‘Morning, beautiful,’ Kelly says. He walks into the bedroom, wearing only boxers. Jen startles.
She could scream. The last day she spent with him, she left this man on
the street. A domestic. A sinister, dark street corner, betrayals, crimes. Here – thirteen days before – he is greeting her sleepily, his expression as friendly as the August sun outside.
‘Morning,’ she murmurs, because she doesn’t know what else to say. Stolen cars, stolen babies, dead policemen, don’t look into Joseph Jones, don’t try to find the baby. Her son’s anguished shouts in their back garden.
And now this. Kelly, here, topless, grinning at her.
He doesn’t miss a trick, stops getting dressed, jeans halfway up his thighs. ‘What’s up?’
‘No, nothing. Got to go in early. It’s the trainee rotation day,’ she says, a fact she wasn’t even aware of until she said it. The power of the subconscious. She knew immediately, from twenty years in the law, the second she saw the date, that it was trainee changeover day.
So what else does she know?
Todd walks into their room, too, and – God. The little things you never notice about living with somebody while they are growing up. He’s maybe an inch shorter now than he is in October. Less broad, too, across the chest. He picks a bottle of perfume up from Jen’s chest of drawers and sniffs it.
Kelly pulls a T-shirt on.
‘You look mental,’ Todd says dispassionately to Jen. ‘Your poor trainee.’
Jen swats him away, but she doesn’t mean it. She could stay here with him for ever. And, she is ashamed to admit, with her husband. She could
pause it all. Todd sniffing that perfume. Kelly with his head popping out of the neck of his T-shirt. Walk around them like they’re statues. Love them, just love them, and never go forwards into the darkness and lies that await them, remaining here in blissful ignorance.
Kelly showers and Jen checks his iPhone and turns back on location tracking as perfunctorily as she eats her breakfast.
Some lawyers occasionally, during their careers, have moments of genius. Most of practising law is mundane: form-filling, costs budgeting, trying to extract everybody with the least damage done possible, but there are
sometimes real lightbulb moments, too, and Jen is having hers today. It is significant, it turns out, that it is trainee handover day. Because here, in Jen’s office, is a brand-new trainee who does not know the name of Jen’s husband.
And, on Find My iPhone, Kelly does not appear to be unblocking a chimney nearby but is at the Grosvenor Hotel in Liverpool city centre.
Jen’s been trying to do the spying herself. But now, she can send a trainee to do it for her.
The one assigned to Jen is called Natalia. She is a classic solicitor-in- training: organized, overly cheerful, neat both in her work and in her appearance. Her hair is slicked back into a piece of elastic so perfectly that Jen takes a second, in her sunlit office, to marvel at it. Like a horse’s tail.
Jen knows that Natalia’s life will implode in early October. She will get
home to find her boyfriend gone, packed up. He won’t engage with her over it, practically ghosts her. She will tell Jen about it after several days of
tearfulness and unproductivity.
‘I have a task for you,’ Jen says. Her tone is probably too familiar. But she’s worked with Natalia for eight weeks already, having shared a pepperoni Domino’s pizza while Natalia cried and said she hated Simon. And if her tone surprises Natalia, she masks it well.
Jen pulls up a photograph of her husband on her computer. She has surprisingly few. ‘All right, this might be somewhat unorthodox,’ she says.
‘Perfect. I’ll do anything,’ Natalia says cheerfully.
‘This man is in the Grosvenor Hotel, right this minute,’ she says, pointing at her screen. ‘Presumably with somebody. We need to know what they’re
discussing.’
Natalia blinks. Even her eyelids are perfect. Jen knows this is a strange thing to notice but, nevertheless, they are. Smooth and painted with a colour just slightly lighter than her skin, enough to make her look alert and awake. ‘Wow, okay. So, like, surveillance on cheating spouses?’ Natalia says.
‘Sure,’ Jen says lightly. ‘Yes.’ She bolsters the lie. ‘The court will be much easier on the wife if we can prove adultery.’ This is strictly legally correct, though Jen would never usually go to these lengths.
‘Great.’ Natalia takes a pad and pen and goes to leave. ‘If you have trouble finding him, call me,’ Jen says.
Jen struggles to get any work done while Natalia is gone, which she
supposes doesn’t really matter. She undertakes useless filing and filling in of timesheets instead, while she waits.
Natalia arrives back at one o’clock, over two hours after Jen dispatched her. She is holding a blue legal pad and an Eagles pen bearing the logo that Jen’s dad designed years ago. Her hair is still absolutely, completely immaculate. ‘I bought a Coke, I hope that’s okay?’ Natalia says.
Jen feels a dart of guilt. God, this is a sordid task to give to a trainee on her first day, and she didn’t even brief her on expenses. ‘Oh my God, of course,’ Jen says. She gets a ten-pound note out of her purse and hands it to Natalia.
‘Shouldn’t I put it in the – the system?’
‘I am the system,’ Jen says crisply. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘All right,’ Natalia says, and Jen suddenly feels like some kind of psycho, dispatching a completely new trainee to spy on her husband. The kind of
desperate behaviour of somebody unhinged, somebody abusing their power. She pushes the thoughts away. It’s for the greater good.
‘Okay,’ Natalia goes on. ‘He – Kelly – met a woman. He calls her Nic. I don’t think they are having an affair, though.’
Nicola Williams. Again and again and again. Even though she knows what she looks like, she still cannot find her online.
‘No?’
‘It didn’t look that way. It was a business meeting.’ Jen swallows. ‘Right,’ she says. ‘Shoot.’
‘They seemed to be starting up some sort of arrangement again? It’s hard to say what. Possibly working for someone called Joe – I don’t know. Kelly
doesn’t want to do it. Nic wants him to, she seems to … maybe think he owes her something. It sounded very loaded. I don’t know …’
‘Okay. And Joe wasn’t there?’
‘No – they kept saying he was inside. But I didn’t really understand
because they were inside?’ Natalia stops speaking, her pen poised above the pad, leafing through it, flicking through pages and pages of immaculate notes. Fucking hell, Jen thinks, Natalia went to Oxford University, Marlborough College before that. And yet. Inside. She doesn’t know what that means. These kids. These naïve kids.
‘I think that’s it. There was a lot of talk around what work they’d do for Joe, but no specifics mentioned,’ Natalia finishes.
Inside.
Jen holds a finger up and googles Joseph Jones prison. The information about him was there all along, hidden away among the common names. He was released last week from HMP Altcourse and was convicted twenty
years ago in one of the largest trials of its type.
Possession with Intent to Supply Class A Drugs, Conspiracy to Rob, Conspiracy to Produce Counterfeit Currency, Section 18 Grievous Bodily Harm with Intent. The offences go on and on. Drugs, money laundering, robbing, stealing cars, burgling people’s houses, violence. As many as there are droplets of mist outside when Todd murders him. Jen reads each while Natalia stands there in silence. She gradually becomes numb to them, to what this could possibly mean about her husband, and for her son.
‘Thanks,’ she says softly to Natalia after a second. ‘Great job.’
‘Shame he’s not cheating,’ Natalia says. ‘If it would’ve helped. He actually mentioned how much he loved his wife.’
Jen turns away from her computer, and from Natalia, too, staring out the window, down at the street, her eyes wet. ‘Did he?’ she whispers.
‘Yeah. Just said he loved his wife. No context really, in among all the Joe stuff.’
Jen nods, turning back to Natalia, wondering what would happen if she imparted some wisdom here, knowing, as she does, what faces Natalia in the future.
But knowing the future is worse than not knowing. Isn’t it?
