‘I can’t charge you for this,’ Jen had said. It wasn’t the right thing to do, she thought, to profiteer off this. Soon enough, Gina would come to her senses and stop.
‘So do it for free,’ Gina said, and Jen had. Not because her late father’s firm didn’t need the money, but because Jen knew, eventually, that Gina would drop it, accept the decree nisi, accept the residency split, and move on. But it hadn’t happened yet, not after Jen told Gina to go away and think about it over the summer, and advised against it in the many meetings during the autumn. They’d chatted, too, about all sorts – their kids, the news, even Love Island. ‘Gross but compelling,’ Gina had said, while Jen laughed and nodded.
Jen looks at Todd now and wonders, suddenly, if he’s in love, like Gina is. Wonders who this Clio really is to him. What she means. The madness of first love cannot be overlooked, surely, given what he does in two days’ time.
Jen has not met Clio. After Gemma dumped him over the summer, Todd became automatically secretive about his love life, embarrassed, Jen thinks, that it didn’t last. Embarrassed about that evening when he’d showed her all those unanswered texts.
Just as he’s getting ready to go out again, he glances, just once, at the front door. It isn’t a quick, curious glance. It’s something else. Some wariness, like he’s expecting somebody to be there, like he’s nervous. Jen never would have noticed it had she not been scrutinizing him. It’s so quick, his expression clearing almost immediately.
‘What’s that?’ Todd says, looking back at her and gesturing to her screen.
‘Oh, I was just reading this interesting thing. About time loops, you know?’
‘Love that,’ Todd says. He’s gelled his hair upwards in a kind of quiff, has on a retro-looking snooker shirt. He’s recently into it, says he likes the maths of potting the balls. Jen looks at him, her damningly handsome son.
‘What would you do – if you were caught in one?’ she asks him.
‘Oh, it’s almost always about some tiny detail,’ Todd says casually.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know, the butterfly effect. One tiny thing to change the future.’ Todd reaches down to stroke the cat and, just for a second, looks like a child again. Her boy who believes unquestioningly in time loops. Perhaps she will tell him. See what he says.
But, for now, she can’t. If this is really, truly, happening, it is Jen’s job to stop the murder. To figure out the events leading up to it, and to intervene. And then, one day, when she manages that, she will wake up, and it won’t be yesterday.
And so that is why she doesn’t tell Todd.
He leaves, and Jen checks that nobody is waiting for him, or following him. And then Jen follows him herself.
Day Minus Two, 19:00
Jen is two cars behind Todd, and is paradoxically relieved to find that he is an incompetent driver: not once, so far as she can tell, has he checked his rear-view mirror and spotted her.
He slows down on a road called Eshe Road North. It would be described by an estate agent as leafy, as though plants don’t grow on housing estates. There are pumpkins on some of the steps to the houses, carved early, lit up, grotesque reminders of everything that’s to come.
Todd parks his car carefully. Jen drives to a side-street, a few houses down, unlit, so she is hopefully unseen, and gets out, drawing her trench coat around her. The night air has that early-autumn spooky feel to it. Damp spiderwebs, the feeling of something coming to an end before you’re truly ready to leave it.
Todd walks purposefully down the road, white trainers kicking up the leaves. It is so strange for Jen to witness this; the things that happened while she was lawyering, while she was busy caring too much about work and – clearly – not enough about home.
She stands at the junction of the side-street and Eshe Road North until Todd disappears abruptly inside a house. It is large, set back from the road, with a wide porch and a loft conversion. These kinds of places still intimidate Jen, who grew up in a two-bed terrace that had windows so rickety the breeze wafted her hair around in the evenings. Her father, widowed, didn’t notice the draught, and anyway took on too much legal aid work and not enough private to fix it even if he did.
She rounds her shoulders against the cold, a woman in a too-thin coat on a rainy street, looking at the trees covered in their burnt-orange jackets, just thinking. About Todd and about her father and about today, tomorrow and yesterday.
She paces down the street. Todd’s inside number 32. She googles the address while she waits, her fingers so cold she can’t type easily. It’s listed as the registered office of Cutting & Sewing Ltd, which is owned by Ezra Michaels and Joseph Jones. It was set up recently and has never submitted any accounts.
As Todd is swallowed up into the house, someone else leaves.
She’s right in the way.
The figure comes through the garden gate just as she passes and, suddenly, she is face to face with a dead man. No, that’s not right. A man who dies in two days’ time. The victim.
Day Minus Two, 19:20
Jen would recognize him anywhere, even though he – currently – has light in his eyes, colour in his cheeks. This very much alive man, with mere days to live, looks like somebody who was perhaps once attractive. He is mid-forties, maybe older. He has a full dark beard and elfin ears that point out at their tips.
‘Hi there,’ Jen says spontaneously to him.
‘All right,’ he says warily. His body goes completely still except his black eyes, which run over her face. She tries to think. She needs as much information as possible. Isn’t honesty by far the best policy? With clients, with opponents at work, and with your son’s enemies, too.
‘Todd is my son,’ she says simply. ‘I’m Jen.’
‘Oh. You’re Jen, Jen Brotherhood,’ he replies. He seems to know her. ‘I’m Joseph.’ His voice is gravelly, but he talks in an authoritative kind of way, like a politician.
Joseph Jones. It must be. The man whose company is registered here.
‘Nice kid, Todd. Dating Ezra’s niece, isn’t he?’
‘Ezra is …’
‘My friend. And business partner.’
Jen swallows, trying to digest this information. ‘Look. I just wondered. I’m a bit worried about him. Todd. Sorry to just – drop by,’ she says lamely.
‘You’re worried?’ He cocks his head.
‘Yeah – you know. Worried he’s got in with a bad –’
‘Todd’s in safe hands. All right now,’ he says. An instant dismissal by a pro. He motions to her, a kind of Which way are you going? gesture. No mistake about it, it means: Choose, because you are going, whether you like it or not.
She does nothing, so he brushes past, leaving her there, alone, in the mist, wondering what’s happening. Whether the future has continued on without her. If there’s another Jen somewhere. Asleep, or too shocked to function? In the world where Todd is probably currently remanded, arrested, charged, convicted. Alone.
She decides to ring the doorbell. The depressing lack of tomorrow has made her fatalistic. And thinking of Todd in police custody has made her desperate.
‘I just wanted to know that he’s okay,’ Jen says to the stranger at the door. He must be Ezra. Slightly younger than Joseph. A thickset man with a bent nose.
‘Mum?’ Todd says from somewhere deep in the house. He emerges into the gloom of the hallway. He looks pale and harassed.
Jen thinks the house was once nice but is now the shabby side of shabby-chic. Worn Victorian quarry tiles. A few offcuts of carpet overlap in the hallway like old papers. ‘What …?’ Todd says to her, making his way past all this. He communicates his bewilderment to her with a tense smile.
A beautiful young woman emerges out of the living room at the end of the hallway, opening the door with her hip. It must be Clio. Jen can tell by the way she moves towards Todd that they are a couple.