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Ryan thinks of that baby, with criminals. Or on a ship, in international waters, in the back seat of a car, alone.
‘We have surveillance looking at ANPR for it, but we suspect they will have swapped the plates. We’ve put a stop on all ferries. Now let’s find baby Eve.’
Leo throws Ryan a look he can’t read.
It’s his job, now, Ryan assumes, to go and get the names off his corkboard, and they’re going to dispatch more surveillance officers to watch all of them, to see if they can find the car, and the baby.
Ryan stares at the missing poster pinned to the board. He reaches a finger out to touch it. The paper feels soft and thin.
The baby is beautiful. Ryan has always wanted children. Two, a boy and a girl. He knows that’s so passé, but it’s always how he’s felt. Two kids and a woman who could make him laugh. Building his own family unit again, from the rubble of his upbringing. If those you’ve left behind don’t stack up, create new people, in front of you.
She’s four months old. She has the most beautiful eyes, like a soulful little lion. And it’s his job to find her.
‘All right, Ryan,’ Leo says an hour later. ‘Sorry for the delay. Been getting authorizations for more coverts.’ He sips his coffee.
Ryan really wants that drink. He’s so tired. He worries that he’s beginning to prefer it, the station coffee, that he might start drinking from plastic cups at home.
‘Where will they take the baby?’ Leo asks Ryan. ‘In your opinion.’
‘The easiest place. They won’t care what happens to her. The baby.’
‘Right … so – the port?’
‘They will fulfil the order, whatever that is. That’s their priority. They might ditch the baby somewhere on the way. They won’t take A roads or motorways because of ANPR. They’ll go rural. That’s what my brother would do, anyway,’ Ryan says, the words feeling like a betrayal to him. His older brother. He had always protected Ryan, sort of, but now look. ‘“The feds are always watching,” he always used to say.’
‘You’re an asset,’ Leo says. ‘Because of the brother thing. You know?’
Ryan shrugs, embarrassed now. ‘I mean –’
‘There’s no need for modesty,’ Leo says. He rises from the chair. ‘My point being: you know this stuff and yet you’re here. You grew up there’ – he holds his left hand out, far apart from his side – ‘and you arrived here.’
‘Thank you,’ Ryan says thickly. ‘I mean … in some ways, Kelly taught me a lot. I guess the best criminals do.’
Day Minus Sixty, 08:00
‘Morning, beautiful,’ Kelly says. He walks into the bedroom, wearing only boxers. Jen startles.
She could scream. The last day she spent with him, she left this man on the street. A domestic. A sinister, dark street corner, betrayals, crimes. Here – thirteen days before – he is greeting her sleepily, his expression as friendly as the August sun outside.
‘Morning,’ she murmurs, because she doesn’t know what else to say. Stolen cars, stolen babies, dead policemen, don’t look into Joseph Jones, don’t try to find the baby. Her son’s anguished shouts in their back garden.
And now this. Kelly, here, topless, grinning at her.
He doesn’t miss a trick, stops getting dressed, jeans halfway up his thighs. ‘What’s up?’
‘No, nothing. Got to go in early. It’s the trainee rotation day,’ she says, a fact she wasn’t even aware of until she said it. The power of the subconscious. She knew immediately, from twenty years in the law, the second she saw the date, that it was trainee changeover day.
So what else does she know?
Todd walks into their room, too, and – God. The little things you never notice about living with somebody while they are growing up. He’s maybe an inch shorter now than he is in October. Less broad, too, across the chest. He picks a bottle of perfume up from Jen’s chest of drawers and sniffs it. Kelly pulls a T-shirt on.
‘You look mental,’ Todd says dispassionately to Jen. ‘Your poor trainee.’
Jen swats him away, but she doesn’t mean it. She could stay here with him for ever. And, she is ashamed to admit, with her husband. She could pause it all. Todd sniffing that perfume. Kelly with his head popping out of the neck of his T-shirt. Walk around them like they’re statues. Love them, just love them, and never go forwards into the darkness and lies that await them, remaining here in blissful ignorance.
Kelly showers and Jen checks his iPhone and turns back on location tracking as perfunctorily as she eats her breakfast.
Some lawyers occasionally, during their careers, have moments of genius. Most of practising law is mundane: form-filling, costs budgeting, trying to extract everybody with the least damage done possible, but there are sometimes real lightbulb moments, too, and Jen is having hers today. It is significant, it turns out, that it is trainee handover day. Because here, in Jen’s office, is a brand-new trainee who does not know the name of Jen’s husband.
