Free I Came to Find a Girl by Jaq Hazell Page A

to tell her that?”
    They didn’t reply. They just carried on looking, waiting for me to say something significant. “If you can think of anything and I mean anything – please give us a call.” The older officer passed me contact details. “We’ll show ourselves out.”
    The younger one nodded towards the dirty plates piled on the worktop and in the sink. “Reminds me of my student days.”
    I poked at my tuna bake. I no longer wanted to eat, and it had congealed anyway, so I scraped it into the swing bin where it landed with a thud.

Ten
    Jenny – I saw her everywhere. I looked for her in every face I passed, on every pavement, in every crowd but always it turned out to be just her chin walking around on someone else, or the way she’d shyly look away, or the back of her long, straight hair worn by a less attractive woman. Sometimes, I thought I’d caught sight of her back disappearing down a side street or in a crowd and I’d have to change direction and follow, walking for ages out of my way. It was exhausting, the constant looking, and the willing, wanting her to be alive and back again.
    People go missing every day, often because they want to get away.
    I took my camera and snapped away at the overflowing bins and relatively empty Sunday streets. Perhaps I’d capture something, a clue, and not even realise till later when I looked over the images on my computer.
    Six hundred people disappear every day. It’s not unusual.
    My housemates wanted to help. They asked what Jenny was like and I zipped through the images on my mobile, determined to find a photo. Eventually there she was in the kitchen at work, smiling and slight in her chef whites, her long mousy hair tied back, and her arm round a grinning Donna.
    “She often wears her hair tied up but she should wear it down. If I had hair like that I’d wear it down,” I said.
    “She looks nice,” Slug said.
    “She is – way too good for you.”

    Saviour’s felt like a morgue long before we knew anything. It amazed me that anyone would want to eat there while there was a question mark over Jenny’s whereabouts, but people did.
    The police did a reconstruction with a young female officer in a long, straight wig and the same sweatshirt, combats and trainers Jenny had worn the night she disappeared. And they released a police statement, saying: “Trainee chef Jenny Fordham is a popular young woman who was born and brought up in the Nottingham area. She is a keen runner, as well as an active member of a young Christian group. It is out of character for her to go missing or fail to keep in touch.”
    Jenny, being considered ‘nice’ and ‘middle-class’, had become newsworthy.
    It is rare for anyone who goes missing over the age of sixteen to gain news coverage. Girls go missing all the time, girls with piercings, bleached or dyed hair, girls who wear tight, revealing clothes; the media rarely bothers with them unless they’re particularly young or vanish in unusual circumstances. Only the wholesome are considered worth looking for – the rest had it coming. But Jenny was good, she was different – her parents live in the Park area of Nottingham, a desirable enclave of period homes near the castle. The national press picked up on the story and Crimewatch ran a reconstruction. And there was the front of Saviour’s on TV, the curved Art Deco windows looked decorative and smart as the Jenny impersonator walked out, Nike kitbag over her shoulder. And that was it, reconstruction over, because that’s all they had – one night, Jenny left work and vanished.
    “Right now, I could almost believe in alien abduction,” Donna said. We had both sat down in the bar for coffee in the brief lull between preparation and the arrival of customers. “It doesn’t add up,” she said, “and you know what really gets me is that normally we leave the same time as Jenny but she didn’t stop for a drink that night. She was running the next day and wanted to get