Page 61 of Just Another Missing Person

“No,” Julia says. “There’s just one of you.”

And here it is. The key.

Olivia.

No friends.

Housemates never met her.

A wardrobe full of differently sized clothes.

Her strange vocabulary online. Her blurred selfies, the way the passport photo was the only good one that they could use. She had avoice. Like a fictional character. Like a creation. She made mistakes—too long a menstrual cycle, the wrong information about dogs on Sugar Loaf Beach, believing you’d wear a moisturizing eye mask out to the shops, using the phrasedrug storelike women do—but women who are online, in America. Shoddy research, Julia thinks, smiling grimly. She can’t help but feel a fizz and crackle of satisfaction: she’s solved it.

She closes her eyes as it comes to her, like a sheet being drawn back off a body.

Two missing women, three if you count Marilyn. Sadie,presumed dead. Olivia, presumed invented. Turns out, Julia had been looking for the wrong woman all along.

***

A constable in uniform appears with a cup of tea for Olivia and nothing for Julia, who looks on in envy. When was the last time she had a drop of liquid? She pushes her hair back from her forehead. She wishes Jonathan were here.

“The passport renewal,” Olivia says, continuing their conversation. “Last summer. I got married. I was Olivia Davis.”

Julia nods quickly, thinking she should feel relieved. The clues followed, the truth chased down. But there’s still a missing woman: it just isn’t Olivia.

“Look—leave this with me,” Julia says. She needs to get back to Emma, sitting alone in an interview suite, having just given Julia damning evidence regarding her son. Julia rubs at her forehead. She can’t even call anyone in, not yet. She needs to handle this alone, work out what it all means, and then instruct. That it is the middle of the night helps with this thought process, to keep it unofficial, almost like if it’s two o’clock in the morning, it isn’t really happening. It allows her to obscure the real reason: that, if she wants to do anything other than call off the Olivia investigation, she will need to keep it off the books.

Nobody in the police knows that Olivia is an invention. The most anyone knows is that she arrived back. Nobody knows that Matthew James was once known as Andrew Zamos: Emma has told only Julia. Nobody knows Julia was blackmailed, and especially, nobody knows that it was Lewis, father of Sadie Owen, who was behind it. Julia closes her eyes, just for a second or two, her head spinning with it.

“Will you tell me who cloned my passport? Will there be an announcement—that I’ve beenfound?”

Julia can’t answer these questions. She motions to Olivia. “All right,” she says. “Give me the night.”

Olivia looks up at her, unblinking, saying nothing. Julia takes this as a tacit agreement and hurries down the corridor, to Emma. Only the desk sergeant and one custody officer know even slightly what’s going on in here. She doesn’t have a lot of time before word spreads. Time to do what? She avoids answering this question, even in her own mind.

“Sorry about that.” Julia gestures to Emma, inviting her to continue the confession she tried to start earlier.

Emma hands her the QR code.

“Right,” Julia says, looking at it.

“When you scan it, it’s a bitcoin transfer, and it saysI have Prudence Jones for you,” Emma explains. “And... he had been talking to Olivia Johnson. Online.”

Julia looks at her closely—slightly sleep-snared hair, an unironed T-shirt.

“I don’t know what it means,” Emma says. “I’m just telling you.”

“Has the bitcoin been called in—collected?” Julia asks, ignoring the Olivia comment.

“I don’t know. How do I tell?”

“Mmm,” Julia says, thinking.I have Prudence Jones for you.

She is thinking, too, that this morning, she thought Matthew James was innocent. Now, she wonders if he’s trafficking women.

“You wanted me to see it,” she says to Emma, watching her facial expression. Emma looks down at her hands—cuticles ragged—then up at Julia, making direct eye contact,and nods. And that’s when Julia understands: she and Emma are entirely on the same page.

“What do you think it means?” Julia probes.

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