Wrong Place, Wrong Time (14)

She props herself up on her elbow, looking at Todd. She missed him coming home, the last time. She’d been at work.

A case had taken over, for the last few weeks, meaning Jen had missed more of her home life than usual. She is often this way when a big ancillary relief case is heading to trial. The neediness and heartbreak of her clients invades Jen’s already poor boundaries, leading her to take constant calls and practically sleep at the office.

Gina Davis was the client who had kept Jen busy during October, but not for the usual reasons. She had walked into Jen’s office for the first time in the summer, with a divorce petition from her husband, who’d left her the week before.

‘I want to stop him ever seeing the kids again,’ Gina said. She had curled her blonde hair carefully, worn an immaculate skirt suit.

‘Why?’ Jen had said. ‘Is there some concern?’

‘No. He’s a great father.’

‘Okay …?’

‘To punish him.’

She was thirty-seven, heartbroken and angry. Jen felt an immediate kinship with her, the kind of woman who doesn’t hide her emotions. The kind of woman who speaks the taboo. ‘I just want to hurt him,’ she said to Jen.

‘I can’t charge you for this,’ Jen had said. It wasn’t the right thing to do, she thought, to profiteer off this. Soon enough, Gina would come to her senses and stop.

‘So do it for free,’ Gina said, and Jen had. Not because her late father’s firm didn’t need the money, but because Jen knew, eventually, that Gina would drop it, accept the decree nisi, accept the residency split, and move on. But it hadn’t happened yet, not after Jen told Gina to go away and think about it over the summer, and advised against it in the many meetings during the autumn. They’d chatted, too, about all sorts – their kids, the news, even Love Island. ‘Gross but compelling,’ Gina had said, while Jen laughed and nodded.

Jen looks at Todd now and wonders, suddenly, if he’s in love, like Gina is. Wonders who this Clio really is to him. What she means. The madness of first love cannot be overlooked, surely, given what he does in two days’ time.

Jen has not met Clio. After Gemma dumped him over the summer, Todd became automatically secretive about his love life, embarrassed, Jen thinks, that it didn’t last. Embarrassed about that evening when he’d showed her all those unanswered texts.

Just as he’s getting ready to go out again, he glances, just once, at the front door. It isn’t a quick, curious glance. It’s something else. Some wariness, like he’s expecting somebody to be there, like he’s nervous. Jen never would have noticed it had she not been scrutinizing him. It’s so quick, his expression clearing almost immediately.

‘What’s that?’ Todd says, looking back at her and gesturing to her screen.

‘Oh, I was just reading this interesting thing. About time loops, you know?’

‘Love that,’ Todd says. He’s gelled his hair upwards in a kind of quiff, has on a retro-looking snooker shirt. He’s recently into it, says he likes the maths of potting the balls. Jen looks at him, her damningly handsome son.

‘What would you do – if you were caught in one?’ she asks him.

‘Oh, it’s almost always about some tiny detail,’ Todd says casually.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know, the butterfly effect. One tiny thing to change the future.’ Todd reaches down to stroke the cat and, just for a second, looks like a child again. Her boy who believes unquestioningly in time loops. Perhaps she will tell him. See what he says.

But, for now, she can’t. If this is really, truly, happening, it is Jen’s job to stop the murder. To figure out the events leading up to it, and to intervene. And then, one day, when she manages that, she will wake up, and it won’t be yesterday.

And so that is why she doesn’t tell Todd.

He leaves, and Jen checks that nobody is waiting for him, or following him. And then Jen follows him herself.





Day Minus Two, 19:00





Jen is two cars behind Todd, and is paradoxically relieved to find that he is an incompetent driver: not once, so far as she can tell, has he checked his rear-view mirror and spotted her.

He slows down on a road called Eshe Road North. It would be described by an estate agent as leafy, as though plants don’t grow on housing estates. There are pumpkins on some of the steps to the houses, carved early, lit up, grotesque reminders of everything that’s to come.

Todd parks his car carefully. Jen drives to a side-street, a few houses down, unlit, so she is hopefully unseen, and gets out, drawing her trench coat around her. The night air has that early-autumn spooky feel to it. Damp spiderwebs, the feeling of something coming to an end before you’re truly ready to leave it.

Todd walks purposefully down the road, white trainers kicking up the leaves. It is so strange for Jen to witness this; the things that happened while she was lawyering, while she was busy caring too much about work and – clearly – not enough about home.

She stands at the junction of the side-street and Eshe Road North until Todd disappears abruptly inside a house. It is large, set back from the road, with a wide porch and a loft conversion. These kinds of places still intimidate Jen, who grew up in a two-bed terrace that had windows so rickety the breeze wafted her hair around in the evenings. Her father, widowed, didn’t notice the draught, and anyway took on too much legal aid work and not enough private to fix it even if he did.