Page 71 of Just Another Missing Person

“His girlfriend. Went missing last year.”

“Not Olivia?”

“No, separate,” Julia says. “Kind of.” Price’s cheeks hollow as he drags on the cigarette. Julia leads him down the street. There’s a black spot for another two hundred feet. Two Tesco bags buffet by on the breeze.

“And another. Maybe. Called Prudence Jones.”

His cigarette smells sharp, ashy, somehow slightly tantalizing on a spring day. It takes Julia back to way back when. When smoking was cool, when work was simpler, when Art loved her unconditionally, and wanted only her. She thinks, too, of a time before Genevieve, when love was so simple. Parenthood is beautiful, but hard, too. It’s tough to exist in the world when there is someone going about their business who you would die for.

“Right—what you got on him?” He discards the cigarette, which bobs a few times on the pavement before it comes to a stop. He stamps and twists on the glowing end with the toe of his trainer, a seamless motion as they walk.

“Girlfriend disappeared last year. Suspicious circumstances—walking home. They were rowing a lot beforehand; her father thought he was coercive. He’s been found with a QR code transferring bitcoin relating to Prudence Jones—it hasn’t been downloaded, so far as I can see. It was not yet activated. So someone’s looked at it, but not taken the bitcoin. After her name it saidI have Prudence Jones for you.”

Price grasps it immediately. “You want me to trace it.”

“Yep.”

Price seems to consider this. “Give it to me. I’ll see what I can do.”

“But, Price,” Julia begins as she passes him the paper. He lights a second cigarette instead of taking it: a petty power play Julia can’t blame him for. She waits for him to take hisfirst drag, and then he reaches for the QR code. “If you cash in this bitcoin—”

“Get fucked, Julia, I’m in a bind but I’m not a fucking idiot,” he says, cigarette in his mouth, hands grasping the paper as he stares down at it.

“Fine.”

“Leave it with me,” he says. “A third favor. But who’s counting?”

Julia meets his eyes. A brutal but fair assessment of their damned relationship, ruined unilaterally by her.

Before he even finishes the sentence, he leaves Julia, puffing his cigarette on his way, leaving clouds of blue-gray smoke that billow behind him like memories.

***

Julia drives a loop, away from the Flamingo, back on to the high street, and goes into a pay-as-you-go stall in an indoor market. As she pretends to look at the handsets strung up on the wall, she tells herself she is good, she is good, she is good. She is doing this to find out what happened to Sadie.

She picks up a handset. Slim, blank, an old-style flip phone, burner SIM included, and pays cash, hoping she isn’t recognized. If anyone ever asks, sees the CCTV, whatever, she will say it was for Genevieve. Some end-of-term present; her phone broke. Something. She is already concocting her witness statement as she leaves, phone in a small white plastic bag she wasn’t charged ten pence for. As it swings down by her side, she wonders if Art bought one of these, in order to cheat on her. If he sent such beautiful text messages to his mistress, also.

“Have a nice day,” the owner of the shop says to her, just as she’s opening the phone and sending Price her number.She nods, glancing up just once. She quickly checks she doesn’t recognize and so has never arrested this man, as she almost always does when interacting with a stranger. When you work in the police, you are never not at work.

She leaves and looks at the less than salubrious surroundings. Two closed-off stalls—God knows what goes on in there—a shop selling knock-off designer T-shirts, a butcher’s. Julia unconsciously memorizes the faces she sees, names of shops, the way she always has, the way her job requires her to.

“And I’ll have a nice day, too,” the owner calls after her. Julia looks back at him. He only wanted her to be polite. Maybe he does just sell phones. Maybe not everything is a front for money laundering.

***

Julia is in Lewis and Yolanda’s living room. Two hours ago, she asked them to tell her everything they remember about the night Sadie disappeared.

She spent the morning in her office, SADIE written on the biggest piece of paper she could find. She locked the door, feigned admin, told only Jonathan what she was doing. She pulled out the old CCTV, the old evidence files, the old statements, and spread them around her in a semicircle. Jonathan joined her, solicitous on the floor next to her, and they began sifting. He didn’t mention their talk yesterday. Not yet.

She then came directly here, so nobody at the station would know what she was doing, and she’s so far taken nine pages of notes with Lewis and Yolanda, the old-fashioned way. Tactile, the paper creased, curling at the edges, indentations on the flipside from the scratch of her ballpoint pen. It could be twenty years ago, and Julia is happy.

Nevertheless, it’s odd to be back. Here, where she was a year ago, just as Genevieve’s life—and Julia’s—blew up. Just as Art spent a summer completely alone watchingLove Island, apart from her. At the end of August, on the very last day, he’d shouted at her, “I put a hammock up in the garden in May and you haven’t even noticed it.” He’d angrily torn his T-shirt off, and sure enough, he had a patchwork tan from the leaves above him as he lay in it. She couldn’t tell him what she had done: rescued their daughter, buried the evidence.

And now here she is. A whole year later. Everything still in chaos, including, now, her career, too.

Sadie had been in between jobs when she’d disappeared. Had temped with her father, was waiting for a new job—Olivia’s story was inspired by her. She had seen Andrew, a few hours before she disappeared, then went out to a speed networking event that she walked home from. She was seen on one CCTV camera, and had disappeared by the next. Her phone turned off immediately, which had originally pointed Julia to foul play. Andrew had been with his mother, then in a restaurant, then seen on a Ring doorbell.

The facts are as she remembered them, but it has still been useful to hear them again, to take notes, to look at the whites of Lewis’s and Yolanda’s eyes, and talk to them.

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