He has his legs crossed at the ankles, an arm slung across the backs of the chairs, ostensibly casual, but Julia knows he will be afraid. So afraid he trades on information – the most dangerous of commodities.
She raises her eyebrows at him. Just as he opens his mouth, the custody sergeant speaks. ‘DCI Day, urgent call for you,’ he says.
Julia looks at Price, thinks of a busy, warm restaurant and her amusing kids, then sighs. ‘I’ll take it out back,’ she says.
This is the job. This is the job. That has become her mantra, necessarily so after twenty years in the police, and all the collateral surrounding that. She shrugs her coat off and holds it over her arms. The custody sergeant puts it through, then stands and goes to the kitchenette. Julia glances at Price again, whose eyes self-consciously meet hers. ‘What’re you in for?’ she asks him, standing opposite him in the empty foyer.
‘This and that,’ he says. He smiles up at her, a bombastic, swaggering teenager’s smile.
‘Meaning?’ she asks. Price is hardly ever interviewed. Smart, slippery, and funny, too, but never under arrest. Almost all of Julia’s dealings with him have been out there, in the world.
‘Business.’ He meets her eyes, and the tension in his smile quivers his jaw, just once. Julia notices it immediately.
‘Who arrested you?’
‘Poole.’
‘What for?’
‘Jesus, am I in the interview suite now? Dealing,’ he says, but, on that final word, the tightness of his jaw becomes a wobble.
Julia swallows. That bottom lip. It’s exactly the same face her children have made at her hundreds of times over the years, and every single time floors her.
The custody sergeant arrives back with a cup of station coffee, just for himself. Julia flicks her gaze to it, then back at Price. She sighs again as she walks towards the back office but stops at the kitchen. She makes a tea, three sugars, loads of milk. The cup warms her fingers. She’s tempted to down it, hasn’t had a drink all day, but she doesn’t.
Price’s hand is already extended out to her as she arrives back with it. ‘Ohhh, miss,’ he says to her, delighted. He sips it. ‘The sugars as well. I owe you a tip. What’s ten per cent of free?’
She smiles and avoids the gaze of the custody sergeant. Better to be judged by a colleague for over familiarity than to lie awake tonight thinking about Price and whether he’d had a hot drink yet that day. There is nothing Julia does better than obsess in the middle of the night. And, in fact, in the middle of the day, too.
‘Good luck, okay?’ she says to him. He raises the cup to her in a silent toast.
She leaves him there, in reception, and takes the call in her office.
Afterwards, she stares around her, just for a couple of seconds as she processes it. She fires a text to the kids saying she will be late. They respond typically: Saskia issues a to-the-point ‘FFS.’ Cal quotes Saskia’s message and says: ‘We don’t need her to have our fun, young Sask.’
Julia tells them to be good. The call was a new case. A missing woman. No mental health history. Last seen on CCTV last night. Housemates have called her in missing. Those are the facts.
Julia sits still, the warm telephone receiver still in her hand, and thinks that, facts aside, she doesn’t have a good feeling about the missing woman, twenty-two. Something about it bothers her already, something that goes beyond the evidence. Some sinister fact, waiting in a dark shadow, hoping it isn’t uncovered.
Julia sticks the polaroid photograph of Olivia onto the whiteboard in the briefing room. It’s a tired, old room: suspended ceilings, awful carpets. For some reason, their cleaners don’t vacuum it as often as the rest of the offices, and it houses preserved, old coffee cups, the smell of Portishead’s ever-present damp, and the paperwork scraps of old investigations. The blinds have shut out the night sky and as Julia looks at them, she wonders if she has seen more evenings than mornings here, in the station. It isn’t a bright Nando’s with her kids, but, funnily enough, it is something almost more potent: to Julia, it is actually home.
Julia stares up at Olivia’s photograph and thinks that nobody is truly missing, not to themselves. Only to those left behind. She doesn’t know what Olivia’s fate is, but she already knows her own. Insomnia. Discussing the confidential details too much at home. Saskia – already far too much like Julia – will start to fixate. Art will get annoyed. A small smile plays on Julia’s features as she thinks about it. How inappropriate to say it, but the thrill of a new investigation – there really is nothing like it.
The rest of the team files in, looking tired. Some won’t have left yet. Some will have been recalled from dinners, date nights, parents’ evenings. There isn’t a designated Major Investigation Unit here. It’s been hastily assembled once the case was deemed high risk. Julia scans the mass of people, hoping it contains some of the best ones.
Two analysts are discussing a man who was arrested last night. ‘It was Buddhas,’ Jonathan is saying to the other, Brian.
‘Buddhas …’
‘He was putting them –’
‘Alright,’ Julia says, badly stifling a grin. She knows all about that arrest.
She turns back to the photograph. Olivia is tall and blonde, but with a strength around the nose that elevates her to striking. Julia reaches out to straighten the polaroid. A selfie on the estuary, a stone’s throw from Julia’s house. Vanilla ice cream shingle, the River Severn blue-grey. Olivia, off-centre. Huge smile, crooked teeth. Perfect imperfection, that luminous quality that the young have.
What troubles Julia the most is the text to the housemates. A single missive, one o’clock in the morning. Please come x. That text is a specifically female call to arms, sent with only one intention, Julia thinks: to be rescued. There are things you don’t just know because you’re police: you know them because you’re a woman.
It’s freezing in the briefing room. It’s late April, but still cold, as cold as January. Nathan Best, one of her favourite Detective Sergeants, catches her looking out. ‘Going to snow tomorrow,’ he says. ‘Fucking joke.’
‘Snow is a great preservative,’ Jonathan shoots at him.
‘Let’s not talk preservatives,’ Julia exclaims. ‘Let’s talk finding living people.’
‘Is this one similar to last year’s? I can’t do that again, honestly,’ Best says, gesturing with his tea so wildly he slops it on the carpet. The stain will never be cleaned, will probably be there forever.
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.