Wrong Place Wrong Time(38)

‘Yeah. Look – later on in October you’re shortlisted for – and win – an award,’ she says. ‘The Penny Jameson. This won’t help me much today, but – well. There you are. You win.’

‘That award is –’

‘Embargoed. I know.’

‘I don’t know I’m shortlisted. But I do know I’m in for it. But you shouldn’t.’

‘Yes,’ Jen says. ‘It’s all I’ve got, my proof.’

‘I like your proof,’ he says succinctly. ‘I’m happy to accept it.’ The clarity of scientists. ‘I’ve just googled that award. It isn’t anywhere online.’

‘That’s what you say the next time.’

Another beat of silence while Andy seems to consider things. ‘Where? Do we meet?’ His tone is noticeably warmer.

‘In a café in Liverpool city centre. I suggest it. You wear a T-shirt that says Franny and Zooey on it.’

‘My J. D. Salinger,’ he says in surprise. ‘Tell me, are you outside my office window?’

‘No,’ Jen says with a laugh.

‘This must be infuriating, then. To have to go through these – ah – these security questions – with me each time.’

‘Yes, it is,’ Jen says honestly.

‘How can I help?’

‘When we meet in Liverpool in a week’s time, you talk about the power of my subconscious landing me on certain days.’

‘… Yes,’ Andy says, and Jen is struck, there in her rainy little car, that it isn’t his expertise that matters, only somebody sympathetic actively listening on the end of the line. Some safe space to hold her thoughts up to the light: isn’t that what everybody needs, anyway? Gina; Todd, even?

‘Well, that is definitely happening. I’m skipping multiple days now. And I think the ones I end up on are significant – in some way.’

‘Well, good. I’m glad you’re working it out, within the framework available to you,’ he says. She hears bristling, a hand across a beard. ‘So … you have more questions?’

‘Yes. I wanted to ask … let’s say in a few days, a few weeks, I work this out.’

‘Yes.’

‘I just want to know, really, the extent to which the things I’ve already done will “stick”, so to speak? Like, I told Todd, on one of the days, that he kills someone in the future. But I’m now back before that conversation has taken place? So – has it?’

Andy pauses, which Jen is glad about. She needs somebody who considers things. Somebody who doesn’t speak to fill silences, to make wild guesses. Eventually, he speaks. ‘It’s the butterfly effect, isn’t it? Let’s say you win the lottery on Day Minus Ten, and continue to go back through time, to Day Minus Eleven, Day Minus Twelve, and so on. If, at some point, you solve the crime, and wake up on Day Zero, are you still the lottery winner from Day Minus Ten?’

‘Exactly, that’s what I want to know.’

‘I don’t think so. I don’t think the things you’re doing now will stick. I think you will go onwards from the day you solve it, and only changes from that day forward will remain. They will wipe the rest. That’s just my feeling.’

Tap, tap, tap go the drops of rainwater. Jen watches them land and then spread, forming rivulets. She opens a window and extends her arm out, just feeling it, real rain, the same rain she’s experienced once before, on her skin. ‘And – just say if I don’t solve it.’

‘I think it’ll become clear. Have faith, Jen. There’s an order to things that we sometimes don’t even know.’

This man, this kind, smart man on the end of the phone, becomes a guru to Jen. A wise old professor, a Gandalf, a Dumbledore. ‘But – like … what if I just cycle back forty years, to oblivion, and then that’s it?’ she asks. Now perhaps her greatest fear. She swallows as she thinks this horrible, catastrophic thought. Oh, to have a brain that does not torture itself.

‘Well, that’s all any of us is doing, only in the other direction,’ he says, which does nothing to ease Jen’s anxiety whatsoever.

‘Do you mind if I just tell you everything I know? Just to … see if you can spot anything?’ she asks him.

‘Shoot. I even have a pad and paper. And I am soon to be crowned one of the great physics minds in Britain, if your premonition is correct.’

‘Oh, it is,’ she says. ‘Okay – so.’

And she tells him. She tells him about the missing-baby poster, the dead policeman and about the burner phone and the texts to Nicola Williams. She tells him about the port worker and how she suspects it’s organized crime. She tells him about Nicola Williams maybe having been stabbed, too. She tells him every date, every time she knows. As she speaks, she hears the sound of a pen being uncapped. Probably a fountain pen, a distinctive, hard click. ‘And that’s all,’ she says, breathless with having divulged everything.

‘So, putting that into chronological order …’ he says.

‘Okay, yes. Todd meets Clio in August. Her uncle is running some sort of – I don’t know. Crime ring.’

‘Okay, so then – into October.’ She hears him leaf through papers. ‘You say Todd appears to ask somebody called Nicola Williams for help. Perhaps setting her up – to meet, and then she’s harmed?’