Wrong Place Wrong Time(101)

Poole enters the room. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Just let a dealer go for this, so it had better be good.’

Julia smiles inwardly as she thinks of Price, going on his way, free tea and call.

‘Similar-ish to last year’s,’ Julia says. ‘It is a young woman.’ Julia still thinks of it often, the missing girl, aged nineteen. She was never found, despite Julia’s very best efforts, which resulted not only in the missing woman’s father accusing the police of laziness but Julia’s husband accusing her of marital neglect.

She grabs a red marker pen and draws an arrow across the whiteboard. It squeaks as she does so, and the room falls as quiet as if she has clinked a glass.

She begins to speak. ‘Here’s what we know. Olivia is twenty-two. She works in marketing. April twenty-ninth, she signs the lease for a house share. April thirtieth, yesterday, she moves into the house in Portishead. A firm of movers called Johnson’s moved her things.’ She glances at her favourite analyst, Jonathan. As dogged as Julia herself, he seems able to magic up information in seconds. He asks and asks: phone companies, airlines, anyone. He simply repeats his request, then calls up again and again. His catchphrase is, ‘I don’t mind holding.’

‘She spends that night in her room, unpacks a bit, then leaves the next morning for a job interview in Bristol City Centre at a marketing firm called Reflections. She sends a text to her housemates, late, one o’clock in the morning, saying, please come. Kiss. This morning, the housemates reported her missing. It’s taken awhile to work its way to us, and meantime the father’s been interviewed on the phone, who was helpful.’

She begins handing out tasks. Poole interrupts her before she can really start. ‘Why is she high risk?’ he says. He’s a contrary type, the sort of person who would argue against his own existence in the right circumstances.

‘No past mental health problems that we know of, attractive woman walking alone late at night, text sent to housemates asking them to come to her. Probably worth looking into, isn’t it?’ Julia says, her tone sharp.

‘Alright,’ he says, holding his hands up. ‘No need to go loopy on me.’

Julia talks over him, directing CCTV collection, phone records, interviewing the father formally, questioning the housemates, fingertip searches. Julia’s strategy is to throw as much time – and budget – at a missing person’s case as she can early on. She doesn’t understand why anyone would work differently. Information, to Julia, is king, and they need it in abundance; she will feast on it. It will tell them if Olivia is hiding or dead: there is no other outcome.

Julia walks back to her office to begin her own set of tasks, thinking guiltily of her children at home, eating take-out Nando’s. They’re both teenagers. Only a few years younger than Olivia.

Julia likes her team to report to her one-on-one, and she likes to look at the things they show her, too. You can’t get a feel from an email and, anyway, you can tell a lot about a piece of information by the way it is relayed. Both by analysts and her own teenagers, as it goes.

She concentrates on Jonathan, sitting in her office. It’s just after ten at night. He’s taken his large, black-framed glasses off and is rubbing at his eyes. His wedding ring hits the desk as he reaches to put them back on.

His wife had a baby only a few months ago. Julia had to force him to take leave. He’d returned to work days early, his eyes bright, alive with the joys of his life having changed in an instant. He loves the baby, but he loves the job more. Julia remembers it so well, the faux-rueful glances exchanged with her husband, cradling a warm sugarloaf of a baby. She got a nanny and returned here, to this very station, so fast and, looking back, sometimes wishes she hadn’t.

‘Alrighty, Instagram,’ Jonathan says. He’s sitting on Julia’s spare chair, which is designated for exactly this, nicknamed The Interrogation Chair by – well, everyone.

‘Twenty-four hours missing now,’ Jonathan says in a low voice.

‘I know.’

Julia looks at the coloured, filtered boxes that comprise Olivia’s Instagram grid. Selfies, flowers, stacks of books. Witty captions. ‘Can you print them all for me?’ she asks. ‘Go through them anyway, but can I have them? And anything else: her emails, Tweets, whatever.’

‘Already done it,’ he says, lifting the file up to show a duplicate. ‘In anticipation of you saying just that.’

Julia smiles a half-smile. ‘Thanks.’

‘Sure. So. Right. This last photo, on her grid – clearly taken in the Portishead Starbucks, yesterday, yeah? Same window. She used a VCSO filter and an iPhone to upload.’ Jonathan is a middle-aged analyst who is now an expert, thanks to his job, in the detailed machinations of the way Gen Z-ers live their lives online.

‘Right.’

He zooms in on it. The photograph is of a distinctive lemon-yellow coat folded onto a stool, a laptop open in the window, and a coffee. Caption: Pretending it’s summer.

‘We have CCTV of a woman in a coat like this,’ he says.

CCTV. Julia blinks. Since last summer, CCTV will forever remind her of Cal. More specifically, of what Cal did.

‘The uniformed officers have watched all the CCTV from Starbucks yesterday. They’ve got this, from outside the estate agents. Yellow coat, right? Walks up the alleyway.’