Page 62 of Just Another Missing Person

Emma reaches across the desk, messing with the peeling Formica. As she moves, Julia catches her scent: she smells of fabric softener. Unlike Julia, who probably always smells of stale police stations, adrenaline, and stress.

“Sadie was the first,” Emma says. “He was questioned, you know. But he was with me. Olivia was the second. And I’ve been—trying to convince myself... he was with me both times, so itcouldn’tbe. Couldn’t—you know? But now this Prudence...”

Julia nods, cringing inside, but still not revealing her cards to Emma. “He was with you at the time Sadie disappeared? You’re one hundred percent sure?” she says, her mind whirring about false alibis, but other things, too. How interesting that he was supposed to be with his mother on both occasions.

“Yes, he was.”

“But, regardless, you moved away, changed names.”

“The father’s vendetta—you know... the press. It’s always the boyfriend. They all just went after him.”

Julia nods quickly, looking at the QR code which sits on the table in front of them. “And now Prudence,” Emma adds, but it’s needless: it speaks for itself, along with her dejected body language.

Julia watches Emma, thinking of the very specific heartbreak of not knowing if your child is entirely innocent, and reaches for the QR code. “You’ve done the right thing,” she says.

Emma looks up. “I hope so.” She has wet eyes. “What now?”

“Please give me a night,” she says to Emma.

***

Julia hurries in the nighttime cold. She’s not told anybody Olivia is back, nor filed any paperwork. Just hoping she has a bit of time to get to Lewis before anyone talks.

The pavements are lightly frosted, even in May, the streets totally empty, and Julia feels, somehow, like she will be here forever, investigating these terrible, confusing crimes about dead women, missing women, where people flip between victim and persecutor on a second’s notice. When she reaches her car, she presses the keys to open it, and, as the lights flash, she finds herself relieved—still—to find that it is empty, even though she knows now who was inside it. And why.

Lewis lives in a middle-class suburb on the outskirts of Portishead. He is—Julia now remembers—forty-something, rangy, tall, possessing a kind of wired charisma usually seen only in celebrities or sportspeople. The kind of obsessive character Julia felt an instant kinship with, but whom she now hates. How dare he—in his quest to frame and capture Matthew—involve her? She thinks of Emma and Olivia leaving the station to go home, coming back at nine o’clock tomorrow morning, bewildered, confused.

It’s the small hours of the night, and Julia is firmly off duty. She doesn’t even have her badge with her. She is in her old, beaten-up car, no team with her, no team even in the know. It will just be her, here, the night air, and Lewis. Same as that first night, when Lewis got into her car.

It takes ten minutes to get to him. Funny how easy it is, once you know, once you have the key to the case. Here her blackmailer was, a couple of miles from the station, all along. She wonders what Jonathan would say about this. Often afan of doing what’s necessary to get answers, she thinks even he would judge her tonight.

Lewis’s house is set back from the road, two columns either side of the wooden front door, clean driveway paving, a rose planted in a blue pot by a doormat that saysWelcomeon it.

As she knocks on the door, it begins to rain, a fine, cold mizzle.

She is surprised when he answers almost immediately, fully clothed in jeans and a T-shirt. He has bags under his eyes, not only the color of bruises, but textured, too, three-dimensional, a half-moon underneath each, as obvious as if they have been gouged. He’s aged a decade in the past year, easily.

He looks behind him, then back at her. Evidently, he makes a decision. It’s easy to watch his mind work: he is a person who shows every emotion on his face, everything he thinks. He bites his lip, winces, then, decision made, he advances out onto the driveway, barefoot, even though the night’s cold and wet. He raises his palms to her, white, bloodless, and Julia realizes that, although recognition and understanding haven’t once flashed across his features, he knows exactly, precisely, why she’s here.

“Evening,” he says flatly.

“You’re the blackmailer,” Julia says, but she’s surprised to find her voice is soft, like ribbons unspooling into the night air around them. “You’re the person that has ruined my life.” As she says it, she realizes that it’s true. She is no longer in checkmate, like she once was; she is now in stalemate, instead: how can she ever phone this in, without revealing her own role in it? How can she ever admit Olivia isn’t real without saying how she worked it out? How can she continueto investigate Matthew, once people know that the missing Olivia doesn’t exist and—worse—the evidence was forged by Julia herself?

She shakes her head angrily, disturbing the cold air that whirlpools around her. “You threatened me and my family,” she says.

“He messaged me, thinking I was Olivia,” Lewis says tiredly. “Said he regretted something in his past. I could tell you all the ways he tried to control my daughter. I could say that I’m pretty fucking convinced he has got something to do with her disappearance and that you—and your team—could never quite get yourselves together to find out what. You didn’t even interview him yourself.”

He shifts his weight, crossing one leg over the other, toe down. He folds his arms and doesn’t look at her, instead looking into the distance. His outfit is dark, only his pale face, pale feet and pale arms visible.

“So whatareyou going to tell me?” Julia asks, her breath a puff of white vapor that hangs and then disperses in the air between them.

He toes the blue plant pot, still not looking at her. The top of his foot is covered in rainwater. And that’s when Julia realizes, and, once again, her perception flips.

Sure enough, he looks at her and says, his voice slow and laced with tiredness, “Go ahead and arrest me for fraud, or whatever it is, DCI Day. I don’t give a shit.” And then he actually puts his wrists together, barefoot on his drive, wife presumably asleep upstairs, daughter still missing, and Julia stares at him. His body is still, those wrists held firm in front of him, waiting to be handcuffed, but his jaw is quivering, just slightly, the way it does when you are heartbroken, and trying not to show it.

That jaw is the sign of a man so sad and mired in grief that he no longer cares, at all, about what happens to him. Her heart rolls over in sadness, the same way it does when she sees homeless animals, crying children, lonely elderly people.

Lewis was a despairing dad, and then a threatening blackmailer, and now, he’s returned to that first persona once more. This man, without his daughter, has nothing left to lose. He knew he was about to be found out. The issue is that he doesn’t care at all, has gone past the point of it in the way humans experiencing tragedies sometimes do. A parent without a child: there isn’t even a name for it.

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