Zero Days

Despite telling Hel that she would call a lawyer before talking to the police again, Jack doesn’t. As Jack enters the station, she cannot help but check for cameras and exits, like she’s on a job. Malik takes Jack to a room where Miles is waiting. This time, Malik informs Jack of her rights, something she did not do before. Malik points out that Jack’s timeline of the night of Gabe’s murder includes a large block for which she has no alibi. Given the distances from station to car and car to home, Jack should have arrived home around 3:15 am, but she didn’t call the police until nearly 5:00 am. Jack explains, again, that she’d taken a wrong turn on the way home and then gone into shock when she saw Gabe’s body. Miles and Malik begin asking questions about Gabe’s computer: if Jack noticed anything missing or if she removed the hard drive, which was missing. They ask if she recognizes a particular kitchen knife from a photograph, and she does. Now, it is covered in blood. Jack asks for her lawyer.

Malik and Miles leave the room. Jack’s borrowed phone pings, and she sees an email from Sunsmile Insurance Ltd. stating that the life insurance policy she took out for Gabe has been confirmed. But Jack never took out an insurance policy, and she wonders if Gabe did. When Jack clicks on the attachment, she sees that she and Gabe took out £1 million policies on each other. Jack realizes that someone is framing her for Gabe’s murder. She wonders if she should tell Malik or if Malik would only see it as a motive. She recalls, sarcastically, that “trusting the police went so well last time” (83), referring to her reports about Jeff. Not only had the police failed to take her seriously, but they also retaliated against her by issuing parking tickets for places she’d never been, flagging her car as stolen, causing her to struggle to get insurance, and more.

Jack overhears Malik and Miles, and Malik wants to arrest Jack. The fact that there was no sign of a break-in supports Malik’s opinion. Jack uses breathing exercises Gabe taught her to calm down. Miles returns to tell Jack that her lawyer will be there soon and offers her something to drink. She requests tea, hoping it will buy her time, and, when he leaves, she runs.

Jack has only her wits to help her escape. She encounters a door with a card reader and inserts a Sharpie into the frame when the door next opens, preventing it from closing securely. Once through, she passes the front desk, slipping into the security camera’s blind spot she noted earlier. Jack realizes she needs clothes and tools and decides to return home.

A taxi drops Jack near her house, and she goes around the back to avoid the police in front, jumping a fence and scaling a stone wall to get into her backyard. She knows that someone broke into their home without leaving clues, and that’s what she plans to do. Jack climbs to the roof and sees that the bathroom fan is cracked and loose, and she pulls it out easily. She reaches through and unlatches the window, letting herself in the way Gabe’s killer must have. The smell of Gabe’s blood brings Jack to her knees. She finds her “go bag,” adds some clothes, and goes in search of Gabe’s key code so she can access his Bitcoin wallet, which has about £20,000 in it. Finding the book where Gabe wrote the code, she adds it to her bag.

Jack hears the officer outside, preparing to enter the house. She hides in a wardrobe while the officer searches the bedroom, but as he turns to leave, she sneezes. With only the element of surprise in her favor, she bursts out of the wardrobe and runs down the hall, going out the same window. Surmounting a stone wall, she feels a terrible pain in her side. She picks the lock to access a neighbor’s garden and knocks on the door. She claims she locked herself out of her house, asking about the security code for the fence so she can get back in. The woman doesn’t know it but offers to let Jack pass through her home. They chat for a moment, and Jack exits onto the empty street.

Aware that she won’t be able to use Hel’s old phone any longer because it will be traced, Jack uses it one last time before tossing it. Calling Hel, she explains that she ran from the police and she needs money, a sleeping bag, warm clothes, and bleach for her hair. Hel proposes that they meet in the bathroom at a shopping center after she picks up the girls from school.

Jack arrives at the shopping center on foot, having purchased a baseball cap to cover her very recognizable hair. She wonders if she’s made a mistake in running from the police, but, without Gabe, she doesn’t really care what happens to her. She only wants the police to find who killed him, and they are wasting time pursuing her. She feels responsible for finding the killer. She thinks of how the police failed her once, and now they seem to be failing her again.

Jack wonders if Gabe did, in fact, buy the insurance policy. Maybe he sensed something and did it to protect her. He had been acting strangely lately: zoning out, being deliberately vague, and claiming he was stressed from work when work never made him feel this way. Now, Jack worries that something Gabe might have done to protect her will trap her.

Realizing that she is bleeding from the wound she sustained climbing the wall, she goes to get first aid supplies. She considers how good at shoplifting she used to be and how the guard who finally caught her told her about security jobs that would make use of her talents. Jack promised him that she’d never shoplift again, but now she must break that promise. She steals a box of dressings and finds the bathroom to assess her injury. She realizes she was caught on a metal spike in the wall outside her neighbor’s garden and wishes she’d stolen antiseptic too.

Hel and the girls arrive, and Hel hands over everything Jack requested along with a burner phone. Donning a different shirt and hat, Jack leaves by the bathroom’s other exit, hopeful that she’ll look like another person to anyone monitoring the cameras.

Jack realizes that she is a fugitive and needs to get out of London. First, though, she needs to change her hair so that she isn’t instantly recognizable. She finds a hostel, but the girl at the front desk says they don’t take cash. Jack is shocked when a stranger pays for her room. He is Lucius Doyle, an American, and he simply asks her to help the next person she can. Jack uses a fake name and address to sign in, and when she looks up, Lucius is gone.

Jack bleaches her hair in the hostel’s bathroom. Her wound is really hurting. In the lobby, she opens her laptop to email Hel—using a secure personal network Gabe set up—and she sees a new message from Jeff. He taunts her, calling her a “naughty girl” and telling her that she’s in big trouble. He advises her to turn herself in and suggests that she killed Gabe because he was hitting her or cheating on her. Furious, Jack sends a scathing reply, addressing half to Jeff and half to his colleagues who might have put him up to writing. She says that he treated her “like shit” for 80% of time they dated and then abused and stalked her for six months after she ended it. Then, when she reported this to the police, they ignored it. Further, she explains how she got into her house—via the broken bathroom fan—and argues that the police could have figured that out if they were not so busy trying to pin the murder on her.

As Jack is writing an email to Hel, she thinks about Cole. He knows even more than Gabe did about mobile phone security and might be able to figure out how to keep in touch with Hel. She is startled when Lucius speaks to her again, and she explains that she is trying to figure out how to word a difficult email. He suggests that, for big things, speaking to someone in person is best. Jack mulls this over and decides to find Cole the next day.