Wrong Place Wrong Time(55)

‘Looking for Kelly,’ he says.

Jen pauses, her footsteps slowing as she crosses the foyer towards him.

‘Kelly Brotherhood?’ she says.

Something seems to break across his features as he meets her eyes, but Jen isn’t sure what. He’s older than she first thought, that first night, and the night she saw him at Eshe Road North. He’s probably older than fifty. Tattoos across the knuckles. Eyes flinty. Body language poised somehow, like a cat about to strike. He’s light on his feet with it.

‘Yes.’ He holds both hands up. ‘He was an old friend.’ The knowledge is a physical feeling that shivers across her torso. Joseph’s sentence was twenty years. So he must have known Kelly before it.

‘What kind of friend?’ Jen can’t resist saying. But, inside, she is thinking that Joseph, too, knows her. He knew to come to the law firm to find Kelly.

Joseph smiles back at her, so fast as not to be genuine. ‘An important one.’

‘Surprised you’d look here?’ she says.

‘I’ve been away. No matter. Wanted to re-start something.’ He turns away from her. He’s in a white T-shirt, the material thin and cheap, and, underneath it, Jen can make out a tattoo that spans the entire width of his back: an angel’s wings, right across his shoulder blades.

‘Re-start what?’ she says, but he ignores her, leaving, the foyer door shutting softly behind him. Jen leans her hands on the reception desk, trying to breathe, trying to think.

Joseph was released only days ago. And look: he’s come here, almost immediately. It’s clear to Jen, on this isolated day in this strange second-chance life, that Joseph Jones’s release from prison set something in motion. Somewhere in the future, which she cannot reach at the moment, no matter how hard she tries. Something that involves almost everybody she knows. Todd, Kelly, and now her, too, surely: why else would he come to Eagles? A gruesome cast of dramatis personae. A hit list of betrayals.





Day Minus One Hundred and Five, 08:55





A Saturday in mid-July. It’s perfect outside, the sky so blue it looks like a bauble fit to shatter. It’s five to nine, and Jen is pulling up outside HMP Altcourse.

As soon as she realized the date and that Joseph would still be inside, she made her excuses to Kelly and Todd, who were taking the piss out of Saturday Kitchen – she said she had brunch with a client – and left. To her dismay, nobody was surprised. Jen has spent her entire life doing things for others: seeing demanding clients when she wanted to be watching Todd’s swimming lessons. Watching Todd’s swimming lessons when she wanted to be lying down with a book. The maternal habit of a lifetime, feeling guilty no matter which she chose.

Todd hasn’t met Clio yet, nor started associating with Connor. So, what, were they all red herrings, now that she’s gone back past them?

HMP Altcourse looks like an industrial estate, a strange kind of self-enclosed village. Jen’s only been here once, as part of her training. Beyond that, she’s never practised criminal law. Her father found the idea of repeat business from criminals so distasteful that they never did it. Jen finds making money from divorces vaguely distasteful, too, but there you go. Everyone has to make rent, and heartbreak is more ubiquitous than crime.

Jen walks into the foyer of the prison, thinking how fortuitous it is that Joseph is back in prison, and that visiting hours are limited and structured on weekdays but unlimited and informal at weekends – any unauthorized visitor can turn up and request to see any inmate on a Saturday. Today.

It’s like she knew.

It is raining outside, midsummer rain; the media have named it Storm Richard. Each time somebody enters the reception, the smell of wet grass puffs in. Visitors’ shoes leave patterns of water across the floor that a jaded cleaner mops up periodically, one hand on a hip, putting up more and more yellow triangular WET FLOOR signs.

The reception is modern, like a private hospital. A wide and sweeping desk dominates the space. A man clicks a mouse at it, takes softly spoken phone calls.

Behind the reception is a whiteboard with times written on it. Through a door marked CANTEEN (SECURE 2), Jen can hear an argument escalating. ‘You said I could order smoky bacon, not salt ’n’ vinegar,’ a man is saying.

‘I know – but Liam –’

‘It was fucking clear!’ the man shouts. Jen winces. The power of a packet of crisps.

For a second, just a second, she wants to confess all, right here in the foyer. Shout and scream. Commit a crime. Commit herself. Tell them she’s time-travelling and be sedated somewhere, meals made, crisp-ordering the height of her control.

‘Request here,’ the receptionist says suddenly. He stands and passes a form to Jen, which she fills in.

‘He’s happy to see you,’ the receptionist says after two phone calls and several more minutes. ‘Visitor centre that way.’ He points inwards, through a set of double doors, into the bowels of the building, and hands Jen a temporary pass with no string or safety pin.

She pushes the cold metal panels on the doors and enters a corridor staffed by two security guards. It smells of disinfectant and sweat. The vinyl floors have rubber edges. There are multiple locks on multiple doors.

She is met by a security guard with a name tag on, printed with the name LLOYD. Somebody, in biro, underneath it, has written Grossman! He asks to see her handbag, then checks it, a deft hand inside like a doctor performing some grotesque internal, then sends it through an airport-style scanner. He gestures for her to spread her arms wide and as she does so he pats her down, avoiding eye contact.