Extract: Just Another Missing Person by Gillian McAllister

OLIVIA:

22 years old. No history of running away.
Last seen on CCTV, entering a dead-end alley.
And never emerging.

JULIA:

Detective Chief Inspector Julia Day ought to be out hunting for Olivia. After all, missing person's cases are a race against the clock. Only this one is different.

Because someone just threatened Julia:
Find Olivia, and we'll take your daughter . . .

Read an exclusive extract of Just Another Missing Person by Gillian McAllister below!

Julia knew from the way Genevieve rushed towards her that something was wrong. She burst through the door of the multistorey car park, let it swing behind her, a hasty, chaotic slam that pounded the walls. Julia shouldn’t have let her go alone: that was her first thought. She had taken a work call, and Genevieve went to pay for their ticket by herself. And now . . .

‘Mum?’ Genevieve shouted, crossing quickly towards her. She looked haunted, white under the strip lights, eye- liner smudged. Eyes panicked, her gaze darting back over her shoulder. Dread began to churn in Julia’s stomach. She could feel her pulse everywhere: in her hands, her legs, her shoulders; her body’s siren call. Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong, thudded her heartbeat.

And then Genevieve indicated with a blood-stained hand behind her. ‘You need to come.’

Julia is trying to work out if the man at the table next but one is somebody she has arrested before. He’s ordering a caramel cheesecake, out with a wife and two children, and she’s pretty sure she once charged him with murder. The lighting is low; she just can’t tell.

She is trying not to let her husband and daughter know what she’s seen, eyes down on the menu.

‘Nando’s is cringe these days, isn’t it?’ Genevieve says. Julia smiles at her arch only child.

‘In what way?’ Art says, bristling. Art, after Art Garfunkel, her husband. An English teacher, a pedant, a ditherer, the last man still using semicolons in text messages. And, until recently, the love of Julia’s life.

The cheesecake arrives at the maybe-murderer’s table. Julia watches him as he looks up. He has two phones, both face down on the table in front of him. A dead giveaway of a criminal. She’s pretty sure it’s him. Something about the brow . . .

‘Oh, just – you know. Cheeky Nando’s and all that. Like, give it a rest,’ Genevieve says. She picks up a menu. She’s in a black halter-neck tucked into high-waisted jeans. Large gold hoop earrings. She looks amazing, but she wouldn’t care if she didn’t. That’s Genevieve all over: she does whatever the hell she likes. Sometimes, Julia is pleased to have raised a strong woman like this. Sometimes, less so.

It’s seven o’clock in the evening, and Julia can’t quite believe that she’s here. That nothing came up, that she made it.

‘They do nice chicken,’ Art says mildly, perhaps slightly wounded: it was his choice of restaurant.

The cheesecake is almost finished. John. Julia thinks he’s called John. She glances at him again and slips her phone out. ‘John murder Portishead,’ she types into Google. She’s sure he shouldn’t be out yet. It was a stabbing in the town centre, brutal. He got life, and not that long ago.

The Google search is too wide; too much comes up. Just as she’s considering typing something else, the phone trills: it’s the station.

‘DCI Day,’ the force incident manager says into Julia’s per- sonal mobile – the one she always uses – and that’s when Julia’s heart begins its predictable descent down her chest. ‘High-risk missing person just in,’ he says, and it lands fully at her feet.

Julia sighs. No peri-peri chicken, no more banter with Genevieve. Just work. This is the job. This is the job, she repeats to herself. That has become her mantra after twenty years in the police.

After she’s taken the details, she stares at the table. A twenty-two-year-old missing woman. No mental health his- tory. Last seen on CCTV yesterday. Housemates phoned it in when she didn’t come home. Those are the facts.

But sitting behind the facts is something else, she’s sure of it. Something else. Something she can’t yet name. A deep detective instinct tells her so. She shivers there in the dim restaurant.

‘I’ve got to go in,’ she says, just as her food arrives. Steaming corn on the cob, mashed potato, chicken . . . she looks at it longingly.

As she stands, she glances at the maybe-murderer to their left. ‘If you happen to see him leave,’ she says in a low voice to Art and Genevieve, ‘can you get his reg?’

* * *

Julia has always been too soft to be a police officer. She is thinking this as she hurries into the station, ready to brief the team, but stopping to stare at an old informant of hers, Price, who Julia has always been too fond of. He is sitting on one of the benches, his features arranged in a surprised expression, paused as if someone’s stopped the universe for just a second.

She is about to ask him what he’s doing here. She can’t help it; it’s shot through her, no matter how many other tasks she has on. Cut Julia, and she bleeds curiosity for those she cares about, which is everyone.

Price has his legs crossed at the ankles, an arm slung across the backs of the metal chairs, ostensibly at home here, but Julia knows he will be afraid. Of course he is: he trades on information – the most dangerous of commodities.

He has auburn hair that he gels so thickly it darkens the red to inconspicuous brown. Freckles. Skin that burns and blushes easily. He’s Scottish, originally from Glasgow, never lost the accent, despite moving down here twenty years ago, when he was seventeen.

‘What’re you in for?’ she asks him, standing opposite him in the empty foyer. It smells of industrial cleaning wax and the stale dinners they serve the accused; many contain meat that somehow doesn’t need to be refrigerated and has a use- by date of several years’ time.

Most of the lights have popped off. Julia finds the station during these down times impossibly romantic, like it’s an out-of-hours museum only she has access to, a still from a movie that she may wander around, just her.

‘This and that,’ he says. He’s smart, Price, strategic; he won’t be telling her for a reason.

‘Meaning?’ she asks. Price is hardly ever interviewed: he informs only to her. Quick, slippery, and funny, too, but never under arrest. Almost all of Julia’s dealings with him have been in the outside world.

The custody sergeant arrives with a single cup of station coffee. Julia flicks her gaze to it. ‘Just made one for you, then?’ she says. The sergeant ignores her.

She looks back at Price, then sighs again as she walks towards the back office, stopping at the kitchen. She makes a tea, three sugars, loads of milk, partially to cool it down to make it less of a risk – steaming-hot tea is not allowed in custody, because it is a weapon. The cup warms her fin- gers. She’s tempted to down it, has had one drink all day, in Nando’s, but she doesn’t. She has too much to do. She has to find out what’s going on with Price. She wants to follow up on the murderer in the restaurant. And then, the main thing: it looks like she has to find a missing woman.

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 nothing?’ He barks a laugh out. He’s acerbic, but one thing is for sure: if their roles were reversed, he, too, would get her tea.

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’s had a hot drink yet that day, that week. 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.

As she gets back to her office, before briefing the team, she checks on the murderer’s file. It was John, John Gibbons. She gets a security guard to verify that he’s still inside, HMP Bristol. It must have been somebody else. Julia cups her face in her hands, two jobs down, one to go, at pushing eight o’clock at night, and thinks about working in a supermarket. But, the thing is, she wouldn’t love anything else. Not like she loves this. And nobody can have a balanced relationship with something they love.

* * *

Julia sticks the Polaroid photograph of Olivia on to the whiteboard in the briefing room. It’s a tired, old room: suspended ceilings, awful carpets. For some reason, their cleaners don’t tidy 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 1970s vertical blinds have shut out the night sky and, as Julia looks at them, she wonders if she has seen more evenings here than anywhere else. It isn’t a warm Nando’s with her kid, but, funnily enough, it is something almost more potent: to Julia, it is home. She removes her shoes as if acknowledging this, and leans into the investigation, into who she has to become, at least for a while. A detective for whom everything else comes second.

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 Incident Team in Portishead. It was hastily assembled once the case was deemed high risk, detectives and analysts from other teams called in, and Julia hopes it contains some good people. She likes who she likes. She can’t help it.

She stares up at Olivia’s photograph. She is willowy and blonde, but with a strength around the nose that elevates her to striking. Julia reaches out to straighten the Polaroid. The Blu Tack it’s been stuck up with is useless, old and dry; that’s police budgets for you. It’s her passport photo: her Insta- gram was too arty, heart-shaped sunglasses and peeking out from behind ice creams. She has a huge smile, crooked teeth. Perfect imperfection, that luminous quality that the young have.

Julia looks into her eyes and thinks that nobody is truly missing, not to themselves. Only to those left behind.

She may not know what Olivia’s fate is, but she already knows her own: insomnia. Discussing the confidential details too much at home. Genevieve – already far too much like Julia – will start to fixate. Art will feel pushed out, though will never say so.