Page 38 of Just Another Missing Person

It’s an age-old tactic to arrest at night. Take them in late, interview early. Still compliant with PACE, but only just. Suspects will say anything to get released after that first night. Not something Julia usually has a problem with, until today.

His mum. She can’t stop thinking about her. Matthew is her only child, too. She was beyond shocked. Stunned, her eyes bright, face red, like somebody had just slapped her.

Julia and Art had wanted a second child. They had waited, for her caseload to die down, for a good time, and it had never come. Not once. Then she had gone for the DCI job, and Art hadn’t spoken to her for a week.

Julia doesn’t come here very much. Coppers favor old men’s pubs rather than this, an orange-hued bar, peeling leather stools, smeared glasses hanging and swaying on a rack above. Julia should be at home. And, yet, she is here, drinking fucking whiskey, even though she’s supposed to be driving. A cliché of a police officer.

She scrapes her hair back from her face.Matthew, Matthew, Matthew, her mind chunters. She thought the whiskey would help her to forget, to at least numb it, but, if anything, it’s revved her up even more.

She keeps thinking of Olivia. Through the trauma, and the guilt and the shame, there is a kernel of something that her detective mind is trying to get at. Something about her Instagram posts. You don’t polish with Zoflora. Julia hates that she knows this, but she does. You don’t go out in an eye mask. It’s almost... what?

Her detective mind attempts this way and that, a burrowing animal trying to find its way in.

The bartender—forty, maybe, ginger man-bun—replaces an old pillar candle in front of her with a new one, which he lights. Wax soon begins to dribble down the sides like teardrops. The ambience is tape over a wound: the bar is tired and near empty. A candle won’t do much. Julia passes a hand over the top of it, the flame just licking her palm; unfelt, but real.

It is this thought that compels her next action: she orders a second whiskey, she flicks through Olivia’s Instagram again, and then she calls Olivia’s father.

14

Olivia

Instagram photo:Coconut conditioner.

Instagram caption:Trying a new conditioner out at the moment. Makes my hair greasy. Tried another. Makes my hair greasy. Washed it with just shower gel. Now look like Brian May. Thanks, hormones.

Tweet:Current fear: spontaneous combustion? A new one in anxiety’s arsenal, but a goodie. Keep checking my arms to see they’re not on fire. Did anyone else worry about this back in the 90s? I feel like it was such a thing then? Did anyone continue into 2023?

Tweet:Relationship status: boyfriend getting hench, I’m bench-pressing Daim Bars.

Instagram photo:A steaming bath.

Instagram caption:My horoscope said I’d get into hot water this month.

Sent items:

27/04:[email protected]@gmail.com

Hey you, how’s things? Been a little while since university days. Just thought I’d email... don’t have your WhatsApp? Though sorry if this reads like one of those round robin Christmas letters your mum used to get. Lololol. Old school. How’re you, anyway?

All fine here. I’ve left ET. Getting a new job. Dunno if it’ll be the right thing for me to leave with nothing new to go to, but—I don’t know, you have to, don’t you? Besides, my horoscope said to! Mercury is in retrograde!! I’m sidestepping into marketing. TBH, sales was not for me. Staffed by psychos.

Talk soon!

O x

Inbox:

28/04:[email protected]@gmail.com

OMG—let me call you!

Fourth Day Missing

15

Julia

“He’s gone no comment,” Poole says, striding into Julia’s office the next morning. Julia startles. She was thinking about Art, and how she overheard him this morning, after last night, telling Genevieve that theater isn’t boring, just misunderstood. Art and Julia had been to see a play together, a year or two before, and Julia had encouraged him to leave halfway through. They’d burst out onto the street in the interval and run home through the rain. One of the worries she had told him that night had been that she might have died of boredom in the theater, and he’d laughed so hard the bed had shaken.

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