Page 29 of Just Another Missing Person

A bell tinkles in the Esso garage as she pushes her way in. It smells of newspapers and car air fresheners.

“I’m from Portishead Police,” she says to the owner. “Could I please have access to your CCTV, in connection with a missing person?” An easy lie, or perhaps not even a lie at all. She doesn’t show her badge, doesn’t name herself. If it ever comes out, she will be on those very same cameras, unable to deny it, but anything she can do to stop herself being traced is for the best.

The owner of the garage blinks, looking at her in surprise. Perhaps shock at the police arriving, or perhaps he hadn’t been expecting a copper to be slight and blond.

He’s maybe twenty-five, one hoop earring in, a black beanie on his head, the sides rolled up like a pie crust. “Er, hang on, not my place,” he says, holding a palm up and disappearing out the back, past a row of cigarettes and scratch cards.

Julia takes a slow wander around the aisles of Pringles and chocolate bars and windscreen-wiper fluid, a Costa Express machine. But, really, she’s just listening to the voices from the back room, and trying to look like she isn’t. It’s an old habit. You learn so much by looking uninterested while listening.

“Which days?” the owner says, emerging. Julia answers and he disappears out back just as her phone goes off, the jaunty tone she has for Genevieve. She opens it out of habit: “It’s going off on TikTok about Olivia,” Genevieve has written. “So many amateur detectives with theories.”

Julia smiles grimly. She doesn’t mind this strange facet of modern policing. Enjoys it, in fact. Most DCIs wouldn’t admit it, but the Gen Z-ers contributing via social media very occasionally do assist. Not to mention entertain.

“Tell me a few,” she writes back to Genevieve, unable to resist, even though she should not be fostering Genevieve’s interest in crime. The worst thing for everybody would be for Genevieve to join the police: Julia wouldn’t wish that for anybody—like becoming an addict. She is a goner, but Genevieve needn’t be. God, she wouldn’t join, after committing a crime, would she?

She turns to the owner, a man with a round face and red cheeks. He passes her a USB, held between index and third finger like the offer of a bribe.

Julia, out in the cold again, works her way up the road that surrounds her car, shops, a clutch of USBs in her hand that she will copy the footage on to. She is thankful that the police system is full of chaos, of scattered, random USBs, that nobody will question what she’s doing, that the search team has probably already done this once, only looking for a woman, instead of a man.

At eleven thirty she takes the USBs back to the station, where she begins to play them one by one. Another coffee. She takes her socks as well as her shoes off this time, puts her bare toes on the ancient carpet.

The motion-sensor lights go off around her. She doesn’t move to reactivate them, is content to sit there alone in the spotlight of her computer.

She doesn’t feel tired. Just lets the adrenaline burn and burn and burn, the only thing on her mind the survival of Genevieve, of her career, of their freedom.

On checking the fourth USB, she finds the man from her car. Or, rather, his gait. Julia’s car is in the very bottom left of the frame, and the man, still in his balaclava, shuts her door behind him, and disappears, stage right, off screen. Eleven forty-seven.

There’s nothing identifying about him. Julia watches the video over and over. He leaves her car confidently, easily, the same way, she assumes, that he let himself in.

He has a walk that is somehow quite gentle, slow, and he is slimmer than she remembered, but nothing else. All in black, only his eyes visible, two dark holes.

There’s a logo in hi-vis on the bottom of his coat. It glows silver as he walks under a streetlight, but, no matter how many times she watches it, she can’t catch it. Each freeze-frame is a blur. She watches twenty times, taking screenshots on the system every 0.1 seconds. None of them shows anything. She downs her coffee and sinks her head into her hands. He is missing, too.

As she goes to the bathroom, she sees Poole and Best together, their heads close, looking in her direction.

***

“DNA results in,” Erin is saying, walking into the kitchenette like it isn’t almost midnight. Jonathan is making coffee and moaning about Meta—Instagram and Facebook—which has still not released Olivia’s records to them. They can look at her social media, but they can’t get inside it and see her messages without Meta.

Jonathan stirs his coffee and then Julia’s. “Sorry, yours will taste of sugar now.”

“What DNA?” Julia interrupts, the way she would if she hadn’t put Matthew’s DNA there herself.

Julia still doesn’t know how she will get Matthew charged, and for murder. There’s no body. Would his DNA being found in Olivia’s room be enough for a charge of kidnap? And then to escalate it? Maybe. But how can she get to thatpoint? There is unlikely to be a match on the system, unless he has committed an offense before.

“A cigarette and a glass,” Erin says, leaning her head on the doorframe. She doesn’t seem surprised. To Erin, a scene always yields something, some clue. It’s both the art and the science of forensics. “Unknown person. Male. No matches on the system.”

Julia experiences an uncomfortable, unfamiliar emotion: how easy it has been to fool her old friends, experts in their fields for the longest time. How straightforward it is when you’re on the inside. And how shameful that is.

Jonathan adds milk to his coffee and hesitates over Julia’s. “You are a details man, Jonathan,” she says. “It’s been no milk for two decades.”

“I remember only important details,” he says. And it’s true. Jonathan has a wonderfully streamlined sort of brain, able to filter out useless trivia from important things to remember. Only last summer, during the Sadie case, Julia had asked him—after the sighting—what Sadie’s exact height was, and Jonathan hadn’t missed a beat before saying, “162 on Facebook, 160 on medical records.”

“The room, otherwise, is a DNA feast—the housemates,’” Erin says, hands in the back pockets of her trousers. “HMOs for you.”

She isn’t wrong. Houses of multiple occupancy are always a DNA nightmare, but Julia needs to get the focus on to Matthew. “Surely we can dismiss the housemates,” she says, though she knows it isn’t what she would ordinarily say. She would usually go after them: every avenue, however unlikely.

“Why?”

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