Wrong Place Wrong Time(98)

‘What’s her surname?’

‘Green …?’

The baby. The stolen baby that was never stolen. Jen is standing at the edge of a hurricane, feeling just the breeze of it beginning to waft her hairline.

‘Can I see a photo?’

Todd looks at her like she is a total idiot and flicks through his camera roll on his phone. And there she is. It’s Clio. It’s fucking Clio. Clio was the stolen baby. No wonder she felt recognition when she saw the photo of the baby. Jen reaches, in a daze, to hold his phone in her grasp. He lets her do it easily, no secrecy here, not really. ‘Wow,’ Jen says, zooming in on her features.

‘Never seen a woman before?’ Todd remarks.

‘Let me look in peace,’ Jen says, working it through.

So, now. Baby Eve was never stolen. Jen prevented it. She stayed with her mother, as Eve Green. Jen stopped them meeting in one way, but, look: they met in another. She fell in love with her son in 2022 the same way she did as Clio, when she was stolen and sent to live with a relative of Joseph’s. Fate.

Jen looks up at her husband, and at her son. Clio. Ryan. Eve. Kelly. People whose names have changed but whose love has endured despite that.

Jen extends an arm to him and Todd steps into their embrace, and they stand there, in the picture window, just the three of them. Jen’s breaths slow.

She goes downstairs after a few minutes, just to check, just to look. Her hand on the door knob.

A strange feeling descends around her, like a fine mist. Déjà vu. What was that? She shakes her head. Stolen babies and … gangs? She blinks, and it’s gone. How strange. She never gets déjà vu.

And on such a normal evening, too.





Day Plus One





Jen wakes up. It’s the thirtieth of October and, for whatever reason, she isn’t sure, she feels as though she has her entire life ahead of her.

‘All right?’ Todd says to her on the landing as she pulls a dressing gown around her. ‘You okay?’

‘Sure?’ Jen says. She has a headache, but that’s about it. She can smell cooking downstairs. Ryan must have started breakfast.

‘You said some weird shit last night. Thought I had a girlfriend called Clio?’

‘Who’s Clio?’ Jen says.





Epilogue:

Day Minus One

The Unintended Consequence





For the first few minutes after she wakes up, Pauline has forgotten.

And then she remembers. Dread descends as she does, and she shoots out of bed like a firework. Connor.

She’d known this was going to happen for months. He’s been secretive, rude, sullen. She’s been waiting up for him, all hours. There’s been a series of escalating behaviours. And now this.

It began with the déjà vu. Last night. And then, right after that, Connor was arrested. The police said he’d committed all sorts of offences: drugs, thefts, the lot. He’s been involved recently, over the past few years, with somebody called Joseph. He’s supposed to have the rest of his life in front of him, and here he is, ruining it.

She needs to call a solicitor. She needs to fix it. She needs to do so many things. She needs to get to the bottom of why he did this.

She heads out onto the landing, ready to fire up the computer and find a solicitor. But there he is, her boy, on the landing. ‘Er?’ she says to him. ‘Did they let you go?’

‘Who?’

‘The police?’

‘What police?’ he says, with a laugh. And that’s when Pauline sees it. The date, flashing up on BBC News, blaring from inside his room. It’s October the thirtieth. Wasn’t yesterday the thirtieth? She’s sure of it.

HYSTERICAL STRENGTH

Hysterical strength is a display of extreme strength by humans, beyond what is believed to be normal, usually occurring in life-or-death situations, particularly involving mothers. Anecdotal reports are of women lifting cars to rescue newborn babies, sometimes creating a huge force field of energy. Indeed, more supernatural reports have also been noted, such as time loops, though none has been proven to date. Sufferers often report déjà vu alongside episodes of hysterical strength.





Acknowledgements





I remember the exact moment I had the idea for this novel. My text history with my author friend Holly tells me it was 27 November, 2019.

Me, 18:32: I want to write a book like Russian Doll but about knife crime.

Holly Seddon, 18:37: OMG the dream.

Holly, 18:38: How would you do it? Would someone keep getting stabbed?

Me, 18:38: Yes, I think so. And the guy has to go further and further back through when he joined a gang maybe, to the point where it doesn’t begin. OMG so told backwards?

Holly, 18:38: OMG

Me, 18:38: Have I just invented something?

Just like that.

I’d watched Russian Doll recently, then sat down to watch the news, and a section on knife crime caught my attention. This is how it happens for writers. Never at the desk, never at the right time, but always, inevitably, the ideas come, and I think this is my best one yet. It’s been an honour to write it, to spend the year with Jen and Todd, and to fall in love with them as I hope you did too.

Of course, the idea changed so much in the planning and the writing of it, but here remains the core: a crime novel where you must stop the ending, told backwards. It makes a simplistic kind of sense to me – doesn’t every crime have its inception in the past, buried deep in history?