Page 35 of Just Another Missing Person

My job is to protect you from this. To believe in you, no matter what you might have done.

Neither copper wears a uniform. Both look tired and serious in the shadows of the pooled orange streetlamps. Unconsciously, I assume, the bald one looks around, expecting a father figure. I feel like telling him the whole sordid story, a high-school boyfriend who cut and run, sends a hundred quid every Christmas—laughable—but don’t. I chose to bring you into the world knowing all of that, and so how could I let it define you? I never, ever have.

“Sorry—why do you need to speak to Matthew?” I say, guarding you despite my doubts. You’re standing slightlybehind me. I reach backward for you in the dark but can’t catch your hands.

“We just need a short statement from him,” DCI Day says, perhaps kindly, or something nudging close to kindness, anyway.

“What’s going on?” you say, finally stepping into the sapphire light.

The first thought I have is absurd—that we’re not presenting a very good impression. We’ve both been drinking beer. Not loads—two—but enough to smell them on us. Shame washes over me, that somehow I shouldn’t be drinking with my adult child. This is what happens when you grow up poor: whenever you let your guard down, you think everything is going to be taken from you.

“Okay if we come in with you?” Poole says.

“Do you need statements from all of the houses? Who gave the DNA?” I say.

“Best if we do this inside. Always better on the sofa with a cuppa,” DCI Day says, as though it isn’t eleven at night and they’re not police. The hairs on the back of my neck rise up. I see now: the fake politeness, their unhurried manner. All is not as it seems.

“Okay?” you say, oblivious. Like:go ahead. You gesture to the front door and then unlock it.No, no, no, I want to say.Do not trust these wolves in sheep’s clothing. Butdoyou trust them? I can’t read your facial expression. Always shy, perhaps secretive, it’s gone up a level since last year. Now, you’re practically a politician. Things glossed over, seemingly forgotten, treated as unimportant, as though that might change the facts of them.

You step inside, followed by the police and then me. As I turn and close the door, I gaze at our street for just a few moreseconds, the rain flickering around the streetlights, my palm upturned to catch a drop, before everything shifts. Again.

You’re all in the living room when I arrive, the officers standing right in the middle of it like grim reapers, their suits and wet shoes strange in the ambient surroundings. They smell of that intangible scent of outside, and it’s all wrong: our living room is dark and cozy, jewel-colored cushions, a big fluffy rug. It needs bare feet and Christmas slippers and faded old books, not this.

“No, no, we’ll just have a quick chat,” Poole is saying while you brandish the kettle in the adjoining kitchen. “No need for tea.”

“Sorry—why?” I say. “Is this a formal interview? Or what?” My tone becomes hysterical.

Poole switches on our lights, which gleam on the wooden floors. “Look,” I want to say. “The lovely house we’ve worked so hard for—we’re not criminals. We don’t need to be interviewed.” Instead, I sit in the armchair and say nothing. As I look down, I see that my legs are trembling.

“We just have a few things we want to go over,” Poole says. A non-answer. He steadfastly directs his sentences to you, and not me. It makes sense. You’re an adult; they don’t know you’re still my baby.

“Go for it,” you say, shooting a look at me that silences me, just briefly. I think about when we moved here, how the people you worked with in the bar back home said they didn’t want to do solo shifts with you any more, not after what had happened with your girlfriend. I think how we cut and run. You got a new job, a new bar. It never happened again.

“Matthew James, your DNA has been found in the bedroom of the missing woman Olivia Johnson,” DCI Day says.

I am sitting in the armchair where I was five seconds ago,coat and shoes still on. But, just like that, absolutely everything, everything,everythingchanges. I swear, I feel the earth tilt underfoot. DNA. You cannot argue with DNA.

Day’s reading it off an email. Her tone is perfunctory, as if she’d rather be doing something else, like she isn’t really in the room at all. She takes her reading glasses off and looks at you. “All we need to know before we go is how you account for this?”

I feel it, somehow, in the physical way you sometimes do when you’re a mum, when her eyes meet yours. She throws you a wobbly, encouraging smile. It’s tone deaf. The gall of it.

I glance at you sharply. Your expression hasn’t changed whatsoever.

“Account for it?” you say. You’re playing for time. I know you so well, and this is the sort of thing you do while you think. It’s what you did last year. I feel myself—I swear it—detach, floating upward, just looking at you. The dark hair I’ve loved for two decades, the hand that goes to your chin in thought.

“Yes... explain it. Justify it. You know—if you did meet her, and what you said the other day was wrong, somehow, then...” DCI Day’s tone is casual, but her words aren’t. They’re full of traps. Either you lied then, or you’re lying now. You have two choices, both of them bad. Jesus, your fucking DNA—halfmyDNA—in a missing woman’s room, one you say you’ve never met. Maybe it’s your lack of father figure. Maybe I didn’t instill a respect in you for women, maybe—

I look out at the rain, the drops on the windows lit orange by the streetlight, and realize only a few seconds before it becomes plainly obvious that this conversation precedes an arrest.

“I’ve never met Olivia Johnson,” you say. Panic breaks across your face like headlights sweeping the dark roadoutside. I think suddenly of the footage, all over the news. Olivia disappearing into that alley, never coming out again. How could that be? Is it possible you have the answer?

“Where were you on the night of the twenty-ninth of April?” Poole says. He sits on our sofa without asking, gets a clean pad out. He communicates something to DCI Day with his eyes, something we can’t interpret.

I know this one. You went to see Linda, the therapist, and then we went out to Portishead One. I stare at this tangible fact like it’s a mirage on the horizon that might disappear if I take my eyes off it.

“Er,” you say, thinking. “Therapy? Then out with Mum?”

“Therapy,” Poole says, his fingers gripping a biro with a chewed lid. It’s the first and only word he has written on his notepad.

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