I knew Fitzbillies, a delicious and expensive bakery on Bridge Street. I knew, too, that I shouldn’t be breakfasting on coffee and doughnuts—that’s the kind of thing that could easily lead to a last-in-first-out crisis. But it was what The Cop liked. As the caffeine and sugar hit my system, my mind began to fill up like a hot bath. Just like always, it filled with Deb.
It seems ridiculous now, but only in the morning did I realize what an incredible opportunity I had here. This cop, surely, must know something. At least if Deb had been found dead, or whether there had been an investigation of any kind into her disappearance. All stirred up inside by worry and coffee and sugar, I suddenly blurted everything out. The Cop was still sort of a stranger, so it felt okay.
I told her everything I could think of. How Deb and I had become friends although I didn’t really like her, how we’d walked to lectures, how eventually we’d spent every moment together, how she’d slept on my floor when we were up late. Her pink sweaters and pearls, our stupid games, our late-night laughter. How disorienting things were since her disappearance. I didn’t get everything in exactly the right order but eventually I got around to all the important details, right up to Deb’s name being replaced from the prize announcements on the noticeboard outside Hall.
I didn’t say anything about The Eleven, or the graffiti, or the bath. All of that was irrelevant to the case. And I didn’t talk about my notebooks, because that wasn’t about the facts. That was just me trying to understand the facts.
I told The Cop everything that might matter. As I stuffed my poor body with a second jammy doughnut which it barely tasted, the words fell out of me in jumbles, and by the time I got to the end I was hyperventilating. Still, I gasped out the essential question: “What do you know about her? Orton. I mean, that’s her surname. Deborah Orton. You must know something. I need to know. It’s been—”
And then I ran out of breath. As my voice stopped, I noticed a rhythmic sound. My foot was wiggling underneath the table, tracing infinity signs.
The Cop brown-eyed me kindly but without recognition. “I don’t know who that is,” she said gently, “but if you want I’ll ask the boys. See if anyone’s heard anything. You want to get dinner? La Margherita?”
“Can’t afford it,” I murmured, looking away.
“You can if I pay.” She winked.
That wasn’t really true, though. Now I come to think of it, this must have been The Cop’s first lie.
—
It was undeniable that I needed her. Needed her help: whatever had happened to Deb, it was clearly beyond my power to resolve it by myself. It wasn’t just that, though. I slept badly in my attic rooms alone, but I could drift off peacefully when I was at The Cop’s place. She was a calming person to be around. She told me she was from a military family. Her father and her brothers were all Forces. All keepers of the peace.
I would hang around the park at odd times of the day, watching Parkside Police Station for her to come out. My own personal thin blue line. When I felt like I couldn’t put things in order anymore, it was restful to think that she was out there doing it for a living. Keeping chaos at bay for one more week, one more meal that I never paid for, one more night with her to divide the days I spent alone. To keep the weeks moving forwards.
Every time we saw each other I’d ask if she had any new leads about Deb. Often she’d ask me for more details—what colour Deb’s eyes were, whether she had any distinguishing marks or scars, what kind of jewellery she could have been wearing the day she disappeared, that sort of thing. Every so often there would be something—a missing person she’d heard of in passing, or a case a colleague of hers was working—and I’d make her promise to follow up. I could never find the words to tell her how painfully grateful I was. Sometimes I would sit and stare at her without speaking. But I recorded everything we were discovering together in a new batch of notebooks.
Over that first dinner at La Margherita, The Cop told me about a blonde woman around the right age, who’d been found wandering through town in the middle of the night with memory loss. I leaned across our pizza excitedly, mashing red sauce into my T-shirt: memory loss would be a viable explanation, at least, for why I’d heard nothing from Deb herself. I asked The Cop what else she knew, and she said the woman had been taken to Addenbrooke’s to be treated for dehydration, and was most likely in the psych ward by now. I asked if she would be able to find out what had happened to her after that, but she said that wasn’t police work.
I nodded, and wondered out loud if I could go to Addenbrooke’s myself. For a moment I saw myself adrift again in infinite white-blue corridors. Would this hospital have glitter floors, too? But The Cop said they wouldn’t give out confidential patient information. Of course, she was right. The Cop was sensible. Level-headed. She didn’t get stuck in stupid loops.
I saw on the local news next day that the woman with memory loss had been identified and returned to her family in Comberton, although she had not recovered her memory, and couldn’t talk. I went to the JCR every day to watch the local news, but I didn’t always get to see it all. If other students wanted to watch the football or something, they’d just change the channel without asking. When that happened, I’d make sure to pick up a copy of the Cambridge Evening News the next morning before lectures.
I tried
