Page 41 of Just Another Missing Person

It’s a Tuesday morning like no other. Yolanda is carefully rolling out pasta, a silver machine out and clamped to the counter, her eyes level with it as she feeds it through.

I walk into my study. It’s quiet, the odd car passing outside, and the endless rain.

I open up my ancient laptop. You sometimes used it when you came here. Not often—always on your phone—but frequently enough for me to want to go and look at it, to fire it up, just to see.

It springs to life as soon as I move my finger over the trackpad, one tab open. I haven’t been on it for days. It might be yours. Fucking hell, I should tell the police, but I can’t help myself looking just now, for me. The private and the public.You are my daughter, and I want to know things first, before them. Before this nightmare turns from its ingredients—grief and love and confusion and searching—and into something bureaucratic and insane. Press, trials...

I delay it, just for a few seconds. Touching the mousepad and the keys. Your slender fingers must have rested here, too. Before. Before you left, or were taken.

Andrew Zamos

I blink, staring at it. His name, googled. And, worse, you had clicked on the news tab. But why?

I can’t reach Julia, but I do get Poole. I tell him this—well, some of it—and he listens. “All right, and you’re sure it was her who typed it?”

“It certainly wasn’t me or Yolanda.”

“Okay. I’ll look into it. All right?”

But it sounds dismissive. “Don’t you agree that maybe she was googling him to try and get at his history? Was maybe worried about him? Like a Clare’s Law sort of thing? I know it sounds like I’m some mad alpha dad, but I swear, I’m not.”

“Nobody thinks you’re a mad alpha dad,” he says, his professional veneer remaining, even though he is forced to use my crazed language. “It’s just that he does have a strong alibi.”

“So—what? That’s that? Do you have any other suspects?”

“I can’t answer that.”

I let out a groan of frustration. “Why aren’t you coming to get my laptop?”

“We will send out an officer. This is perfectly under control.”

“Is it?” I say. “So how come nobody’s found my daughter?”

“DCI Day is—”

“Where is she?”

“She is completely focused on this case,” he says.

“I never said she wasn’t.” His statement isn’t lost on me. He pauses, too. He knows he’s misstepped, said too much. And the smallest slips are sometimes the most significant. “But I don’t see the results,” I add, which I know is unfair, but I’m beyond caring.

“You have to trust us that we are on it, Lewis,” Poole says to me, but I’m not really listening to him. I’m thinking about how sometimes, people protest too much.She is completely focused on this case.

“Well, if you aren’t—your supervisors will be hearing from me,” I say.

I hang up and stare and stare and stare at that preserved Google search. Then close the laptop, leaving it there, a museum of things you typed and felt and thought, even if the latter two are invisible. In the background, something I can’t see. But there nevertheless. Like you.

***

“So he did pass it on?”

“Yes, we’re on it,” DCI Day says, but her eyes aren’t on me. She keeps checking her phone.

“Are you reinterviewing him? Andrew?”

“Look, Lewis,” she says to me, I think kindly, though still distractedly. “It’s a Google search.” Another glance over her shoulder.

“On the news tab.”

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