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.
‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘Nobody comes in or out.’
She tugs at one of the bins with a gloved hand. It moves easily. She opens both bins, then stares in. Nothing. One pristine, looks never used. It doesn’t smell of cleaning fluid. The other has a single can of Carling in it, but the stain that’s dribbled out of it is ancient, a dark brown fuzz.
She adds it to her mental list: fingertip searchers and forensics on the bins. This skill is now a living, breathing thing. The way tasks leap up the priority list. A mystical but methodical sort of sifting, the larger items naturally rising to the surface, the finer grains falling to the bottom. She gets it right most times. But not enough.
She casts a gaze across the ground. Old chewing gum. She’s looking for blood. A weapon. Signs of a struggle. But there’s nothing.
‘Right,’ she says, taking another look before she leaves. She’s freezing. There’s so much to do, and none of it here. She gets her phone out. ‘I need every single bit of CCTV on this alleyway,’ she says to Jonathan.
‘Mad, isn’t it?’
‘Completely and utterly,’ Julia says, looking at the walls, looking for tiny holes. Could somebody have used a ladder, then taken it off the wall …？ She scans again, but sees nothing but clear bricks, mortar, nothing.
‘Maybe it wasn’t her,’ Jonathan says.
‘If it wasn’t, whoever it was still went in and never left,’ Julia replies.
‘Yeah,’ he says slowly. ‘Yeah. I’ll send it. But I have watched it. I promise, she doesn’t come back out.’
It’s after midnight, and Julia leaves the station with gritty eyes that have watched four videos at a time on her monitor, followed by another four. She has covered every single camera, and every single minute. She has barely blinked.
It can’t be true, but it is: Olivia goes into the alleyway and doesn’t leave. Nobody else walks in there. The bins do not go in or out. At two o’clock in the morning, a fox enters then exits. And that’s it. No cars, no people. Nothing. She’s called both the estate agents and the pub, and both have confirmed the bins aren’t used. ‘Why are they there then?’ Julia asked, and neither could give a satisfactory answer. They’re on Julia’s list, somewhere in the middle, troubling her like a couple of nuisance summer flies. Think, she implores herself. Think outside of the box.
She is now walking to her car. She’s parked half a mile away, due to a lack of police parking spaces. The younger guys steal them, getting in earlier and earlier, and she lets them. She rubs at her forehead. This morning feels a hundred years ago. Another day that’s passed without her seeing her children. Perhaps Art was right.
Out of guilt, she checks Saskia’s last seen. Two minutes ago. ‘You up?’ she texts.
Saskia calls immediately, just as Julia wanted her to. ‘Always,’ she says. She has inherited Julia’s insomnia.
‘Same,’ Julia says with a smile. How amazing that Saskia, her posing toddler, once a fan of wearing sunglasses and a volatile expression, is now an adult she can call up for a late-night chat.
‘We made dinner, in the end,’ Saskia says. ‘We’ve saved Nando’s for tomorrow. How are the criminals?’
‘We have a missing person, actually, not much older than you.’
‘Ooh. Colour me intrigued. Cal is still up, too,’ Saskia says. ‘Want him on?’
‘Sure,’ Julia says, her voice high and light. Her two children’s voices chorus down the phone to her, and she closes her eyes. It’s okay. They’re okay. She’s okay.
‘Saskia is doing last-minute cramming,’ Cal says to her in his low, amused drawl. Julia’s children are as opposite as can be. Saskia may be sardonic, but she is also a conformist. Happy to work hard and get a good job, finds life easy. Cal is on the fringes, awkward, emotional, intense.
Julia’s breath makes cirrus clouds in the cold April air as she walks. She cuts through a park, the iron gate singing behind her, the sky dark blueberry beyond. There’s nobody around, except her; except them.
‘I’m just looking it over,’ Saskia says.
‘Where are you?’ Cal asks. Julia is glad he’s at home. Wholesome, fifteen, and with his older sibling. She closes her eyes. She doesn’t regret it.
‘Almost at the car, now,’ she says.
‘Is it juicy?’ Saskia asks. ‘The misper?’
‘Very.’
‘Oh – how so?’
‘Disappeared into an alleyway – only it’s blocked up. No escape. Riddle me that,’ Julia says.