Page 54 of Just Another Missing Person

Outside, the streets are covered in moisture. It’s been raining hard, now dulled to gentle tapping as the drops fall from the spring trees and bushes.

I finish the cigarette—God, I hate them, really—and toss it to the ground. It lands in a puddle still dimpling with rain. I get in the car and start the engine running, and it feels kind of apt, you know? Black rain on the windscreen, tears inside, and just me, alone. A single parent in every sense.

I looked up Prudence Jones earlier today. Nobody is missing who goes by that name, not that I can find, anyway. I have no idea what the bitcoin could be for, though I could make a few dark guesses. Kidnap, murder, trafficking. Which is it?

I idle at a pedestrian crossing on a timer for nobody when I could run the red light, and I wonder if you would. If we are perhaps just made of different stuff, even though I grew you for so long by myself, and parented you solo for all of your life, that it feels like you must be solely me. But maybe I’ve only been seeing what I want to see. Maybe you don’t give a shit about other people, about red lights, about laws that say you shouldn’t murder women.

And, of course, I think about your father. A waster. A man who is content to take flight at two pink lines. But what if he’s worse than that? I blink as I pull away. I can hardly remember him. Suddenly, sleeping with him, being careless with him, feels like the biggest gamble of my life. Putting everything on red in a game of Russian roulette, without knowing what the bet is, what the stakes are.

The police station comes into view. Always lit up, one ofthose grim places that never truly shuts, like fire stations, like churches, like A&E departments, places too important to close their eyes for even a minute.

I park up and take a few breaths, just for me: for you, too, I suppose, and I try to tell myself that handing over this QR code is protecting you—in a way: just from yourself.

My footsteps echo across the car park. The information I hold is in my hand, so weightless it feels almost insignificant, a damp and feather-light piece of paper, nothing more than that. It moves slightly in the cold breeze.

The automatic doors let me in, and there is DCI Day, right there in the foyer, a tableau of an overworked police officer, as though she is just waiting for me. I lift the piece of paper, ready to say my bit.

Day turns slowly to look at me, eyes first, then her head, then her body, like an animal.

“My son has been questioned and is still being held here,” I say. Her facial expression doesn’t change, but her eyes seem to sharpen as I speak. “I have some evidence that might assist you. And I wanted you to know: he used to be known as Andrew. Last year, his girlfriend, Sadie, went missing.”

25

Lewis

There’s a man outside the police station, talking to DCI Day. I’ve come to discuss Andrew with her, to show her the messages between my alter ego and him, but I now stand, one hand on the hot roof of my car, the other on the doorhandle, just looking, and watching it unfold.

It’s something: more than a normal altercation between police and public. They’re both emotional. He—in a parka, even though it’s warm—is right up in front of her, like a drunk, like somebody at the end of a night out, his body a coat hook hanging over her. She’s gesticulating, not a pose I’ve ever seen her make before. One arm across her body, the other held up in a stop sign.

She seems to have the final word, because he leaves, and as he turns I see his neck—a thick, white, NHS-issue gauze over it, steri-tape holding it down. Even so, the wound underneath has leaked through, a burgundy stain blooming across it like a poppy with a black center. It looks unclean, uncared for, the edges of the gauze dirtied.

I watch him go, walking slowly down the street, wondering if he’s a victim of a recent crime, wondering if he is as dissatisfied with DCI Day as I am.

Just as I think this, he turns. “Fuck you,” he shouts, his accent wide and northern, like a blank winter sky. “Fuck you and your corruption!” he says.

The words have a physical effect on Day. Her palm, facing out toward him, collapses, and she pulls both arms around her waist. She looks tired. She looks like she hasn’t slept in weeks and weeks, purple eyelids, cut-outs beneath her cheekbones. She bends over slightly, as though gut-punched.

Corruption.

Corruption.

The second she turns away, trudging back to the station, I find myself hurrying after him.Corruption. What does he mean? My breath puffs out of me as I cross the car park. Following Day recently has somehow opened something in me, like this is a normal way to behave, to overhear, to accost, to tail somebody. I guess all I can say is that, one day, if you have kids, you might understand some of what I’ve done this past week. I miss you so viscerally it has become a soured, rotten part of me, right in the very center of my body, like I have grown a new, sad organ.

“Hey, hey!” I shout to the man.

He turns and looks at me. Tall, with vacant eyes, angry body language, like somebody who it would take absolutely nothing to tip over into violence. “How do you know her?” I say lamely. “DCI Day?”

He rubs at his neck, which makes me wince. An old gesture, one that doesn’t accommodate the new wound, and he startles as his fingers cross it, then looks at them, checking for blood. “Yeah?” he says.

And that’s when he says the sentence that changes everything: “She tried to fuck up your life, too?”

“What?” I say, my voice carried away on the spring breeze,fresh and scented. The verges of the car park are lined with cow parsley. My eyes dart to the police station, but Day’s safe inside: they all are, in there in their ivory towers. Unthinking, unfeeling, unbothered if they don’t solve the crimes, they still get paid, still get their final salary pensions. Meantime, we—the unfortunate—we languish, our lives upended.

“She can’t do shit—and if you fucking challenge her, she threatens you. This is 2022, but the police are still fucking us over.”

“Huh?”

He gestures crudely to his neck, his hand forming a gun shape. “Her daughter did this to me, mate,” he says, his voice hoarse, his eyes bright and feverish. “So yeah—don’t mess with her. She’ll threaten you. Fuck,” he adds, turning in a circle. “I shouldn’t have said it.” He looks at me sharply, then draws his hood up, and lights a cigarette which illuminates his face perfectly in the igloo of his clothing. “Don’t say anything. Don’t say I told you.” He points to his neck again, and then leaves me there, standing, reeling, thinking:Exactly who is this DCI Day? And who is this man?

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