The Girls Beneath. Ross Armstrong

a car bomb, chief,’ said Bartu.

      It wasn’t, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a trap. All options are open.

      The chief is supposed to be in charge of this place but he seems to me to be a rather nervy and unimpressive man. He was more concerned about me on the whole. How I was ‘feeling’, if I was ‘safe’. We were told to be a lot more careful around cars in the future. We nodded like children, then the chief placed a reassuring hand on my shoulder, which was anything but. Then he went back to his paperwork before I knew that the conversation was over, like an errant stepfather doing just enough to make his lover’s kids feel like he actually cares.

      But that was it. No further reprimand. Workers in Argos break TVs when they come down the chute. Milkmen smash glass bottles. Cats piss on the carpet. PCSOs blow up cars filled with Catherine Wheels. It’s nothing to worry about. Consider our wrists gently slapped. Our one point of contention came when the chief sent us to file a report with the duty officer, who seemed to take umbrage with my claim to have smelt a leak.

      ‘That’s not possible,’ said the duty officer.

      ‘Really?’ I said, concealing the fact that really I saw it rather than smelt it. And that it tasted of ink. And sounded like an E flat.

      ‘It’s odourless. Humans can’t smell it.’

      ‘Oh. Well I can, it seems.’

      ‘It’s odourless,’ he said, perplexed.

      ‘Oh, well. Just lucky I guess.’

      I discovered in my home research that it’s not entirely true that carbon monoxide is undetectable or odourless. Some people have been known to sense it but up to now all of those people have been dogs. I’m not entirely sure how dogs have made that clear, or why my sense of smell is more akin to a dog’s, but there we are.

      In the debrief room myself and Emre Bartu say little. We’re playing a game I think, which is tough for me, I’m better focusing on the literal than anything that involves subterfuge. It makes me seem a touch autistic, I suppose, but that’s not it. People with autism often don’t like the nature of ruses themselves, whereas I’d love to partake in one, I just find it mentally difficult to squeeze out anything but the truth.

      So, I’m attempting to pretend to be concentrating on various things. Our notes. Thinking through our work plan for today. When, in fact, we’re both listening. Pretending to take no notice in an update Anderson and Stevens are giving about Tanya Fraser.

      They say they checked her home and there’s nothing to suggest any foul play there. Which I suppose there wasn’t if you weren’t looking effectively.

      They say that they’re ‘not ruling anything out’ but are ‘interested in her truancy record’.

      They say they know she’s gone missing overnight before, and it turned out that she and a school friend were staying with her cousin in Essex, where they roamed around parks and shopping centres, smoking.

      Having taken advice from the missing persons bureau, who use data compiled from 3,000 previous cases, they leaned heavily on the belief that she would, in all probability, come back of her own accord.

      You see, two hundred and twenty thousand children go missing in Britain every year. Thirty percent of fifteen to seventeen-year-olds come home without police intervention. Eighty percent of missing teenagers turn out to be less than 40km from their homes. Just over ninety-nine percent are back home within three days. I know the maths is on their side, I did the numbers myself, but what if Tanya’s story lives in the minorities?

      At least an inspector named Jarwar has also been asked to give it the once over. And let’s hope she shares our curiosity, because to me there were a hundred unfinished sentences in the bedroom alone.