Wrong Place Wrong Time(21)

Frantically, she opens his desk drawers and the ones in his bedside tables and looks under the bed. She pulls the duvet back and feels around in the bottom of the wardrobe. She just knows she’s going to find something. She can feel it. Something damning. Something she can never forget.

She ransacks the room. She’ll never be able to get it straight again, but she doesn’t care.

She’s already wasted six minutes. One unit of legal time: an hour divided into tenths. Her gaze lands on his Xbox. He’s always on it. He must talk to some people on there. It’s worth a shot.

She powers it up, listening out for the shower, then navigates to the messenger section. It’s a dark world in there. Messages with random people about spooky games, fighting games, games where you earn enough points to buy knives to stab other players with …

She goes to the recent sent items, which has two messages in. One to User78630 and one to Connor18. The first says: okay. The one to Connor says: 11pm I’ll drop it off?

She will ask Pauline about Connor. See if he’s wrapped up in anything. It seems too much of a coincidence that they have started spending time together just as Todd goes off the rails. And 11 p.m. drop-offs … that doesn’t sound good.

She turns off the console and leaves Todd’s room. Seconds later, he opens the bathroom door.

They meet on the landing. He has only a towel around his waist.

She meets his eyes, but he doesn’t hold her gaze for long. She can’t gauge his mood. She recalls his facial expression from the night of the murder. There wasn’t any remorse on it, not anywhere, not even a bit.

What’s the point in going to the office if, when she wakes up tomorrow, it will be yesterday? There is, for the first time in Jen’s adult life, no point in working at all. She muses on this while feeding Henry VIII.

She tries calling a number she finds listed for Andy Vettese but gets no answer. She googles him again. He won some science award yesterday, for a paper on black holes. She emails two more people who have written theses on time travel.

She thinks about how to convince her husband of what is happening.

Jen sighs and eventually finds a legal pad full of notes on a case that doesn’t seem to matter much right now. All she can hear is the soft hum of the heating.

In the notebook, she writes Day Minus Three.

What I know, she writes underneath that.

Joseph Jones’s name, his full address

Clio may be involved

Connor drop-offs?

It isn’t a lot.



For the first time in years, Jen is on the school run. The green school gates are clotted with parents. Cliques, loners, people dressed up, people very much dressed down – the lot. Jen would usually spend her time at the school gate paranoid everybody was talking about her but, today, she wishes she had done this more often. For starters, it’s fascinating.

She spots Pauline immediately. She is alone, has lately been insisting on collecting Connor so she knows he’s been to school – he was recently told off for skiving – and then goes on to get her youngest, Theo. She is wearing a denim jacket and a huge scarf, is staring down at her phone, her legs crossed at the ankles.

‘I thought I’d try one of these school-run things,’ Jen says to her.

‘I’m genuinely honoured,’ Pauline says, looking up with a laugh. ‘Everyone here is a dick. Honestly – Mario’s mum has a Mulberry handbag with her. For the school run.’

Pauline is one of Jen’s easiest friends. Jen did her divorce, three years ago, separating her neatly from her cheating husband, Eric. Pauline had turned up at Jen’s firm for an initial consultation, screenshots of Eric’s infidelity in hand. Jen had known of her from the school but had never spoken to her. She made Pauline a tea and very professionally looked at the damning texts, sent from Eric to his mistress, and said she’d take Pauline’s case on.

‘Sorry you had to see them,’ Pauline had said in Jen’s office, pocketing her phone and sipping the tea.

‘Yes, well, it’s good to have the – er – evidence,’ Jen had said. And, despite herself – her stiff suit, the corporate surrounds – she felt her expression falter. ‘However – um … graphic.’

Pauline met her eyes for just a second. ‘So do you attach dick pics to the court petition?’ she had said and, right there in Jen’s office, they had exploded into laughter. ‘That was the first time I’d laughed since I found them,’ Pauline had said sincerely, later. And, just like that, a friendship was born, out of tragedy and humour, as they often are. Jen had been so pleased when Connor and Todd had become friends, too. Until now.

‘Well, you’ve got me, here, unwashed,’ Jen says.

Pauline smiles and scuffs a Converse shoe on the floor. ‘You not working today?’

Todd appears in the distance, loping along with Connor, one of the only students who is taller than him. Thicker set, too, a unit of a kid.

‘No.’

‘How’s things? How’s your enigma of a husband?’

‘Listen,’ Jen says, skipping past the small talk.

‘Uh-oh,’ Pauline says. ‘I don’t like that lawyerly listen.’

‘Nothing to worry about,’ she says lightly. ‘Todd is, I think – maybe – caught up in something …’