Page 5 of Just Another Missing Person

She enters the alleyway, stooping under the police tape, and runs a gloved hand across the back wall, over the seam where the buildings meet. It’s faultless. Not a single way in. The first window of the flats is at least twenty feet in the air. Julia looks around it, her mind spinning.

There’s nothing. No marks where a ladder would have been. No manhole covers. No drains. Nothing. Olivia wasn’t carrying anything. According to Jonathan, no vehicle entered or left.

The only items in the alley are two industrial blue bins. Julia remembers a case on the news, years ago, where the Scottish police didn’t check them in a case not unlike this one, with catastrophic results. They contained an unconscious drunken lad, who was taken to a landfill. Discovered two days too late.

“The bins been emptied?” she calls to the PCSOs.

“Nobody has been let in or out since we found the CCTV,” one of them, Ed, replies. He’s young, barely twenty, is gym-obsessed, drinks tea with protein powder in it, which Julia finds incredibly endearing.

“Good. Don’t,” she says. “Nobody comes in or out.”

“Obviously,” he says, flexing a muscle at her.

“No messing with the bins, either,” she says. “Not even to shoulder press.”

Ed guffaws.

She tugs at one of the bins with a gloved hand. It moves easily. She opens both lids, then stares in. Nothing. One pristine, looks never used, doesn’t smell of cleaning fluid. The other has a single can of Carling in it, but the stain that’s dribbled out of it is ancient, a dark brown fuzz.

She adds to her mental list fingertip searchers and forensics on the bins. This skill is now a living, breathing thing.The way tasks leap up the priority list. A mystical but methodical sort of sifting, the larger items naturally rising to the surface, the finer grains falling to the bottom. The list reorganizes itself overnight, in the shower, when she should be listening to her husband. She gets it right most times. But not enough.

She casts a gaze across the ground. Old chewing gum. A couple of bits of gravel. Nothing else. She’s looking for blood. A weapon. Signs of a struggle. But there’s nothing.

“Right,” she says to herself, taking another look before she leaves. She’s freezing. There’s so much to do, and none of it here.

Jonathan must have heard her, because he appears at the entrance, says, “Incredibly odd, right?”

“Completely,” Julia says, bewildered. “I can’t think of a single credible explanation.”

“Rope out of the window?” he suggests, and this is why Julia likes working with Jonathan.

She pokes her head back into the alley, looking at the walls, looking for scuff marks, tiny holes, anything. But there’s only clear bricks, mortar. Nothing else.

“I need every single bit of CCTV on this alleyway,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says slowly. “Yeah. I’ll send it. But I have watched it. I promise, she doesn’t come back out.”

***

It’s after eleven, and Julia leaves the station with gritty eyes that have watched four videos at a time on her monitor, followed by another four. She has covered every single camera,and every single minute. She has barely blinked, doubling up on Jonathan’s work.

It can’t be true, but it is: Olivia goes into the alleyway and doesn’t come back out. Nobody else walks in there. The bins do not go in or out. At two o’clock in the morning, a fox enters then exits. And that’s it. No cars, no people. Nothing. She’s called the pub and clarified that the bins aren’t used. She’ll check with the hairdresser’s in the morning. “Why are they there, then?” Julia asked, and the pub manager couldn’t give a satisfactory answer. Those bins are on Julia’s list, somewhere in the middle, troubling her like a couple of nuisance summer flies. Think, she implores herself. Think outside of the box.

She is now walking to her ancient car, parked half a mile away, despite a reserved space in the station. Local criminals have been videoing which police cars go in and out, uploading them to YouTube, God knows why, but Julia has no interest in appearing in one.

She rubs at her forehead. Leaving Nando’s feels a hundred years ago. Perhaps Art was right about her work–life balance. A pedant, a person who reads literary fiction on the toilet—Art is indeed often right, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.

Out of guilt, Julia checks Genevieve’s last seen. Two minutes ago. “You up?” she texts.

Genevieve calls immediately, just as Julia wanted her to. “Always,” she says.

“Same,” Julia says with a smile. How amazing that Genevieve, her posing toddler, once a fan of wearing sunglasses and a volatile expression, is now an adult she can call up for a late-night chat. A fellow insomniac. Julia closes her eyes. She doesn’t regret doing what she did for her.

“How are the criminals?” Genevieve asks, as she often does. “I got that reg. You want it?”

“You’re a star,” Julia says, noting it down, knowing she probably won’t use it. “The missing person isn’t much older than you, actually,” she adds.

“I’m guessing Nando’s is off for the foreseeable?” Genevieve asks, and Julia considers her question. The thing with her daughter is that she doesn’t say how she feels. You have to mine for it, excavate it, come up with theories by yourself based on remarks she makes. Even more so recently.

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