Wrong Place Wrong Time(95)

Her first-ever contract. Of course she remembers. ‘Yeah.’

‘Well, after that, an old client came in. And – Jen, he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Passing those names and addresses kept us afloat for years. It paid for your LPC. It’s paying for your training.’

‘People being robbed.’

‘How did you find out?’

‘That doesn’t matter,’ she says.

She almost wishes she hadn’t found this out, she thinks, looking at her father, thinking about how she can never un-know it. But finding out that Kelly discovered this dark secret right in the centre of her family and never told her … it is a kindness. Kelly kept his identity, his transformation, secret from her.

Because he loves her. And because he walked into the law firm one day in 2003, fell head over heels in love with her and didn’t want to look back.





Day Minus Seven Thousand Two Hundred and Thirty, 08:00





Jen is back in the flat when she wakes. She blinks, looking at the sash window and the purple cushions below it. She flings an arm across her eyes.

She’s here.

She rolls over in her single bed. Still in the past.

He did it because he loved her.

He has been lying to her for twenty years.

What else was he supposed to do?

He isn’t who he says he is.

He gave up everything. For her.

He never told her her father was bent.

Why is she here? She pads out of her bedroom and into her kitchenette. It’s full of early-morning January sun. She hasn’t yet met Kelly. His number isn’t yet in her phone.

He’s undercover. Investigating her father. That’s why he never tells her.

That’s why he warns her, in the future, about looking into it.

That is why Joseph comes to the law firm, to find Kelly, to start things up again – and to notice which of his old associates may not be who they said. This is why Kelly says, in 2022, that she is in danger, that she should stop looking: Joseph assumed she knew what her father was doing. He said as much in the prison when they met.

She goes to the sash window that overlooks the crowded streets, already full of commuters in suits. Her husband-to-be is out there, somewhere, working as a police officer, yet to meet her.

She turns away from the sunlight. January the twelfth.

The date from the news story she saw after her shower.

Today is the day Eve goes missing.

Tonight is the night she is stolen.

Jen takes the bus to Merseyside Police in Birkenhead.

It’s so like Crosby police station from the outside. A sixties building. A revolving door lets her into a bright foyer. Bigger than Crosby, but still as tired, the same kind of chairs bolted to each other. She thinks about how they sat in them on that first night, all those weeks ago but years into the future, Kelly vibrating with fury.

She supposes it is easy to disappear. Quit the police, go travelling in a camper van with the woman you love. Re-settle out of Liverpool. Never travel. Get married using a fake passport that nobody ever checks. Thousands of people must do it, for reasons both more and less honourable than Kelly’s. Jen has never once in Crosby bumped into somebody she grew up with. She wonders if Kelly had any near misses. The world’s a big place.

A receptionist with thin, plucked eyebrows and her waterline pencilled in the way that everybody did in 2003 types at a boxy computer.

‘I need to speak to a police officer,’ Jen says. ‘He will go by the name of Ryan or Kelly.’

‘Why?’

‘I have a tip-off. About the crime-ring operation that he is working undercover on,’ Jen says. As she says it, a man pushes the door open. He’s old, maybe fifty, and has feathering grey hair at his temples.

His face arranges itself into an expression of surprise. ‘Kelly?’ he says to her.

‘I need to speak to Kelly. I know he’s undercover.’

‘You’d better come in,’ he says. He reaches to shake her hand. ‘I’m Leo.’

Kelly is sitting opposite Jen in an interviewing suite and he doesn’t know who she is. It’s crazy, but it’s true. To him, they have never met.

‘Look,’ Jen is explaining patiently. ‘I can’t say how I know. But the house they intend to burgle tonight … they intend to take two cars.’ She dutifully gives the address of Eve Green, taken from the news story, which Leo and Kelly write down.

It’s the same address – only one digit different – from the one on her father’s piece of paper. 125 Greenwood Avenue.

‘Thanks,’ Kelly says professionally to her. His blue eyes linger on hers. ‘No intel at all on where it came from?’

Jen’s gaze meets his. ‘Sorry – can’t say.’

‘Sure, okay. Well,’ he says, dismissing her as though she is a stranger, ‘we will be sure to check it out.’ A fixed, careful smile.

She looks at him, wondering where the join is between him – this Ryan – and her Kelly. Whether he became the latter, or always was, deep inside. Suddenly, there in the police station, looking at this man that she has loved for twenty years, she wonders if it matters. Does anyone care how or why we are forged into who we are? Dark, guarded, funny. Whatever. Or does it only matter that we are?

‘You will look into it?’