Page 28 of Just Another Missing Person

“Thank you, thank you,” I say quickly, relief making me overly familiar. “Ninety percent.” I flick open my wallet, not really thinking about it. A small photograph of you sits in the window. You know the one, at the beach, heart-shaped sunglasses on, ice cream in hand. “So retro,” you said, when I asked for the spare and put it there, but I don’t care.

How can you be here, concrete, in my hands, in my wallet, but nowhere else? I could rip this photograph up, I findmyself thinking. Tear it and—like Dorian Gray—maybe you would emerge somewhere else, your portrait killed, your real self freed.

I look at Day. She is staring down at your photograph. “She’s lovely,” she says. Yolanda is steadfastly not looking at the photograph, her jaw quivering.

“I know. She knows it, too,” I say with a little laugh. I hope you don’t mind that I say this. I mean, it is true.

As we’re standing up, I think about it. Ninety percent.

Ten percent, therefore. This is how my brain works. First, the relief. Then, thebut.The images begin to come: you’re walking along a deserted street. It was rainy, the night you went missing. The slick street shimmers with it. A car offers you a lift. You’re on the motorway before you realize the danger you’re in. That the doors are locked. That your driver isn’t who he said he was.

I touch my wallet as I put it away. Your eyes are boring into my hand. I can’t close the flap and put you away. Tears clog my throat. I want to tell you. I want to tell you, the miniature you in the photograph:Come home. Comethe fuckhome, Little O. We need you.

“We have our very best investigators on this, Lewis,” Poole says. “Keep your phone on overnight. I’m sure we’ll have news.”

“We won’t be sleeping.”

“...No,” Poole says, after a beat or two. “No, of course. Well, if you do, put that phone on loud.” I glance at Day—far, far more endowed with interpersonal skills—but she’s looking through the window in the door at an officer who’s motioning to her with his phone.

“Sorry, sorry,” Day murmurs. Her brow is creased. She seems distracted, all of a sudden, by that colleague, by thatwaving phone. No, not distracted. What? I look closely at her. Fearful?

“Okay?” Poole says to us, an understudy finally taking centre stage, and I am struck by the thought that he might be about to say something horribly rousing, the stuff of Hollywood films, like,Let’s bring your daughter home, Lewis, but he doesn’t. Instead, he gestures for us to go without anything further: they leave us to our own hell. The police station dribbles us out on to the wet street outside.

It’s typical, blustery spring weather. The rain now spitting, sunshine appearing and disappearing on fast speed like a stop-motion film. Cold air, hot sun, freezing rain. Weather that doesn’t know what to do with itself, like us.

As I look up, I remember something else. Feeling sure, the other Thursday, that you wanted to tell me something. You hesitated in the kitchen, a hand halfway to your hair, saidDad...but then said nothing else when I prompted you. As you looked down and chopped an onion, you were blushing, eyes smarting. You blamed the onion.

Nothing tangible, nothing that counts to the police. But still things nevertheless, like the clouds above. I keep looking up, searching.

You’re out there, somewhere, alone.

Or, worse: not alone.

Later, after dropping Yolanda at home, I swing back by the police station, intending to tell them about you chopping the onion. But, as I arrive, DCI Day leaves, and that’s the first time I follow her.

10

Julia

That night, Julia tries to find Zac’s brother, but she can’t use the Police National Computer without leaving a trace. There’s nothing on Google. She cups her chin in her hands and thinks. She can’t fathom why anyone who knew him would wait to act against Julia until now. Or what that has to do with Olivia.

Maybe Matthew had donesomethingto Olivia, and she’s now framing him...

Outside, the moon is up, a white haze around it, the streets quiet and black. Julia has decided to try and find the man in the balaclava. Where the sun set is striated and marbled pink and orange, a Jupiter sky. The air smells damp, as Portishead often does. It could be a January morning. It could be Christmas Day. She gets into her car but checks the back seats first. She wonders if perhaps now she always will.

The world carries on as normal around her. She’s spent the day trying to trace Olivia’s housemates. The dad has told her he will put her in touch. But, really, Julia needs to find her blackmailer. She stops at a zebra crossing. She fantasizes that it is he who is about to step on to the road. That she could get out, threaten him. Arrest him. Silence him, somehow.

She thinks about last year’s investigation, and Sadie.Genevieve’s mugging happened right in the middle of the first week of that investigation, the day Julia was supposed to conduct all of the interviews with all of Sadie’s contacts. She spent the days after in her back office, making sure Genevieve was okay, making sure Zac didn’t come in (he did), making sure, making sure, making sure. But, evidently, she had been concentrating on the wrong things. Sadie had never been found, perhaps because of Julia’s negligence—she had never missed interviews before. And then, a few days later, when Zac died, she had spent two days panicking and let Jonathan fill her in on the telecoms and forensics reports instead of looking at them herself. There is no substitute for first-hand. Still, sometimes, she looks guiltily at Sadie’s Facebook, flicks through the photographs. A kind of apology, to her, from the woman who had been supposed to find her.

And it looks like Julia’s efforts were thwarted, anyway, as somebody had found out about Genevieve. And now Olivia. Also missing, the investigation also bungled, for the same and different reasons.

An old couple crosses the street slowly, arms linked. Silhouettes against the blazing red, alive sky. Julia watches them go. Sometimes, on days like this, when surrounded by so much crime, she finds it amazing anyone gets to that age. Unscathed, happy. Neither a victim nor incarcerated. That’s the skew you get from two decades in the police.

She drives her old car—she won’t part with it—to the exact location she parked it that night, gets out and scans a slow circle around in the cold, just searching. The first thing any detective should do when arriving at any scene at all: spend five minutes observing. It’s amazing what you see in that final minute.

There are several targets: Ring doorbells. A petrol station. A One Stop. They all have CCTV.

And so that’s where she starts. Off record, painfully so, alone, but trying.

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