Jen’s eyes open. She is in bed. And it’s the twenty-sixth.
It’s Day Minus Three.
She goes to the picture window. It’s raining outside. Where is this going to end? Cycling back – what, for ever? Until she ceases to exist?
She needs to know the rules. That is what any lawyer would do. Understand the statute, the framework, and then you can play the game. All she knows so far is that nothing has worked. She can only infer from travelling backwards that she hasn’t managed to stop the crime. Surely. Stop the crime, stop the time loop. That must be the key.
She hastily refreshes her email, looking for a reply from Andy Vettese, but there’s nothing. She goes downstairs to find Todd hunting for something.
‘On the top of the TV unit,’ Jen says. She knows he will be looking for his physics folder. She knows because she’s his mother, but she also knows because this has already happened.
‘Ah, thanks.’ He throws her a self-conscious grin. ‘Quantum today.’ God, he towers over her. He used to be many feet shorter than her, would reach his arm right up vertically when he was on the school run, his warm hand always finding hers. He’d get frustrated if she couldn’t take it, when she was fussing with her handbag or reaching to press the button on the traffic lights. She had felt guilty each time. It’s crazy the things mothers feel guilt over.
And now look, over a foot taller than her and refusing to meet her gaze.
Maybe she had been right to feel guilty, she thinks hopelessly. Maybe she should have never done anything except hold his hand. She could come up with a thousand maternal crimes: letting him watch too much television, sleep-training him – the lot, she thinks bitterly.
‘Do you know who Joseph Jones is?’ she says quietly, watching him carefully. Not to see if he tells her, but to see if he lies about it, which she thinks he will. A mother’s instincts are better than any lawyer’s.
Todd puffs air into his cheeks, then plugs his phone in the charger on the kitchen island. ‘Nope,’ he says, a studied frown crossing his features. He’s never once charged his phone there before school. He charges it overnight. ‘Why?’ he asks.
Jen appraises him. Interesting. He could have easily said, ‘Clio’s uncle’s friend,’ but he chose not to. Just as she expected.
She hesitates, not wanting to do something big, wanting to plan her moment. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she says.
‘Alrighty. Mysterious Jen. More a question than an axiom. Shower time.’ Todd leaves his phone charging. Jen stands there in the kitchen, without a theory, without a hope, and with the only person who might be able to help lying to her.
She glances at the stairs. She’s got between five and twenty minutes. Todd sometimes takes long and contemplative showers, sometimes quick ones, rushing so much to get dressed afterwards that his clothes stick to his wet skin. She tries to get into his phone but fails the PIN request twice.
She dashes upstairs. She’ll search his room instead. She’s got to find something useful.
Todd’s room is a dark cave, painted bottle green. Curtains closed. A double bed with a tartan cover on it sits underneath the window. A television faces the bed. There is a desk in the corner, underneath the stairs that lead up to her and Kelly’s bedroom. It’s neat but not cosy: the way many men keep their spaces. A black lamp and a MacBook sit on the otherwise empty desk; an exercise bike leans against the far wall.
She opens his laptop, and fails that password log-in twice, too. She looks around his bedroom, thinking how best she can use the time.
Frantically, she opens his desk drawers and the ones in his bedside tables and looks under the bed. She pulls the duvet back and feels around in the bottom of the wardrobe. She just knows she’s going to find something. She can feel it. Something damning. Something she can never forget.
She ransacks the room. She’ll never be able to get it straight again, but she doesn’t care.
She’s already wasted six minutes. One unit of legal time: an hour divided into tenths. Her gaze lands on his Xbox. He’s always on it. He must talk to some people on there. It’s worth a shot.
She powers it up, listening out for the shower, then navigates to the messenger section. It’s a dark world in there. Messages with random people about spooky games, fighting games, games where you earn enough points to buy knives to stab other players with …
She goes to the recent sent items, which has two messages in. One to User78630 and one to Connor18. The first says: okay. The one to Connor says: 11pm I’ll drop it off?
She will ask Pauline about Connor. See if he’s wrapped up in anything. It seems too much of a coincidence that they have started spending time together just as Todd goes off the rails. And 11 p.m. drop-offs … that doesn’t sound good.
She turns off the console and leaves Todd’s room. Seconds later, he opens the bathroom door.
They meet on the landing. He has only a towel around his waist.
She meets his eyes, but he doesn’t hold her gaze for long. She can’t gauge his mood. She recalls his facial expression from the night of the murder. There wasn’t any remorse on it, not anywhere, not even a bit.
What’s the point in going to the office if, when she wakes up tomorrow, it will be yesterday? There is, for the first time in Jen’s adult life, no point in working at all. She muses on this while feeding Henry VIII.
She tries calling a number she finds listed for Andy Vettese but gets no answer. She googles him again. He won some science award yesterday, for a paper on black holes. She emails two more people who have written theses on time travel.
She thinks about how to convince her husband of what is happening.
Jen sighs and eventually finds a legal pad full of notes on a case that doesn’t seem to matter much right now. All she can hear is the soft hum of the heating.
In the notebook, she writes Day Minus Three.
What I know, she writes underneath that.
Joseph Jones’s name, his full address
Clio may be involved
Connor drop-offs?
It isn’t a lot.
For the first time in years, Jen is on the school run. The green school gates are clotted with parents. Cliques, loners, people dressed up, people very much dressed down – the lot. Jen would usually spend her time at the school gate paranoid everybody was talking about her but, today, she wishes she had done this more often. For starters, it’s fascinating.
She spots Pauline immediately. She is alone, has lately been insisting on collecting Connor so she knows he’s been to school – he was recently told off for skiving – and then goes on to get her youngest, Theo. She is wearing a denim jacket and a huge scarf, is staring down at her phone, her legs crossed at the ankles.
‘I thought I’d try one of these school-run things,’ Jen says to her.
‘I’m genuinely honoured,’ Pauline says, looking up with a laugh. ‘Everyone here is a dick. Honestly – Mario’s mum has a Mulberry handbag with her. For the school run.’
Pauline is one of Jen’s easiest friends. Jen did her divorce, three years ago, separating her neatly from her cheating husband, Eric. Pauline had turned up at Jen’s firm for an initial consultation, screenshots of Eric’s infidelity in hand. Jen had known of her from the school but had never spoken to her. She made Pauline a tea and very professionally looked at the damning texts, sent from Eric to his mistress, and said she’d take Pauline’s case on.
‘Sorry you had to see them,’ Pauline had said in Jen’s office, pocketing her phone and sipping the tea.