Woman Last Seen(33)
“She’s no one. She’s nothing,” says Dad. He doesn’t look at me. He looks at the wall above my head.
“Nothing?” I repeat, unsure. Confused.
“There are women you marry and there are women you do that with.”
“Make sex, you mean?” I want him to know I am not a baby. I understand.
“Have sex with, yes,” he corrects and I’m embarrassed that I’ve shown I’m not really sure about any of this after all. “The women you marry are something. The others are nothing. Remember that. I don’t want a daughter of mine not understanding that.”
I squirm. I feel I’ve done something wrong, but I don’t know what. Surely he’s the one who has done the wrong thing. “Now wash your hands and come downstairs to set the table. And, darling, obviously as that woman was nothing, we don’t need to mention this to Ellie. It’s between us.”
He doesn’t often call me “darling” and I can’t help but be happy about it.
14
DC Clements
Thursday 19th March
Back at the station, Tanner returns to his desk, as another senior officer hands him a pile of traffic offenses to process. Clements hardly sees her environment anymore; it is familiar to the point of being void. Curling posters on the wall, detailing policies and advertising helplines, no longer catch her attention. She doesn’t know if the walls are beige or gray. She still notices smells, though—today the station smells of wet clothes and mud; there have been two sudden downpours this morning. Sometimes there is an energy to the place that overrides what she can see, hear and smell; sometimes she can just feel. Feel danger or excitement. Challenge. Lots of her colleagues have their eyes pinned to their phones or screens absorbing the news from European cities in lockdown. Normal citizens being told to stay indoors, doing so. Locked up, not like criminals exactly, but... Clements can’t process it. It’s too wild. A sense of urgency ripples through her body. She needs to find Leigh Fletcher.
Clements walks swiftly to her desk and starts to fill in the paperwork. There is a myth that the police regard any missing persons case which is not that of a child, or where a crime is not obviously suspected, as beyond their remit. It is not true. Clements wants to find this woman, bring her home—if that is what Leigh wants. Clements uploads the personal details they collated: name, age, marital status, last sighting, physical description. She attaches the photo, noting that Leigh Fletcher is pretty. It shouldn’t matter—it doesn’t really—unless the case becomes something bigger than a missing person and ends up in the papers. Then it will have a bearing. The public are always more sympathetic toward a pretty woman than a plain one, although this one is a bit old to fully catch the nation’s attention. Women over twenty-seven have to work so much harder to exist, even being murdered isn’t enough to incite sympathy, unless you are cute. Clements sighs, frustrated at the world. Frustration is not a bad reaction; it means there is some fight in her, still. Sometimes Clements is furious and wants to kick and punch at the invisible, insidious walls that limit, cage, corrupt. Other days she’s just out-and-out depressed. Those are the worst days.
Leigh Fletcher has long dark hair. In the pic the glossy hair has clearly just benefitted from a fresh blow-dry. She’s wearing lipstick, a pale pink shade, but not much else in the way of makeup. She doesn’t need it. Her lashes are thick and fabulous, her skin clear, and the only wrinkles on her face are around her eyes. Clements imagines the missing woman identifying them as laughter lines, shunning the miserable description of crow’s feet. She’s smiling in the photo, a huge beam. But there’s something about her big brown soulful eyes that makes Clements wonder. She looks weary. Most working mums are tired—that’s a given—but this is deeper. She’s drained. Done for.
Clements shakes her head. Sometimes she wonders whether she has too much imagination for a cop. She has to keep that in check. It’s perfectly possible that she’s reading too much into the snap.
Suddenly, Clements feels the weight of a hand on the back of her chair, someone leaning in far too close—ostensibly to look at what she is typing—in fact, simply invading her body space because he can. She recognizes DC Morgan’s bulk and body odour instantly. Without looking at him, she knows he’ll have food between his teeth or caught in his beard. His shirt will be gaping, the buttons straining to stretch the material across his pale podgy belly that is coated in dark hair. Morgan is not an attractive man anymore, but Clements admits he might have had a charm once. Before his confidence loosened into boorishness, when his mass was the result of muscle not fat. Invasion of body space—and probably much more—is the sort of stunt he has been pulling for twenty-plus years, and no amount of training courses on appropriate workplace behavior are likely to change him now. In fact, Clements has been on the courses with him and heard him dismiss them as “political correctness gone mad. Nothing more than the spawn of limp-wristed liberals.” He is a treat. She would probably hate him if he wasn’t such a good copper.
“All right, Morgan?” Clements says in greeting. She rolls her chair away from him, narrowly avoiding running over his foot but forcing him to jump back from her.
He straightens up, arches his back. “Must be the day for it.” He likes starting conversations in an obtuse way, forcing others to ask questions, somehow making him seem more interesting and engaging than he truly is.