Page 4 of Just Another Missing Person

“Right. Eight thirty last night. Okay? Here’s the weird bit.” Jonathan presses play again. Olivia turns right off the high street, and up an alleyway. He leaves the tape running for five minutes, people coming and going, late-night shoppers, thedribs and drabs of commuters, a handful of evening drinkers. As he often does, he allows his evidence to speak for itself.

“Okay?” Julia says.

He opens Google Maps on his phone. “Here is that alley,” he says. “Blindman’s Lane, it’s appropriately called.”

Jonathan angles Street View up to the alley. As Julia’s looking, a text from his wife comes up, a photograph icon, and the message:Bedtime, AGAIN, she presumes regarding their baby.

“It’s blocked up,” he says, flicking the notification away. “Dead end. Look.” Sure enough, the alley ends in a brick block of flats, covering the entire thing. No doors, no accessible windows. Nothing.

“She doesn’t come out. I have watched five hours of footage, sped up,” Jonathan continues.

“Is it still blocked up? Is Google Maps up to date?”

“Four uniformed officers have confirmed it. And I went myself—it’s only”—he jerks his thumb—“down there.”

“No ladder? No fire door? A shaft down to a basement?” Julia says, zooming in on Google.

“No, no, no,” Jonathan says. He closes Google Maps and opens the text from his wife. It is indeed a photograph of her and their baby, maybe four months old now.

“Seriously cute,” she remarks.

“He’s got us wrapped around his little finger. Bedtime means nothing to him.”

“Well,” Julia smiles, thinking of Genevieve. “He’ll be sleeping until noon in fifteen, sixteen years.”

Jonathan’s smiling eyes meet hers. “We’ve bought something called a SNOO; it says it’ll rock him instead of us.”

“Yeah, sure. Good luck with that,” Julia says. “I need to look at this alleyway, too,” she says to him. “Don’t I?” Hegestures economically to the door, like, be my guest, but then comes with her: he’s nothing if not a gentleman.

It’s a quarter of a mile down the road to the alleyway. As they leave, the station fire alarm triggers, as it does near constantly, and never gets fixed. They ignore it and walk there quickly, Julia’s mind fizzing. “Never once does the inner monologue stop,” Art, her husband—is he still, technically?—once said to her, a sentence that for some reason she has remembered for all of these years since.

It’s freezing out, the air dry-ice cold, the streets quiet. Portishead’s nightlife hasn’t yet recovered from the pandemic, or perhaps nobody’s has. The silent street ahead is frosted, the pavement tactile underfoot.

“I think it’s going to be a big one,” Jonathan remarks. “Lots of resources needed. Her social media is plentiful. Daily posts for over a year. And not a sniff of any reason to disappear.”

Julia asks him, “What sort of person is she?”

“Hmm,” he says, and Julia waits. Jonathan is good at character. “Opinionated. Lefty. Kind of—vivacious, her captions are all really sort of... voicy.”

Julia nods. She likes Olivia already.

The alley is obvious: sealed off with police tape, two PCSOs manning it. Everything’s a crime scene until proved otherwise, but Julia’s surprised they could get two: Portishead is small, underfunded like everything, ill equipped, each big case requiring a team cobbled together from Bristol, Avon and Somerset.

She stands and looks at the alleyway. The PCSOs acknowledge her with raised eyebrows, but nothing more. They will not be surprised by her sudden appearance here. None of the force would be, nor that Jonathan has come with her.Julia is picky about who she works with, apparently, though shouldn’t everyone be?

To the left is a hairdresser’s. Old stone stained with years of water damage. On the right is a pub, red brick, newish, but still probably four decades old. And in the middle, the alleyway.

It is a complete dead end. The back is bricked right up to the fourth or fifth storey. Julia comes back out and walks a slow circle around. “The flats have no way of accessing that alley,” Jonathan says, as they fall into step beside each other. Julia isn’t surprised that he, too, has done this exact walk. Some people want to know why things are the way they are, and some people don’t. Luckily, Jonathan is the former.

He indicates the newbuild set of flats. They’ve been erected on to the back of both the hairdresser’s and the pub, spanning the entire back of the alleyway. “There is no way they’re recent, is there?” she asks.

“What, like, finished yesterday?” Jonathan says with a laugh.

“Right.”

He doesn’t need to answer her rhetorical question, and so he doesn’t. They walk back around to the alleyway entrance. Julia’s phone trills with a text from her brother. Open-hearted, always fun, a perennial child, Julia can’t believe he’s a lawyer. He moved from criminal defense into civil a few years ago, thankfully before they ever came up against each other. “I can’t tell you how happy I am—watchingSaved by the Bellwhile drafting a particulars of claim,” he has sent. Julia smiles and pockets it.

She puts on protective clothing. By the book, by the book, by the book. It’s another of her mantras. Somebody guilty will never walk free because of an error on Julia’s part. And neither will somebody innocent be convicted, either.

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