Page 66 of Just Another Missing Person

Jonathan puts his coffee down on Julia’s desk and takes hiscoat off, folding it over his arms, then looks at her. “Jesus—all I did was dispense milk last night. You solved a case.”

Julia pats The Interrogation Chair, and she fills him in, the way she often has, the sun rising beyond her slatted blinds. The way they have sat for years, picking things apart, solving them, turning them over between each other.

She tells him. She trusts him enough to tell him about the duplicate Olivia having been invented and who by, who Matthew really is, and about Sadie. She leaves out the blackmail, though she knows that soon Jonathan will begin to ask questions.

Jonathan puffs his cheeks out. “Right.” He’s staring down at his phone, but the screen is black. Inside, his brain will be technicolor, Julia is sure of it. He taps a finger on the desk. “Photoshopped in,” he says. “Into the alleyway. He some expert? It was seamless.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t spot it. Sadie’s father got—he got someone to do it,” Julia says, hoping his forensic mind doesn’t home in too quickly on it: on the only piece of the jigsaw that she hasn’t told him. The why.

“Who?”

“Some known criminal or other.”

“What? Why? How did he know them? Isn’t he just a dad?” Jonathan says, Julia thinks disparagingly: somebody right in the trenches of new parenthood, who can’t think of anything more mundane. In five years, he will realize that time was beautiful.

“I don’t know,” Julia lies.

“What’re you going to do—charge him?”

“I really don’t know.”

“You know, I meant to ask you something about this case—not that it matters now,” Jonathan says.

“Go on?”

“I watched the bodycam footage of the PCSOs the other day,” he says. “I thought there was something odd about it, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Then last night, up feeding late, I realized what that thing was.”

“Right?” Julia says, trying not to sound rattled. Trying, in fact, to sound impressed, the way she would usually be at this fantastic detective display: a clue, ruminated on, the significance of which became clear in the night. That’s almost—laughably—how it should be.

But now, for the first time in their long careers, Julia is annoyed by Jonathan’s scientific nature, his memory, his logic.Fuck, fuck, fuck.

“There was no glass on the footage. And when I went to check more recently, that footage had gone, which is doubly suspicious. I’ve been weighing up what to do. What to say...”

Jonathan folds his arms and tilts his head to one side, evidently trying to weigh it up. You can never take back an accusation, and he’s never once made one against her. For fifteen years, they have been firm allies. From those first shared sandwiches on the brick wall all the way to now. “You went to the crime scene, right? Her bedroom?” he says.

“Yes, I did, that night,” she says. She meets his eyes as they sit there side by side, and is glad he’s not a mind reader, on top of everything else, too, as she tries to work it through. He can’t know. Nothing links her to that camera. Nothing. She attends almost every scene. Always has.

As they’re staring at each other, two minds working in overdrive, Julia’s phone beeps. She sees it’s Genevieve, but ignores it. God, the plates she’s spinning. One is sure to drop, soon, and shatter; she only hopes it isn’t the one that’s made of glass.

“Did you not wear a bodycam?” Jonathan asks.

“No, I went kind of off the hoof,” she says. “Just wanted to get a feel for it. You know how it is. Like we did with the alley.”

“Was it there when you went? The glass?”

“I don’t know. Didn’t Erin find it under the bed?”

“The thing is, though... according to the server, you accessed that bodycam footage twice, two days ago, once late at night. And now it’s disappeared.”

Julia freezes. So he can connect her to that cam. She didn’t know, hasn’t worked at the real coalface since bodycams were introduced. Things are done for DCIs; you lose touch. Besides, she has never needed to understand the tech to cover her tracks: she’s never needed to do anything underhand enough to warrant that.

She breaks eye contact. It’s all over. It must be.

“I’m not wrong, am I?” he asks, eyes gentle, hands steepled together. Julia feels suddenly sorry for him, her strait-laced colleague who she has roped into this mess. Who now has a moral dilemma, as well as her.

“I can’t remember,” she says lightly. “I access all sorts.”

Jonathan throws her a silent but astonished look that somehow—he is so good at expressions—contains a high amount of scorn, too.

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