‘Cool, thanks, mate,’ Ryan says, altering the cadence of his natural voice.
The man tilts his head back. ‘Where you from?’
‘Manchester.’
He makes an impatient gesture. ‘Before that.’
‘Always Manchester, but got a Welsh dad,’ he says. It’s the truth; they decided he should stick to this rather than try out an accent.
‘You?’ the man asks Angela.
‘Yeah, round here,’ she says, in perfect Scouse, even though she is from Leigh. Undercover officers are not often local. Too much chance someone would know them, blow their cover.
The man crosses the warehouse to them, black boots crunching the grit and grime on the floor. ‘It’s Joseph,’ he says, extending a hand to Ryan, then to Angela.
‘Nicola,’ she says.
Joseph holds his hands up. ‘My standard warning. If you double-cross me. If you dob me in. If you’re DS. If you slip up. I will do the time. And then – I will fucking come and kill you. Okay?’
‘Likewise,’ Ryan says.
‘Let’s shake on it then,’ Joseph says.
‘Kelly,’ Ryan says as he grasps Joseph’s hand. ‘Good to meet you.’
Kelly. The alias Ryan had to choose for himself. ‘Something you’d turn your head to,’ Leo advised. ‘Something familiar. That’s the first test they do to check you’re not coppers. Call your name in a bar, see if your head swivels.’
‘I’d always answer to my brother’s name,’ Ryan had said in a low voice, thinking of the night, the night his brother got in too deep, owed so much money, so many favours. The night his brother tied the noose. They’d found him too late, by about half an hour, the coroner later said. He’d done it in the loft. He hadn’t wanted to be found.
Day Minus Six Thousand Nine Hundred and Ninety-Eight, 08:00
Jen is in a two-up-two-down terrace. She and Kelly rented it for a year. They had no emotional connection to it at all. Jen hardly remembers it. It is only now, looking up at the ceiling marbled with damp, that she recalls living here at all.
Jen is not yet pregnant, and so Todd is not yet born. Which leaves only one person this mystery can be about.
‘Lopez?’ Kelly calls up the stairs. Emotion moves up through her. She’d forgotten he went through a phase of calling her that. Jen became Jenny became Jenny from the Block, after that song, then became Lopez.
‘Kelly?’ she says.
‘You’re up!’
‘I am.’
‘Look,’ he says, in that way that he does, that authoritative, guarded way. ‘I have a thing today.’
‘What’s that?’
‘An all-day conference.’
Something vague is stirring in Jen’s mind. What kind of painter/decorator goes to a last-minute conference? One she trusted, she supposes.
‘Sure,’ she says, but the ground underfoot as she rises from bed feels unstable, like it’s made of quicksand.
‘You’ll be gone all day?’
‘Yeah,’ Kelly says distractedly.
‘Okay.’
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’ Kelly’s eyes are the same, but not much else. He’s so slim. Elegant, almost.
‘I’m fine,’ Jen says weakly, looking up at him. ‘Don’t worry – you go.’
‘You sure?’
‘Sure as sure can be.’
Jen doesn’t hesitate at all in following Kelly. They’re rushing towards the moment she cracks it open, she can tell.
She’s here, in the back of a cab. It was much harder to call a taxi this far back in the past. She has a mobile, but it’s an old brick whose numbers illuminate green neon and sing as she touches them. A children’s toy of a phone.
‘Can we stop here?’ Jen says.
Kelly has parked illegally right in the centre of Liverpool, on double yellows. His car is a Y reg: Jen hadn’t realized quite how much cars had changed. It’s boxy, looks too big. She can’t stop looking at it, or him. She feels like an alien.
Kelly looks left and right as he unfolds his long legs out of the driver’s seat. The checking seems habitual, a tic. Blue eyes flick up and down the street.
She remains in her black cab. She will be almost invisible to Kelly here, sheltered in the back, behind a grimy window.
‘Got to get a move on soon,’ the cabbie says.
‘Just five – just five minutes, please, I just need to watch something,’ she says.
The taxi driver doesn’t answer her, instead pointedly gets a novel out. John Grisham, the pages folded down. He leaves the engine idling. Oh, the days when people read novels to pass the time.
‘Sorry, won’t be long,’ she adds, thinking of all the things she could tell this man about the future. Brexit. The pandemic. Nobody would believe her. It’s mind-blowing. A whole two decades squashed here into a taxi with them.
Kelly moves around to the back of his car. He scans the horizon in that way he sometimes still does in the present day. She’d never thought about it much until forced to observe her husband in this way. His hair is gelled carefully, coiffed at the front.
Another driver honks at them, gesturing at the taxi as he drives past. He winds his window down. ‘Move!’ he yells.
Jen’s driver puts the car into gear. ‘One sec, please, please,’ she says. If she gets out now, Kelly will see her, and it will all be for nothing.
Kelly opens the boot with one hand and pulls something out. It’s large and burgundy, some folded material – curtains, maybe? Jen rests her forehead against the mucky window of the taxi, squinting. It’s a suit bag. Jen recognizes it from years ago. He wore suits very occasionally. To funerals, to weddings. It hung on a hook in the back of their wardrobe.
‘Any time, love,’ the taxi driver says, but Jen just nods.
Kelly disappears up a side road, his stride a study in casual walking that Jen knows to be false. She’s going to lose him. ‘I need to go,’ she says.
She starts to gather her bag and purse, trying not to lose sight of him. As she’s counting out the money she got out of the drawer in the kitchen – different drawer, different kitchen, different notes – another car honks their horn.
‘Hang on,’ the taxi driver says.
‘I’ll go, I need to go,’ Jen says, almost shouting.
‘We’re blocking a bus route.’
‘I need to get out!’ Jen yells. She fiddles with the car door handle as the honking continues, wondering what will happen if she just cuts and runs without paying. It’s only a taxi. It’s barely a crime.
She thrusts too many notes into the silver tray that has actual cigarette ash in – God, yes, people used to smoke everywhere! – and leaps out.
She dashes to the side-street. Kelly has almost reached the end of it. He stands out to her in a crowd the same way Todd does, the same way her own name does on a list.
He turns abruptly left and goes into a pub called The Sundance. He’s holding his suit bag still, over his arm, so Jen hedges her bets and waits nearby, on the pavement.
She stands outside Woolworths, the red-and-white sign so familiar to her. It goes bust in just five years’ time. The recent past, really, but it doesn’t feel it. Inside: the sealed plasticky floors, the stationery. She could stay here for ever, just looking in through the window, marvelling at times gone by, Christmases buying games and pic ’n’ mix, just staring at the changes that have overtaken the world over the last twenty years, the things lost and gained. She raises a palm to the glass, just as she did right at the very beginning of this, and waits.