Wrong Place, Wrong Time

But look. Here is his blue spot. Not in the Lake District at all. At a house in Salford.

Jen looks back up at her son, who is staring down at his phone, an expression of concentration on his face.

‘Todd,’ she says, cringing as she says it. Her baby, post exam, looking forward to pizza with his mother; he deserves better. He looks up at her in surprise. ‘How bad would it be if I had to pop to the office? Just quickly – we can have the pizza afterwards.’

Todd’s eyebrows rise in surprise, but then he waves a hand. ‘Yeah, fine,’ he says. ‘Don’t worry. I shall go immerse myself in H2O. Also known as a bath to mere mortals.’

Jen laughs softly to herself, then rubs at her eyes as he stands and leaves the living room. Is this the right thing to be doing? More neglect of Todd, not less, in search of answers? But she’s got to know for sure.

She decides to get a taxi so that she can arrive incognito.

‘Won’t be long,’ she calls to Todd. She hears the sound of the bath running, doesn’t catch his reply. She hesitates at the bottom of the stairs, torn, torn between duties. But it’s all for him, she decides as the Uber app vibrates to say her car is a minute away. It’s all to save him, wonderful him.

‘Get extra bacon on mine,’ Todd calls.

‘Sure thing.’

She waits out on the street for the taxi.

It’s the height of summer. Geraniums, sweet peas, roses in her neighbours’ gardens. It smells like a perfumery. The air is soft. It’s raining lightly, warm drizzle, but Jen doesn’t mind. It’s humid, like a steam room.

She reaches to pluck off the petal of a peony at the very corner of her driveway, in the only tiny patch of soil they can be bothered to maintain. Once white, it’s now a deep brown around the edges, like an old newspaper, but it still smells of delicious, pungent vanilla.

She looks up at their sleeping house, one light on in the frosted bathroom window, thinking of her son and his pizza. He’ll understand one day.

As the Uber pulls up, she thinks suddenly of how much she trusted her husband. She trusted him so much. Camping with people she’s never met. She never thought, never thought once.

She tugs on the cool plastic handle of the Uber and is greeted by Eri, a middle-aged man with a beard wearing a baseball cap. The car smells of artificially sweet air-fresheners and chewing gum.

She hands him a clutch of twenties she got out of the emergency drawer in the kitchen, their paper as soft and dry as the peony petals. ‘I’m following someone,’ she says.

‘Oh.’ Eri considers the notes, then eventually takes them.

‘I’ll pay whatever I owe on the app, too. We need to keep an eye on this.’ She shows him the phone. ‘If the blue dot moves, we might need to … redirect.’

‘Okay then,’ he says. ‘Like in the movies,’ he adds, his eyes meeting hers in the rear-view mirror.

‘Mmm.’ Jen sits in the back, leaning her head against the cold window, watching her street rush by. A woman in a black cab following her husband. The oldest story in the book, with a twist. ‘Like in the movies,’ she repeats.

Call of Duty awaits you, Todd texts Jen.

God, isn’t it funny, Jen thinks, the lights of Merseyside rushing by like scattered colourful stars, how you can forget entire phases of your life? The PS5 phase, Call of Duty. Two controls they had to charge all the time, they’d played so much. They had been so addicted. When they weren’t playing it, they would shoot at each other around corners of the house. ‘This is Black Ops,’ Todd would say to her, walking into the kitchen, holding an imaginary walkie-talkie.

Jen wonders now, as they race down the motorway, lit-up blue signs passing above their heads like they’re flying, whether she had been irresponsible to let her son play that game, ignoring the warnings about violent computer games. It wouldn’t happen to them, she had thought. She had been too lax. She must have been. Raised by a lawyer, she’d wanted to teach a kid how to relax and have fun – but had she gone too far?

Kelly’s spot is at the end of a track road, just a little way off the motorway junction at Salford. Eri drives dutifully, not saying anything.

As Jen is considering whether this is a good idea, he says: ‘You don’t look very happy.’

‘No. I’m not.’

Eri turns the radio off completely. The air is warm, the car a lit-up cocoon. ‘Are you following your husband?’

‘How do you know?’

Eri catches her gaze in the mirror, then helps himself to a second stick of powdery Wrigley’s. He holds one up for her, and she declines. ‘Usually is,’ he says.

Jen turns her mouth down, pleading the fifth. She’d usually make small talk, try to make the taxi driver feel okay about being nosey, but she doesn’t today.

They come off at a roundabout, take the second exit, then head out into the country. The track road is unlit, not even tarmacked. Just mud. The hairs on Jen’s arms rise as they travel down it. The smells of the countryside in summer drift in through the air-con. Haybales. Rain on hot pavements after a long drought.

‘Maybe I should get a role in the films,’ Eri says cheerfully. ‘Following husbands.’

‘Maybe.’

They head up what looks like a private drive, an unmarked hairline fracture on Google Maps.

‘Should we go all the way up?’ Eri asks. He takes his baseball cap off. His hair was perhaps once thick but has now thinned out, fine strands still curling like a baby’s after a bath.

Eri brings the car to a stop when Jen doesn’t reply. They are about three hundred feet from Kelly’s dot. Jen should get out, but she hesitates. Wanting to enjoy these last few moments until … until something.

With Eri’s headlights now off, Jen’s eyes adjust to the twilit drive. It winds to the left, then to the right. The sky is a bright mother of pearl, close to the summer solstice. The trees are full, shaggy, the leaves of one meeting the other.

Headlights sweep the skies like laser beams. ‘He’s driving,’ Eri says. He reverses quickly backwards and out on to the main road. Jen glances at her phone as the blue dot begins to move.

Kelly drives past them and into the distance, not seeming to notice them. ‘Shall we follow?’ Eri asks.

‘No. Let’s … I want to see where he was, what’s at the end of this drive.’

Eri heads wordlessly all the way to the top. It winds this way and that, the bends obscuring what lies at the end of it. Jen is expecting to see a wedding venue, a castle, a stately home, but instead a small and shabby housing development slides into view, one building at a time. Seven houses dotted around a shingled driveway. Eri pulls the car to a stop. The houses are old stone. The windows are illuminated in four of them; the others in darkness.

One is untidier than the rest. Roof tiles missing. An old-fashioned wooden front door that looks rickety, near rotten. One bay window on the first storey is boarded up, QAnon looped on it in pink spray paint. Eri sits in silence while Jen gazes up at it. That’s the house. She’s sure of it. It’s the only one without a car outside.

‘I have no idea what this is,’ she says.

‘Looks dodgy.’

Jen’s mind is spinning in overtime. A place to deal. A hideaway. A place to cut drugs. A place to kill people. A place to keep missing children, dead policemen … it could be anything. Nothing good.

‘He said he was going camping,’ she whispers to Eri instead of all this.

‘Maybe he is. Looks pretty outdoorsy,’ he adds with a laugh.

‘In the Lake District.’

‘Oh.’

‘Will you wait here?’ she asks, easing the door handle open. ‘I need to go and look.’

‘’Course,’ he says, but his facial expression has become more wary. Her fleeting friend the Uber driver, the person she has confessed the most to. She glances back at him as she goes. He’s lit up by the interior light, a snow globe in the dimness.

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