Page 72 of Just Another Missing Person

“Can you remember anything about these rows—between Sadie and Andrew?”

“He didn’t want her doing things—did he?” Lewis says. He’s cradling a cup of tea, hands either side of it, restraining it like it’s a wild animal, and looking at her. He’s never once leveled the threat that hangs in the air between them: that he knows she is corruptible. That he knows what she did; what she would do. And he might tell somebody if she can’t find out what happened to Sadie.

“I’d say that’s fair,” Yolanda says, perhaps with the distance a year brings, and Julia feels a wave of sympathy for her, stoic, must-be-bewildered Yolanda, whose daughter’s case is being reinvestigated for no reason that she knows of. She is not unlike Art, whose stoicism and resentment of her career bubbled over into infidelity. Julia wants to tell them to guard it, their marriage. Visit it often: protect it from harm.

“They had a big one, only a few days before, about her going out too much. He grabbed her wrist. That’s all I heard, like I said last year,” Lewis says, spreading his hands wide.

Julia nods. “Uh huh.”

“He didn’t like her to go to certain places, either. Bristol—didn’t like it. Maybe because men were looking at her.”

“Did he say that?” Yolanda says, her body language entirely an echo of last year: a woman tired of reining in her husband, a woman not entirely convinced they were on the right path. But neither Yolanda nor Lewis knows about Prudence. There isn’t a single missing woman on the PNC called Prudence Jones. Julia’s searched twice now, and asked Jonathan. It remains a mystery.

“Well, he implied it. But he definitely said she shouldn’t go into Bristol,” Lewis says. “It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he had somehow followed her that night, on the pretense of a lift home, and then...”

Yolanda gets up off the sofa and goes down into the kitchen. Julia doesn’t follow her; the bereaved need time and space to escape situations if they want to. It leaves Julia and Lewis alone. She straightens her reams of paper and looks at him. “Do you have any leads?” he says eagerly. “Where is Andrew?”

Julia winces, and wonders how to say that they’re looking for a perpetrator here—and a body. Nothing less than that, and nothing more, either.

“Not much yet,” she says, “but I’m on it. I am interested in Andrew.”

Lewis cocks his head. “Why?”

“All I have is what you have told me. But I have interviewed him now.”

“And?”

“He’s a closed-up clam,” she says.

“He knows something. He did it.”

Julia makes an equivocal face. “Maybe. Maybe not. But...” She hesitates. It might help. She’s already acting illegally, off the books: it might help.

“But what?”

“Do you have any idea”—she says, trying to think carefully before she vaults over yet another boundary that should be firm but isn’t—“why Matthew would have received bitcoin money which said on the narrative,I have Prudence Jones for you?”

Lewis blinks, and Julia only hopes this doesn’t reactivate him into doing something reckless—into doing somethingmorereckless. “Who?”

“A woman called Prudence Jones. A QR code transferring funds. The narrative saidI have Prudence Jones for you—that’s all. As far as we are aware—she is not dead.”

Lewis nods quickly. He sets his mug on the floor, then glances at the door his wife disappeared through. “Don’t we need to find Prudence, then?” he asks, then adds, more quietly: “Maybe it isn’t too late for her.”

***

Julia’s eyes feel gritty when she arrives back at the station, her legs as heavy as if somebody has their hands grippedtightly around her ankles. She is thinking that she can’t set Price looking for Sadie and not have anybody find out. Nor can she investigate Sadie’s disappearance alone, off the record, with no resources. She can’t keep avoiding Jonathan’s ultimatum. As though her thoughts have magicked him up, when she rounds the corner, he is sitting in her office. Waiting for her.

There is something about the inevitability of it all that makes her do it. That he is expecting an explanation from her. That she’s tired of working alone, never confiding in anybody, a lone wolf who allowed herself to be blackmailed because she had no other options.

“All right?” he says. He looks tired too, around the eyes, two- or three-day stubble on his jaw.

“Not really,” she says heavily.

His expression is open. Eyebrows raised, elbows on his knees, sitting in her chair, just waiting for her. Her longest-serving sergeant, her colleague, her friend, Jonathan in his black-framed glasses.

“I kind of got myself into a situation,” she says.

He nods quickly, like perhaps he already knows the full story. “It’s—” Julia continues, thinking he might well hand her over to the anti-corruption team, he might tell the CPS, he might never work with her again. But, somehow, she knows he won’t do these things. And, more importantly, she knows she can’t lie to him any longer. Julia, straight as an arrow, comes back to herself right there in her office with the most prized member of her team.

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