Page 75 of Just Another Missing Person

“Thanks,” I say, slightly breathlessly.

Number forty-one is on the ground floor. The corridors twist and turn, always at right angles, no daylight, just rows and rows and rows of the same thing, roller-shutter doors like small yellow garages as far as the eye can see: an industrial horizon.

I stand in the totally empty, silent corridor and think that it could be anywhere. It could be a basement. It could be in America. It could be on Mars. What are you storing here? Old possessions from your life as Andrew? If so, I don’t know about it. Like most omissions, it is a lie designed not to look like one. People only ever hide things intentionally, though they may say otherwise.

I take three long breaths in and out. Knowing that, really, this is the moment. The moment I find something. Something damning, something hopeful, some clarity. And, suddenly, I’m desperate for that. Whatever it is. Even if it’s bad. It’s better to know.

Now that I’ve had these thoughts, I feel ready: ready to spring it open, and to see what lies inside. Your locker is in front of me, the same as all the others, but containing Godknows what. 2740. The numbers ring out little beeps on the keypad.

And I’m in. The door is mechanized, rolling up like a grotesqueGeneration Gameprize, and I close my eyes and wonder what it is I’m hoping for. Old clothes. School books. Something anodyne. Or, even better: an explanation. Something to keep secret that isn’t a murder, that explains everything so easily. A confession in object form, though I can’t say what that would even be.

The storage box reveals its contents, and I blink as I look at them. Two passports. And a bundle of clothes. One by one, the hairs on the backs of my arms rise up. It isn’t the passports. It’s the clothes: they’re bloodstained.

And, as if I’m not even really here, not experiencing this, I find myself thinking how ingenious it is. A storage center that only you have access to. No worry about disposing of the evidence yourself. Keep it in your possession, but nowhere near you, so the police don’t find it on their searches. How very clever you are.

I reach toward them, knowing my life is changing. First passport: Gail Hannah. Second passport: Sadie Owen. The clothes: a white broderie anglaise top, a pair of jeans, a pink cardigan. All three have blood on, dashed here and there like careless paint flicks. Stab wounds—signs of a struggle—kidnap—murder—I can’t—I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.

As I pick through them, something falls away from them and onto the floor. I bend to pick it up and see it: it’s a lock of hair. My back and shoulders begin to shiver.

It’s undoubtedly Sadie’s, that fine, almost white-blond. It’s dry against my fingertips, cold, eerie somehow, like a very still animal.

I take the passports and the clothes and the lock of hair, my life changed forever. My body is moving, somehow, my lungs breathing, my limbs working, all the while my heart is breaking. They belong to me now. I draw them to my chest and shut the locker.

The door closes with an echo that travels all the way down the empty corridor, and then back up, like the shout of somebody dying. Heard once, then echoed, even though by then it’s far too late.

34

Lewis

Your things were returned to us forever ago, and so it’s easy for me to look through them. I’m searching for anything to do with Prudence Jones. I comb through your emails. I ransack your hard drive. I leaf through the pages of the things left behind that never meant much to us—to-do lists, items you wanted to buy, jobs you were going to apply for. But there’s nothing. Prudence doesn’t even come up, only in obscure ways, like you having googledDear Prudence movie is it shit?a year ago (lol, as you would say).

I google, too, as I’m sure DCI Day has, to see if any women called Prudence Jones are missing, but there aren’t, nothing high profile anyway, the women Andrew specializes in: young, attractive, middle-class women walking home by themselves at night.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” Yolanda says, arms folded by the door to my study. “The police interviewing us again.”

“It’s what we wanted,” I say, but I avoid her gaze.

“It must be about the woman who was found—Olivia?” She gulps, now, and I can’t handle it. But isn’t it better not to tell her? I would only be easing my own conscience. Isn’t that what the guilty do? They confess, to get it off their shoulders, and put it on to someone else’s.

“I don’t think there’s some—serial kidnapper of women out there,” I lie, but of course it’s exactly what I think. Matthew could be trafficking women, could be hired to kill them.

“No. I like DCI Day, anyway,” Yolanda says. I wince, and spare Yolanda with a lie.

“Hopefully they will find something.”

“Hope so.”

She holds on to the door handle. In the time I’ve been in here, she’s changed into soft pyjamas, flanneling material, a dusty pink. She looks about twenty-five, diminutive, peaceful somehow. You look nothing alike, but you do, tonight, just now. Something around the eyes... more a facial expression than anything else.

“You look like her,” I say. “Standing there.”

I close the laptop and stop the Prudence Jones searches, leaving it to Julia. Yolanda smiles, says thank you and takes my hand as we head into the kitchen. It’s late, after nine, but she starts cooking. And, for the first time, I stay with her, sitting on the bar stool as she chops and fries.

Our neighbor’s children are in their garden, even though it’s past their bedtime. They have a slide and swing set that they’re scrambling over. Their parents are talking, not keeping an eye on them. I want to shout out to them: tragedy can strike at any time. It could be you.

Yolanda begins to make a marinade, satay maybe. I wouldn’t know: I’m a rubbish cook. But it’s a dark split-pea yellow. She whisks it with cream.

“I think all the time about whether she tried to call us,” she says. “You know? If she was taken... if she tried to make a call. And if it’d have been us.”

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