Page 1 of Just Another Missing Person

Part I

Olivia

First Day Missing

1

Julia

Julia is trying to work out if the man at the table next but one is somebody she has arrested before. He’s ordering a caramel cheesecake, out with a wife and two children, and she’s pretty sure she once charged him with murder. The lighting is low; she just can’t tell.

She is trying not to let her husband and daughter know what she’s seen, eyes down on the menu.

“Nando’s is cringe these days, isn’t it?” Genevieve says. Julia smiles at her arch only child.

“In what way?” Art says, bristling. Art, after Art Garfunkel, her husband. An English teacher, a pedant, a ditherer, the last man still using semicolons in text messages. And, until recently, the love of Julia’s life.

The cheesecake arrives at the maybe-murderer’s table. Julia watches him as he looks up. He has two phones, both facedown on the table in front of him. A dead giveaway of a criminal. She’s pretty sure it’s him. Something about the brow...

“Oh, just—you know. Cheeky Nando’s and all that. Like, give it a rest,” Genevieve says. She picks up a menu. She’s in a black halter-neck tucked into high-waisted jeans. Large gold hoop earrings. She looks amazing, but she wouldn’t careif she didn’t. That’s Genevieve all over: she does whatever the hell she likes. Sometimes, Julia is pleased to have raised a strong woman like this. Sometimes, less so.

It’s seven o’clock in the evening, and Julia can’t quite believe that she’s here. That nothing came up, that she made it.

“They do nice chicken,” Art says mildly, perhaps slightly wounded: it was his choice of restaurant.

The cheesecake is almost finished. John. Julia thinks he’s called John. She glances at him again and slips her phone out. “John murder Portishead,” she types into Google. She’s sure he shouldn’t be out yet. It was a stabbing in the town center, brutal. He got life, and not that long ago.

The Google search is too wide; too much comes up. Just as she’s considering typing something else, the phone trills: it’s the station.

“DCI Day,” the force incident manager says into Julia’s personal mobile—the one she always uses—and that’s when Julia’s heart begins its predictable descent down her chest. “High-risk missing person just in,” he says, and it lands fully at her feet.

Julia sighs. No peri-peri chicken, no more banter with Genevieve. Just work. This is the job. This is the job, she repeats to herself. That has become her mantra after twenty years in the police.

After she’s taken the details, she stares at the table. A twenty-two-year-old missing woman. No mental health history. Last seen on CCTV yesterday. Housemates phoned it in when she didn’t come home. Those are the facts.

But sitting behind the facts is something else, she’s sure of it. Something else. Something she can’t yet name. A deep detective instinct tells her so. She shivers there in the dim restaurant.

“I’ve got to go in,” she says, just as her food arrives. Steaming corn on the cob, mashed potato, chicken... she looks at it longingly.

As she stands, she glances at the maybe-murderer to their left. “If you happen to see him leave,” she says in a low voice to Art and Genevieve, “can you get his reg?”

***

Julia has always been too soft to be a police officer. She is thinking this as she hurries into the station, ready to brief the team, but stopping to stare at an old informant of hers, Price, who Julia has always been too fond of. He is sitting on one of the benches, his features arranged in a surprised expression, paused as if someone’s stopped the universe for just a second.

She is about to ask him what he’s doing here. She can’t help it; it’s shot through her, no matter how many other tasks she has on. Cut Julia, and she bleeds curiosity for those she cares about, which is everyone.

Price has his legs crossed at the ankles, an arm slung across the backs of the metal chairs, ostensibly at home here, but Julia knows he will be afraid. Of course he is: he trades on information—the most dangerous of commodities.

He has auburn hair that he gels so thickly it darkens the red to inconspicuous brown. Freckles. Skin that burns and blushes easily. He’s Scottish, originally from Glasgow, never lost the accent, despite moving down here twenty years ago, when he was seventeen.

“What’re you in for?” she asks him, standing opposite him in the empty foyer. It smells of industrial cleaning wax and the stale dinners they serve the accused; many contain meatthat somehow doesn’t need to be refrigerated and has a use-by date of several years’ time.

Most of the lights have popped off. Julia finds the station during these down times impossibly romantic, like it’s an out-of-hours museum only she has access to, a still from a movie that she may wander around, just her.

“This and that,” he says. He’s smart, Price, strategic; he won’t be telling her for a reason.

“Meaning?” she asks. Price is hardly ever interviewed: he informs only to her. Quick, slippery, and funny, too, but never under arrest. Almost all of Julia’s dealings with him have been in the outside world.

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