Crosby police station foyer looks the same, as it did that first night, tired, smelling of canteen dinners and coffee. Jen arrives at six, looking for Ryan Hiles. It seems to her that this is the next logical step. Todd and Kelly think she’s at the supermarket.
She is told to wait and she sits on one of the metal chairs, staring at the white door to the left of the reception desk. At the end of a long corridor behind it, she can see a tall, slim police officer moving around, on the phone, laughing at something, pacing slowly this way and that.
The receptionist is blonde. She has chapped lips, the line between skin and mouth blurred and sore-looking in that way it is when people have a habit of wetting their lips.
The automatic doors open, but nobody comes in.
The receptionist ignores the doors. She’s typing quickly, her gaze not moving from the screen.
It’s twilight outside; to anybody else, it looks like a normal day at six o’clock in October. Woodsmoke comes in on the breeze as the glitchy automatic doors open and close for nobody again. Jen folds her hands in her lap and thinks about normal life. The continuity of one day following another. She stares at the doors sliding open, hesitating, and then closing, and tries not to wonder if Todd is proceeding somewhere, in the future, without her. Facing life in prison. Not even the best lawyer would be able to get him off.
‘Can I just take your name?’ the receptionist says. She seems content to conduct this conversation across the foyer.
‘Alison,’ Jen says, not yet ready to reveal her identity without knowing where Ryan Hiles is and why Todd has his badge. The last thing she wants to do is make things worse for Todd in the future. ‘Alison Bland,’ she invents.
‘Okay. And what’s the …’
‘I’m looking for a police officer. I have his name and badge number.’
‘Why is it you want to see him?’ The receptionist dials a number on the desk phone.
Jen doesn’t say she has the badge itself – doesn’t want to hand over evidence, link Todd’s fingerprints to something heinous. To something else heinous.
‘I just want to speak to him.’
‘Sorry, we can’t have civilians coming in to give names and ask to speak to coppers,’ the receptionist says.
‘It isn’t – it isn’t a bad thing. I just want to talk to him.’
‘We really can’t do that. Do you need to report a crime?’
‘I mean …’ Jen says. She goes to say no, but then hesitates. Maybe the police can help her. Just because the murder hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean that no crimes at all have been committed. The knife … buying a knife is a crime. It’s a gamble – he might not yet have bought it – but it’s one she is prepared to take. If Todd is investigated for something smaller, perhaps that would stop the larger crime?
Something ignites in Jen. All she needs is change. To blow out one match in a whole line of them. To keep a domino standing that would otherwise fall. And then, perhaps, she will wake up, and it will be tomorrow.
‘Yes,’ she says, to the receptionist’s obvious surprise. ‘Yes, I’d like to report a crime.’
Twenty-five minutes later, Jen is in a meeting room with a police officer. He’s young, with pale blue eyes like a wolf. Each time they meet hers, Jen is struck by how unusual they are, a dark blue rim, light blue pools in the centre, tiny pupils. Something about the colour makes them look vacant. He’s freshly shaven, his uniform a little too big for him.
‘Right, tell me,’ he says. They have two white plastic cups of water in front of them. The room smells of photocopier toner and stale coffee. The setting seems so mundane for the reaction Jen hopes to set off.
‘I’ll just keep a note,’ he adds. She doesn’t want this. A young officer who takes meticulous notes and won’t answer questions. Jen wants a maverick. Someone who goes off the record, who has a dead wife and an alcohol problem: someone who can help her.
‘I’m pretty sure my son is involved in something,’ she says simply. She skims over the alias she gave, hoping he won’t question this, and goes to the heart of the matter: ‘His name is Todd Brotherhood.’
And that’s when it happens. Recognition: Jen is sure of it. It passes across his features like a ghost.
‘What makes you say that he’s involved in something?’
She tells the officer about the cutting and sewing business, about her son meeting Joseph Jones, and about the knife. She hopes that, if Todd has armed himself already, they will find that weapon, arrest him and stop the crime.
The police officer’s pen stalls, just slightly, at the mention of the knife. His iced eyes flick to hers, the colour of a gas fire on low, then back down again. Jen can feel it in the air, the change, even in here. She has lit the touchpaper. The butterfly has flapped its wings.
‘Right – where is the knife? How do you know he bought one?’
‘I’m not sure right now, but I have seen it in his school bag once,’ she says, omitting that this happens in the future.
‘Has he ever left the house with it?’
‘I assume so.’
‘Okay then …’ the officer says, upending the pen. ‘All right. Looks like we need to speak to your son.’
‘Today?’ Jen asks.
The policeman finishes writing and looks at her. He glances at the clock on the wall.
‘We’ll make enquiries with Todd.’
She shivers, there in the warm police interviewing room. What if there is some unintended consequence of this action she’s just taken? Maybe Joseph Jones should die, if he’s got something to do with something terrible, and she only needs to help Todd get away with it. How is she supposed to know which it is?
‘Okay – well, I can go and get Todd for you,’ she says, wondering quite how she’s coming across. How strange it must sound. Even now, in this chaos, Jen still worries about being judged as a parent.
‘Just your address is enough,’ the officer says. He stands up and extends the flat of his palm towards the door. An instant dismissal. Just arrest him, please arrest him, so he can’t do anything more, Jen thinks.
‘Nothing you can do today?’ she probes again. She needs him taken in tonight, before she sleeps, if she has even a chance of stopping the crime. Tomorrow doesn’t exist, not to her, anyway.
The policeman pauses, looking at his feet, that palm still extended. ‘I’ll try my best. You know – usually, young men carry knives because of gangs.’
‘I know,’ Jen whispers.
‘We’ll talk to your son, but in order to get kids out of this you have to work out the why.’
‘I’m trying,’ Jen says. She stops just there, on the threshold of the meeting room, then decides to just ask. ‘Have any babies gone missing in the area? Recently?’
‘Sorry?’ the officer says. ‘Missing babies?’
‘Yes. Recently.’
‘I can’t discuss other cases,’ he says, giving nothing away.
She leaves then, and as she exits through the glass doors etched with a finely threaded grid and steps outside, she smells it. Not what she was expecting: petrichor. Rain on pavements. Summer’s coming back. That smell, that intangible smell – lawns being mowed, cow parsley, hot, packed earth – always reminds her of the house they had in the valley, the little white bungalow. How happy they were there, away from the city. Before.