Page 44 of Just Another Missing Person

“I just—if you don’t mind... I’ve seen the interviews, but I wanted to get a feel for... what you thought of her,” Julia says. “There’s some stuff to me that doesn’t quite add up.”

“Oh yeah?” Annie says. It’s nice to be treated normally. Noguvorma’am, no deferential behavior, sniffing around for promotions. And no suspicion either.

She makes Julia a latte from a surprisingly upmarket coffee machine. “This thing... so temperamental,” she says. Annie jabs a few buttons and milk begins spurting out. Annie and Olivia texted a fair amount after she had signed the lease and before she moved in. The latest:OMG you move in super soonest!Julia remembers it well.

“Like what—what doesn’t add up?” Annie says.

Julia considers telling her about the different-sized clothes but they’d only just met. Annie won’t know.

“She got a new number before she disappeared,” Julia says. “A new house, obviously. And a new job.”

“Yeah.”

“Some kind of fresh start, or something beyond that?”

“Maybe.”

“Did you ask her?” Julia looks quickly at Annie, who begins making herself a coffee, her back to Julia. That’s when she thinks about them, the stairs. From Olivia’s tweets—she thought the whorls in the wood were spiders. “One second,” Julia says, breezing back into the hallway to look at them. And that’s what had bothered her: the stairs are wood, but there are no knots in them. She walks up and down them, eyes to the ground, her body bent over, slowly, just looking. Nothing. They’re cheap, MDF-type wood. And the tweet was recent, one of her last before she disappeared, right after she moved in. It was definitely about this house. The evidence in Olivia’s case is strange in this way. Nothing tangible. Nothing she could interview on, arrest on. But things that don’t add up, regardless. “Sorry,” Julia says, going back into the kitchen. “So, did you ask her? Why she moved?”

“No,” Annie says, seemingly not fazed by Julia popping off to investigate their house. A black cat arrives at the door and saunters in. “He’s not even ours,” Annie says. “He comes to sleep in the downstairs bedroom.”

“Did she seem—you know... agitated, when she moved in?” Julia presses.

Annie actually steps away from Julia now, so much so the cat skitters back out and up the garden. It’s a classic move of somebody who feels cornered; Julia’s seen it thousands of times before.

“You know—if you know something...” Julia says, thinking how Annie is a direct communicator, the way she saidThe DCI, okay, Jesus, at the door. “If you know... anything at all that would help us. It’s a strange case for reasons I also can’t disclose.”

Annie keeps her head down, looking at her socked feet,but flicks her eyes to Julia. The coffee machine hisses milk out and they both ignore it. “The thing is,” she says, hesitating.

Julia waits. She could wait all day.

Eventually, Annie finishes, just as Julia knew she would. “We were so worried about her, we didn’t want the police to waste any time—we’d wasted enough. That text was—we were so spooked by it.”

“Of course,” Julia says, still waiting.

“So—what I mean is, when we called 101 to report it, the operator really pressed us on when we last saw her, and my housemate, she just—she just said it. She said we’d all moved her things into her room with her, just for five minutes. I mean—she heard her shower here—she just didn’t...”

“What?”

“Well, we haven’t actually... she moved in and we spoke a lot on text, but...”

“You haven’t actually what?”

“... met her.”

Julia blinks. “Youhaven’t, or none of you have?”

“None of us.”

“But you—you’ve given statements to...”

Annie turns and starts messing with the coffee machine, trying to turn it off. It begins cleaning itself, hot air rushing up the milk steamer. “The thing is—once the housemate told the lie, it was... we had to pretend. She’d told the operator we’d all met her. So we didn’t think we could go back on it... She only said it was five minutes. And we were so worried. The text—we’d chatted so much anyway, we may as well have met her...”

Julia stares at Annie. “So you all lied?”

“We just said we’d met her when we hadn’t. We WhatsAppedloads, weknoweach other. We spent a night as housemates! We just didn’t physically see her.”

“Physically seeing someone matters,” Julia says.

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