It takes him forty minutes to plate the car and he cuts his hand, right across the palm, with the sharp edge of the number plate. But it’s done. Another crime committed.
Ryan drives to the port, where he waits, as instructed, for Ezra to be free, then coasts up to him, getting out and handing him the keys.
‘Perfection,’ Ezra says. Right there, at the cold port, Ryan loses his nerve. Imagine, imagine, imagine, is all he can think. Imagine if Ezra realizes who he is. Ryan may not be in danger of getting arrested, but he is definitely in danger of getting fucking murdered.
‘Great,’ Ryan says. His hand is trembling as he reaches to clap Ezra on the shoulder. He disguises it, lets his jaw swing, a common symptom of being on cocaine. Let Ezra think it’s that, that he’s coked up, like his brother’s associates.
Ryan looks just beyond Ezra, to the cargo ships, the brightly coloured cranes against the night sky.
Ezra meets his eyes. Something seems to pass between them, though Ryan doesn’t know what. His knees begin to weaken, and he disguises it by hopping from foot to foot.
‘First one?’ Ezra asks carefully.
‘Yeah. First of many.’ Ryan rocks back on his heels. They will kill him. No matter the police protection, the safe house he will go to if his cover is blown: these people will kill Ryan if they discover him. Stop thinking about it. Just stop it.
‘We’ve done forty this week,’ Ezra says.
‘Forty cars?’
‘Mmm.’
Wow. Ryan blows air out through his mouth. The scale of this is bigger than even he realized.
‘You hurt your hand?’ Ezra asks.
‘Yeah, no big deal,’ Ryan says. ‘Just the number plate.’
‘I did the same with DIY earlier!’ Ezra says, showing Ryan his own palm.
‘Ha,’ Ryan says, his mind spinning.
‘You should get Savlon on that,’ Ezra says casually, like they’re two kids, not men in an organized-crime gang. Fucking Savlon.
Day Minus Five Hundred and Thirty-One, 08:40
It’s May, but May the previous year. This isn’t right, how far back she is. She’s got to speak to Andy. To ask what to do. To stop it. To slow it down.
Jen descends the stairs and can tell just from the light and the noise of the house – Kelly cooking, Todd chattering away – that it’s a weekend. She stops on the penultimate step, just listening to her husband and her son’s easy banter.
‘That would be uninterested,’ Todd is saying. ‘Disinterested means impartial.’
‘Why, thanks, OED,’ Kelly says. ‘I actually did mean impartial.’
‘No you didn’t!’ Todd says, and they both explode with laughter.
Jen walks into the kitchen. ‘Morning, beautiful,’ Kelly says easily. He flips a pancake. The scene looks so normal. But … the photograph. He has some relative, out there, that he’s never told her about.
It’s painful to look at him, like looking at an eclipse. Jen can feel herself squinting. ‘What?’ he says again.
Her gaze goes back to Todd. He is a child, a kid, an adolescent. Huge feet and hands, big ears, goofy teeth that haven’t yet settled and straightened. Four spots on his cheeks. Not a sniff of facial hair. He’s short.
She drifts over to where Kelly is flipping the pancakes.
‘So you were saying you are impartial to my computer game?’ Todd asks Kelly.
Kelly’s black hair catches the sunlight as he adds more pancake batter to a pan. ‘Yeah – that’s what I meant.’
‘I smell bullshit.’
‘All right, all right,’ Kelly holds his hand up. ‘Thanks for the lesson. I meant uninterested. You shitbag.’
Todd giggles, a high, childlike giggle, at his father. ‘Just think – you could’ve had two of me, if you’d had another. A double pain in the arse,’ Todd says.
‘Yeah,’ Kelly says, something old and whimsical crossing his features for just a second. He always wanted another child.
‘You’re more than enough,’ Jen says to Todd.
‘Hey, we’re all only children,’ Todd says, reaching for a banana and unpeeling it. ‘I never thought of that before.’ Jen watches Kelly closely. Is it this conversation? Is that why she’s here?
He says nothing, busying himself in the kitchen. ‘We are,’ he says casually after a second or two.
Jen looks out at the garden. May. May 2021. She cannot believe it. Early-morning sunbeams funnel down, like shafts from heaven. Their old shed is still out there, the one they had before they got the little blue one. Jen is wondering if anybody else could tell two Mays apart, just from the way the light hits the grass.
‘Right, I need to shower,’ she says.
She goes to the very top of the house, where she sits on the exact centre of their double bed and uses a phone she had too long ago to google and dial Andy’s number.
‘Andy Vettese.’
Jen goes through the usual spiel hurriedly. The dates, the conversations they have already had. Andy keeps up in the way that he does, his silence somewhat misanthropic, but avid, Jen thinks. She tells him about the Penny Jameson in the future. He says he was being put forward for it.
He seems to believe her. ‘Okay, Jen. Shoot. What do you want to ask?’
‘I just – it’s eighteen months before,’ she says, trying to turn her attention back to the task at hand.
‘Do the days you’re landing on have anything in common?’
‘Sometimes … I always learn something. But …’ She cradles the phone between her shoulder and her ear and rubs her hands down her legs. She’s freezing cold. She has very old nail polish on, an apricot shade she went through a phase of loving but dislikes now. ‘So many things ought to have worked to stop it that haven’t.’
‘Maybe it isn’t about stopping it.’
‘Huh?’
‘You say he’s bad, right? This Joseph? Maybe it’s not about stopping his murder.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, if you stop it, seems like you have another problem.’
‘Huh?’
‘Maybe it isn’t about stopping it but about understanding it. So you can defend it. You know? If you know the why, then you could tell a court that.’
Jen’s ears shiver after he’s finished speaking. Maybe, maybe. She is a lawyer, after all. ‘Yes. Like, it was self-defence, or provocation.’
‘Exactly.’
Jen wishes she could go back to Day Zero, just once, to watch it again, knowing everything she knows now.
‘I don’t know if I told you this in the future, but I always tell my wannabe time travellers the same thing: if you seek me out in the past, tell me you know that my imaginary friend was called George, at school. Nobody knows that. Well – apart from the travellers I’ve told. So far, nobody has ever come to tell me.’
‘I’ll tell you,’ Jen says, moved by this personal piece of information. By this clue, by this shortcut, by this hack.
She thanks him and says goodbye.
‘Any time,’ he says. ‘Speak to you yesterday.’
Jen smiles a wan, sad smile, hangs up, and thinks about today. It’s all she has, after all.
Today. May 2021.