Just Another Missing Person by Gillian McAllister

Author:Gillian McAllister
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

20

Lewis

I have my head under the spare bed, in search of an identity. Do you remember? The summer you worked with me, we messed up that run of blank passports, shipped to the office from Holland ready for us to stamp, personalize, hologram. The passport office is, quite understandably, fastidious about disposing of bad runs, but we had ruined so many. We sneaked them out, put them under the spare bed, laughed about it every now and again, worried about it even more so. Passport after passport sits in there, printed skewed to the side, printed too lightly.

They’re here somewhere, I think, rifling past drifts of dust and shoeboxes and lever-arch files until I find them: in the pink folder, exactly as I remember. I open it on my lap, sitting on the woven carpet that you chose with Yolanda. There are five copies of the same passport, a woman. Tens of other, different ones. I select one, open Facebook and finish setting up my new account, ticking hobbies, interests, bands my new persona likes. After that, I sit back, and look around me.

You were the last person to sleep in here but, already, it has that chilled, dusty feeling empty rooms have. I try not to read into it. Try to stop being superstitious. A room’s smell doesn’t mean you’re gone. It doesn’t.

I return to Facebook, and find Andrew, under my new, female name.

Hi, couldn’t resist messaging, I write. Love your profile xx. I then press Add friend.

Let’s wait and see.

Yolanda walks into the guest room, hands on her hips. Wearing a strange outfit—sweatpants and an old winter jumper. Bare toes in the deep carpet.

“What are you doing?” she says plainly to me, but indulgently so.

“Nothing,” I say petulantly, like a teenager.

Yolanda isn’t a suspicious person. For somebody who knows me so well, she sometimes seems to have no idea that I am almost always doing something semi-dysfunctional. Usually of the benign variety—ordering megapacks of sweets, et cetera. Perhaps she just knows this and ignores it. “DCI Day called,” she says.

My heart immediately seems to expand widthways in my chest. “And?” I say urgently.

“They’re looking again at the place she disappeared,” she says. “That’s all. Well—almost. Did you know DCI Day didn’t interview Andrew? She wasn’t in that day—something to do with her daughter.”

“What?” I say, my world rocked. “So—she just didn’t . . . didn’t bother to look at the whites of his eyes herself? How can they test his amazing alibi?”

“I know,” Yolanda says thoughtfully, her gaze on me.

“Why didn’t she get him back in, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“I . . .” I say, looking at her bare toes and thinking how like yours they are: long and elegant.

But, just as I’m about to reply to her, engage with her, apologize, Andrew sends me a message back.

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