Page 77 of Just Another Missing Person

“No.” He looked out of the window for a while after she said that.

Eventually, he turned to her, and said: “So now—how do we sort it?”

“I have no idea. What about—you know... do you feel you have to tell somebody?”

“I can keep your secrets, Julia. But now—we find out what happened to Sadie.”

And so, today, Julia is ostensibly tying up loose ends on the Olivia case, actually working on Sadie with Jonathan’s assistance—he’s in Scotland for his wedding anniversary, but working from there—and actually, actually, having a thirty-second nap at her desk. The world takes on that strange quality as she drifts, her body jolting as though falling, her thoughts crossing over into dreams, not knowing what’s real. The heat of the room, the smell of stale coffee, the light from her lamp.... just one minute more, two minutes, five.

She begins to dream of Price, and everything she’s asked of him. She in his flat, then he in her house; the images pass by, unexplained. And that’s when he turns to her, his silhouette moving in some darkness she can’t make out, and says it: “Another missing woman, blond, goes by Marilyn.”

She opens her eyes. Marilyn.

She’d been distracted by how the timings didn’t marry up with Marilyn being Olivia. Then distracted by her return. Then couldn’t trace Marilyn, anyway.

But what if Marilyn is Sadie?

Her chin sticks to her forearm as she lifts her head, checks the time: five past nine at night. She must’ve been out for over half an hour.

Marilyn. What if Sadie was involved with a gang, then left it? What would happen to a woman who made that choice?

She shakes her head, trying to break the sleep inertia. She’s been all over the place. Distracted by blackmailers, by findingher assailant, by covering her tracks. Sidetracked, too, by being duped into looking for the wrong woman.

She leaves the office, accepting she will finish nothing useful tonight, not while sleeping at her desk, anyway. She texts Art spontaneously, not thinking, just acting.Coming home :)she sends. A nod to everything, she hopes: her workaholism, perhaps selfishness, expecting him to run a home without her. He replies immediately, sends her a single kiss, and Julia presses her phone to her chest, breathing deeply for a second, then uses her pay-as-you-go phone to call Price.

His phone rings and rings out. Outside, it’s twilight, still and quiet. She walks quickly, past the shut-up shops, past the alley, thinking of the night that started it all.

Price doesn’t pick up. He will be working. Doing whatever he does. Supplying drugs, dealing drugs, buying drugs, Julia doesn’t know for sure, only that it goes way beyond informing.

She tries him again as her car looms into view, but doesn’t risk a voicemail. The streets are black, slick with rain. The nighttime scene is an oil painting, the dim lights of the flats above the shops, the marina in the distance, but Julia can’t relax. She’s on the trail. Find Sadie’s body. Find out what Price meant. Find Sadie.

A bus-stop light is flickering, a strobe from Julia’s long-ago youth. She watches her feet move jerkily as the light illuminates and darkens each step as she walks, thinking. She tries Price again, the third time. Still nothing.

She leaves the high street behind her, heading toward her car. The remaining light slowly falls away, streetlamps becoming further and further apart, living rooms turning todarkness as people go to bed, and, just as Julia thinks about going to Price’s house, it happens.

A light step, maybe ten feet behind her. She doesn’t turn around. The sound is very distinctive to police. The noise of somebody trying to cover up the echo their steps create. Somehow, Julia can feel the intent, fired through the night air and right toward her.

They get closer. Julia casts a panicked glance around her, trying to think. She doesn’t feel as powerful as she does usually. It must be because of Lewis. The worst happened to Julia, that night in her car, and she can’t forget it.

There’s nowhere she could go. She gets her phone out. It lights up the night in a white haze, and the motion of doing so must force the person following her to act.

A hand around her wrist, as tight and as powerful as a handcuff. A voice in her ear. “You say nothing.”

Julia freezes, purely calm now, for the second time in as many weeks. She does as she’s told, but looks down at the hand: gloved.

“Stop looking for her,” the voice says. “And, when I release you, don’t look back.”

***

Julia is freed. The streets look the same. Bus stop still strobing. She doesn’t hear the man’s footsteps as he leaves. She lets out a breath, counts to twenty, and then turns around, but there’s nobody: it’s as if it didn’t happen.

The cold night air makes her feel feverish as she walks to her car on shaky legs. Not knowing what else to do, she gets in, seat freezing against her back, and thinks.

Who, what, why, her detective mind asks, and she rests her head against the steering wheel, not wanting to think, not wanting to have to keep pondering endlessly over these poor missing women, and the people who miss them, too.

Somebody knows she is looking for Sadie, and wants her to stop. Probably Sadie’s killer. That’s the why. But what about the who?

She lifts her head up, eyes stinging in the glare of an orange streetlamp, and tries to think. But how can she possibly know?

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