‘Wow,’ Saskia says. ‘That’s so weird. You need the TikTok detectives on the case.’
Julia has to laugh. ‘Maybe I actually do.’
‘What’s that saying? You can’t hide one body, but you can hide a body in a hundred pieces?’
‘Jesus, Saskia,’ Cal says.
‘I know,’ Julia says. ‘Right – home in ten. Love to you both.’ She hangs up. It isn’t even a ten-minute drive to home, new home, anyway. After everything with Art, they moved, even though it felt like the wrong thing to do, to move house together, still as a family, while she and Art sleep in separate bedrooms and ruminate （Julia can only speak for herself here）。
But now they have a new semi-detached house for which they paid a huge premium: it’s overlooking the beach at Portishead. During winter storms, the sand glasses the windows and blows in the cracks. Julia finds it everywhere. It is unimaginably romantic.
She emerges from the park. It’s surrounded by black iron railings that blend into the dark air.
Footsteps.
Julia doesn’t react, has trained herself not to. She isn’t worried. She always feels somehow armed, even though she isn’t. The power the police hold. To arrest, to flash a badge. Julia feels untouchable, even in a deserted city park at dusk.
She keeps her pace measured. Lets her phone glow bright. If they want to mug her, let them, make the target bright and obvious. She looks casually over her shoulder. A man in a hoody. A kid, really, maybe sixteen, seventeen. Has a mother, somewhere. She looks closely. She doesn’t know him. Has never arrested him, and so she immediately relaxes.
Everything about his body language says that he has a problem with the world. Arms criss-crossing in front of and behind his body as he walks. Hood pulled down, obscuring his face completely. Pace slow, like he has all the time in the world. Julia has met many men like him. Has arrested them, pressed them for information. Has taken victim impact statements from them, too. Has met their parents, has met their sons.
She takes a quick left, just to see what he does. He smiles a half smile, then walks on past her. Julia watches him go. Hoping he has a home to go to with somebody who cares enough about that walk, and what it might mean.
Julia reaches for her car keys, and only unlocks the door when she’s as close to it as can be. She lets a sigh out as she gets in. It smells of her children’s McDonald’s. Saskia steers with her knees while eating Big Macs, much to Julia’s shame. She once said, ‘Oh sure, so you’re going to arrest me for it, then, are you?’ while Julia gaped, thinking, well, maybe?
The fabric of the seat is cold against Julia’s skin. She allows her heartbeat to slow, thinking of Olivia and where she could be. That distinctively female fear she must’ve felt, that text to her housemates. Is that what Julia would send, if she were in real trouble?
She starts the engine, turns her lights on, then turns the heat up. Her phone vibrates in the cup holder, but she ignores it. She knows it will be Saskia, having thought of another question and fired it off in that way that she does.
As soon as her phone stops, she feels it. A presence. Or, rather, a lack of absence.
She tells herself she always gets like this when working on missing persons cases, that it is because a young, attractive woman has disappeared, that it’s because it’s late, unseasonably cold, it’s because Art both is and isn’t at home, waiting for her.
But then the back of her neck shivers with something more than just anxiety: instead, a deep, limbic part of her brain fires up a warning flare into the night. She isn’t alone. She counts to three, then raises her eyes to the rearview mirror.
In the back is a man wearing a balaclava. He says only one word: ‘Drive.’