Simon stepped out of the pub with a sense of relief. Liz was getting a little too friendly the drunker she got. It made things awkward.

Sarah’s friend, maid-of-honour or whatever, was also odd. She was attractive, straight brown hair tied back off her face but with a fringe that framed and softened the look that was Japanese in style. And she was fit. There were toned muscles under her draped grey dress. But the way she looked at him was unsettling.

It felt like she was seeing too much, reminiscent of the police. That brought up all sorts of memories he tried to keep buried. Now he looked around. Time to go home, but which was the best route?

Walk across Tower Bridge and then to the Docklands Light Rail, he decided, after a moment’s reflection. The whole route was plastered with CCTV because up to the Docklands it was a prime area for socialising and tourists. If nothing else, the London Mayor was keen to keep tourists safe.

Simon had bought his flat with two criteria: proximity to public transport and crime levels. The online crime map was a really useful tool for working out the safest places to live.

His flat had a low crime rating thanks to two factors. One, the high numbers of CCTV cameras lining the surrounding roads. Two, the large police station three blocks away. Criminals avoided police stations. There were far too many officers frequenting the local shops, pubs and cafes or just roaming about.

It suited Simon, though, because he had to be careful about everything. About where he lived, about what he did and how he interacted with people. His history meant certain jobs were entirely out of the question, no teaching jobs, no customer facing jobs, no job where he might land up alone with one other person.

Fortunately, he was good at art, and a charity had got him access to a design course. So an open plan office job at a large advertising agency was a good fit. But even there he kept his distance, which extended to turning down an offer of promotion to manager.

He wasn’t good with people. That was one reason. He also struggled to read and managers had a lot more paperwork, although he probably could have found a workaround for that. The clincher was that managers had one-to-one meetings with their staff and he wasn’t willing to risk that.

Now, as Simon set off into the twilight, he took a deep breath of cool air. He enjoyed walking. Maybe because he’d been a prisoner in his own home until the age of fourteen. The walk across Tower Bridge, with the stiff wind blowing down the Thames, blew out all his stress.

It was always a superb view and out of habit, he stopped at the midpoint of the bridge and looked downriver. The Thames was a deep, rippling green with a pale blue line where it met the sky. Above that, the sky was tending towards inky with regular dabs of almost translucent fluffy clouds picked out in a burnt orange as the last rays of the sun hit them. It was too dark to take a photo, but he committed the range of colours to memory.

He liked the sky. It was big and wide and open and it brought peace with it. He never tired of looking up, and spent much of his free time painting the sky in all its wide variety.

He took a final deep, satisfied breath and carried on to catch his train. It was just a single line and ten stops before he got home. Then a walk along a well lit, heavily surveilled road to his flat.

He lived on the top floor, deliberately, because he got better views of the sky from up there. The building was old though and didn’t have a lift. When he was tired like today and drained from having to interact with people, the four stories seemed exhausting.

Once through his front door, his motion sensitive automatic recording system kicked in. He checked it to make sure nobody had come in while he was away. Nobody ever had, but it was best to be careful. Nobody, aside from him, had ever been in the flat. He’d even had it decorated before moving in so that he wouldn’t have to share the space with anybody else.

Simon made himself a cup of tea, adding in his usual two lumps of crystallised ginger and settled on his sofa with a sigh of relief. It was good to be home. He took a first tentative sip while he examined his latest, nearly complete, cloud painting on the easel across the room, mentally filling in what still had to be done: mostly highlights to the fluffy edges of the clouds.

His mind drifted on, thinking about the work gathering, and Liz, who’d been extra chatty. He quite liked her as a colleague. She had a clean, no nonsense drawing style that was well suited to advertising.

Then he considered that woman. It took him a moment to recall her name, but it finally came to him, Jaq. Maybe it was because it was a strange name for a woman that it had stuck.

The other option was that he was attracted to her. That made him nervous. But he was human, after all, and in his thirties, so it was normal to be attracted to a woman. He had to keep reminding himself of that.

Being fascinated by a woman wasn’t an unhealthy perversion. All the same, it was just as well he wouldn’t be seeing her again. It was best to steer clear of any temptation that left him in a turmoil of desire and equally powerful nauseous revulsion.

***

‘All right people,’ Detective Chief Inspector Morris shouted over the hubbub of the office. ‘We have a missing person.’

‘Oh great,’ Jaq said as she put down the bag that she’d been shoving her glasses and phone into before heading home. ‘It always happens at the end of the day on the weekend shift.’

‘This is Elizabeth Chadwick,’ DCI Morris said, swiping left on the smart board so that a large photo of a woman with a pierced nose appeared. ‘She has been missing for 38 hours. Uniforms haven’t been able to find her, so they’ve handed everything over to us. We’ve got some catching up to do. Divide into your usual three teams.’

The unit swung into well-oiled action as each team took over a particular section of the search.

‘Our usual, friends and known associates,’ Darren Jones, Jaq’s senior partner, said as the two of them opened the case file on their computers. ‘But let’s catch up on all the details first.’

‘Elizabeth Chadwick?’ Jaq examined the photograph and personal details of the missing woman again. ‘She looks familiar.’

‘Do you know her, Burnham?’ 

Darren was a damn good detective and might have been her ideal life partner from that point of view, though sadly, happily married. Besides, too old and not her physical type. Hating herself for it, Jaq couldn’t get past the extensive acne scaring, the wonky nose, and the almost translucent ginger hair that he kept to a short buzz cut.

Jaq scanned the missing person’s information again and spotted the place of work, London Marketing.

‘Of course!’ she said, snapping her fingers. ‘Liz.’

‘So you do know her.’

‘I met her on Thursday at a pub. She’s a colleague of Sarah’s.’

‘Ah. Not too close of a connection that you’d have to be off the case, but make sure to put it in the case notes.’

‘Shit,’ Jaq said and shook her head. ‘She seemed like a nice woman.’

‘Let’s hope we find her then.’ Darren swiped through the pages of information the uniformed police had already gathered. ‘It’s 38 hours since she disappeared. That’s not good. Her mother reported her missing. They live together and Liz went out on Saturday evening to see her boyfriend but didn’t turn up. Team one will be looking more thoroughly into him. Her mother only realised that she wasn’t home when she got up on this morning. Uniforms have already checked all the hospitals between the pub and home. CCTV, though, shows her coming this way.’

‘This way?’ Jaq scanned the document until she got to the same place as him. ‘Towards our station? Do you think she was being followed?’

‘It doesn’t look like it on the CCTV. But if she felt like she was being followed, then heading towards a police station is a good move. And we know some stalkers are really good at avoiding cameras.’

‘Yeah.’ 

Jaq worked her way through the rest of the information, friend and family contacts. This would involve more door-to-door questioning, although local constables had already started on that and handed over copies of their notes. After looking through those, Jaq consulted their lists of known local offenders and colleagues’ addresses. ‘Oh, look here,’ she said a couple of hours later, tapping an address on the screen. ‘That’s Jasmine Road too, really close to where Liz was last seen.’

‘And who is it?’

‘One of her colleagues. Simon White. I met him on Thursday too. He’s a bit odd.’

‘Odd how?’ Darren said, his fingers already tapping through his tablet, calling up the crime database for information on Simon White.

‘Nothing I could put my finger on exactly.’

‘A bit of a creep?’

‘More like… hyper vigilant, not willing to just let things drop. He was also sitting next to Liz on Thursday, although he left a couple of hours before the party ended.’

‘Worth a visit,’ Darren said, and slipped his tablet into his work bag. ‘Nothing comes up about him on an initial search, but it’s worth checking out for now.’

‘Yeah, let’s go. I’ll notify the team, who will be questioning the rest of the work colleagues, so we don’t duplicate. I’ll get Amber to dig deeper into this Simon White in the meantime.’