A receptionist with thin, plucked eyebrows and her waterline pencilled in the way that everybody did in 2003 types at a boxy computer.
‘I need to speak to a police officer,’ Jen says. ‘He will go by the name of Ryan or Kelly.’
‘Why?’
‘I have a tip-off. About the crime-ring operation that he is working undercover on,’ Jen says. As she says it, a man pushes the door open. He’s old, maybe fifty, and has feathering grey hair at his temples.
His face arranges itself into an expression of surprise. ‘Kelly?’ he says to her.
‘I need to speak to Kelly. I know he’s undercover.’
‘You’d better come in,’ he says. He reaches to shake her hand. ‘I’m Leo.’
Kelly is sitting opposite Jen in an interviewing suite and he doesn’t know who she is. It’s crazy, but it’s true. To him, they have never met.
‘Look,’ Jen is explaining patiently. ‘I can’t say how I know. But the house they intend to burgle tonight … they intend to take two cars.’ She dutifully gives the address of Eve Green, taken from the news story, which Leo and Kelly write down.
It’s the same address – only one digit different – from the one on her father’s piece of paper. 125 Greenwood Avenue.
‘Thanks,’ Kelly says professionally to her. His blue eyes linger on hers. ‘No intel at all on where it came from?’
Jen’s gaze meets his. ‘Sorry – can’t say.’
‘Sure, okay. Well,’ he says, dismissing her as though she is a stranger, ‘we will be sure to check it out.’ A fixed, careful smile.
She looks at him, wondering where the join is between him – this Ryan – and her Kelly. Whether he became the latter, or always was, deep inside. Suddenly, there in the police station, looking at this man that she has loved for twenty years, she wonders if it matters. Does anyone care how or why we are forged into who we are? Dark, guarded, funny. Whatever. Or does it only matter that we are?
‘You will look into it?’
‘Yeah – ’course,’ he says lightly. ‘Life’s too long not to follow a lead.’
Jen waits on the road where it all happens that evening. She is sitting in an old banger of a car, wondering how come her father could do it: supply information to criminals, keep it from her, let her marry somebody undercover …
It begins to rain, spring drops that fall irregularly on the roof of her car. She thinks, too, of what her father said the night he died. That Kelly was straight-up. Why would he say that, if he didn’t believe Kelly to be good? Perhaps he knew. Perhaps Kelly told him.
Something pops into her head, as if from nowhere. The sign she saw at the NEC but didn’t realize the significance of. Abdominal aortic scanning. You could scan for the illness that killed her father. She wonders if that technology exists yet. If it does, she could do that – call him, now, tell him to get a scan. Save more than one life tonight.
She rests her elbow on the window and her face in her palm. She knows, somewhere deep inside her, that it isn’t the right thing to do.
She thinks of him asking her to make that garlic bread. Content as anything. She thinks, too, of her mother, long gone before him. Perhaps it was his time to go. You can’t save everyone. You just can’t.
She must have woken up on the day he died so that she would go and speak to him and learn something about the timeshares. That must be what it was for. Nothing else, but something still feels unfinished about it, to Jen.
The police have 123 Greenwood Avenue surrounded with unmarked cars.
Eventually, around eleven thirty, they arrive. Two teenagers, just boys really, barely Todd’s age. They get out of the car, wearing all black, their bodies like spiders’， and she watches them go in.
She knows it’ll happen but is still awed when it does. That she, forty-three-year-old Jen, is still here, in a much younger Jen’s body, watching the things happen that she knew would, the things she’s worked out, despite never believing that she could, that she was capable of it.
She watches them fish keys out of the letterbox. She knows things are coming to a close. She knows that this is the last day, however it will end.
Like clockwork, a tired-looking woman emerges out of the house next door to 125, carrying a baby. She lowers the baby, crying, into a car seat, then stops, patting her pockets. She hesitates, looking at the quiet street. Not seeing the car parked wonkily. Not seeing the careful letterbox crime happening next door, the two boys dressed in black, camouflaged in the shadows of the house.
At that moment: blue. An explosion of light so blue it’s as though the saturation is turned up.
Police everywhere, emerging from cars and shrubs and behind buildings, arresting the teenagers.
She hears somebody read the caution out. She thinks of Kelly, absent for his own protection. He hasn’t yet done anything that will require undercover testimony. He hasn’t yet become Witness B, and everyone he will become after that. He hasn’t yet met Jen as he knows her.
The woman with the baby hasn’t left her driveway, has just watched it all play out, holding Eve, with no idea of the bullet she’s just dodged; there but for the … We only think of the bad things that happen, rather than those that, through fortune, pass us by.
Jen closes her eyes, leans her head on the steering wheel and wants to sleep. She’s almost ready. There’s a deep knowledge, sitting underneath everything, just like Andy said there would be. She’d lived her life once, and missed it all, but her wise mind, her subconscious, it knew things.
She’s almost ready.
Almost one o’clock in the morning and the police pull back up at Merseyside station, where Jen is waiting. And so, too, is Kelly. Just as Jen hoped.
The moon is out, the sky high and clear, and Jen is almost gone. She knows it.
Kelly and Leo get out of an unmarked car. Leo goes immediately to his own car, but Kelly loiters. He walks slowly towards the station, his breath puffing out into the cold winter air. He pulls a mobile phone out, presumably to call a taxi home.
She gets out of her car before he can dial. They only met once, earlier today, and uncertainty crosses his features. Confusion blended with amusement: he is all Todd.
‘Hi. We met earlier,’ Jen says, hurrying over to her husband of twenty years.
‘All right,’ Kelly says, his frown deepening. ‘You okay?’
‘Yes,’ she says breathlessly. She’s so far back now, an arrow aimed at the future: the slightest, slightest tweak, and she will miss. ‘I just wanted to know – the burglars – my tip-off – you got them?’
‘We did,’ he says carefully. He puts his phone back in his pocket but turns his slim body away from her.
The remoteness stops her in her tracks, there in the January drizzle, almost identical to the October mist. He doesn’t know, she thinks, looking at him. This man she’s loved and laughed with, got pregnant by, said vows to, shared a bed with. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know her. She is seeing wary Kelly, the way he greets strangers. He has nothing to be wary of, now, in the past, but he still is. He is still him. She was right. He is still himself. The man she loves.
‘I’m so glad you got them.’