Page 39 of Just Another Missing Person

Poole is wearing a Reebok jumper and jeans, his eyes bright. She jumps. “Could you knock?” she says sharply. “Why are you dressed for PE?” She closes her screen down. She was reading about a David Harper, perhaps the brother of Zac, perhaps not.

“I’m apparently on annual leave,” Poole says.

“No such thing. How’s it going, upgrading it to murder?” Olivia’s dad is due to get back to Julia shortly, and she’s tetchy, on edge, waiting.

Poole seems to just about manage not to roll his eyes. “That’s too high a bar, isn’t it? Besides, the lawyer is Mr Jackson.”

“Oh,” Julia says, staring down at the desk. That explains the no comment. Mr. Jackson is formidable. Leaves no stone unturned, and sees almost no cases through to conviction in the process. He roadblocks them. Each one failing either at first hearing or at trial. There is no way she will get this through on a murder charge. Not until there’s a body.

“But... we have DNA,” Poole says, seemingly unconcerned. “So the kidnap charge is okay. Maybe.”

Julia nods quickly, feeling sick. Poor kid, thrown into the legal system with no idea he’s up against a corrupt police officer.

But the arrest is just the beginning. Charging him is just the beginning. He will plead not guilty—why wouldn’t he? And then there will be a trial in a couple of years’ time. It will hang over Matthew and Julia until then, the backlog of the courts ensuring it does. Lawyers and experts and jurors will pick over her faked, amateur evidence. She wonders where this will end, truly. In his trial—or hers?

Something tragic and instinctive compels her to go to the police custody cells and look in on Matthew. She moves past Poole, not providing an explanation. She can feel him staring at her as she goes.

The reception area contains a bank of CCTV, and each monitor houses a moving figure.

Most people in police custody simply do nothing. They sit and they stare into space. Some are drunk. Many feel frightened and stupid, because the police they have been running from for a long time—drugs, thefts, mostly—have caught up with them in ways they never thought they would.

Matthew is not a typical detainee. He is pacing, right now, a hologram version of himself above Julia’s head. She watches him go this way and that, biting a fingernail, rubbing his hands through his hair.

He is clearly trying to work something out. Innocent people are completely bewildered. So sure that things are going to be resolved that they wait by the door. Guilty people mostly perform. Any distress is demonstrative; not like this, while alone. If Julia had to guess, she’d say he was not quite guilty, but not quite innocent either. Curious.

She wishes she could let herself into his cell, ask him: do you have any enemies? Is it possible we have one in common? But she can’t. Was he chosen at random? A nearby house, close to the scene of the kidnapping. He was with his mum at a bar right off the alleyway, too. The perfect candidate: a guileless kid.

If not—then somebody’s framing him for a reason. Once again, Julia’s mind goes to Olivia. A traumatic encounter with Matthew maybe, once; maybe she wants revenge?

As she continues out through the reception foyer, she crosses paths with Mr. Jackson.

She nods to him, and he acknowledges her with a raise of his eyebrows. “DCI Day,” he says. She isn’t sure whether it’s a greeting or the beginning of a sentence.

Mr. Jackson is old, weather-beaten, and one of the best lawyers she knows. He’s a careful sort of solicitor, the type who doesn’t think success lies in flashy clients or big-name cases. Mr. Jackson’s ethos is in the detail. He will go through every single piece of paper twice, never mind if it takes all night. He calls lawyers who don’t do this “first-page lawyers’: those who read only the first page of the file.

The greatest lawyers aren’t like they are in the movies.They’re not slick, expensive, big-picture types. They’re like this: careful, considered, willing to read four thousand boring pages to find a small hidden error on just one, and they never lose concentration while searching for it.

“I was hoping to catch you,” he says cordially. “We’ve had some disclosure but not all.”

“Well, those are the breaks,” Julia says.

“You have a duty to provide it eventually,” he says. “Why not just do it now?”

Julia sighs. “What’re you missing?”

He consults a notebook in his hands. The hairs on her upper arms rise. The same animalistic fear that let her know the man was in her car is back. Another antagonist. This time, a lawyer who never misses a trick.

“The PCSOs manning the scene had bodycams on, but I haven’t seen the footage. Can you arrange?”

“Bodycams?” she says. Her shoulders and chest go hot. “Did they?”

“Yes, so the notes say.”

“Right, sure,” she says. She swallows. Her throat has dried up completely. Bodycams. She hadn’t realized. PCSOs don’t always wear them, she didn’t check the notes... if the PCSOs had looked in the room carefully, it will be clear from the footage that the glass and cigarette weren’t there, and time-stamped, too. She was the only visitor to the room after that, surely; she signed the crime scene log. “I’ll get that done,” she says, her voice dry.

“I will be going through that disclosure with a fine-toothed comb,” he says, enunciating this phrase precisely, not saying “fine toothcomb” as many do. He has an issue with people who use the wrong words, not unlike Art. “You have two pieces of DNA, nothing else.”

He leaves the rest unsaid. Julia nods quickly. “I’d expect nothing less.”

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