Page 14 of Just Another Missing Person

Julia wrenches up the sash window. Ivy climbs up the front of the house. The PCSO downstairs isn’t looking at her. She glances across the street and around. She takes the cigarette out, careful not to disturb the end that will have been smoked. The end containing this man’s DNA. Matthew, poor Matthew, whoever he is.

She places it on the outside sill, tucked into the corner so it won’t get blown away. It looks like an offhand discarding by a cocky criminal. The search team will find it, for sure, and then the SOCO will test it.

It’s so easy, this is so damn easy, it’s amazing it doesn’t happen more. Maybe it does, she thinks, as she gets the glass out. Rolls it under the bed, far enough that nobody will have seen it yet. Enough that they will conclude this man, this Matthew, was here drinking from it, right before Olivia left. Was taken.

That’s all it takes. Two items. DNA. Planted. Faked.

They’ve had endless training about corruption. Julia remembers a particular session that they had been told was a stop and search exercise. Just before lunchtime, the trainer pulled a knife out on Julia’s colleague, said he would go and kill her grandma if she didn’t comply with his requests. It was a simulation, but terrifying nevertheless—he’d taken the information from their public Facebook pages. The names of their children, their partners, their parents and grandparents, in order to corrupt the officers. They’d all learned the lesson, quick-sharp: don’t show your hand online, don’t reveal a vulnerability publicly that could compromise you.

Buthadshe? It turns out you can stay off social media, you can never get into debt, into criminality, into any kind of strife. But sometimes circumstances come after you.

Julia stands back and looks. You can’t see either item by looking in the room normally. Erin won’t suspect a thing. It’sdone. She leaves, feeling transformed, the king killed, and awaits her fate.

“Pretty normal, right?” Erin says, as Julia lets herself out of the bedroom.

“Yeah. Strange case, though,” Julia says. Her lower back is wet with sweat.

She hesitates. She could tell Erin. She really could. That there’s a man out there. His weapon isn’t a gun, or a knife. It’s a secret.

But she knows what would happen next. Julia wouldn’t have to convict Matthew James, but she would have to convict her daughter, and herself.

“We’ll get him,” Erin says. “Sleep well,” she says to Julia as she sees her out. Orange streetlamps are hazy in the spring mist. Julia scans the street around her car, looking for him.

“We don’t know who did it. Male or female,” she says to Erin, an afterthought, on the threshold to the house.

“Always a man, though, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Julia says, thinking that Erin is right and wrong, both at the same time.

5

Julia

Julia trembles in the cold as she hurries toward her car. She tries the handle. It opens, but he is gone. The air in here is light again: she is alone. Relief sweeps over her like tiredness.

He has left a note on the passenger seat. It’s handwritten, a looping, feminine style. She turns it over. Just a plain piece of paper—notoriously bad at retaining fingerprints, though Julia will run it through the system anyway—and five words:

Thank you for your cooperation.

She leans her head back against the freezing driver’s seat, alone, thinking. No handwriting analysis system exists in the police, but maybe she could get it dusted.

She’s got to make a plan. Julia needs a next step.

She drives home too quickly, full of adrenaline, trying to outrun herself. And all she can think as she speeds along is that that’s two lives ruined. Hers and Matthew’s. Three, if you count Olivia’s.

***

Julia lets herself into her house. All of the lamps are on—teenagers—and Genevieve is still downstairs, in the small galley kitchen to the right, off the hallway. The kitchen spotlights cast a perfect rectangle on her hallway floor, populated by a single shadow.

“What time do you call this?”

Julia watches as the shadow puts its hands on its hips. “Got waylaid,” Julia says weakly.

“Check this out. Ridiculous—andrude,” Genevieve rants, that spiked tone of voice so distinctly her that Julia wants to gather her close. She’s been even more haughty since Zac. Some defense mechanism, Julia assumes. Already confrontational in nature, Genevieve is now positively combative at times.

“What’s that?” she says, turning in to the kitchen.

“An empty tub of Greek yogurt in the fridge. Dad—if he wasn’t hiding upstairs—would like to issue a confession, in accordance with the Police and Criminal Evidence Act,” she proclaims. Her blond hair, just like Julia’s—the exact same shade—falls around her face. Julia never stops being amazed at the things her child has inherited from her, things that were transplanted across, whole. Same hair shade, same texture, same section at the side that won’t lie flat.

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