Page 3 of Just Another Missing Person

The text to the housemates is what troubles Julia the most.Please come x. That text is a specifically female call to arms, sent with only one intention, Julia thinks: to be rescued. There are things you don’t just know because you’re police: you know them because you’re a woman.

They go over what Julia knows. Olivia’s friends, associates, regularly frequented locations according to her Instagram, and then Julia begins handing out tasks, thinking how interested Genevieve would be in this. “What I wouldn’t give to attend a briefing,” she’d said recently to her. Previously ambivalent, Genevieve is now positively obsessed with what she callstrue crimeand what Julia calls her job.

“Not on your life,” Julia had replied. Genevieve’s intensifying interest in the police concerns Julia, given everything, but that’s a conversation for another day.

Poole interrupts her before she can really start. “Why is she high risk?” he asks. Julia isn’t surprised: he’s a contrary type, the sort of person who would argue against his own existence in the right circumstances. “Just to play devil’s advocate,” he adds, as if to demonstrate everything Julia is thinking. Christ. Is it not one of life’s truisms that anybody who feels the need to play devil’s advocate is seriously in need of a stiff gin and a shag? Get a life, she thinks caustically.

“No past mental health problems that we know of, an attractive woman presumably alone at night, a text sent to housemates asking them to come to her. Probably worth looking into, isn’t it?” Julia says, instead of saying what she really thinks, her tone nevertheless sharp.

“All right,” he says, holding his hands up, brushing one over his bald head. “No need to go all Julia on me.”

She talks over him, giving orders for CCTV and phone-records collection, interviewing the parents formally, questioning the housemates, fingertip searches. Her strategy, always, is to throw as much time—and budget—at a missing person’s case as she can, early on. Julia abides by the golden-hour principles: get the immediate response right, and the rest follows. She doesn’t understand why anyone would workdifferently. Information, to Julia, is crucial, and they need it in abundance. Eventually, it will tell them if Olivia is hiding, abducted or dead: there is no other outcome.

Julia walks eagerly back to her office to begin her own set of tasks, shoeless, semi-content, but thinking guiltily of Genevieve and Art at Nando’s. Genevieve is only a few years younger than Olivia. It could easily have been her.

***

Julia likes her team to report to her one on one, and she likes to physically look at the things they show her, too. It creates much more work than a DCI should ever have, but she can’t help it. You can’t get a feel from an email, a dry CCTV report.

Jonathan is sitting in her office, looking implacably out of the blinds Julia paid to have fitted last year. She knows this is not normal behavior, but the authorities didn’t stop her, and now she has white wooden slatted blinds that she can close and shut out the world, or open up fully and let the sunlight in. The entire right-hand wall is windows and beautiful blinds just like at home. The rest of her office is a neat square, a corner desk, full of items she bought with her own money: a lamp from Next, an Apple Mac because she prefers them. In other words, it’s a room in her house, transplanted to the office.

It’s a couple of hours later, just after ten at night. Julia has been coordinating an ever-growing team of searchers, analysts and Forensics. She’s pleased to see Jonathan, who has taken his large, black-framed glasses off and is rubbing at his eyes. His wedding ring hits the desk as he reaches to put them back on.

His wife had a baby only a few months ago. Julia had to force him to take leave. He’d returned to work a week early regardless, his eyes bright, alive with the joys of his life having changed in an instant. He loves the baby, but he is addicted to the job. Julia was the same. The warm sugarloaf of a newborn not quite enough to kill her passion for this: solving things, piecing them together, helping people, and inching ever closer to that most elusive of things: the truth.

She sits cross-legged in her chair. “All right, tell me what you know,” she says.

“Settle in,” he says. “I’m afraid she is a quintessential member of the iGeneration.”

“I-what?”

“Vast internet presence. She’s a Gen Z-er, but I’m sure she would say: don’t put a label on a whole generation, guys, that’s so not cohesive.”

“I suddenly feel very, very old,” Julia says drily.

“Allow me to start with Instagram,” Jonathan says. He’s sitting on Julia’s spare chair, which is designated for exactly this, nicknamed The Interrogation Chair. He brings up Olivia’s Instagram grid on the computer and they look at it together. Jonathan also likes to show rather than tell, though that is because—as he once told her—he doesn’t actually like talking to people very much.

The Instagram grid comprises selfies, flowers, stacks of books. Witty captions. “Can you print them all for me?” Julia asks. “Go through them anyway, but can I have them? And anything else, her emails, tweets, whatever.”

“Already done it in anticipation, my friend,” he says, lifting the file up to show a set of printouts underneath it. “Though we have got to get you digital.”

Julia smiles a half-smile. “No, no, no.” There is something authentic, to Julia, about leafing through the pages in bed. Something tangible, as though any secrets hiding between each sheet will be released into the night air.

“Sure. So. Right. This last photo—clearly taken in the Portishead Starbucks, yesterday, yeah? See the distinctive branded window? She used a VSCO filter.” Jonathan is a middle-aged detective who specializes in the detailed machinations of the way the youth live their lives online. He knows about everything: TikTok trends, incels, Tumblr suicide pacts. And he has the best instincts of any detective Julia knows.

“Right.”

He zooms in on it. The photograph is of a distinctive lemon-yellow coat folded on to a stool, a laptop open in the window and a coffee. Caption: Pretending it’s summer.

“We have CCTV of a woman in a coat like this,” he says, “just a few hundred meters from that Starbucks.”

Julia swallows some emotion or other that she refuses to name. Since last spring, CCTV will forever remind her of Genevieve. More specifically, of what Genevieve did.

“They’ve got this, from outside the hairdresser’s. Yellow coat, right? Woman walks up the street.”

It’s grainy footage from up above, but it is in color, and it is—to Julia, anyway—clearly Olivia. The same distinctively fair hair, a natural blond, no roots. And the same coat from the photograph. She pauses it, zooms in. Did she know, then, that these would be her final moments in the before?

“Agreed. That’s Olivia,” Julia says.

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