Page 40 of Just Another Missing Person

“If you’re considering a murder charge without a body, I would reconsider,” he adds over his shoulder as he leaves.

A throat clears behind Julia. It’s Erin, who doesn’t meet her eyes as she passes.

***

The fire alarm is triggered before Julia can get back to her office. It’s still pouring with that fresh, sleety, wet rain, and standing in it with all of her colleagues in earshot isn’t what Julia wants. Especially because there is somebody wanting to speak to her: Patricia, the CPS lawyer. Julia had called her earlier, advised her they had a suspect, but she hadn’t been expecting Patricia to just turn up.

“Here’s as good a place as any, I suppose?” she says to Julia, wandering over, one hand in a pocket, the other holding a pink folder. A studiedly casual pose.

Every inch of Julia’s body is sweating. The backs of her knees are slick with it. Her spine. Her hands. All she is thinking about is bodycams. When she sees Patricia there, she wants to cut and run. Patricia is a by-the-book sort of woman, the kind who would say they are “undergoing continued professional development” that evening. The sort to use management speak on nights out, to never break character, an old-school, boundaried type who would deliberately not laugh at a joke she found funny if it wasn’t in an appropriate setting. Julia has therefore, quite predictably, never got along with her, favoring people who are their full selves in the office, emotional outbursts and all.

Patricia is short, and sort of ageless, somewhere betweenthirty-nine and sixty, with bobbed, curly blond hair, a wide smile, though not one offered up terribly often.

“About Matthew James,” Patricia says. She gestures with the file, its pink cardboard case gathering raindrops that darken to blood red.

“Yes,” Julia says.

Patricia, like Julia, is regularly lied to, and therefore has a serious radar for it. Julia tries to straighten her shoulders, wipes the sweat off her palms. She thinks suddenly of Art, and how much she’d like to speak to him right now. To text or to email him. Not about this. Just... the way they were. If not an email then a beer garden, the two of them. Sun. She wonders what he would say about all this: everything that happened with Genevieve, everything that she has made happen with Matthew...

“All I have is the glass and the cigarette,” Patricia says, without introduction. “You say you want him for murder, not just kidnap?”

“Right,” Julia says: that is her task. Murder. She’s got to do it.

“A guy with previously good character. Not at all known to the victim, so far as we know?”

“We’re waiting on a few things,” Julia says hurriedly, sleet sticking to the end of her nose. “Meta for Matthew or Olivia, not released yet. So we can’t see their private messages. And Olivia’s dad doesn’t have her Facebook and Instagram passwords.” Julia’s talking, but she’s hardly listening, even to herself. How can she get that bodycam footage? How can she check it? How can she charge this kid with murder, when there’s no body? She is sticking plaster after plaster over gaping wounds.

“I have to say”—Patricia folds her arms—“I’m surprised.” Her hair is getting steadily wetter, drops covering the strandslike miniature pearls. She doesn’t seem to notice. “You are usually cautious on charging.” She meets Julia’s eyes right as she says this, a kind of searching quality passing across her face. Around them, their colleagues begin to murmur impatiently. The alarm is still going.

“He has absolutely zero explanation for how those items ended up in her room, though.”

“A room that had only belonged to her for twenty-four hours. Who was the previous occupant?”

“Jonathan went through it. He moved out ages ago—the room sat empty. Plus, Matthew says he’s never been there—ever. It must be”—Julia swallows—“a bare-faced lie. The DNA match is Matthew, not a previous occupant.”

“I don’t think it’s enough for kidnap, let alone murder, that’s my honest feeling,” Patricia says, spreading her arms wide, gesturing with the folder. “I’m not saying I won’t charge him ever. I’m just saying we need a little bit more. Something to raise it. Any kind of further suspicious DNA, blood, a sighting, these things together... I’m not trying to be obstructive,” she adds at the end, which is exactly what somebody who thinks they are being obstructive would say.

A cobra has wrapped itself around Julia’s body, squeezing her organs, her windpipe, her neck. This can’t be happening. She has to convict him. She doesn’t know by when. Only that she has to, and she’s probably being watched until she does.

What’s he going to do, if Matthew is released pending further investigations, rather than charged? Will he get back in touch? Or will he pull the trigger? He’s already cocked the gun. Would she take the sentence herself, if it meant Genevieve would be okay? She probably would.

Julia blinks. “All right, I’ll do some digging,” she says. “I’llfind some more evidence.” She adds it without thinking. “I mean—I’ll...”

“I know what you meant,” Patricia says plainly. And, of course, it wasn’t the initial statement that was the problem. It was Julia’s panic. The alarm switches off abruptly, and the unexpected silence shivers Julia’s ears. The receptionist stops checking everyone off, and they file back inside. Patricia waves to Julia and heads to her car. “Short and sweet,” she says over her shoulder, and Julia nods.

Julia heads in with everybody else, but doesn’t go to the back rooms. Instead, she goes to the docking station in the open-plan office where the bodycams are uploaded every day. She sees that the stations are empty, but nevertheless she searches around them, looking on the shelves underneath them, but there aren’t any there.

Footage from three days ago will already have been uploaded somewhere. She heads back to her office and finds it on the server.

She plays two at once, the PCSOs checking out the crime scene, talking shit together about some television drama with incorrect police procedure. She watches and watches. And then it happens. The PCSO bends down. The bodycam captures underneath the bed. No glass.

Julia’s heart seems to zoom around her chest. She brings a shaking hand to her mouth. It’s over. It’s surely over. She’s a goner.

16

Lewis

There are four steps down to our kitchen, an open-plan monstrosity that you and Yolanda love and I hate. I can’t relax here, feel like a show-off simply for living in it. Slippery, dark, hardwood floors, bifold doors at the end there, a KitchenAid on the surface.We are middle class, and we are utterly, depressingly conventional, it says to me. I once expressed all of this to Yolanda and she said, eyes smiling, “I thought it was just a nice food mixer.”

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