Day Minus One Hundred and Forty-Four, 18:30
‘Oh, it was mad,’ Todd is saying animatedly to Jen, his words tripping over each other. Jen is sitting on the loveseat in their bay window, thinking that her husband is involved in organized crime. ‘Fractional distillation didn’t
come up at all. We did all the prep on it – we thought it would be the main question, and it just totally wasn’t?’ He fiddles with Henry VIII’s collar, the cat lying contentedly on his lap on the sofa. ‘It never goes the way you’d expect, you know?’ He shifts, unable to keep still, and the cat jumps down on to the floor. Three candles are lit along the windowsill.
Jen nods, smiling at her son.
The first thing she noticed this morning was that her phone was different.
Her hand closed clumsily around it. It was chunkier, bigger than the
slimline one that she got in early July. Shit shit shit, she thought. She knew she’d jumped back further before she checked the date.
It was June. The rose bush in the front garden of the house opposite was in full bloom as she stared out of her bedroom window, fat bundles of fragrant flowers clutched together, about to fall. How could it be June?
Where was this going to end? In nothingness? In birth, in death? And – an even darker thought – it’s too late for Jen to kill him herself, like Kelly suggested, all those days ago. He’s inside.
The first thing that Jen thought, getting dressed in different clothes,
clothes she throws out in several months’ time, was who Kelly is to Joseph. And how it might have worked: Joseph gets out of prison, comes to the law
firm to find his old friend Kelly, Todd gets involved with Clio, doesn’t like what he finds out Joseph and Kelly are doing, and kills Joseph? It was plausible, but unlikely, she concluded. It seems a weak motivation for murder. And it leaves a lot to be explained: Ryan Hiles, the missing baby, Nicola Williams, the veiled conversations between Kelly and Todd. The thing Joseph knows about Kelly.
She looks at Todd, now, sitting in the lamplight with cat hair all over his trousers. ‘You’ll have aced it,’ she says thickly.
‘Well, I did actually enjoy it! Jed said I’m mental.’ He’s giddy. With relief, with the endorphins that follow stress, and with something else, maybe, too. Something that is missing in the autumn. Some lightness. ‘I mean – am I some sadist? … What?’ he says, stopping, looking across the room at her.
‘You’re not a sadist,’ she says, but even she can hear her voice is imbued with sadness. She misses this. Just normality, not fractured days, everything backwards. She doesn’t even know why she’s woken up on today, the seventh of June. Todd hasn’t met Clio yet. Joseph is inside. So what is it?
She leans her face in the palm of her hand.
‘I wonder if I’ll get an A,’ Todd says thoughtfully. ‘Maybe just a B.’ He gets an A.
Only recently, Todd came home talking so happily about making polymer bouncing balls. ‘Polymer what?’ Kelly had said. Todd had hesitated, then pulled one out of his rucksack. ‘Got you one,’ he’d said lightly, confident enough to steal from school. They hadn’t minded, thought it was funny. He was overly interested in chemistry, so what if he shouldn’t have been allowed to take it? Maybe it’s that sort of thing that causes Todd to go wayward. Jen never gave much thought to what sort of parent she’d be, but maybe she was too relaxed, favouring banter over discipline. Fooled, by his intellect, into thinking he’d never rebel. But all kids rebel, even the good ones: they just rebel differently.
Jen looks at her handsome son and thinks about everything that future- Todd will miss out on. University, marriage, some graduate scheme with other geniuses. But instead, what faces him? Remand, a trial, prison. Out by the time he’s thirty-five. The knowledge, for ever, that he has taken a life, for whatever misguided reason.
‘Are you going to order, or shall I?’ Todd says, waving the Domino’s app at her on his phone.
They must have agreed to get a takeaway. ‘Yeah – let’s just wait for Dad.’ Henry VIII pads over and leaps up on to Jen’s lap. He is slimmer, too, she thinks ruefully.
Todd makes an over-the-top puzzled face, a cartoon double-take. ‘Oh-
kay,’ he says. ‘Dad’s away, but sure. You do that, Jen.’
‘Is he?’ she asks sharply. ‘At risk of being accused of being old,’ she adds, rictus grin in place, ‘remind me where he is?’
‘It’s Whitsun.’
‘Oh,’ Jen says. She can feel her mouth make the shape, a round, significant O. Kelly goes away every Whitsun weekend, camping with old friends from school. A long-standing arrangement. She’s never met them, something that she had wondered about but that Kelly had explained easily. ‘Oh, they’re not local, I just see them on that one weekend. Honestly, it’d
bore you to tears.’
‘Pizza for two then,’ she says to Todd, but, in fact, she’s thinking: That’s why. That’s why today. Out of all of the days that have come before.
Thank God. Thank God she turned on Find My iPhone this morning on Kelly’s phone, the same way she does each morning now. When she checked earlier, he was in Liverpool, but she’ll look again.
‘Let me think,’ Jen says, getting her phone out, ostensibly ordering pizza but, really, looking at Find My iPhone. Kelly goes camping in the Lake District. Lake Windermere. Same spot every year.
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.
Here’s a rewritten version:
—
Jen wanted to savor these last few moments… until whatever was coming next.
With Eri’s headlights now switched off, her eyes adjusted to the dimly lit drive. The road twisted left, then right. The sky was a luminous mother of pearl, on the brink of the summer solstice. The trees were thick, their leaves interlocking like shaggy blankets.
Suddenly, headlights cut through the sky like lasers. “He’s driving,” Eri announced as he quickly reversed back onto the main road. Jen glanced at her phone, watching as the blue dot on the screen started to move.
Kelly drove past them, oblivious to their presence. “Should we follow?” Eri asked.
“No. I want to see where he was—what’s at the end of this drive.”
Eri silently drove all the way to the top. The road wound in a way that concealed what lay ahead. Jen had imagined a wedding venue, a castle, maybe even a stately home. Instead, a small and shabby housing development emerged, one building at a time. Seven houses scattered around a shingled driveway. Eri brought the car to a stop. The houses were old stone, with lights on in four of them; the others were dark.
One house stood out, looking more neglected than the rest. Missing roof tiles. A rickety wooden front door, almost rotten. A bay window on the first floor was boarded up, with “QAnon” scrawled on it in pink spray paint. Eri sat in silence while Jen stared at the house. She was certain this was the one. It was the only one without a car parked outside.
“I have no idea what this is,” she muttered. “It looks shady.”
Jen’s mind raced with possibilities. A place for deals. A hideout. Somewhere 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 whispered to Eri, keeping her darker thoughts to herself. “Maybe he is. Looks pretty outdoorsy,” Eri joked.
“In the Lake District.” “Oh.”
“Will you wait here?” she asked, slowly opening the door. “I need to go check it out.”
“Sure,” he replied, though his expression grew more cautious. He was just her temporary Uber driver, the one she had confided in the most.
She glanced back at him as she stepped out. He was bathed in the interior light, like a snow globe in the darkness.
Jen walked hesitantly across the gray shingle. The air outside felt like a vacation. Summertime scents, the sound of crickets.
Suddenly, she longed to be back there, on the landing with the pumpkin, watching Todd kill a man. She would just let it happen. Accept it. He’d do his time and eventually have a life afterward. For the first time, she wanted to cover up this wound she had uncovered. To stop delving into its depths. To move on.
She approached the house and tried the front door, but it was locked. It sat slightly apart from the other houses. None of them had boundaries—no fences, no front or back gardens. The neighbor’s manicured lawn stopped at an arbitrary line. Beyond it, the wildness of this garden took over—nettles, weeds, and two giant pink lupins swaying in the breeze.
Jen pushed open the letterbox. It reminded her of the one from her childhood home. It was stiff and cold under her fingertips, and she thought of her father and the day he died, and how she hadn’t made it in time.
Through the letterbox, she could see an old-fashioned hallway with uneven quarry tiles. She guessed Kelly had picked up the post from the floor and stacked it on the hallway table.
The sign on the side of the door read “Sandalwood.” The next cottage along was labeled “Bay.” It was tiny, just two rooms deep. Jen walked a clockwise loop around it. At the back were two old sliding patio doors, the glass stained with a touch of moss.
Inside, a dark-wood dining table stood on a teal-carpeted floor, like something out of a doll’s house. No chairs. An empty kitchenette to the left, with nothing on the work surfaces—not even a kettle. Jen pressed her forehead against the patio doors to peer inside, and her fingers came away green.
The house was uncared for, but not abandoned—perhaps recently emptied.
She circled back to the front. The living room windows were mullioned, every other pane a distorted circle of blown glass. The living room itself was preserved, like a museum or a set. A pink three-piece suite sat in the center, its arms draped in once-white lace. A remote control lay on an empty coffee table at an angle. A full bookcase, though she couldn’t make out the titles. Two dusty champagne flutes perched on top. She was about to stop looking when something caught her eye: the distinctive black velvet back of a double photo frame, right on the windowsill, littered with dead flies. The distorted glass had almost hidden it from view. She shifted against the window to get a closer look.
The air seemed to settle, as if the universe itself was holding its breath. This wasn’t a wild-goose chase. This wasn’t madness.
Here it was.
A photograph of Kelly—unmistakably Kelly—with that guarded, small smile.
He was much younger, perhaps twenty, standing next to someone else. A man with a shaved head. Their arms were around each other. The frame was thick with dust, and she was a foot away, but she could see they looked alike. Their eyes. And something more—a shared essence, the way families sometimes resemble each other in ways beyond the obvious. Bone structure, the shape of their foreheads, the way they stood: as if ready to burst into motion, like runners on the starting blocks.
Who was he? This stranger who resembled her husband? Kelly had always claimed to have no living relatives—something she had always believed. As she studied the figures in the photograph, she thought about how different it was to lie about an acquaintance who had been to prison versus lying about your own family, about where you came from.
And why would her husband leave a photo of himself in a house if it was connected to something illegal? He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. He wasn’t that foolish.
She walked back to the Uber. Kelly had the same eyes as Todd. And this man, too. That’s all she could think about. Three pairs of navy-blue eyes. Her husband, her son, and a stranger. Someone she didn’t know and couldn’t find. Even if she broke in and took the photograph, she wouldn’t have it tomorrow.
Eri was playing a platform game on his phone, holding it horizontally and tapping at the screen while tinny music played. “Sorry,” he said, locking the screen as Jen climbed into the front seat beside him.
“What…” he began, his tone suggesting he felt obligated to ask.
“I don’t know. It’s empty.”
Jen opened the app and checked Find My iPhone. Kelly was now heading toward the Lake District, just as he had said. But he had stopped here, at this abandoned house, along the way.
“Who owns it?”
“Hang on,” Jen replied. You could find out who owned any property through the Land Registry for three pounds.
She downloaded the title and scrolled to the registry. The owner was the Duchy of Lancaster—the Crown. Unclaimed property reverts to the Crown. It’s the first thing any property lawyer learns. Jen stared at the house, her phone glowing in her lap.
“Mind if I smoke?” Eri asked, rolling down his window.
“Go ahead.” The lighter sparked twice, briefly illuminating the car. He smoked, and she thought. His cigarette smelled like the past: summer evenings outside wine bars, waiting at train stations, the docks at night.
“We should go,” Jen said.
“Will you confront him?” Eri asked, his cheekbones prominent as he drew on the cigarette.
“No. He’ll just lie.”
They drove in silence, Jen thinking about the two men in the photograph.
Her husband, and someone else. Someone who looked like him. What did it all mean?
When Jen got home, two pizza boxes sat on the counter. One empty, one full. Todd had eaten without her. He must have ordered it himself, alone.
