Ryan thinks of that baby, with criminals. Or on a ship, in international waters, in the back seat of a car, alone.
‘We have surveillance looking at ANPR for it, but we suspect they will have swapped the plates. We’ve put a stop on all ferries. Now let’s find baby Eve.’
Leo throws Ryan a look he can’t read.
It’s his job, now, Ryan assumes, to go and get the names off his corkboard, and they’re going to dispatch more surveillance officers to watch all of them, to see if they can find the car, and the baby.
Ryan stares at the missing poster pinned to the board. He reaches a finger out to touch it. The paper feels soft and thin.
The baby is beautiful. Ryan has always wanted children. Two, a boy and a girl. He knows that’s so passé, but it’s always how he’s felt. Two kids and a woman who could make him laugh. Building his own family unit again, from the rubble of his upbringing. If those you’ve left behind don’t stack up, create new people, in front of you.
She’s four months old. She has the most beautiful eyes, like a soulful little lion. And it’s his job to find her.
‘All right, Ryan,’ Leo says an hour later. ‘Sorry for the delay. Been getting authorizations for more coverts.’ He sips his coffee.
Ryan really wants that drink. He’s so tired. He worries that he’s beginning to prefer it, the station coffee, that he might start drinking from plastic cups at home.
‘Where will they take the baby?’ Leo asks Ryan. ‘In your opinion.’
‘The easiest place. They won’t care what happens to her. The baby.’
‘Right … so – the port?’
‘They will fulfil the order, whatever that is. That’s their priority. They might ditch the baby somewhere on the way. They won’t take A roads or motorways because of ANPR. They’ll go rural. That’s what my brother would do, anyway,’ Ryan says, the words feeling like a betrayal to him. His older brother. He had always protected Ryan, sort of, but now look. ‘“The feds are always watching,” he always used to say.’
‘You’re an asset,’ Leo says. ‘Because of the brother thing. You know?’
Ryan shrugs, embarrassed now. ‘I mean –’
‘There’s no need for modesty,’ Leo says. He rises from the chair. ‘My point being: you know this stuff and yet you’re here. You grew up there’ – he holds his left hand out, far apart from his side – ‘and you arrived here.’
‘Thank you,’ Ryan says thickly. ‘I mean … in some ways, Kelly taught me a lot. I guess the best criminals do.’
Day Minus Sixty, 08:00
‘Morning, beautiful,’ Kelly says. He walks into the bedroom, wearing only boxers. Jen startles.
She could scream. The last day she spent with him, she left this man on the street. A domestic. A sinister, dark street corner, betrayals, crimes. Here – thirteen days before – he is greeting her sleepily, his expression as friendly as the August sun outside.
‘Morning,’ she murmurs, because she doesn’t know what else to say. Stolen cars, stolen babies, dead policemen, don’t look into Joseph Jones, don’t try to find the baby. Her son’s anguished shouts in their back garden.
And now this. Kelly, here, topless, grinning at her.
He doesn’t miss a trick, stops getting dressed, jeans halfway up his thighs. ‘What’s up?’
‘No, nothing. Got to go in early. It’s the trainee rotation day,’ she says, a fact she wasn’t even aware of until she said it. The power of the subconscious. She knew immediately, from twenty years in the law, the second she saw the date, that it was trainee changeover day.
So what else does she know?
Todd walks into their room, too, and – God. The little things you never notice about living with somebody while they are growing up. He’s maybe an inch shorter now than he is in October. Less broad, too, across the chest. He picks a bottle of perfume up from Jen’s chest of drawers and sniffs it. Kelly pulls a T-shirt on.
‘You look mental,’ Todd says dispassionately to Jen. ‘Your poor trainee.’
Jen swats him away, but she doesn’t mean it. She could stay here with him for ever. And, she is ashamed to admit, with her husband. She could pause it all. Todd sniffing that perfume. Kelly with his head popping out of the neck of his T-shirt. Walk around them like they’re statues. Love them, just love them, and never go forwards into the darkness and lies that await them, remaining here in blissful ignorance.
Kelly showers and Jen checks his iPhone and turns back on location tracking as perfunctorily as she eats her breakfast.
Some lawyers occasionally, during their careers, have moments of genius. Most of practising law is mundane: form-filling, costs budgeting, trying to extract everybody with the least damage done possible, but there are sometimes real lightbulb moments, too, and Jen is having hers today. It is significant, it turns out, that it is trainee handover day. Because here, in Jen’s office, is a brand-new trainee who does not know the name of Jen’s husband.
And, on Find My iPhone, Kelly does not appear to be unblocking a chimney nearby but is at the Grosvenor Hotel in Liverpool city centre.
Jen’s been trying to do the spying herself. But now, she can send a trainee to do it for her.
The one assigned to Jen is called Natalia. She is a classic solicitor-in-training: organized, overly cheerful, neat both in her work and in her appearance. Her hair is slicked back into a piece of elastic so perfectly that Jen takes a second, in her sunlit office, to marvel at it. Like a horse’s tail.
Jen knows that Natalia’s life will implode in early October. She will get home to find her boyfriend gone, packed up. He won’t engage with her over it, practically ghosts her. She will tell Jen about it after several days of tearfulness and unproductivity.
‘I have a task for you,’ Jen says. Her tone is probably too familiar. But she’s worked with Natalia for eight weeks already, having shared a pepperoni Domino’s pizza while Natalia cried and said she hated Simon. And if her tone surprises Natalia, she masks it well.
Jen pulls up a photograph of her husband on her computer. She has surprisingly few. ‘All right, this might be somewhat unorthodox,’ she says.
‘Perfect. I’ll do anything,’ Natalia says cheerfully.
‘This man is in the Grosvenor Hotel, right this minute,’ she says, pointing at her screen. ‘Presumably with somebody. We need to know what they’re discussing.’
Natalia blinks. Even her eyelids are perfect. Jen knows this is a strange thing to notice but, nevertheless, they are. Smooth and painted with a colour just slightly lighter than her skin, enough to make her look alert and awake. ‘Wow, okay. So, like, surveillance on cheating spouses?’ Natalia says.
‘Sure,’ Jen says lightly. ‘Yes.’ She bolsters the lie. ‘The court will be much easier on the wife if we can prove adultery.’ This is strictly legally correct, though Jen would never usually go to these lengths.
‘Great.’ Natalia takes a pad and pen and goes to leave.
‘If you have trouble finding him, call me,’ Jen says.
Jen struggles to get any work done while Natalia is gone, which she supposes doesn’t really matter. She undertakes useless filing and filling in of timesheets instead, while she waits.