Page 46 of Just Another Missing Person

“What’s your gut instinct?”

Jonathan sucks in his cheeks. “I’d say most incidental things like this do end up being connected,” he says eventually. “Though not always in the way you expect. Also, you know. Look and you shall find.”

Julia nods.Look and you shall findis a common fact in any investigation. All you have is a snapshot. It’ll naturally be full of red herrings. If anyone disappeared on any single day of their life, there would always be something strange about it. Human beings aren’t robots. Taking a different route to avoid an old acquaintance. Getting a coffee and throwing it away because the milk tasted off. Julia has done both of these things recently, things that would look strange and loom large if a major crime unit were to investigate them.

Of course, Julia has since done much, much worse. If she is ever investigated, she’s finished.

Jonathan is getting ready to go. Home to a wife and a baby. Julia goes home to a daughter and a husband who won’t brush his teeth in the bathroom with her.

“Mañana,” Jonathan says. “Been learning Spanish on Duolingo.”

The foreign phrasing... that’s what gives her the idea: a way to get rid of the bodycam footage. Maybe the decision to descend downward into the criminal world was actually made the night all of this started, the night the man got into her car and forced her into corruption. The night that, only a few hours before, she’d seen Price. Her old informant. A man of the (criminal) people who can get you any service you require. All you have to do is trade your ethics. Again.

19

Emma

There is a lot going unsaid currently in this police meeting room, mostly by me. I keep going over and over it. Your hushed confession. You had been speaking to Olivia Johnson. A single line, uttered as if to a priest, and then you were whisked off, and here we are.

But the night she disappeared... I cling on to it. You were with me. Youwere. I collected you from Linda’s. We went home, then we went out together, for tacos, at Portishead One. You said you were enjoying the new bar job. You like work like that—you seem to have zero ambition for much else, though, as with most things to do with you, I don’t truly have any idea. You like the late nights, the quiet of the world after your shift.

And then, after the tacos, we came home, pretty late... but not so late that... do I know you were in your bed the whole night...? It was the first thing they asked me. I tried to answer as forthrightly as possible. And then, after that, we got a lawyer.

And now you are sitting with me, and opposite is the lawyer who calls himself Mr. Jackson. I quite like that formality. A proper person doing a proper job. Somebody who willuntangle this nonsensical situation we find ourselves in. He got me in, too, argued you are so anxious you needed an appropriate adult as support.

You have spent the night in a cell. Your hair mussed, in police-issue clothing—a cheap burgundy tracksuit. You don’t smell like you, like us. No laundry detergent. You smell like them. The State, the public sector. The sweat and stale odor of prison.

You look small, diminutive. You always did. At nursery you’d hang on to one of the key workers’ legs, waiting for me, then transfer straight to mine, my baby limpet. Even last year, when you first met your then-girlfriend, you came home and you said you felt like a twat every time she texted you, you couldn’t think what to say back. “But you’re so good with banter when you relax,” I’d said, and you’d shrugged. Forever insecure. I wish I could take that away from you completely.

“All right,” Mr. Jackson says, uncapping a fountain pen. He smells of Old Spice, and I wonder if he strays into cliché. Pinstripe suit, ink cartridges, an understated watch bought indirectly by repeat offenders. It’s only the same as me, I suppose, letting oligarchs outbid normal buyers and leaving the penthouse suites in Bristol and Portishead empty.

“Tell me everything, from start to finish,” Mr. Jackson says to you. He’s old, maybe close to sixty, white hair, black eyebrows. A throat-clearing habit that I try not to let irk me.

“The main thing,” you say, “is that I have never been in that house.” Your gaze lingers on mine just briefly; it’s drawn to me like a magnet.

Mr. Jackson looks straight at you over the table. It’s a standard-issue police interviewing room. Plastic chairs. Blue carpet. A panic strip halfway up the wall like a dado rail.

“DNA evidence is very rarely wrong.” He says this without breaking eye contact with you for even a second.

“Okay. But I am not wrong, either.”

“I have had clients tell me they weren’t there. It was their identical twin. They’re being framed.”

Something leaden is making its way around my bloodstream. Some awful, creeping knowledge. Even this lawyer, this £300-per-hour defense lawyer, doesn’t believe you, and he doesn’t even know what I know, either.

I close my eyes. Images flash through my mind. Made-up things, hypotheticals, but so real to me. One o’clock. You get out of bed, in search of—what? Sex? A kill? You creep out, find her, follow her up the alley...

You don’t dignify Mr. Jackson’s statement with an answer, only a sad raise of your eyebrows, and he continues. “One thing”—he puts the cap back on his pen, like he won’t even proceed a single step further until you tell the truth—“that the justice system is good at is bringing everything out in the wash.”

“Well—I mean. I haven’t got a twin,” you say. “But—all of the above?”

I glance at you, dithering... deciding... I don’t know the first thing about lawyers, about client confidentiality, about the situation we find ourselves in.

“You think it’s a fix,” Mr. Jackson says.

“I know that I wasn’t there,” you say carefully.

“Isn’t the main thing”—I talk over you—“that he was with me on the night she disappeared into that alley?”

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