Page 11 of Just Another Missing Person

“Have you got Olivia?” she asks, hoping that, if he has, he hasn’t killed her yet. If she were this man, and she had killed Olivia, she wouldn’t provide only a glass and a cigarette: she’d provide a body.

Maybe it isn’t too late for her.

He reaches over her seat, to her right, which makes her jump, and clicks her door open. “Good luck, Julia,” he says quietly. He smells of the outside air, nothing more. His left hand has emerged: no weapon. She should feel relieved, but doesn’t.

Because he is expecting her to plant the evidence. Right now.

And if she doesn’t do it, he is going to tell the police—and the world—what Genevieve did.

***

Genevieve was mugged on a misty spring evening almost exactly a year ago. She went to pay for parking while Julia took a call she recognizes only now to be unimportant, about a charging threshold for a burglary. Genevieve was perhaps too full of sass, a tall and sporty fifteen-year-old to whomeverything had always come easily and, when a young lad approached her, she resisted. He firstly asked her for the time, then for directions. If Julia had been there, and not an entire floor away, one finger in one ear, the other listening to the Super, she would have told Genevieve to drop her belongings and run. Never a surer sign that you’re going to be mugged than those clues.

But she wasn’t there. And so the mugger, a petty criminal called Zac who Julia knew of, reached for Genevieve’s phone. And Genevieve didn’t want to give it. She took a swipe at Zac’s neck with her keys held out between her knuckles, just the way Julia had told her to if she was ever attacked. Zac began to bleed, there in the stairwell. Genevieve had hit his jugular—a combination of bad luck and bad judgment—and fled to Julia, that door slamming behind her.

Julia raced up the stairs and called him an ambulance from a tired pay phone in the lobby. And then she did three things, things that felt right, maternal, protective, but which in hindsight she knows look gruesomely selfish: she told Zac—bleeding out, barely conscious—that if he ever phoned it in, she would get him sent down for life for drug offenses. She thought they might be the last words he ever heard, and hated herself.

Then she broke into the CCTV cupboard and removed it, took it home and corrupted the footage. It formed part of the police file, and anyone who looked could see that it was useless. So how had this man seen it?

And then, she and Genevieve left before the ambulance arrived, presuming Zac would die. The whole journey home, she felt chased by him, the specter of him: her guilt.

Only he didn’t die.

Zac survived, had an operation and a blood transfusion,and the only way Julia knew was because the police were told by the hospital that a stabbing had occurred but hadn’t been fatal. Julia sat at her desk, blinking back shock, hoping he’d heard her threat.

He went to the station a few days afterward, full of bluster, threatening to complain. But he eventually didn’t. Because, four days later, he was admitted with an infection that became sepsis. And three days after that, he died. Julia will remember forever the moment she saw it on the news:Car Park Stabbing Victim Dead of Sepsis at 19.Right there, in that single moment, a week after the stabbing her daughter became—somehow—a murderer. But—much to Julia’s shame—the thought that followed this was one born out of relief: that it’s much easier to get away with murder than with assault, because your one witness is dead. The only thing you have to do is work out whether he told anyone, and Julia had thought he hadn’t, after a few weeks elapsed, then a few months. Now, she isn’t so sure.

Genevieve’s act caused his death, a jury would surely say, even though it hadn’t felt like that in the immediate aftermath, when he survived, the cause and effect so disparate. Shit luck. Bad judgment, sure, but mostly shit luck. Genevieve might get some mitigation for having been mugged, but her actions went totally beyond a reasonable response, including leaving the scene: something Julia had thought was the right thing to do, but now isn’t so sure.

The case had been referred to Julia, as all stabbings were, and she had closed it as quickly as she could: Zac was a regular user, a criminal, had plenty of enemies. Misadventure, she had concluded, after asking a few questions of his friends and acquaintances, her hands shaking as she took notes from them. She had gleaned enough to know they weren’t awareof what had really happened. Enough to hope he hadn’t told anybody at all.

Julia never told Art. Genevieve had asked her not to, in the car on the way back that night, her face white, eyes hollow and panicked. And Julia had agreed, for Genevieve’s sake and her own. Her daughter’s crime seemed somehow to cross directly with Julia’s job, already something Art was scathing about. Julia wonders now if that was the wrong thing to do, too.

But, now, somebody knows. Somebody—when even her husband doesn’t.

She looks at the man in the back of her car. He and Zac must be connected. Zac had several days to tell people. She’d assumed he hadn’t, but perhaps he had. But why is it only coming out now? And what does that have to do with Olivia?

She tries to forget about how this man knows, about what he knows, and thinks, instead, about the choices facing her. She looks at herself in the rear-view mirror. Genevieve has her eyes. Pale blue. Her daughter who likes Walkers Sensations, delivering a great comeback and complaining about companies on social media in the hope of coupons. She wants nothing more than a job where she gets to wear a sharp suit and most of all—somewhat to Julia’s shame—a husband. She doesn’t give a shit about being popular, and therefore is. She is always the first on the dancefloor, or was, before last year. She once told Art she was “certain” she could cope with a nuclear war. She leaves cat food out for hedgehogs in their garden. She regrets the assault so much—they never use the word “murder”—she won’t even be driven down the road past the car park, and won’t talk about it, either. The topic, in the Day household, is as prohibited as a firearm.

***

Julia leaves the car and the man inside it and walks down the street like an autumn leaf blown on the breeze, carelessly buffeted this way and that. Her feet feel like she has on clown shoes. Nothing feels real.Think. Think.She’s got to call this in. There is no way she can plant evidence to frame somebody.

But...

Think. Think.

But there’s nothing.

If she doesn’t do it, she is certain that man will tell the world about Genevieve, and about her. He has serious intent. He’s broken into her car, he’s sourced DNA for her, he’s found out her most damning secret. Julia’s back is against a wall, with nowhere to go, and no time to make a decision, either.

She glances back at the car. What could she do? Confess all, now, to her police officer colleagues? Genevieve would get a decade in prison, if not more, for both the brute force and fleeing the scene. Julia would get time, too, for using her job to cover up a murder. God knows how much. They might make an example out of her, give her a decade too.

The car looks totally normal, but he’s still in there, somewhere in the darkness, silent like an animal lying in wait. She turns away from him and darts up an alleyway that runs between two Victorian terraces. The houses are joined on the first floor above her. The passage is unlit, black, the bricks are slick with the damp weather, the air eddying with cold air. Julia turns in a circle, her hands on her head, her body covered in sweat.

She can’t. She can’t become corrupt. It goes against everything she stands for. She can’t convict somebody of murdering Olivia, who might still be alive out there somewhere. She needs to find her.

But her mind—she sometimes wishes it didn’t work so quickly—has already landed on the answer: there isn’t one. She has no choice. It’s Genevieve or this. And nothing tops Genevieve. That is what motherhood is.

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