Chapter 38
Perhaps it was just a defence mechanism, but Oliver slid right back into rational-and-calm-in-a-crisis mode.
And that was a relief on so many levels, not just because it was always a relief when Oliver was rational and calm in a crisis but also because it was so typically him that it meant he was back to being Oliver.
My Oliver, the Oliver I knew and loved, instead of the weird authoritarian stranger who’d been paying random unscheduled visits for the past six weeks.
“I’ll check her room,” he said calm-in-a-crisisly.
“Won’t that be a bit pointless?”
Oliver shrugged. “Yes and no. I agree she’s probably gone, but we’d look like fools if we ran into the night looking for our missing foster daughter and it turned out she was upstairs asleep and the car had been stolen quite independently.”
“That seems pretty unlikely.”
“I’m trying to avoid jumping to conclusions. Besides, even if she did abscond with our motor vehicle, we’ll learn something from what she left behind.”
If Jaz had left anything behind, it was probably a note saying “seeya suckers, p.s. Luc you were a shit dad,” but that aside, Oliver was right.
We trooped upstairs, and he rapped smartly on Jaz’s door.
“Jaz,” he called out. “We’re concerned that you might be missing, so unless you tell us not to, we’re going to come into your room.”
Silence.
“Jaz,” he repeated. “I’m sorry if we’re waking you, but we’re coming in now.”
It had been nice and polite, and also completely unnecessary. The room was empty.
No. Not empty. The bed was empty and—I noticed—made, but everything else was still there. Her laptop, her clothes, the guitar my mum had stolen from Brian May.
“We can at least assume she intends to come back,” Oliver murmured. “That or she planned extremely badly.”
I still didn’t know Jaz anywhere near as well as I wanted to or thought I should, but she didn’t seem the sort to plan a runaway badly. I mean, hell, she’d made the bed before leaving. “That’s good?” I ventured.
“Relatively. Still, we’ll need to contact the police.”
And just like that we were back in the stop-being-your-dad space. “Fuck me, Oliver, she’s a kid. Do you really think getting her arrested for grand theft auto is the best thing for her?”
Oliver’s expression was that very specific hurt-but-acknowledge-I-deserve-it face that I was way more used to doing myself when he, say, suggested I could sometimes be unreliable, flaky, or lacking in motivation.
“I didn’t mean about the car, although I understand why you wouldn’t give me the benefit of the doubt. I meant about her.”
“About her?” I asked, feeling slower on the uptake than I would have liked.
“She’s a missing child. She almost certainly wasn’t abducted, but it’s the small hours of the morning, she’s in a car she might not know how to drive, and she’s fourteen. I don’t want to be alarmist, but literally anything could happen.”
I tried my best not to imagine quite how long a list anything covered. My best didn’t do great. “Isn’t there, like, a twenty-four-hour thing with reporting people missing?”
“That’s a myth,” Oliver told me, and it was weirdly comforting being back to a world where Oliver told me things were myths instead of one where we had gut-splaying arguments about our values, assumptions, and emotions.
“For any missing person but especially a child, the first twenty-four hours are the most important. A rule that said you had to wait twenty-four hours would, a lot of the time, be equivalent to a rule saying you had to wait until the person was dead.”
Fuuuuuck. “Thanks for that.”
“Which is why we’re not going to wait twenty-four hours. Or any hours. I suggest you call Jaz. She’s more likely to pick up if it isn’t me. Then, if that doesn’t work, we’ll go to the authorities.”
“But what about”—I shuddered—“like the whole grand theft auto thing?”
“Twocking,” Oliver replied.
I wasn’t in the mood for jokes. And that sounded a whole lot like a joke. “What the hell are you on about?”
“Taking without owner’s consent. Or just taking without consent, or simply twocking. If the car is damaged, it could be aggravated twocking.”
If our kid hadn’t been missing, I’d have had something to say about how weird it was that we gave crimes such cutesy names in this country. But time was of the essence, so I pulled out my phone and tried calling Jaz.
And I heard a ringing.
From the dining table. Where Oliver had left her phone after he confiscated it.
“Fuck.”
I really needed Oliver to be calm right then, and he was. Perturbed, but calm. “Then I suppose,” he said, “we try the police and cross the twocking bridge when we come to it.”
Only we didn’t, because his phone rang before we got the chance.
“This is probably mixed news,” he said, answering it.
Then there was a “Yes” and then a “Was there by any chance a teenage girl with the car?” followed by a long silence and then “Her name is Jasmine Johnson, she has a right to the presence of an appropriate adult; my partner and I are her legal guardians.”
“Let me guess,” I said, once he’d hung up. “Twocking.”
Oliver nodded gravely. “Possibly aggravated twocking.”
“Fuck.”
He went back to his phone. “I’ll get a taxi. We need to be in Dagenham.”
* * *
Just-long-enough-to-change-out-of-pyjamas later, the taxi arrived.
And, barely twenty minutes after that, we were getting out in front of a squat brick building that looked so much like the first thing you’d imagine when you heard the phrase “a police station in Dagenham” that I was briefly worried the driver had dropped us off there from sheer power of suggestion.
Fortunately, it turned out some places are exactly what they look like.
We hurried inside, and behind the desk, we found a duty officer whose boredom and tiredness were fighting for control of his face, with no clear winner.
“I’m Oliver Blackwood,” said Oliver. “I’m here for my car, and to speak with Jasmine Johnson.”
The duty officer spoke into an intercom. “Blackwood, here for the twocker.”
“Alleged twocker,” Oliver corrected. Then he followed up with, “I’ll need a room where we can speak privately.”
That seemed like a stretch to me, and it must have seemed like a stretch to the officer, too, because he gave Oliver a shifty look. “Not sure we can do that.”
“You have a legal obligation to,” Oliver told him. Because of course he did. Oliver wouldn’t have brought it up otherwise.
“Says who?”
“Your code of practice under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984,” replied Oliver smoothly.
I’d seen this a few times now, and it never stopped feeling like magic. There was just something about a well-dressed man confidently citing legislation that made people in general and the police in particular get very compliant, very quickly.
Not long after, we were sitting in a spare interview room, completely unsupervised, with Jaz. And this time she wasn’t even in handcuffs. Although she was glaring at us both like she actively resented our being in the same room, building, city, country, or planet as her.
“Have they explained your rights?” Oliver asked.
Jaz shrugged.
“Jaz”—I still wasn’t wild about Oliver doing his I’m-being-calm-and-in-control tone with Jaz, but at least he’d stopped calling her Jasmine—“I know we’ve had an argument, and I do apologise for my part in it, but right now, it’s very important that you listen to me.”
She shrugged again.
“Have they tried to photograph or fingerprint you?”
There was just the tiniest shake of her head.
“Good. They can’t without my or Lucien’s permission, and we won’t give it to them. They’re also not allowed to take hair or saliva samples.”
Jaz said nothing, and she was still looking at Oliver like she hated him, but I could tell when she was paying attention, and this was one of those whens.
“What have you told them?”
She shrugged.
“Nothing?”
A head-twitch that could have been a nod.
“Good,” said Oliver again. “At some point, there is going to be an interview. I am going to accompany you.” He took a deep breath and got very, very rigid. Then he shot a meaningful glance at a security camera. “Shall I tell you what I remember happening this evening?”
At last, Jaz’s ice-girl facade cracked. “Go on then, this ought to be good.”
“We had a fight,” he said, his voice soft and cool and level. “It became very heated.”
“Oliver,” I half whispered, “I don’t think this is helping.”
Jaz was half grinning. “No no, this is fantastic. Come on, Oliver, tell me how inappropriate I was.”
“I lost my temper,” Oliver continued. “And I told you to get out of my house. I think, although of course it’s hard to remember these things exactly, that I said something like you could take the car and go for all I cared.
I didn’t mean it literally, of course, but you clearly”—he gave Jaz his most no-seriously-you-have-to-fucking-trust-me look—“didn’t realise that, which means you sincerely believed that you had my permission to take the vehicle. ”
Jaz nodded. She might not have been Oliver’s biggest fan, but she was sharp. “Yeah. Sounds about right.”
I had to admit, this did not seem like a fantastic idea.
I mean, I knew twocking was bad, but this felt like it was just moving the bad around.
Like there was crummy parenting and then there was telling a teenage girl to get in a car in the middle of the night and drive away with it.
My one faint consolation was that Oliver probably knew what he was doing.
Fuck, I hoped he knew what he was doing.
When they came to collect Jaz for her interview, she was only allowed to take one adult with her. And obviously that adult was Oliver. Which meant I was left filling in paperwork and worrying while Oliver and Jaz tried to pass off a case of aggravated twocking as a simple misunderstanding.