Page 60 of Just Another Missing Person

I get inside and try to keep the tears at bay. For where I have ended up, for you. The things desperate men do for their daughters.

When Julia gets in, I spot the exact moment she realizes I’m there. Her shoulders stiffen, just slightly, by only a millimeter or two.

She seems to count to ten or so in her head, looking into her lap, psyching herself up. I wonder if this is how you felt, and I hate—Ihate—the symmetry of it, that I, the victim, have become the perpetrator.

She meets my eyes in the rear-view mirror and, even though I’m sure she knew I was there, I think she’s surprised, too. Surprised that she was right, perhaps an old anxiety, perhaps something she always checks.

Julia looks at me and I gaze back at her. I know I’ve got to speak. I can only hope she won’t recognize my voice. I’ve used so many fake ones in setting this up, I’ve run clean out of them.

I take a deep breath, trying not to let the tears out. I never thought it would end up here. Never, ever, ever. My eyes are about to start smarting, I can feel it. Jesus Christ, I can’t cry here. I can’t. I swallow hard, then try to be as succinct as possible. I say one word only: “Drive.”

Part II

Sadie

Three Hundred and Seventy-First Day Missing

29

Julia

It’s half past one in the morning, and, once again, Julia has too much to do. She has Emma in one meeting room and Olivia in another. Really, she wants to be at home with Genevieve, who texted her an hour ago saying, “This is too late for EVEN ME! Goodnight!!!”

Olivia really is uncanny. She is a walking avatar of the passport photograph that they have been looking for. Her eyebrows rise as she speaks, her mouth upturned slightly. “I mean—I am here,” she says, gesturing to her body, to herself. A white T-shirt, faded jeans, a satchel. Even at this hour, even underneath the unflattering strip lights, she looks beautiful. “My husband said, enough’s enough—earlier,” she says. “And I told him it was fine. But then I was lying in bed and thought—no. I’ve got to go. In case they still think it’s me.”

“Look,” Julia says. And then she asks the question she knows she needs to ask to get the answer she needs: “Where did you renew your passport?”

Sadie’s father worked at the passport office in Bristol.

“Bristol.”

The very specific feeling of unlocking the truth floods Julia’s system. She and Jonathan used to talk about this feelingall the time. “Like electricity going from your heart,” he once said, and she’d nodded emphatically.

She catches her own reflection in the one-way glass, wondering when workaholism and passion turned into something else, something perhaps toxic, something destructive. Something that allows her to avoid her husband, maybe. Julia is only able to face these thoughts now she is here: excited, hyped up, full of good old-fashioned delicious police adrenaline that forms a protective ring around her. Can we only be truly honest with ourselves when things are going well?

Often in policing—and this is what truly makes Julia addicted to it—there really is one single moment that cracks open an entire case. A chance piece of information, a coincidence that feels a little too unlikely, a “hang on” moment when leafing through tedious paperwork. It sometimes stops Julia in her tracks when she considers how many of these eureka moments might have passed her by, but she can’t think like this—not tonight, when it’s happened, once again: thank God it’s happened.

The key that unlocks this case is so real to Julia that she can almost feel it grasped tightly in her hand, metallic, ancient, wrought iron. A key to a case from just over a year ago. A case during which she was distracted by Genevieve. A case where the father felt she betrayed him. Where the father would do anything to bring his daughter back. Or to cover his own tracks?

It springs open, and Julia looks inside.

Sadie.

She picks her phone up and googles the Sadie case. And there he is. A handful of less than salubrious news articles written about him. The boyfriend: Andrew.

Now Matthew.

He was questioned, on Sadie’s first day missing, by a specialist interviewer, who was good, but who wasn’t Julia. And who left shortly after, relocated, was no longer here to recognize him, not that that would be very easy—Matthew has a full beard now that obscures much of his face. Julia never met Andrew. Was too distracted by Genevieve and Zac to look too closely at the news articles, too. Just papers speculating that it’s often the boyfriend. Nothing more, but enough to drive somebody away.

Andrew had a cast-iron alibi—his mother, multiple waiters, a Ring doorbell—and was immediately dismissed as a suspect. No record was kept of his interview because it wasn’t under caution. His was one of the many interviews you conduct when looking for a missing person: you interview everyone they know, nobody under suspicion at first, and so nothing added to the PNC. Interviews with their friends, their partner, their parents. People they work with. People they used to work with. People they went on two dates with. Andrew, with an easy alibi, was called in once, interviewed informally by a colleague of hers, his DNA never taken. No matter what Lewis said—and people close to the misper often make demands the police have to ignore—Julia and her team hadn’t thought it was right to investigate him. There was no reason to.

And so the informal interview didn’t go on Andrew’s record. It doesn’t go on anyone’s until there is either a caution or an arrest.

Andrew Zamos. Now Matthew James. Moved across town, new name, new social media. It makes sense. Julia might have done the same for herself and Genevieve, if they had been in the news. You can’t hide from everyone if you don’t go far, but you can hide from people googling you when you gofor a job interview, or when you first meet somebody. You could tell those close to you the truth, but otherwise hide under cover. A pretty simple disguise that is capable of fooling the PNC—it would never tell you about a name change by deed poll. It’s ancient, the software too creaky, the UK’s lack of an ID-card system against it, too. God, how many others might have done it?

If Julia had been less distracted, she would’ve read the news stories better. Remembered them, and him, and avoided this whole mess.

“So there are two Olivia Johnsons?” Olivia says. Her hands are back on the table, a piano playing pose.

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