‘Yes.’
‘So – to be clear – you want me to find out what I can about the police officer, Ryan, and the missing baby? And Nicola Williams?’
‘Exactly,’ Jen says, marvelling at Gina’s upright body language. How different we are at work to how we feel inside.
‘Leave it with me,’ she says, and Jen could kiss her. Finally. Some help. Gina meets Jen’s eye. ‘And thank you. For – you know. For Love Island.’
‘No problem,’ Jen says, her eyes damp.
‘You need the info asap?’
‘Ideally today,’ Jen says. ‘Is that okay? I’ll pay whatever you need to get it by this evening.’
Gina waves a hand. ‘What is it you say … pro bono?’
‘Right,’ Jen says. ‘Yes, pro bono. For the public good.’ After all, isn’t that what stopping a murder is?
Jen stays in the office, using the various tools at her disposal to pillage information.
She emails the firm’s librarian, asking her to find details of any babies who have gone missing in Liverpool recently. She sends back a few articles: court battles, people who’ve lied about their children being kidnapped, a woman whose baby was snatched outside a supermarket then returned to a doctor’s surgery.
Jen makes her way methodically through them. None look like the missing baby. There is something base about her recognition of it, something familiar. It must be a maternal instinct.
She looks up Nicola Williams next, but the name is so common, and she has nothing else to go on. She should’ve taken down the number. Memorized it.
Nicola. Nicola Williams.
Wait. That first night. In the police station. Was Nicola Williams the name she heard in the police station the night of Todd’s arrest? The name of the person who’d been stabbed two nights previously?
Jen sinks her head into her hands at her desk. Was it? She feels sure it was, but she can’t go forward … only back. And it’s no use googling it: it hasn’t happened yet.
Say it was Nicola who was injured … the thought chills Jen. Where was Todd? What did he do on Day Minus Two? Is he connected to that? She can’t remember. It’s all a blur.
She doesn’t know. She just doesn’t know.
Jen leaves the office and drives aimlessly. The rain has intensified. She doesn’t want to go home. Doesn’t want to go back to the scene of the crime, doesn’t want to sit in the house failing to work everything out. She drives slowly towards the coast. She knows it’s mad to go to the beach in the rain, but then Jen feels mad. She wants to stand there and feel it, each cold drop of water on her skin. She wants to remind herself that she is still here, still alive, just not in the way she’s accustomed to.
She parks up at Crosby beach. It’s deserted. Rain snakes down the path leading to the sea in stripes, already a few inches deep. Jen’s hair is slicked to her scalp within seconds. It smells of cold brine. The wind whips the grit of the sand into her face.
She walks past a homeless man sitting by a car-parking meter. He’s soaked through, and Jen feels so guilty she passes him a wet five-pound note.
The beach has the Antony Gormley exhibition on it. Another Place. Dozens of bronze statues looking out to sea. Jen approaches them, the noise of the downpour around her as loud as a train. She is the only human on the beach.
Her feet sink into pale sand that compacts like snow.
She stands by one of the metal figures, shoulder to shoulder, and looks at the blurred and rainy horizon, spending time with a statue instead of another person. If only. If only she could work this through with somebody. She’d figure it out much more easily, she’s sure, if she wasn’t always alone. The statue’s body is freezing cold against her palm, its mouth wordless. Together, they look at every single metal figurine, each in a different time, in a different place, alone, looking out to sea for answers.
That evening, late, Jen heads out, back to Eshe Road North, just hoping to observe something. Bad, criminal things only happen at night, so she may as well sit and watch the house.
She still hasn’t heard from Gina.
At a quarter past ten, Ezra leaves the house, and gets into his car, wearing a uniform of some sort – dark green trousers, green jacket, hi-vis waistcoat.
Jen follows him, keeping well back, her headlights on, just a normal driver, just a coincidence. They drive like this for a while, down a track road and crossing a staggered junction.
She follows him all the way to Birkenhead port. He gets out and takes a clipboard from another man there, looping an ID around his neck with one hand and fumbling for a cigarette with the other. He takes up a position to check cars in and stands there, doing nothing except smoking.
Jen’s shoulders sink in disappointment. So he only works here.
She leaves the engine idling, watching as a Tesla appears. The port is blustery, leaves tossed on the breeze. It’s busy, too, cars coming and going, but the Tesla does something different: it flashes its lights, then disappears slowly down a side-street. Ezra follows it on foot. She puts the car into gear and is just behind them. She parks randomly on a drive, hoping to look like a resident, and switches her lights off.
A boy – only Todd’s age, but shorter and blond – gets out of the Tesla with an oblong-shaped package under his arm. Ezra greets him, shaking his hand and, together, they crouch in front of the Tesla. It takes Jen a few minutes to work out what they’re doing: they are removing the plates from the Tesla and putting different ones on.
The kid leaves, and Ezra drives the Tesla back through the car-parking barrier and leaves it waiting to be loaded on to a ship.
So Ezra is a bent port worker, then. Taking stolen cars, plating them and shipping them somewhere to sell, no doubt for cash given to him on the side. She supposes the blond boy is a foot soldier of sorts, paid a pittance to steal the cars from people’s driveways with the promise of gang advancement ahead. What if Todd is working for Ezra and Joseph, too? It goes wrong, somehow, and Joseph ends up dead. Jen doesn’t want to believe it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
She waits a minute before leaving. She passes the boy, walking by the side of the road. She looks carefully at him. His gaze is fixed ahead. He can’t be more than sixteen, a teenager, a baby, burning bright, with no idea of the damage he is doing to his mother, waiting at a window back home.
It’s almost midnight, and Gina has sent across photos of twelve babies who have gone missing in England in the past year. None from anywhere near Merseyside. And none that looks exactly like the baby in the poster. Some have lighter hair, some larger eyes, though it’s hard to know for sure that they’re different. Jen is suddenly struck by the terrifying thought that the baby may not yet be missing.
She scrolls up through Gina’s texts. She missed them all while she was distracted at the port.
Nothing on Nicola. Name too common.
I have something on Ryan though – he’s dead.
Panic flashes across Jen’s body as if she has been doused in hot oil. She calls Gina immediately, but there’s no answer. She rings again and again and again. But Gina doesn’t pick up today; it’s gone. They’ll have to start from scratch tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, yesterday.
Day Minus Twelve, 08:00