Wrong Place Wrong Time Read online

  Jen pulls up outside, just on the double yellows, and stops the engine. Their son’s stabbed somebody – what does a parking ticket matter? Kelly gets out before the car is even stationary. He reaches – unconsciously, she thinks – behind him for her hand. She grasps it like it’s a raft at sea.

  He pushes one of the double glass doors open and they hurry in across a tired grey linoleum foyer. It smells old-fashioned inside. Like schools, like hospitals, like care homes. Institutions that require uniforms and crap food, the kind of places Kelly hates. ‘I will never,’ he’d said early on in their relationship, ‘join the rat race.’

  ‘I’ll talk to them,’ Kelly says shortly to Jen. He is trembling. But it doesn’t seem to be from fear, rather from anger. He is furious.

  ‘It’s fine – I can lawyer up and do the initial –’

  ‘Where’s the super?’ Kelly barks to a bald officer manning reception who has a signet ring on his little finger. Kelly’s body language is different. Legs spread widely, shoulders puffed up. Even Jen has only rarely seen him drop his guard like this.

  In a bored tone, the officer tells them to wait to be seen.

  ‘You’ve got five minutes,’ Kelly says, pointing to the clock before throwing himself into a chair across the foyer.

  Jen sits down next to him and takes his hand. His wedding ring is loose on his finger. He must be cold. They sit there, Kelly crossing and uncrossing his long legs, huffing, Jen saying nothing. An officer arrives in reception, speaking quietly into his phone. ‘It’s the same crime as two days ago – a section 18 wounding with intent. That victim was Nicola Williams, perpetrator AWOL.’ His voice is so low, Jen has to strain to hear.

  She sits, just listening. Section 18 wounding with intent is a stabbing. They must be talking about Todd. And a similar crime from two days ago.

  Eventually, the arresting officer emerges, the tall one with the cheekbones.

  Jen looks at the clock behind the desk. It’s three thirty, or perhaps four thirty. She doesn’t know whether it’s British Summer Time in here still. It’s disorientating.

  ‘Your son is staying with us tonight – we’ll interview him soon.’

  ‘Where – back there?’ Kelly says. ‘Let me in.’

  ‘You won’t be able to see him,’ the officer says. ‘You are witnesses.’

  Irritation flares within Jen. This sort of thing – exactly this – is why people hate the justice system.

  ‘It’s like that, is it?’ Kelly says acidly to the officer. He holds his hands up.

  ‘Sorry?’ the officer says mildly.

  ‘What, so we’re enemies?’

  ‘Kelly!’ Jen says.

  ‘Nobody is anybody’s enemy,’ the officer says. ‘You can speak to your son in the morning.’

  ‘Where is the superintendent?’ Kelly says.

  ‘You can speak to your son in the morning.’

  Kelly leaves a loaded, dangerous silence. Jen has seen only a handful of people on the receiving end of these, but still, she doesn’t envy the policeman. Kelly’s fuse usually takes a long time to trip but, when it does, it’s explosive.

  ‘I’ll call someone,’ she says. ‘I know someone.’ She gets her phone out and begins shakily scrolling through her contacts. Criminal lawyers. She knows loads of them. The first rule of law is never to dabble in something you don’t specialize in. The second is never to represent your family.

  ‘He has said he doesn’t want one,’ the officer says.

  ‘He needs a solicitor – you shouldn’t …’ she says.

  The officer raises his palms to her. Next to her, Jen can feel Kelly’s temper brewing.

  ‘I’ll just call one, and then he can –’ she starts.

  ‘All right, let me back there,’ Kelly says, gesturing to the white door leading to the rest of the station.

  ‘That cannot be authorized,’ the officer says.

  ‘Fuck. You,’ Kelly says. Jen stares at him in shock.

  The officer doesn’t even dignify this with a response, just looks at Kelly in stony silence.

  ‘So – what now then?’ Jen says. God, Kelly has told a copper to fuck himself. A public order offence is not the way to defuse this situation.

  ‘As I’ve already told you, he’ll remain with us overnight,’ the officer says to her plainly, ignoring Kelly. ‘I suggest you come back tomorrow.’ His eyes flick to Kelly. ‘You can’t force your son to take a solicitor. We have tried.’

  ‘But he’s a kid,’ Jen says, though she knows that, legally, he isn’t. ‘He’s just a kid,’ she says again softly, mostly to herself, thinking of his Christmas pyjamas and the way he wanted her to sit up with him recently when he had a vomiting bug. They spent all night in the en suite. Chatting about nothing, her wiping his mouth with a damp flannel.

  ‘They don’t care about that, or anything,’ Kelly says bitterly.

  ‘We’ll come back, in the morning – with a solicitor,’ Jen says, trying to ameliorate, to peacemake.

  ‘Feel free. We need to send a team back with you to the house now,’ he says. Jen nods wordlessly. Forensics. Their house being searched. The lot.

  Jen and Kelly leave the police station. Jen rubs at her forehead as they go to the car and get in. She blasts the heat on as they sit there.

  ‘Are we really just going to go home?’ she says. ‘Sit there while they search?’

  Kelly’s shoulders are tense. He stares at her, black hair everywhere, eyes sad like a poet’s.

  ‘I have no fucking idea.’

  Jen gazes out of the windscreen at a bush glistening with middle-of-the-night autumnal dew. After a few seconds, she puts the car in reverse and drives, because she doesn’t know what else to do.

  The pumpkin greets them on the windowsill as she parks up. She must have left the candle burning. Forensics have already arrived in their white suits, standing on their driveway like ghosts by the police tape that flutters in the October wind. The puddle of blood has begun to dry at the edges.

  They’re let in, to their own fucking house, and they sit downstairs, watching the uniformed teams out front, some on their hands and knees doing fingertip searches of the crime scene. They say nothing at all, just hold hands in the silence. Kelly keeps his coat on.

  Eventually, when the scene of crime officers have gone, and the police have searched and taken Todd’s things, Jen shifts on the sofa so that she’s lying down, and stares up at the ceiling. And that’s when the tears come. Hot and fast and wet. The tears for the future. And the tears for yesterday, and what she didn’t see coming.

  Day Minus One, 08:00

  Jen opens her eyes.

  She must have come up to bed. And she must have slept. She doesn’t feel like she did either, but she’s in her bedroom, not on the sofa, and it’s now light outside beyond their slatted blinds.

  She rolls on to her side. Say it isn’t true.

  She blinks, staring at the empty bed. She’s alone. Kelly will already be up, making calls, she very much hopes.

  Her clothes litter the bedroom floor as if she evaporated out of them. She steps over them, pulling on jeans and a plain rollneck jumper which makes her look truly enormous but that she loves anyway.

  She ventures out on to the hallway, standing outside Todd’s empty room.

  Her son. Spent the night in a police cell. She can’t think about how many more might await him.

  Right. She can sort this. Jen is an excellent rescuer, has spent all of her life doing just that, and now it’s time to help her son.

  She can figure this out.

  Why did he do it?

  Why did he have a knife with him? Who was the victim, this grown man her son has probably killed? Suddenly Jen can see little clues in Todd in the recent weeks and months. Moodiness. Weight loss. Secrecy. Things she had put down to teenagehood. Just two days ago, he had taken a call, out in the garden. When Jen had asked who it was, he told her it was none of her business, then threw the phone on to the sofa. It had bounced, once,
then fallen to the floor, where they’d both looked at it. He had passed it off as a joke, but it hadn’t been, that small temper tantrum.

  Jen stares and stares at the door to her son’s bedroom. How had she come to raise a murderer? Teenage rage. Knife crime. Gangs. Antifa. Which is it? Which hand have they been dealt?

  She can’t hear Kelly at all. Halfway down the stairs, she glances out of the picture window, the window that she stood at only hours ago, the moment everything changed. It is still foggy.

  She is surprised to see the road below bears no stains – the rain and the mist must have washed the blood away. The police have moved on. The police tape has gone.

  She glances up the street, the edges peppered with trees ablaze with crunchy autumn leaves. But something is strange about what she sees. She can’t work out what. It must just be the memories of last night. Rendering the view sinister, somehow. Slightly off.

  She hurries downstairs, through their wooden-floored hallway and into the kitchen. It smells of last night in here, before anything happened. Food, candles. Normality.

  She hears a voice, right above her, a deep male register. Kelly. She looks at the ceiling, confused. He must be in Todd’s room. Searching it, probably. She understands that impulse entirely. The urge to find what the police couldn’t.

  ‘Kell?’ she calls out, running back up the stairs, out of breath by the time she reaches the top. ‘We need to get on – which solicitor we should –’

  ‘Three score and Jen!’ a voice says. It comes from Todd’s room and is unmistakably her son’s. Jen takes a step back so massive it makes her stumble at the top of the stairs.

  And she’s not imagining it: Todd emerges from the confines of his room, wearing a black T-shirt which says Science Guy on it, and jogging bottoms. He has clearly just woken, and squints down at her, his pale face the only light in the darkness. ‘We haven’t done that one yet,’ he says with a dimpled grin. ‘I even – I must confess – went on a pun website.’

  Jen can only gape at him. Her son, the killer. There is no blood on his hands. No murderous expression on his face, and yet.

  ‘What?’ she says. ‘How are you here?’

  ‘Huh?’ He really does look just the same as he did. Even in her confusion, Jen is curious. Same blue eyes. Same tousled, black hair. Same tall, slim frame. But he’s committed an unforgivable act. Unforgivable to everyone, except maybe her.

  How is he here? How is he home?

  ‘What?’ he prompts.

  ‘How did you get back?’

  Todd’s brow flickers. ‘This is weird, even for you.’

  ‘Did Dad get you? Are you on bail?’ she barks.

  ‘On bail?’ He raises an eyebrow, a new mannerism. For the past few months, he’s looked different. Slimmer in the body, in the hips, but bloated in the face. With the pallor somebody gets when they are working too much, eating too many takeaways and drinking no water. None of which Jen is aware Todd is doing, but who knows? And then along came this mannerism, acquired just after he met his new girlfriend, Clio.

  ‘I’m about to meet Connor.’

  Connor. A boy from his year, but another new friend, made only this summer. Jen befriended his mum, Pauline, years ago. She is just Jen’s sort of person: jaded, sweary, not a natural mother, the kind of person who implicitly gives Jen permission to mess up. Jen has always been drawn to these types of people. All of her friends are unpretentious, unafraid to do and say what they think. Just recently, Pauline had said of Connor’s younger brother, Theo: ‘I love him, but because he’s seven, he often acts like a twat.’ They’d laughed like guilty loons at the school gate.

  Jen steps forwards and looks closely at Todd. No mark of the devil on him, no change behind his eyes, no weapons in the room beyond him. In fact, it looks untouched.

  ‘How did you get home – and what happened?’

  ‘Home from where?’

  ‘The police station,’ Jen says plainly. She finds herself keeping a distance from him. Just a step more than usual. She no longer knows what this person – her child, the love of her life – is capable of.

  ‘Sorry – the police station?’ he says, evidently amused. ‘Question mark?’ Todd’s expression twists, nose wrinkling up just like it did when he was a baby. He has two tiny scars left over from the worst of his teenage acne. Otherwise, his face is still childlike, pristine in that beautiful peach-fuzz way of the young.

  ‘Your arrest, Todd!’

  ‘My arrest?’

  Jen can usually tell when her son is lying, and at that moment she registers that he is definitely not. He looks at her with his clear twilight eyes, confusion inscribed across his features. ‘What?’ she says in barely a whisper. Something is creeping up her spine, some tentative, frightening knowledge. ‘I saw … I saw what you did.’ She gestures to the mid-landing window. And that’s the moment she realizes what’s the matter. It isn’t the scene outside: it’s the window itself. No pumpkin. It’s gone.

  Jen’s teeth begin to chatter. This can’t be happening.

  She tears her eyes away from the pumpkin-less windowsill.

  ‘I saw,’ she says again.

  ‘Saw what?’ His eyes are so like Kelly’s, she finds herself thinking, for at least the thousandth time in her life: they’re identical.

  She just looks at him and, for once, his gaze holds hers. ‘What happened last night, after you got back.’

  ‘I wasn’t out last night.’ The banter, the pretension, the posturing are all gone.

  ‘What? I was waiting up for you, you were late, but then the clocks changed …’

  He pauses, maintaining eye contact. ‘The clocks go back tomorrow. It’s Friday today?’

  Day Minus One, 08:20

  Some internal elevator plunges down the centre of Jen’s chest. She pushes her hair off her face and heads to the family bathroom at the back of the house, holding up a finger to Todd for just a second. She shivers as she turns her back on him, like he is a predator she wants to keep an eye on.

  She is sick into the toilet, the sort of sick she hasn’t been in years. Hardly anything comes up, just a sticky yellow stomach acid that sits right at the bottom of the water. She thinks of her pregnancy, when she told a doctor she was vomiting so much that only bile was coming up, and he apparently felt the need to say, ‘Bile is bright green and signals real trouble. You mean stomach acid.’

  She stares and stares into the acid lining the bottom of the toilet. It might not be bile, but she thinks she might be in real trouble.

  Todd does not know what she is talking about. That is clear. Even he wouldn’t deny this. But why? How?

  The pumpkin. The pumpkin is missing. Where is her husband? She can’t think straight. Panic rises up through her body, a great pressure with nowhere to go. She’s going to be sick again.

  She sits on the cold chequerboard tiles.

  She gets her phone out of her pocket and stares at it, bringing up the calendar.

  It is Friday the twenty-eighth of October. The clocks do indeed go back tomorrow. Monday will be Halloween. Jen stares and stares at that date. How can this be?

  She must be going mad. She gets up and paces uselessly. Her body feels like it’s covered in ants. She’s got to get out of here. But out of where? Out of yesterday?

  She navigates to her last text message with Kelly and presses call.

  He answers immediately. ‘Look,’ she says urgently.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ he says, languid, always amused by her. She hears a door close.

  ‘Where are you?’ she asks. She knows she sounds crazed, but she can’t help it.

  A beat. ‘I am on planet Earth, but it sounds like you might not be.’

  ‘Be serious.’

  ‘I’m at work! Obviously! Where are you?’

  ‘Was Todd arrested last night?’

  ‘What?’ She hears him put something heavy down on a hollow-sounding floor. ‘Er – for what?’

  ‘No, I’m asking you. Was he?’

&n
bsp; ‘No?’ Kelly says, sounding baffled. Jen can’t believe it. Sweat blooms across her chest. She starts to rub at her arms.

  ‘But we sat – we sat in the police station. You shouted at them. The clocks had just gone back, I was … I had done the pumpkin.’

  ‘Look – are you okay? I need to finish Merrilocks,’ he says.

  Jen sucks a breath in. He said he finished there yesterday. Didn’t he? Yes, she’s sure he did. He was at the top of the landing, wearing only a tattoo and a smile. She can remember it. She can.

  She puts a hand to her eyes as if she can block out the world.

  ‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ she says. She starts to cry, water lacing her words. ‘What did we do? Last night?’ She leans her head back against the wall. ‘Did I do the pumpkin?’

  ‘What are you –’

  ‘I think I’ve had some sort of episode,’ she says in barely a whisper. She rolls her pyjamas up over her knees and stares at her skin. No impressions where she knelt on the gravel. Not a single speck of dirt on them. No blood under her nails. Goosebumps erupt up and down her arms fast, like a time-lapse.

  ‘Did I carve the pumpkin?’ she asks again, but, as she speaks, some deep realization is dawning all around her. If it didn’t happen … she might have lost her mind, but her son isn’t a murderer. She feels her shoulders drop, just slightly, in relief.

  ‘No, you – you said you couldn’t be arsed …’ he says with a little laugh.

  ‘Right,’ she says faintly, picturing exactly how that pumpkin turned out.

  She stands and stares at herself in the mirror. She meets her own eyes. She is a portrait of a panicked woman. Dark hair, pale complexion. Hunted eyes.

  ‘Look, I’d better go,’ she says. ‘I’m sure it was a dream,’ she says, though how can it be?

  ‘Okay,’ Kelly says slowly. Perhaps he is about to say something but decides against it, because he says only ‘Okay,’ again, then adds: ‘I’ll leave early,’ and Jen is glad he is this, a family man, not the kind of man who goes to pubs or plays sport with friends, just her Kelly.