Page 30 of Just Another Missing Person

Julia has no answer for this, and her brain stalls as she tries to think of one. “Uh—just that it’s natural their DNA would be there.”

“Not in her actual room, is it?”

“Oh—you said in her room?” Julia lies, trying to cover her own tracks.

Erin just looks at her, confused, saying nothing. Julia is never not on top of the facts.

The night behind Erin is black, the strip lights a stark, unflattering white. “Anyway,” she continues, “the cigarette isn’t a match to the housemates. It had been smoked pretty recently, though I’m not sure if it’s from that night; it had hardened just slightly. Maybe the night before. It had been stubbed out by the smoker, not stood on. The previous occupant of the room had moved out too long ago, so it isn’t them, either. Anyway—I’ll leave you with it. Miles has made a very late dinner.”

“How is he?” Julia asks.

Erin waves a hand. “Yeah, fine, wants to move house again.”

Erin’s husband is a restless type; he either likes to be planning a party or a renovation. They’ve moved four times in a decade. “Where?” Julia asks with a smile.

“Bristol. He’s found a Victorian doer-upper, has so much potential—blah blah...”

“Don’t do it,” Jonathan says. “We’re having a bathroom put in. Baby up all night, builders in all day, listening to pissing Ed Sheeran.”

Julia smiles, at their chat, the normality. And then it comes to her. Right then, while trying to make small talk, late at night, exhausted, while amid the soup of keeping her head above water: how she’s going to arrest Matthew James.

“I think we should do a voluntary DNA screening,” she says, almost jubilant with it, her own deception. “Everyone on those three roads surrounding the alleyway, where her phone pinged, comes forward, offers their DNA. Males only. We’ll see where we get to.”

“Oh, yeah...” Erin says slowly while she thinks, rocking back on her heels slightly, looking at Julia. Appraising her, Julia thinks. “Yes. And if they don’t come forward...”

“Well, that says something by itself,” she says, but really she is thinking: Matthew probably will, he has no reason not to. He has nothing to fear, or thinks he doesn’t, has no idea he has a silent enemy.

A few minutes after Erin’s gone, and Julia’s finished her coffee, whichdoestaste slightly of sugar, the Superintendent pokes his head around the door. Alfie Breeze, late fifties. Was once a great detective but has slid happily into management, budgeting, HR matters. He leaves at five o’clock, plays golf in the spring and summer. Somewhat disengaged, he regards his best years as firmly behind him. Tonight, he’s passing through the office, not because he’s working hard, but because he has been in a restaurant in Portishead, and still likes to abuse the free parking here.

“All right?” he says. He pulls his trousers up as he sits down opposite her in her office. Julia’s slatted blinds tiger-stripe him in the glow from a yellow streetlight. He smells of cigars. The charred, heavy smell used to make Julia nauseous when she was pregnant. A wave of nostalgia hits her, for back then. So in love with Art, who said it made him laugh how she was still solving crimes with a huge pregnancy bump.

Julia blinks, lost in the swirling smoke of the past, before it all went wrong. Before—Art would say; did say—sheneglected him. Before he slept with someone else—just once, he yelled at her, his face bright red with anger, like a baby.

“How’s it going?” Alfie prompts. Outside, it’s strange weather. A kind of sleety, white rain, illuminated here and there by passing headlights.

“All right. We have some unknown male DNA at the scene,” she says woodenly.

“What do you think the chances are?” he asks.

Julia tries to forget everything she’s done, looks out at the tumbling sleet and thinks only about Olivia. “I don’t think she’s dead,” she says eventually, and is surprised to find she believes that. It doesn’t make sense to Julia. She has no evidence, just a hunch. Maybe it’s Olivia’s vivacious online persona, maybe the strangeness of the alley, certainly the man in the back of her car, the lack of a body...

She considers, just for a second, what would happen if she told Alfie. He’d phone it in to the anticorruption team. He’d charge Genevieve. She wouldn’t be out until she was thirty. And Art would—what? Julia doesn’t know, not at the moment. He’s (usually) a fan of doing the right thing. He’d visit Genevieve, would be overly solicitous to Julia, maybe, before leaving her for an unproblematic colleague.

“Something on your mind?” Alfie says quietly. He stands and begins to tidy up, slowly and methodically. His signature soft-interview technique.

Julia had forgotten, in Alfie’s benign semiretirement, just how formidable he used to be, and she finds herself wishing, suddenly, that all of her friends weren’t fucking police. She could tell a girlfriend this, a sister, but she doesn’t have anybody. Work has taken that social life from her. All she has left is trained interviewers. Even her brother, previously her playmate, forever young with her, she hardly sees now.

“No, just want to find her,” Julia says lamely.

“Couple of the team have said you seem skittish. Not following things up.” Alfie walks over to the blinds, starts fiddling with the metal pole that closes them. He turns it, shutting out the sleet. “Doesn’t feel like spring, does it?” he says, not turning back to her. “Snow in May.”

So that’s why he’s in here. Not checking in: checking up.

“Who’s said what?”

“Just wondering if you need someone else to take it,” Alfie says. Julia closes her eyes. More than anything, she wants that. But that would be her death warrant. Or, rather, Genevieve’s.

“Please don’t do that,” she says. “It’s just complex. That’s all.”

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