‘You’ve lied to me …’ Jen says slowly.
‘It’s confidential.’
Jen has so many questions she doesn’t know where to start. She is trying to marry up two things that simply do not go together.
Kelly looks like he’s going to cry. Eyes red-rimmed. Gaze scanning the horizon. She knows him. She knows when he’s unhappy. ‘My real name is Ryan,’ he says quietly. ‘Kelly was … someone I knew.’
Ryan. Things begin to fall into place. ‘How …’ Jen starts to say, trying to frame it correctly. ‘How do you intend to just – live as Kelly?’
He shifts, uncomfortable. ‘I – I don’t know.’
‘Kill Ryan off? Fake his death?’
He turns to her in surprise. ‘No, what? I don’t know … I don’t know what I’m going to do about it.’
Jen looks away from him, out of the window. Classic, evasive Kelly. Ignore the problem. Then – when it crops up … damage control. The abandoned house, Sandalwood, makes more sense to her now. Gina thought Ryan Hiles was dead because it passed to the Crown, the same thing Rakesh found. But there was no other record of Ryan Hiles’s death. It seems obvious now. A fake death certificate, bought for the sole purpose of showing it to the Land Registry to ensure the property didn’t pass to him and make him traceable, blowing his cover. But he didn’t do anything else, didn’t register his own death in any other way which would have attracted scrutiny, required more documents, more things he couldn’t produce: a body, for one. It was a sticking plaster over a huge wound.
His mother must have died only recently. Sandalwood was only just beginning to fall into disrepair. Jen supposes that, when he cried in the bathroom when Todd was three, his mother might have been alive, and he missed her.
He looks at her. ‘I left the police,’ he says. ‘Last year. I stayed as Kelly because …’
‘Why?’ she says.
‘Because I met you.’
‘But you could have – couldn’t you have told me? Or just chosen a new name?’
‘Joseph Jones believes I am a criminal called Kelly,’ he says quietly, so softly she has to strain to hear. ‘If I change anything, or if I tell anyone – word would get back to him that I was never Kelly. It would be the most obvious tell of all that I am undercover. So I – I have stayed.’
‘You stayed a criminal?’
‘So he thinks, but I’m not. I’m not doing anything. I decided I had better hide in plain sight. It’ll be better when he’s convicted,’ he says ruefully, but Jen knows that it isn’t. Every prison sentence has an end and, by then, it’s too late. Ryan has truly become Kelly.
‘What would the police do if they knew?’
‘Arrest me, probably, because I haven’t been acting on their authority. For fraud by false representation. Maybe sue me, too. Say I was impersonating a police officer, get me on charges for misconduct in a public office.’
Jen is hot and panicked. This is so, so much bigger than she thought it would be. She closes her eyes. They’d arrest him not only for fraud but also for those crimes he commits in 2022 to keep his cover. He will not be protected by immunity for those. He will be regarded as a criminal.
‘When we went travelling. You didn’t want to come back. You wanted to stay in the cottage – in the middle of nowhere. Because of him?’
‘Yes. He knew … he knew two of his soldiers dobbed him in. A woman and a man.’
Nicola.
‘Why didn’t you ever tell me?’ she asks.
Kelly’s gaze moves off hers. ‘Confidential,’ he says, his voice low.
‘But … I mean.’ She can’t say the things she wants to say: does confidentiality apply between lovers? Why did he think it was acceptable to keep this from her for ever? Because he hasn’t lived for ever yet, with her.
‘Were you ever going to tell me?’ she says.
‘Of course I was,’ Kelly says. ‘I am.’ Jen marvels at their different tenses. Hers past. His future.
But it’s a lie. Jen’s lived it.
The last piece of the puzzle finally drifts into place now, in the correct order, front to back, as it should be. Jen stares at it in her mind. ‘Can I ask …’ she says, thinking of what Kelly just said about Joseph.
‘Yeah?’
‘When Joseph gets out of prison, if he found out you were the copper who sent him down, what do you think he would do?’
‘He won’t find out. The curtain … they disguised my voice. There were so many of us – working for him. The scale of it …’
‘But say – somehow … he does. What then?’
Kelly waits a beat, then speaks. ‘He’d come and kill me.’
Day Minus Six Thousand Nine Hundred and Ninety-Eight, 23:00
It’s late. Jen is in the bath. She can’t wait to go to sleep and wake up someplace else, tomorrow.
A hot pool of confusion gathers in her stomach.
Undercover. Undercover. The word, ugly and huge, thrums underneath Jen’s breastbone like a heartbeat. So this is why. No PAYE job. No social media. No parties.
Kelly has been living under an assumed identity for twenty years.
But why did he never tell her?
She thinks she has pieced it together into the right order. She wishes she could ask Andy, but he won’t even have finished his degree yet. Not even he can help her now.
She stares at the frosted window, thinking it through.
Kelly went undercover. His evidence sent Joseph to prison. Twenty years later, Joseph is released, comes looking – at the law firm – for Kelly, trying to start up his crime ring once again, with all the old players in it. If Kelly refused to obey Joseph, Joseph would suspect he was the undercover officer. If he complied, he became a criminal, proper. Kelly couldn’t win. And, since Joseph served twenty years for the crimes he committed with many of his foot soldiers, he had a hold over all of them if they didn’t comply: he could hand them in. Only, over Kelly, he had an even greater hold, so great he didn’t even know it: if he reported Kelly for his past crimes, then the police would come looking and find out Kelly was still living under his assumed identity. Illegally. Or, worse, that he was committing offences now, without the authority of the police.
Hence the package passed, containing the stolen car key. Kelly was forced to comply. Todd was there when they met again, as was Clio, and they fell in love. Kelly told Todd not to tell Jen about him knowing Joseph, and he also, later, told Todd to finish it with Clio. He must have confessed all that night in the garden, told Todd who he really was. The most fucked-up thing Todd had ever had happen to him, he had said. He must have shown him his old badge, the poster. Jen can just imagine it now, the conversation taking place in Todd’s room. Todd hiding the badge, phone and poster, from her.
Kelly began working for Joseph again, but at the moment he thought Joseph might know he was the policeman who put him in prison, he desperately contacted Nicola for help. Who is not, as it turned out, a criminal, but somebody who had been undercover back then. Police. He must have felt between a rock and a hard place. In fear for his life, coming clean to Nicola must have been the least bad option.