Page 49 of Just Another Missing Person

Julia saw Art this morning after seeking yet another extension to detain Matthew, this time from a magistrate, which she knows will be granted imminently but that she still feelsuneasy about. It’s rare for their paths to cross in the morning these days—sadly. Art leaves early, often before her.

But this morning, he was getting dressed in the spare room, the door ajar. Julia stood, just looking for a second. Not at his naked form, a body she knows as well as her own, but at his mannerisms. Their exact texture has faded, somehow, with the lack of intimacy that comes with a frosty marriage, where you can no longer openly study the person you live with if you want to. After a few seconds, he turned, saw her looking and closed the door. Julia sobbed while brushing her teeth, wondering what might happen if she could tell him.

A few minutes later, he texted her: always his favorite medium. Just a short sentence, but Julia read it over and over: “Hope you’re okay.”

“Thanks,” she says softly to Price, a man she’s spoken more words to today than her husband. “You in now?” she adds. So far, she’s managed to withhold the disclosure from Mr. Jackson, but she doesn’t have much longer.

“It’s the daytime, isn’t it?” he says, a long-time joke among criminals, who tend to work at night, or often not at all.

“Yeah, no worries,” he says, not yet understanding: not yet comprehending that their careful give-and-take relationship is about to become something else.

***

Price lives in a top-floor flat in a tall block. His living room, he once told her rather proudly, has a dual aspect: two windows.

Price and Julia go back almost nineteen years, to when she was a PC. She worked regularly, then, with Covert Human Intelligence Sources: police-speak for snitches. Julia likedto use informants more than other officers. Perhaps it was her preference for real-time, primary information, perhaps something else, the careful nurturing of the relationship, the soft push and pull; she was good at it, and Price was, too.

He buzzes her in through a housing-association-bland front door—dark green, small white window, sadly not unlike a prison—and she finds her way through the unchanged, derelict corridors. The lift isn’t working, and she seems to remember it hadn’t been the last time she visited him either, about twelve years ago. The stairs are unpainted concrete, the smell distinctly multistory urine, the handrail white-peeling paint.

“All right,” Price says at his door, Scottishr’s rolling.

He’s a big smoker, and his small—although neat—flat smells of dry tobacco, of old wormcasts of cigarettes in ashtrays. Nostalgia hits Julia. Those were the days. Working as a PC. Dealing with Price. Cigarettes and calling the station on payphones and Britpop.

“DCI Julia Day,” he says, stepping aside. “What’s the situation? Twice in one week, a treat for me.”

“Just something and nothing, really,” she says lightly, though she knows Price is not so stupid that he will be lured into casualness. It doesn’t matter what she tells him: he, like most people who live in the way he does, has to listen to more than what he’s told, in order to survive.

He sees her through to his living room. Two brown leather sofas, an ashtray, and a cuckoo clock. He’s recently dusted: it smells of Pledge furniture polish.

He makes a tea; Julia refuses one. While his back is to her, at his kitchenette, she starts to speak. “My turn to ask you for a favor,” she says. She sets it up this way deliberately: within that sentence lies the subtext of leverage. Price cannot say noto her. She has too much on him. She knows that this specific fact won’t bother him, though, so she has her trump card ready.

He says nothing, but turns slowly to her, leaning back against the countertop, teabag dripping from a spoon, eyebrows raised.

“Do you know anybody good at tech?” she says. “I need some footage gone.” The sentence is painful to say. Not only because it extorts him, somebody who has never, ever crossed her, but because it extorts her, too. Evidence planting. Illegal CCTV searches. And now this: enlisting help, off-record help.

But criminals have access to things that the police don’t. And Julia’s run out of options. Here is her only remaining one: joining the world she’s battled for two decades, at least temporarily.

“What kind of tech?” he asks easily. He gulps his tea. He takes it black. Drinking it must be for show: it’s still boiling.

Julia shifts her weight on her feet, waits a beat, then answers: “Someone who can delete something.”

“A hacker. Delete what?” Price says curiously, thehinwhata surprised Scottish owl hoot.

“Do you have anyone on your books?”

“Is this errand personal, or professional?”

“Both,” Julia says honestly.

The cuckoo clock on the wall chimes twelve. As if on cue, the sun comes out, no longer the milky quality of winter but sharp and green, like spring. Dust motes dance in the air above the counters. There’s not a single thing out on the surfaces, only two mugs on the draining board and a pink cloth which Price picks up and uses to mop up the minuscule drop of tea on the lino. He’s a tidy person. Tidy surroundings, tidy appearance and a tidy, fast mind, too.

“Nice clock,” Julia remarks, raising her eyes to it.

“From my mum.”

Of course: his mother is German. It continues cooing, and he waits for it to stop, perhaps reverentially. “Bavaria,” he says. “Where she is—they sell them there for nothing—pence.”

He pauses, looking at her, cloth in hand, and Julia is struck that this is how a lot of criminal deals are done: in houses, neighbors just next door, kids playing outside.

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