Page 2 of Just Another Missing Person

The custody sergeant arrives with a single cup of station coffee. Julia flicks her gaze to it. “Just made one for you, then?” she says. The sergeant ignores her.

She looks back at Price, then sighs again as she walks toward the back office, stopping at the kitchen. She makes a tea, three sugars, loads of milk, partially to cool it down to make it less of a risk—steaming-hot tea is not allowed in custody, because it is a weapon. The cup warms her fingers. She’s tempted to down it, has had one drink all day, in Nando’s, but she doesn’t. She has too much to do. She has to find out what’s going on with Price. She wants to follow up on the murderer in the restaurant. And then, the main thing: it looks like she has to find a missing woman.

Price’s hand is already extended out to her as she arrives back with it. “Ohhh, miss,” he says to her, delighted. He sips it. “The sugars as well. I owe you a tip. What’s ten percent of nothing?” He barks a laugh out. He’s acerbic, but one thing is for sure: if their roles were reversed, he, too, would get her tea.

She smiles and avoids the gaze of the custody sergeant.Better to be judged by a colleague for over-familiarity than to lie awake tonight thinking about Price and whether he’s had a hot drink yet that day, that week. There is nothing Julia does better than obsess in the middle of the night. And, in fact, in the middle of the day, too.

“Good luck, okay?” she says to him. He raises the cup to her in a silent toast.

As she gets back to her office, before briefing the team, she checks on the murderer’s file. It was John, John Gibbons. She gets a security guard to verify that he’s still inside, HMP Bristol. It must have been somebody else. Julia cups her face in her hands, two jobs down, one to go, at pushing eight o’clock at night, and thinks about working in a supermarket. But, the thing is, she wouldn’t love anything else. Not like she loves this. And nobody can have a balanced relationship with something they love.

***

Julia sticks the Polaroid photograph of Olivia on to the whiteboard in the briefing room. It’s a tired, old room: suspended ceilings, awful carpets. For some reason, their cleaners don’t tidy it as often as the rest of the offices, and it houses preserved, old coffee cups, the smell of Portishead’s ever-present damp, and the paperwork scraps of old investigations.

The 1970s vertical blinds have shut out the night sky and, as Julia looks at them, she wonders if she has seen more evenings here than anywhere else. It isn’t a warm Nando’s with her kid, but, funnily enough, it is something almost more potent: to Julia, it is home. She removes her shoes as if acknowledging this, and leans into the investigation, into whoshe has to become, at least for a while. A detective for whom everything else comes second.

The rest of the team files in, looking tired. Some won’t have left yet. Some will have been recalled from dinners, date nights, parents’ evenings. There isn’t a designated Major Incident Team in Portishead. It was hastily assembled once the case was deemed high risk, detectives and analysts from other teams called in, and Julia hopes it contains some good people. She likes who she likes. She can’t help it.

She stares up at Olivia’s photograph. She is willowy and blond, but with a strength around the nose that elevates her to striking. Julia reaches out to straighten the Polaroid. The Blu Tack it’s been stuck up with is useless, old and dry; that’s police budgets for you. It’s her passport photo: her Instagram was too arty, heart-shaped sunglasses and peeking out from behind ice creams. She has a huge smile, crooked teeth. Perfect imperfection, that luminous quality that the young have.

Julia looks into her eyes and thinks that nobody is truly missing, not to themselves. Only to those left behind.

She may not know what Olivia’s fate is, but she already knows her own: insomnia. Discussing the confidential details too much at home. Genevieve—already far too much like Julia—will start to fixate. Art will feel pushed out, though will never say so.

Two analysts are discussing a man who was arrested last night. “It was ornamental Buddhas,” David is saying to Brian.

“Buddhas—”

“When Forensics examined them, it becameveryclear that he was putting them up his—”

“All right,” Julia says, biting back a grin. She knowsallabout that case. “Enough Buddhas and—”

“Please say we’ve got a good, interesting one?” Jonathan, Julia’s favorite detective, asks her. They have worked together for fifteen years. He started life as her analyst, then qualified into the force. Even when he was far more junior to her, in charge of telecoms reporting, Julia would eat her sandwiches at lunchtimes with him on the wall outside, glad to have found someone like her: a details person, somebody who always, always, always took the work home with them, emotionally or physically. After he qualified, she managed to keep him in the Major Crime Unit by calling in a favor.

Julia makes an equivocal sort of face, not answering yet. “I’ll take that as a yes,” Jonathan says. He is as dogged as Julia herself, seems able to magic up information in seconds, no doubt from his history as an analyst. His strategy is only that he asks and asks: phone companies, airlines, anyone. He simply repeats his request, then calls up again and again. His catchphrase is “I don’t mind holding.” He does much of his typing with a phone held in the crook of his shoulder, call-center muzak softly detectable.

It’s freezing in the briefing room, carpet tiles cold against her feet in their tights. It’s late April, but still frigid, as bad as January. Nathan Best, her second-favorite Detective Sergeant, catches her looking out. “Going to snow tomorrow,” he says. “Fucking joke.”

“Snow is a great preservative,” Jonathan shoots at him.

“Let’s not talk preservatives,” Julia exclaims. “Let’s talk finding living people.”

“Is this one similar to last year’s? I can’t do that again, honestly,” Jonathan says. She appreciates his honesty: she feels the same. A woman called Sadie went missing last spring, walking home, also seen on CCTV. The only hopeful element was that she’d taken her passport with her—though it hadnever been used at an airport. The investigation went on for months, with a sighting halfway through that amounted to nothing but upset everybody. They redoubled their efforts, searching wider and wider areas, ordering vast back catalogs of telecoms intelligence, arresting and questioning several known sexual deviants in the area, following less and less likely leads. Only recently, they talked about a reenactment, but they knew so little, there seemed no point. Reconstructions only work when the general public can recall esoteric details about a disappearance.

Jonathan gestures with his hand so carelessly he slops tea on the carpet. That stain will probably be there forever. This is life in the police. No high-speed car chases, no undercover assignments. Only a vague and constant feeling of spinning-plates pressure, stale office surroundings and, somewhere beyond that, a place hard to see, but nevertheless magical: life and death. And—beyondthat—the trauma of it. Sadie was never seen again, despite Julia’s very best efforts, which resulted not only in the missing woman’s family accusing the police of laziness but in Julia’s husband accusing her of marital neglect.

She remembers the day after they withdrew on the case so vividly. None of them could accept it. By the end, they were going over things they’d already looked at twice before. Just desperate. The day they withdrew, Julia went straight home and lay on their bed in the middle of the day, looking up through the skylight above it. She’d missed Art’s birthday. The car needed its MOT. She hadn’t attended four monthly book clubs in a row. The other members aren’t police, and so don’t understand. And all she could think of was that woman, and her invisible, grisly, assumed ending, and how Julia had failed her.

DS Poole enters the room. “Sorry,” he says. “I just bailed a dealer for this, so it had better be good.”

Something in Julia relaxes as she thinks of Price, going on his way, free tea and all. That guy somehow always lands on his feet. He’ll be recalled, but he’ll get out of it.

She grabs a red marker pen and draws an arrow across the whiteboard. It squeaks as she does so, and the room falls as quiet as if she has clinked a glass.

She begins to speak. “Here’s what we know. Olivia Johnson is twenty-two. Nickname Little O. She works in marketing. April twenty-seventh, she signs the lease for a house share. April twenty-eighth, the day before yesterday, she moves into that house in central Portishead.” She glances at Best, who looks concerned, and then at Jonathan, who looks up for a challenge.

“She spends that night in her room, unpacks a bit, then leaves the next morning for a job interview in Bristol City Centre at a marketing firm called Reflections. We don’t know where she worked before yet, but according to her emails to her new landlord she moved from Walton Bay. She sends a text to her housemates, late that night, saying, please come. Signed with a kiss. No location sent along with it. Earlier that night, she was seen on CCTV on Portishead High Street. We’ve got the footage. This morning, the housemates reported her missing. It’s taken a while to work its way to us, and meantime the father, who’s been interviewed on the phone, has been helpful.”

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