I stop at my usual café on the three-minute walk to work the following morning and order a large coffee and croissant, which I pick at, once settled at my desk in the offices of Camden News.
The office spreads over two floors of a dilapidated Victorian terrace on the main road, wedged between an off-licence and a 99p shop. As usual I am the first one through the door. Ordinarily, it’s the time of day I like best, cracks of light straining through horizontal plastic blinds, illuminating a space that once would have been the living room of an elegant town house, but is now characterised by cracked ceilings and floors, semi-carpeted with brown and green florals, and a series of messy desks.
I’ve worked in the office ever since joining the paper three years ago, months after dropping out of my second year of college. As usual, Jess was the one to pull me into shape, getting me a shoo-in onto the paper via a friend who did music reviews. Even after everything that has happened, they’ve made no effort to get rid of me.
Si’s desk stands somewhere between mine and Ben’s, a battered copy of McNae’s Essential Law for Journalists and notes scrawled in shorthand strewn across it as testimony to the NCTJ training I never managed. He and Ben will be in soon, and at once the peace will be shattered. On another day I might have taken this moment to drink up the silence, to register the endless piles of papers and the smell of unloved carpet, grateful not to be working in a proper media office, like Jess’s glass carbuncle a few streets away, with its upright leather sofas, mood boards and a coffee machine with individual colour-coded capsules.
Today, however, the space around my desk feels bare, like a carcass picked raw. Despite the October sunshine outside, there is a damp chill in the air which crawls over me, forcing me to pull my hooded jumper tightly around my waist.
Knowing it will be at least another hour until anyone else gets in, I light a cigarette before heading across the room to push open the large sash window. Hesitating, I spot a tiny gap where the window hasn’t been properly shut. It explains the cold air seeping into the office from the dilapidated garden beyond. It also confirms that no one has done anything to fix the lock, which looks like it was fitted with the original window more than a hundred years ago.
It is just a matter of time before someone breaks in and helps themselves to the prehistoric computers, in the process destroying the order of the mountain of used reporters’ pads dating back years – ‘going digital’ in this office means not replacing the broken fax machine.
I am preoccupied by my thoughts as I reach my desk, flicking for the number for Missing Persons in the Rolodex that contains the name of every official contact I’ve made in my three years as a reporter.
After two rings, the voice on the other end of the line answers.
‘Hi,’ I say. ‘This is PC Taylor from Kentish Town. We’ve got a body and I need to check whether it matches anyone on your register … That would be great, thank you. Of course, my badge number is …’
Reaching into my back pocket, I retrieve the identification card I swiped from the PC on the front desk when her back was turned the day before. It is absurd that the Missing Persons register is only accessible to the police when surely it should be a matter of public record, I muse as I finger the badge, wondering how long it will have taken her to notice it is missing.
‘No, we don’t have an ID on her, but we do have a first name,’ I reply. ‘Eva. Looks like a female aged between sixteen and twenty-five, brown hair, brown eyes … That’s no problem, I can hold.’
I feel my heart quicken as the woman at the end of the phone makes her search.
‘Hi, thank you … Oh, I see,’ I say a few moments later, trying not to let my disappointment show.
‘I understand. Yes, please do hold onto the information and if anything crops up … I tell you what, I’ll give you my direct line. PC Taylor, that’s right …’
It is unlikely the call will come through – things are rarely so swift or straightforward – but if it does, I am not worried that my answer machine will give away my true identity. My voicemail greeting simply informs callers that I am away from my desk.
Hanging up, I light a cigarette and pick up the phone again. This time I try Maureen, out of the need for a companionable voice, if nothing else. In the years since we first met, at the pub next to the women’s refuge Maureen runs just off Kentish Town High Street, she has proved one of my closest confidantes.
As Maureen’s number goes to voicemail, I hang up and immediately the phone rings.
‘Hello?’ I say.
‘Isobel, it’s me.’
‘Oscar, hi …’. There is something about his voice that still has an infantilising effect on me, though I am a month older than him, and I hate him for that above anything else.
‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you,’ I say.
‘So I hear. I got your message from the station.’
‘And?’ I continue, waiting for the conversation to descend into the usual dressing down.
‘And we’re looking into it.’
‘Really?’
‘Sure, I’ll call you in a bit.’
‘OK,’ I say, holding out the phone receiver in front of me as it goes dead.
At that moment the door opens and Ben, the News Editor, walks into the room.
‘Isobel,’ he says, throwing down a battered briefcase. ‘Why the fuck aren’t you at the council briefing?’
My ability to compartmentalise is one of the things that makes me so good at my job, Ben will occasionally concede after the several pints it takes for him to say anything vaguely complimentary to anyone. But apparently this time I’ve divided the many tasks in my mind so efficiently that I’ve completely forgotten the meeting that had nearly brought me out in hives to think of it on my way back from the party. Though, in my defence, there have been a couple of things to distract my attention since then.
‘I’ve got something else I think you’ll be interested in,’ I say without stumbling. ‘There was a stabbing on the high street at the weekend. The nationals haven’t got a whiff of it yet, and off the record police confirmed that they’re treating it as connected to the ongoing tensions between two rival gangs in Mornington Crescent I’ve been looking into …’
‘That’s my girl,’ Ben says.
As I talk him through the details, I feel the events of Saturday morning begin to fade, the woman’s face sweeping in and out of focus in my mind like a figure stepping in and out of the shadows, until, for the moment, she vanishes altogether.