, and together they crouch in front of the Tesla. It takes Jen a few minutes to realize what they’re doing: they’re swapping the plates on the Tesla.
The kid leaves, and Ezra drives the Tesla back through the parking barrier, leaving it waiting to be loaded onto a ship.
*So Ezra is a crooked port worker, taking stolen cars, swapping the plates, and shipping them off somewhere to sell, probably for cash handed to him on the side. The blond boy must be some sort of foot soldier, paid a pittance to steal cars from driveways with the promise of gang advancement. What if Todd is working for Ezra and Joseph too? Something goes wrong, and Joseph ends up dead. I don’t want to believe it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.*
She waits a minute before leaving. She passes the boy walking along the road. She looks carefully at him. His gaze is fixed straight ahead. *He can’t be more than sixteen, a teenager, a baby, burning bright, with no idea of the damage he’s doing to his mother, waiting at a window back home.*
It’s almost midnight, and Gina has sent over photos of twelve babies who have gone missing in England in the past year. None from anywhere near Merseyside. And none looks exactly like the baby on the poster. Some have lighter hair, some larger eyes, though it’s hard to know for sure.
Jen is suddenly struck by the terrifying thought that the baby might not be missing yet.
She scrolls up through Gina’s texts. She missed them all while she was distracted at the port.
*Nothing on Nicola. Name too common.*
*I have something on Ryan though—he’s dead.*
Panic surges through Jen as if she’s been doused in hot oil. She calls Gina immediately, but there’s no answer. She tries again and again. But today, Gina doesn’t pick up. It’s over. They’ll have to start from scratch tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, yesterday.
