Jen opens her eyes.
She must have come up to bed. And she must have slept. She doesn’t feel like she did either, but she’s in her bedroom, not on the sofa, and it’s now light outside beyond their slatted blinds.
She rolls on to her side. Say it isn’t true.
She blinks, staring at the empty bed. She’s alone. Kelly will already be up, making calls, she very much hopes.
Her clothes litter the bedroom floor as if she evaporated out of them. She steps over them, pulling on jeans and a plain rollneck jumper which makes her look truly enormous but that she loves anyway.
She ventures out on to the hallway, standing outside Todd’s empty room.
Her son. Spent the night in a police cell. She can’t think about how many more might await him.
Right. She can sort this. Jen is an excellent rescuer, has spent all of her life doing just that, and now it’s time to help her son.
She can figure this out. Why did he do it?
Why did he have a knife with him? Who was the victim, this grown man her son has probably killed? Suddenly Jen can see little clues in Todd in the recent weeks and months. Moodiness. Weight loss. Secrecy. Things she had put down to teenagehood. Just two days ago, he had taken a call, out in the garden. When Jen had asked who it was, he told her it was none of her business, then threw the phone on to the sofa. It had bounced, once, then
fallen to the floor, where they’d both looked at it. He had passed it off as a joke, but it hadn’t been, that small temper tantrum.
Jen stares and stares at the door to her son’s bedroom. How had she come to raise a murderer? Teenage rage. Knife crime. Gangs. Antifa. Which is it? Which hand have they been dealt?
She can’t hear Kelly at all. Halfway down the stairs, she glances out of the picture window, the window that she stood at only hours ago, the moment everything changed. It is still foggy.
She is surprised to see the road below bears no stains – the rain and the mist must have washed the blood away. The police have moved on. The police tape has gone.
She glances up the street, the edges peppered with trees ablaze with crunchy autumn leaves. But something is strange about what she sees. She can’t work out what. It must just be the memories of last night. Rendering the view sinister, somehow. Slightly off.
She hurries downstairs, through their wooden-floored hallway and into
the kitchen. It smells of last night in here, before anything happened. Food, candles. Normality.
She hears a voice, right above her, a deep male register. Kelly. She looks at the ceiling, confused. He must be in Todd’s room. Searching it, probably. She understands that impulse entirely. The urge to find what the police couldn’t.
‘Kell?’ she calls out, running back up the stairs, out of breath by the time she reaches the top. ‘We need to get on – which solicitor we should –’
‘Three score and Jen!’ a voice says. It comes from Todd’s room and is unmistakably her son’s. Jen takes a step back so massive it makes her
stumble at the top of the stairs.
And she’s not imagining it: Todd emerges from the confines of his room, wearing a black T-shirt which says Science Guy on it, and jogging bottoms. He has clearly just woken, and squints down at her, his pale face the only light in the darkness. ‘We haven’t done that one yet,’ he says with a dimpled grin. ‘I even – I must confess – went on a pun website.’
Jen can only gape at him. Her son, the killer. There is no blood on his hands. No murderous expression on his face, and yet.
‘What?’ she says. ‘How are you here?’
‘Huh?’ He really does look just the same as he did. Even in her confusion, Jen is curious. Same blue eyes. Same tousled, black hair. Same
tall, slim frame. But he’s committed an unforgivable act. Unforgivable to everyone, except maybe her.
How is he here? How is he home? ‘What?’ he prompts.
‘How did you get back?’
Todd’s brow flickers. ‘This is weird, even for you.’ ‘Did Dad get you? Are you on bail?’ she barks.
‘On bail?’ He raises an eyebrow, a new mannerism. For the past few months, he’s looked different. Slimmer in the body, in the hips, but bloated in the face. With the pallor somebody gets when they are working too much, eating too many takeaways and drinking no water. None of which Jen is aware Todd is doing, but who knows? And then along came this mannerism, acquired just after he met his new girlfriend, Clio.
‘I’m about to meet Connor.’
Connor. A boy from his year, but another new friend, made only this summer. Jen befriended his mum, Pauline, years ago. She is just Jen’s sort of person: jaded, sweary, not a natural mother, the kind of person who implicitly gives Jen permission to mess up. Jen has always been drawn to these types of people. All of her friends are unpretentious, unafraid to do and say what they think. Just recently, Pauline had said of Connor’s younger brother, Theo: ‘I love him, but because he’s seven, he often acts
like a twat.’ They’d laughed like guilty loons at the school gate.
Jen steps forwards and looks closely at Todd. No mark of the devil on him, no change behind his eyes, no weapons in the room beyond him. In fact, it looks untouched.
‘How did you get home – and what happened?’ ‘Home from where?’
‘The police station,’ Jen says plainly. She finds herself keeping a distance from him. Just a step more than usual. She no longer knows what this person – her child, the love of her life – is capable of.
‘Sorry – the police station?’ he says, evidently amused. ‘Question mark?’ Todd’s expression twists, nose wrinkling up just like it did when he was a baby. He has two tiny scars left over from the worst of his teenage acne.
Otherwise, his face is still childlike, pristine in that beautiful peach-fuzz way of the young.
‘Your arrest, Todd!’ ‘My arrest?’
Jen can usually tell when her son is lying, and at that moment she
registers that he is definitely not. He looks at her with his clear twilight eyes, confusion inscribed across his features. ‘What?’ she says in barely a whisper. Something is creeping up her spine, some tentative, frightening knowledge. ‘I saw … I saw what you did.’ She gestures to the mid-landing window. And that’s the moment she realizes what’s the matter. It isn’t the scene outside: it’s the window itself. No pumpkin. It’s gone.
Jen’s teeth begin to chatter. This can’t be happening.
She tears her eyes away from the pumpkin-less windowsill. ‘I saw,’ she says again.
‘Saw what?’ His eyes are so like Kelly’s, she finds herself thinking, for at least the thousandth time in her life: they’re identical.
She just looks at him and, for once, his gaze holds hers. ‘What happened last night, after you got back.’
‘I wasn’t out last night.’ The banter, the pretension, the posturing are all gone.
‘What? I was waiting up for you, you were late, but then the clocks changed …’
He pauses, maintaining eye contact. ‘The clocks go back tomorrow. It’s Friday today?’
