Wrong Place Wrong Time(102)

It’s grainy footage from up above, but it is in colour, and it is – to Julia, anyway – clearly Olivia. The same distinctively fair hair, a natural blonde, no roots. And the same coat from the photograph. Julia tries to forget Cal, for just a second, and be moved, the way she has always been, by the last-seen footage of a missing person. She pauses it, zooms in. Did she know, then? Did she want it to happen – to disappear? Or was she taken?

‘Agreed. That’s her,’ she says.

‘Right. Goes into the alley. Nine thirty last night. Here’s the weird bit.’ Jonathan presses play again. Olivia turns right off the high street, up to an alleyway. He leaves the tape running for five minutes, people coming and going, late-night shoppers, the dribs and drabs of commuters, a handful of evening drinkers. As he often does, he allows his evidence to speak for itself, the silence to breathe.

‘Okay?’ Julia says.

He opens Google Maps on his phone – he uses his personal phone, which Julia has always liked. ‘Here is that alley,’ he says. ‘Blindman’s Lane, it’s called.’

It’s off the High Street in Portishead. Jonathan places his phone down on the desk and angles Street View up to the alley. As she’s looking, a text from his wife comes up, a photograph icon and the message: bedtime, Julia presumes of their baby.

‘It’s blocked up,’ he says, flicking the photograph away. ‘Dead end.’

‘Dead end?’

‘She doesn’t come out. I have watched five hours of footage.’

‘Is it still blocked up? Is Google Maps up to date?’

‘Five uniformed officers have confirmed it. And I went myself – it’s only –’ he jerks his thumb – ‘down there.’

‘No ladder? No fire door? A shaft down to a basement?’ Julia says, zooming in on Google.

‘No, no, no,’ Jonathan says. He closes Google Maps and opens the text from his wife. It is indeed a photograph of her, and their baby, maybe four months now. Something soft and doughy exhales inside Julia, releases a puff of longing for those days, those distant-past days. Both the marriage and the babies. The babies consigned to teenagehood. And the marriage …

‘I need to look at this alleyway,’ she says to Jonathan. He gestures, as he often does – economically – to the door, like, be my guest.

It’s a quarter of a mile down the road to the alleyway. Julia’s passed it thousands of times, but of course has never looked at it properly until now. She walks there quickly, her mind fizzing the way it always does. ‘Never once does the inner monologue stop,’ Art, her husband – is he still, technically? – once said to her, a sentence that for some reason she has remembered for all of these years.

It’s freezing out, the air dry-ice cold, the streets quiet. Portishead’s nightlife hasn’t yet recovered from the pandemic, Julia thinks, or perhaps nobody’s has. The silent street ahead is frosted, the pavement tactile underfoot. She slows her steps. She has learnt, after this long in the job, to relax in these pockets of time. Nobody enjoys a two-minute walk to run an errand more than her.

As soon as she reaches the correct alleyway, it’s obvious: sealed off with police tape, two PCSOs manning it. Olivia’s house will be the same. Everything is a crime scene until it isn’t. Julia’s surprised they could get two: Portishead is small, underfunded, like everything, ill-equipped, each big case requiring a team cobbled together from Bristol, Avon and Somerset.

She stands and looks at the alleyway. The PCSOs acknowledge her with raised eyebrows, but nothing more. They will not be surprised by her sudden appearance here. None of the force would be.

It truly is blocked up. Completely and utterly. On the left an estate agents. Old stone, stained with years of water damage. On the right a pub, red brick, new-ish, but still probably forty years old.

It is a complete dead end. The back of the alleyway is bricked up. Julia walks a slow circle around until she understands. At the very end of the alleyway, a new build set of flats has been erected onto the back of both the estate agents and the pub.

Julia, back at the entrance, puts on protective clothing – some officers aren’t fastidious at this, but Julia is. By the book, by the book, by the book. It’s another of her mantras. Somebody guilty will never walk free because of an error on Julia’s part. And neither will somebody innocent be convicted, either.

She enters the alleyway, stooping under the police tape, and runs a gloved hand across the back wall. The seam where the buildings meet. It’s faultless. Not a single way out. No windows into here. The first window of the flats is at least twenty feet in the air. Julia looks around it, her mind spinning.

There’s nothing. No marks where a ladder would be. No manhole covers. No drains. Nothing. Olivia wasn’t carrying anything. No vehicle entered the alley.

The only items in the alley are two industrial blue bins. Julia remembers a case on the news, years ago, where the Scottish police didn’t check the bins, to catastrophic results. They contained an unconscious drunken lad, who was taken to a landfill. Discovered two days too late.

‘The bins been emptied?’ she calls to the PCSOs.

‘Nobody has been let in or out since we found the CCTV,’ one of them, Ed, replies. He’s young, barely twenty, is gym-obsessed, drinks tea with protein powder in it, which Julia finds incredibly endearing.