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He nods, just once, a downward bob of his head. ‘Yeah.’
‘Is … were you undercover when you met me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is your name Kelly?’
He waits a beat. ‘No.’ He swallows, Adam’s apple sliding up and down.
‘How is this – how could you?’ Jen’s mind is spinning, spinning, spinning in space, in the blackness. She can’t string a sentence together.
‘You’ve lied to me …’ Jen says slowly.
‘It’s confidential.’
Jen has so many questions she doesn’t know where to start. She is trying to marry up two things that simply do not go together.
Kelly looks like he’s going to cry. Eyes red-rimmed. Gaze scanning the horizon. She knows him. She knows when he’s unhappy. ‘My real name is Ryan,’ he says quietly. ‘Kelly was … someone I knew.’
Ryan. Things begin to fall into place. ‘How …’ Jen starts to say, trying to frame it correctly. ‘How do you intend to just – live as Kelly?’
He shifts, uncomfortable. ‘I – I don’t know.’
‘Kill Ryan off? Fake his death?’
He turns to her in surprise. ‘No, what? I don’t know … I don’t know what I’m going to do about it.’
Jen looks away from him, out of the window. Classic, evasive Kelly. Ignore the problem. Then – when it crops up … damage control. The abandoned house, Sandalwood, makes more sense to her now. Gina thought Ryan Hiles was dead because it passed to the Crown, the same thing Rakesh found. But there was no other record of Ryan Hiles’s death. It seems obvious now. A fake death certificate, bought for the sole purpose of showing it to the Land Registry to ensure the property didn’t pass to him and make him traceable, blowing his cover. But he didn’t do anything else, didn’t register his own death in any other way which would have attracted scrutiny, required more documents, more things he couldn’t produce: a body, for one. It was a sticking plaster over a huge wound.
His mother must have died only recently. Sandalwood was only just beginning to fall into disrepair. Jen supposes that, when he cried in the bathroom when Todd was three, his mother might have been alive, and he missed her.
He looks at her. ‘I left the police,’ he says. ‘Last year. I stayed as Kelly because …’
‘Why?’ she says.
‘Because I met you.’
‘But you could have – couldn’t you have told me? Or just chosen a new name?’
‘Joseph Jones believes I am a criminal called Kelly,’ he says quietly, so softly she has to strain to hear. ‘If I change anything, or if I tell anyone – word would get back to him that I was never Kelly. It would be the most obvious tell of all that I am undercover. So I – I have stayed.’
‘You stayed a criminal?’
‘So he thinks, but I’m not. I’m not doing anything. I decided I had better hide in plain sight. It’ll be better when he’s convicted,’ he says ruefully, but Jen knows that it isn’t. Every prison sentence has an end and, by then, it’s too late. Ryan has truly become Kelly.
‘What would the police do if they knew?’
‘Arrest me, probably, because I haven’t been acting on their authority. For fraud by false representation. Maybe sue me, too. Say I was impersonating a police officer, get me on charges for misconduct in a public office.’
Jen is hot and panicked. This is so, so much bigger than she thought it would be. She closes her eyes. They’d arrest him not only for fraud but also for those crimes he commits in 2022 to keep his cover. He will not be protected by immunity for those. He will be regarded as a criminal.
‘When we went travelling. You didn’t want to come back. You wanted to stay in the cottage – in the middle of nowhere. Because of him?’
‘Yes. He knew … he knew two of his soldiers dobbed him in. A woman and a man.’
Nicola.
‘Why didn’t you ever tell me?’ she asks.
