Page 8 of Just Another Missing Person

I check the clock that hangs—nonsensically—above the fridge, though I know exactly what time it is here, always, to the minute. “Did you text her?” I bark it, defensive. You being missing is a problem to be riddled out, to be quickly fixed. A mistake.

“Nothing’s delivering,” Molly says.

An image of you springs to mind. A selfie you sent me once, wearing one of those bloody awful sheet masks you love so much. A peace sign made with your fingers, your face covered in moist cloth like Hannibal Lecter. That’s what I said back to you, and you sent a photo with your teeth bared.

“So she’s out, phone dead,” I say now to Molly. A twenty-year-old woman I have actually not yet met, talking to me—I catch myself reflected in the microwave—forty-two, rail thin, and now about as panicked as I’ve ever been.

“We don’t know whether to—whether to call the police?”

“Do. I will, too,” I say.

I turn to the window that looks out on to a tired square. Tatty, mossy pavements, dying plants even though it’s springtime, pale skies. As I look up at the world with a white blind drawn across it, I think of him, your boyfriend Andrew, and ask your housemate if they’ve heard from him.

“No... I’ll try and call him.”

“Okay.”

“I rang her mum first, but got her voice mail. Didn’t leave a message.”

“All right. I’ll call—I’ll call the... I’ll call,” I say.

“Okay,” Molly echoes, her voice small.

I ring off, adrenaline flooding my system. Already, my mind is suggesting solutions, and aren’t there plenty? You stayed out, met a nice new boy maybe. Lost your phone. Appendicitis. Car crash. Amnesia. But all of them involve a call from somebody. And you are the most communicative person I know. You’d ring, you’d arrange for someone else to ring, or someone would look in your phone and know to dial me.

I pick up my coat and walk in a stupid, useless circle around the kitchen.

I press the numbers like I’m in a film.

“999, which emergency service, please?”

“Police,” I say to the operator, leaving the kitchen, then leaving the office.

“What’s your emergency?” she asks, and all I can think is how long it took to conceive you—nineteen months. The day Yolanda got her eighteenth period—and I’m sorry if this is too much information—I locked myself in the bathroom and cried, not knowing that, four weeks later, there’d be other bathroom tears. Two pink lines, happy tears, two souls, freed. That struggle—it never really left us. We weren’t able to have another child, and we treated you like a glass bauble.

“What’s your emergency?” the operator says again. But I’m not answering because I’m thinking that, really, for the whole pregnancy, I didn’t believe there was a baby in there. Strange, but true. It felt so abstract to me. Right until you were born, placed on to Yolanda’s chest, and reaching out a little starfish hand to grip my finger, holding on for life.

“My daughter is missing,” I say eventually. “She—her housemates say she never came home. I need to speak to somebody. Please—she’s—this is out of character.”

“All right, okay, let me take some further details and then I will get a patrol dispatched to you to take an initial statement—what’s the address?” she says to me, I think kindly.

I’m outside. I don’t remember coming out. It’s fresh out, freezing. I’m breathing the same air as you—surely?—and it’s only as I think this that I notice I have the handle to the kitchen door still firmly enclosed in my palm. I grip it tight, holding on for life.

3

Julia

Julia knows from victims that the following is true: in real crises, a chamber opens somewhere deep in the brain, and you cope. You cope with things you never thought you could. Julia notices this in herself dispassionately, through a haze of what feels like an eerie calm.

She meets the man’s eyes again in the mirror, nods once and puts the car into first gear.

Right. It is her job to comply and, in the meantime, to glean as much information about him as possible so that, if she survives, she can phone this in, identify him and arrest him. All that without letting him know she’s doing it: in crimes like this, many perpetrators kill their victim if they feel they are too good a witness. Too much knowledge is a bad thing.

“Where?” she says to him, indicating right to pull away with a hand that she can see is shaking but doesn’t feel like it is.

His balaclava is close-cut, doesn’t give anything away. He has nondescript brown eyes, so probably brown hair.

She flicks her gaze back to the road, trying to look casual.Then back to him. The outline of thin shoulders in his black coat. He’s slim. His legs rise up off the back seats. So tall, too.

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