Kelly is cooking a pie. When she sits down at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, he pours the sauce into the pastry-lined dish and opens the oven. The heat and the steam from the oven shimmer so violently he seems to disappear right in front of her.
That night, Jen googles how to send a timed email and then fires it off, hopeful, into the ether. As she falls asleep, she prays it works. She prays a future her, somewhere, stops the crime, and breaks the time loop.
Day Minus Eight, 08:00
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:
Burner phone 15/10: Nice to chat. See you on 16th?
Nicola W 15/10: I can be there.
Burner phone 15/10: Happy to help tomorrow?
Nicola W 15/10: Happy to help.
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.
Burner phone 17/10: Yep. Understood.
Nicola W 17/10: Get back in there.
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.