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.’
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.