Wrong Place Wrong Time(37)

She follows him all the way to Birkenhead port. He gets out and takes a clipboard from another man there, looping an ID around his neck with one hand and fumbling for a cigarette with the other. He takes up a position to check cars in and stands there, doing nothing except smoking.

Jen’s shoulders sink in disappointment. So he only works here.

She leaves the engine idling, watching as a Tesla appears. The port is blustery, leaves tossed on the breeze. It’s busy, too, cars coming and going, but the Tesla does something different: it flashes its lights, then disappears slowly down a side-street. Ezra follows it on foot. She puts the car into gear and is just behind them. She parks randomly on a drive, hoping to look like a resident, and switches her lights off.

A boy – only Todd’s age, but shorter and blond – gets out of the Tesla with an oblong-shaped package under his arm. Ezra greets him, shaking his hand and, together, they crouch in front of the Tesla. It takes Jen a few minutes to work out what they’re doing: they are removing the plates from the Tesla and putting different ones on.

The kid leaves, and Ezra drives the Tesla back through the car-parking barrier and leaves it waiting to be loaded on to a ship.

So Ezra is a bent port worker, then. Taking stolen cars, plating them and shipping them somewhere to sell, no doubt for cash given to him on the side. She supposes the blond boy is a foot soldier of sorts, paid a pittance to steal the cars from people’s driveways with the promise of gang advancement ahead. What if Todd is working for Ezra and Joseph, too? It goes wrong, somehow, and Joseph ends up dead. Jen doesn’t want to believe it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

She waits a minute before leaving. She passes the boy, walking by the side of the road. She looks carefully at him. His gaze is fixed ahead. He can’t be more than sixteen, a teenager, a baby, burning bright, with no idea of the damage he is doing to his mother, waiting at a window back home.

It’s almost midnight, and Gina has sent across photos of twelve babies who have gone missing in England in the past year. None from anywhere near Merseyside. And none that looks exactly like the baby in the poster. Some have lighter hair, some larger eyes, though it’s hard to know for sure that they’re different. Jen is suddenly struck by the terrifying thought that the baby may not yet be missing.

She scrolls up through Gina’s texts. She missed them all while she was distracted at the port.

Nothing on Nicola. Name too common.

I have something on Ryan though – he’s dead.



Panic flashes across Jen’s body as if she has been doused in hot oil. She calls Gina immediately, but there’s no answer. She rings again and again and again. But Gina doesn’t pick up today; it’s gone. They’ll have to start from scratch tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, yesterday.





Day Minus Twelve, 08:00





Twelve days back and Jen opens her eyes on the exact day Nicola Williams texted Todd’s burner phone saying, It’s in place but see you tonight. Jen is therefore determined to follow Todd today, not to let him out of her sight. Personal investigators be damned. This has got to be the better way. Jen can’t start over again with Gina today. It’s too disheartening to lose it all when she sleeps.

She follows Todd to school and intends to wait outside, all day, in the car park. As long as it takes. She has absolutely nothing better to do. The only requirement of today is that Todd has zero opportunity to meet Nicola alone.

She sends some work emails while she waits, eyes on Todd’s car, and on the school doors. She researches local missing babies, and goes deeper into the probate registers, looking for Ryan, but she uncovers nothing.

It begins to rain around eleven o’clock, fat drops that land like falling pennies that disappear to nothing on her windscreen. She stares out as the car park becomes a moving, shivering river. She’d forgotten this. Mid-October had been unseasonably wet.

Jen stares up at the rain striking the windscreen, thinking about the weather, her son, and the ripple effects that can spread from a single raindrop.

She thinks about what the implications are for the changes she makes today. She wishes she understood it.

Maybe she can. It’ll just take a tedious explanation first.

She dials Andy’s office and is surprised when he answers straight away.

‘You won’t know me,’ she starts hesitatingly.

‘No, clearly not,’ he says, deadpan.

She explains her predicament as briefly as she can while he communicates a baffled and judgemental silence down the phone to her.

‘And that’s about it,’ she finishes.

A beat. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘I do get these calls from time to time, so I can’t say I’m surprised.’

‘No. Pranksters, usually, right?’ Jen says. She’s seen them about, too. She read another thread on Reddit this morning from somebody claiming to have time-travelled to 2022 from 2031. She didn’t believe it, despite experiencing much the same thing herself. This guy couldn’t even prove it. Says there’s a nuclear war in 2031, and nobody can disprove that anyway.

‘Yes, exactly. Hard to know who to believe, isn’t it?’ he says. She can’t bear it; she can’t bear for anyone – even this virtual stranger – to think her mad or needy or a malingerer, someone who calls up professors and bullshits them.