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‘How does Dad know him? They were just talking.’
Todd shifts back from her, barely a step. Jen stares at him. Something significant has happened in his mind, but Jen has no idea what.
‘Do they know each other?’ Jen asks again. They both look back down at the street. The dark is gathering. Her husband just performed some sort of transaction right there, so brazenly. Jen can feel the significance of this, of the argument Kelly and Todd go on to have, too. Information is rushing towards her. Perhaps an end is in sight.
‘I need to know,’ she says to Todd.
‘Look – I … I don’t want to be causing marital issues here.’
‘Todd, you are not in a sitcom,’ Jen snaps.
‘Amazingly, I do know that. Yes, Dad knows Clio’s uncle and his mate. Asked me not to tell you.’ Todd scuffs his bare foot on the carpet.
‘What? Why?’
‘He says they’re his old friends and you used to find them irritating. And you wouldn’t like that he’d got back in touch with them.’
‘He asked you to lie to me?’
‘Do you not find them irritating?’
‘I have no idea who they are.’ Jen is completely confused. In a few weeks’ time, Kelly tells Todd he can no longer see Clio, can no longer associate with any of them. And yet – look. Items passed under streetlights; trades willingly arranged on burner phones.
Kelly has some association with Joseph. Clio and Todd got together and complicated it. And Kelly … Kelly thought it would fizzle out, that he could cover it up for long enough, and, when it became apparent that he couldn’t, he told Todd to end it. And why.
That why is the missing piece. And Jen is fairly sure that, today, Todd doesn’t know why. Only Kelly does.
Todd holds his hands up. ‘I don’t know any more than that.’
‘Is Joseph trouble?’ Jen asks curiously while her mind performs a firework display of questions.
‘He might be a wheeler-dealer. I don’t know. He’s a bit of a wide boy.’
‘How so?’
Todd turns his mouth down. ‘I don’t know. He doesn’t work, but he has money. I really don’t know.’
‘Does Clio know more?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll ask Dad.’
Jen grabs a jacket and shoves her feet into trainers, heads out into the mild, soupy night, summer’s last exhale. She’s glad to do this away from Todd. He already knows too much, clearly.
She hurries along the street to the takeaway, feeling guilty about grilling Todd, feeling guilty in case he’s worrying, feeling complicit in her hurt in some way. He’s just a fucking kid. Of course he’d lie in order to keep his glamorous girlfriend.
Jen’s footsteps ring out as she half walks, half runs along the streets. The air is close, the sunset monochrome, rendered grey by cloud cover. The odd September leaf has fallen in the street. Brown, three-cloved, like a child’s depiction. More and more and more will gather and fall, and she won’t see any of them.
Jen rounds the corner of the street that the takeaway is on and stops when she sees Kelly. He’s got his back to her, is leaning on a street sign. His legs are crossed in front of him. He’s on the phone. The burner phone she discovered in Todd’s room in October. She registers now that that was after their row, so … why did the phone end up in Todd’s room? Does Todd take it from Kelly?
‘I’ve done it,’ he says. ‘So you’re going to have to be in play, too.’
Jen waits there, saying nothing. She walks a few silent paces back, hidden behind a corner, still able to hear.
‘I’ll bring it to you. It’s a spare key, it’s on Mandolin Avenue, not far. I need to go now. Need to put in an appearance at home.’
That second sentence kills Jen more than the first.
