‌Day Minus Six Thousand Nine Hundred and Ninety-Eight, 11:00‌

‘I worked with him, yes,’ Kelly’s voice says, ‘for several months last year.’ He has disguised his Welsh accent, smoothed it out like planing wood. Jen is fairly sure only she would know this was him. The verbal cues you pick up only through twenty years of marriage.

‘And what was your role?’ The questions continue even though Jen’s mind is still trying to process it. The fact keeps repeating on her like

shockwaves after an earthquake. He’s a police officer. He was a police officer?

Her eyes trail upwards to the tiny windows at the top of the courtroom. He never told her. He never told her, he never told her, he never told her.

Her life is a lie.

Thoughts gather around her like a crowd of reporters asking questions.

How could he have kept this from her? Kelly? Her happy-go-lucky, trustworthy husband, Kelly? It doesn’t even explain anything. Why are they seeing the repercussions of this lie twenty years later? Why is Todd

involved?

He never told her. He never told her. Jen puts her forehead in her hands.

But then, isn’t this truth more palatable than the other? Maybe, but being damned if you do and damned if you don’t is still damned.

‘I was assigned to infiltrate the organized-crime gang the defendant was running,’ Kelly says dispassionately. God, it’s mad. It’s mad.

‘And at what point were you dispatched?’

Kelly clears his throat. ‘When the baby was stolen.’

‘Your Honour,’ the defence barrister, an elderly man, says immediately, rising to his feet. ‘Please stick to the points in issue.’

‘When two foot soldiers stole a baby as part of the workings of the defendant’s supply chain,’ Kelly clarifies acerbically.

‘Your Honour –’ the barrister says again.

‘Witness B, we respectfully ask that you stick to the facts at issue. This is not a kidnapping trial.’

‘We never found the perpetrators,’ Kelly says. ‘But the defendant knows.’

‘Your Honour –’

‘Witness B,’ the judge says, clearly exasperated now.

‘Fine,’ Kelly says. Jen knows his teeth are gritted, hollows appearing underneath his cheekbones. He pauses, and she knows, too, that he will now be running a hand through his hair. Even this Kelly, who she hasn’t seen for twenty years. Even this Kelly, who she has at this point loved for only six months. This Kelly, who’s been a liar from day one. A painter/decorator

since aged sixteen. Both parents dead. Never been to college, left school after GCSEs. How true is any of it? How can he be police? Why didn’t he tell her?

She would’ve understood. It’s hardly a crime, to have been an undercover police officer.

She shifts uncomfortably in the public gallery, wishing she could cross- examine along with the barristers.

‘I was instructed to find out the defendant’s identity,’ Kelly says. ‘And I did so by going in at the very bottom level of his gang. For reasons relating to my anonymity, I can’t explain any further than that what my role was.’

‘What sort of tasks did you undertake for the defendant?’

‘For reasons relating to my anonymity, I can’t explain any further than that what my role was.’

‘What did you witness the defendant – directly – doing?’ ‘For reasons –’

The barrister sighs, clearly irritated. She takes off her glasses, cleans them theatrically on her robes, then puts them back on. For quite whose benefit, Jen isn’t sure.

‘I can tell you what I didn’t do,’ Kelly says, in a tone of voice Jen knows to precede something unhelpful.

‘Yes?’ the barrister says.

‘I didn’t ever find the people who Joseph instructed to commit crimes.

Instructions that resulted in the kidnap of baby Eve.’

‘Right.’ The defence barrister jumps to his feet. The judge waves them over, casting a look to the troublemaking black curtains. ‘Jury out,’ he says.

They filter back out into the foyer and, after ten minutes, an usher confirms the case is adjourned until tomorrow. Jen stands there, open- mouthed. ‘What?’ she says.

‘We’re resuming again tomorrow,’ an usher says to her, a dismissal. Jen stands in the foyer, people milling around her like a school of fish.

She doesn’t have a tomorrow, she thinks desperately. It won’t come.

Kelly goes white when he sees Jen standing by his car.

His cheeks sink. His lips blanch. His eyes dart left and right, then he

smiles at her. Trying to style it out. Jen watches him, this man who becomes her husband, lying to her. His suit is already rumpled, the jacket slung over his arm. He looks ill, pale and young, almost like a child, very much like Todd.

‘I saw your testimony,’ she says simply. ‘I was in the public gallery.’ Her body immediately wants to cry and to be comforted by this man she’s loved for over half her life. The man she would always turn to.

‘I …’ He looks up the high street, into the sun, then gestures to his car. ‘Is that it?’ she says to him. In the pause in which he considers which

truths to tell and which to conceal, Jen tries to move the events in her brain so that they run forwards, not backwards, but she can’t think, her mind a sea of disparate facts. Maybe it will end here, she thinks. She could break up with Kelly. But so many questions remain unanswered. She knows

somehow, thanks to Andy maybe, that it isn’t yet time.

They get inside the car. The air outside is soupy, the seats warm against their thighs. He guns the engine and drives, fast, out of Liverpool. He still hasn’t spoken.

‘Kelly?’ she says. She hates that she has to prompt him. ‘I mean …’ She tries to remember that they have only been in a relationship for six months. That he doesn’t know the future, that they make it. They make it twenty

happy years and counting. Somehow. He doesn’t know the importance of what he is toying with, of what is at stake.

Kelly says nothing. He navigates a one-way junction, eyes flicking to the rear-view mirror.

‘You’re undercover police.’

He nods, just once, a downward bob of his head. ‘Yeah.’ ‘Is … were you undercover when you met me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is your name Kelly?’

He waits a beat. ‘No.’ He swallows, Adam’s apple sliding up and down. ‘How is this – how could you?’ Jen’s mind is spinning, spinning,

spinning in space, in the blackness. She can’t string a sentence together. ‘You’ve lied to me …’ Jen says slowly.

‘It’s confidential.’

Jen has so many questions she doesn’t know where to start. She is trying to marry up two things that simply do not go together.

Kelly looks like he’s going to cry. Eyes red-rimmed. Gaze scanning the horizon. She knows him. She knows when he’s unhappy. ‘My real name is Ryan,’ he says quietly. ‘Kelly was … someone I knew.’

Ryan. Things begin to fall into place. ‘How …’ Jen starts to say, trying to frame it correctly. ‘How do you intend to just – live as Kelly?’

He shifts, uncomfortable. ‘I – I don’t know.’ ‘Kill Ryan off? Fake his death?’

He turns to her in surprise. ‘No, what? I don’t know … I don’t know what I’m going to do about it.’

Jen looks away from him, out of the window. Classic, evasive Kelly.

Ignore the problem. Then – when it crops up … damage control. The abandoned house, Sandalwood, makes more sense to her now. Gina thought Ryan Hiles was dead because it passed to the Crown, the same thing Rakesh found. But there was no other record of Ryan Hiles’s death. It seems

obvious now. A fake death certificate, bought for the sole purpose of showing it to the Land Registry to ensure the property didn’t pass to him and make him traceable, blowing his cover. But he didn’t do anything else, didn’t register his own death in any other way which would have attracted scrutiny, required more documents, more things he couldn’t produce: a body, for one. It was a sticking plaster over a huge wound.

His mother must have died only recently. Sandalwood was only just beginning to fall into disrepair. Jen supposes that, when he cried in the bathroom when Todd was three, his mother might have been alive, and he missed her.

He looks at her. ‘I left the police,’ he says. ‘Last year. I stayed as Kelly because …’

‘Why?’ she says.

‘Because I met you.’

‘But you could have – couldn’t you have told me? Or just chosen a new name?’

‘Joseph Jones believes I am a criminal called Kelly,’ he says quietly, so softly she has to strain to hear. ‘If I change anything, or if I tell anyone – word would get back to him that I was never Kelly. It would be the most obvious tell of all that I am undercover. So I – I have stayed.’

‘You stayed a criminal?’

‘So he thinks, but I’m not. I’m not doing anything. I decided I had better hide in plain sight. It’ll be better when he’s convicted,’ he says ruefully, but Jen knows that it isn’t. Every prison sentence has an end and, by then, it’s too late. Ryan has truly become Kelly.

‘What would the police do if they knew?’

‘Arrest me, probably, because I haven’t been acting on their authority.

For fraud by false representation. Maybe sue me, too. Say I was impersonating a police officer, get me on charges for misconduct in a public office.’

Jen is hot and panicked. This is so, so much bigger than she thought it would be. She closes her eyes. They’d arrest him not only for fraud but also for those crimes he commits in 2022 to keep his cover. He will not be protected by immunity for those. He will be regarded as a criminal.

‘When we went travelling. You didn’t want to come back. You wanted to stay in the cottage – in the middle of nowhere. Because of him?’

‘Yes. He knew … he knew two of his soldiers dobbed him in. A woman and a man.’

Nicola.

‘Why didn’t you ever tell me?’ she asks.

Kelly’s gaze moves off hers. ‘Confidential,’ he says, his voice low. ‘But … I mean.’ She can’t say the things she wants to say: does

confidentiality apply between lovers? Why did he think it was acceptable to

keep this from her for ever? Because he hasn’t lived for ever yet, with her. ‘Were you ever going to tell me?’ she says.

‘Of course I was,’ Kelly says. ‘I am.’ Jen marvels at their different tenses. Hers past. His future.

But it’s a lie. Jen’s lived it.

The last piece of the puzzle finally drifts into place now, in the correct order, front to back, as it should be. Jen stares at it in her mind. ‘Can I ask

…’ she says, thinking of what Kelly just said about Joseph. ‘Yeah?’

‘When Joseph gets out of prison, if he found out you were the copper who sent him down, what do you think he would do?’

‘He won’t find out. The curtain … they disguised my voice. There were so many of us – working for him. The scale of it …’

‘But say – somehow … he does. What then?’

Kelly waits a beat, then speaks. ‘He’d come and kill me.’