Wrong Place Wrong Time(30)

It is a small grey oblong bundle held together by an elastic band. Jen climbs down from his desk chair and holds it in the flat of her hand. Drugs – she thinks it might be drugs. Her hands shake as she undoes the elastic, then peels open the bubble wrap.

It isn’t drugs.

The package contains three items.

A Merseyside Police badge. Not the full ID, just the leather wallet with the Merseyside crest on. On it is embroidered a number and a name: Ryan Hiles, 2648.

Jen fingers it. It’s cool in her hands. She holds it up to the light. How does a teenage boy come to have a police badge? She doesn’t chase that thought down the alley it wants to go down, though it’s obvious that it’s nothing good.

Next, folded into four neat squares, is a dog-eared A4 poster with a photograph of a baby on it, maybe four months old. Above him or her is written MISSING in red, blocky letters. There is a pinhole in the corner.

Jen blinks in shock. Missing. Missing babies? Police IDs? What is this dark world Todd’s been plunged into?

The final item is what looks like a pay-as-you-go phone. It’s off. Jen’s finger trembles as she presses the on button and watches it spring to life, its screen a neon green. No passcode. It’s an old-style flip phone, not a smartphone. It was clearly never meant to be discovered. She looks at the contacts. There are three: Joseph Jones, Ezra Michaels, and somebody called Nicola Williams.

She goes to the text messages, listening out for Todd and Kelly.

Times for meetings with Joseph and Ezra. 11 p.m. here, 9 a.m. there.

But, with Nicola, it’s different:

Burner phone 15/10: Nice to chat. See you on 16th?

Nicola W 15/10: I can be there.

Burner phone 15/10: Happy to help tomorrow?

Nicola W 15/10: Happy to help.

Burner phone 17/10: Call me.

Nicola W 17/10: PS. It’s in place but see you tonight.

Nicola W 17/10: Nice to meet. Happy to do it, but you need to work for it. Given what’s happened.

Burner phone 17/10: Yep. Understood.

Nicola W 17/10: Get back in there.

Burner phone 17/10: Baby or no baby.

Nicola W 18/10: All in place. When we have enough, we can move in.

Jen stares at them. A goldmine. Actual, date-stamped messages arranging something. Jen must be able to work out what. She must be able to follow her son on these days, to insert herself into proceedings.

She turns the rest of the items over, looking for more, but there’s nothing.

She sits back on Todd’s desk chair. Catastrophes crowd into Jen’s mind. Dead policemen. Dead kids. Kidnaps. Ransoms. Is he some sort of foot soldier, a minion sent to undertake a gang’s bidding?

She stands on the chair and puts the bundle back, exactly where it was, then sits in her son’s ransacked bedroom. Her knees tremble. She watches them, shivering just slightly, thinking that it’s all her fault. It must be.

Nicola Williams. Why is that name familiar to her?

She looks up Joseph, Clio, Ezra and Nicola on Facebook. All are there except Nicola, and all three are friends with the other. Joseph’s profile is new, but he looks like a perfectly ordinary man. An interest in horse-racing and opinions on Brexit. Ezra’s is more established, his profile pictures dating back ten years, but it’s otherwise locked.

She tidies up, then makes Todd’s bed, her hand smoothing over his pillow, but it’s lumpy, something underneath it. She never checked there. Checked only under the mattress, like in the movies. She reaches for the bulge, hoping to find information, but actually, she just finds Science Bear. The teddy Todd’s had since he was two, the one who holds a blue fluffy Bunsen burner and a test tube. He must still sleep with it. Her heart cracks for him, here in his bedroom, thinking of that night with the norovirus and wiping his mouth with that hot flannel, and the other night, the one with the murder. Her son, the half child, half man.

Crosby police station foyer looks the same, as it did that first night, tired, smelling of canteen dinners and coffee. Jen arrives at six, looking for Ryan Hiles. It seems to her that this is the next logical step. Todd and Kelly think she’s at the supermarket.

She is told to wait and she sits on one of the metal chairs, staring at the white door to the left of the reception desk. At the end of a long corridor behind it, she can see a tall, slim police officer moving around, on the phone, laughing at something, pacing slowly this way and that.

The receptionist is blonde. She has chapped lips, the line between skin and mouth blurred and sore-looking in that way it is when people have a habit of wetting their lips.

The automatic doors open, but nobody comes in.

The receptionist ignores the doors. She’s typing quickly, her gaze not moving from the screen.

It’s twilight outside; to anybody else, it looks like a normal day at six o’clock in October. Woodsmoke comes in on the breeze as the glitchy automatic doors open and close for nobody again. Jen folds her hands in her lap and thinks about normal life. The continuity of one day following another. She stares at the doors sliding open, hesitating, and then closing, and tries not to wonder if Todd is proceeding somewhere, in the future, without her. Facing life in prison. Not even the best lawyer would be able to get him off.

‘Can I just take your name?’ the receptionist says. She seems content to conduct this conversation across the foyer.

‘Alison,’ Jen says, not yet ready to reveal her identity without knowing where Ryan Hiles is and why Todd has his badge. The last thing she wants to do is make things worse for Todd in the future. ‘Alison Bland,’ she invents.