He pushes one of the double glass doors open and they hurry in across a tired grey linoleum foyer. It smells old-fashioned inside. Like schools, like hospitals, like care homes. Institutions that require uniforms and crap food, the kind of places Kelly hates. ‘I will never,’ he’d said early on in their relationship, ‘join the rat race.’
‘I’ll talk to them,’ Kelly says shortly to Jen. He is trembling. But it doesn’t seem to be from fear, rather from anger. He is furious.
‘It’s fine – I can lawyer up and do the initial –’
‘Where’s the super?’ Kelly barks to a bald officer manning reception who has a signet ring on his little finger. Kelly’s body language is different. Legs spread widely, shoulders puffed up. Even Jen has only rarely seen him drop his guard like this.
In a bored tone, the officer tells them to wait to be seen.
‘You’ve got five minutes,’ Kelly says, pointing to the clock before throwing himself into a chair across the foyer.
Jen sits down next to him and takes his hand. His wedding ring is loose on his finger. He must be cold. They sit there, Kelly crossing and uncrossing his long legs, huffing, Jen saying nothing. An officer arrives in reception, speaking quietly into his phone. ‘It’s the same crime as two days ago – a section 18 wounding with intent. That victim was Nicola Williams, perpetrator AWOL.’ His voice is so low, Jen has to strain to hear.
She sits, just listening. Section 18 wounding with intent is a stabbing. They must be talking about Todd. And a similar crime from two days ago.
Eventually, the arresting officer emerges, the tall one with the cheekbones.
Jen looks at the clock behind the desk. It’s three thirty, or perhaps four thirty. She doesn’t know whether it’s British Summer Time in here still. It’s disorientating.
‘Your son is staying with us tonight – we’ll interview him soon.’
‘Where – back there?’ Kelly says. ‘Let me in.’
‘You won’t be able to see him,’ the officer says. ‘You are witnesses.’
Irritation flares within Jen. This sort of thing – exactly this – is why people hate the justice system.
‘It’s like that, is it?’ Kelly says acidly to the officer. He holds his hands up.
‘Sorry?’ the officer says mildly.
‘What, so we’re enemies?’
‘Kelly!’ Jen says.
‘Nobody is anybody’s enemy,’ the officer says. ‘You can speak to your son in the morning.’
‘Where is the superintendent?’ Kelly says.
‘You can speak to your son in the morning.’
Kelly leaves a loaded, dangerous silence. Jen has seen only a handful of people on the receiving end of these, but still, she doesn’t envy the policeman. Kelly’s fuse usually takes a long time to trip but, when it does, it’s explosive.
‘I’ll call someone,’ she says. ‘I know someone.’ She gets her phone out and begins shakily scrolling through her contacts. Criminal lawyers. She knows loads of them. The first rule of law is never to dabble in something you don’t specialize in. The second is never to represent your family.
‘He has said he doesn’t want one,’ the officer says.
‘He needs a solicitor – you shouldn’t …’ she says.
The officer raises his palms to her. Next to her, Jen can feel Kelly’s temper brewing.
‘I’ll just call one, and then he can –’ she starts.
‘All right, let me back there,’ Kelly says, gesturing to the white door leading to the rest of the station.
‘That cannot be authorized,’ the officer says.
‘Fuck. You,’ Kelly says. Jen stares at him in shock.
The officer doesn’t even dignify this with a response, just looks at Kelly in stony silence.
‘So – what now then?’ Jen says. God, Kelly has told a copper to fuck himself. A public order offence is not the way to defuse this situation.
‘As I’ve already told you, he’ll remain with us overnight,’ the officer says to her plainly, ignoring Kelly. ‘I suggest you come back tomorrow.’ His eyes flick to Kelly. ‘You can’t force your son to take a solicitor. We have tried.’
‘But he’s a kid,’ Jen says, though she knows that, legally, he isn’t. ‘He’s just a kid,’ she says again softly, mostly to herself, thinking of his Christmas pyjamas and the way he wanted her to sit up with him recently when he had a vomiting bug. They spent all night in the en suite. Chatting about nothing, her wiping his mouth with a damp flannel.
‘They don’t care about that, or anything,’ Kelly says bitterly.
‘We’ll come back, in the morning – with a solicitor,’ Jen says, trying to ameliorate, to peacemake.
‘Feel free. We need to send a team back with you to the house now,’ he says. Jen nods wordlessly. Forensics. Their house being searched. The lot.
Jen and Kelly leave the police station. Jen rubs at her forehead as they go to the car and get in. She blasts the heat on as they sit there.
‘Are we really just going to go home?’ she says. ‘Sit there while they search?’
Kelly’s shoulders are tense. He stares at her, black hair everywhere, eyes sad like a poet’s.
‘I have no fucking idea.’
Jen gazes out of the windscreen at a bush glistening with middle-of-the-night autumnal dew. After a few seconds, she puts the car in reverse and drives, because she doesn’t know what else to do.
The pumpkin greets them on the windowsill as she parks up. She must have left the candle burning. Forensics have already arrived in their white suits, standing on their driveway like ghosts by the police tape that flutters in the October wind. The puddle of blood has begun to dry at the edges.
They’re let in, to their own fucking house, and they sit downstairs, watching the uniformed teams out front, some on their hands and knees doing fingertip searches of the crime scene. They say nothing at all, just hold hands in the silence. Kelly keeps his coat on.
Eventually, when the scene of crime officers have gone, and the police have searched and taken Todd’s things, Jen shifts on the sofa so that she’s lying down, and stares up at the ceiling. And that’s when the tears come. Hot and fast and wet. The tears for the future. And the tears for yesterday, and what she didn’t see coming.
Day Minus One, 08:00
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.