Just Another Missing Person Quotes

“Parenthood is beautiful, but hard, too. It’s tough to exist in the world when there is someone going about their business who you would die for.”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“ABC: Assume nothing, Believe nothing, Challenge everything. One of the most important rules of being a detective.”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“Maybe. Often those with the largest online social networks are the most introverted and lonely in real life, yes,’ Jonathan says. ‘But – there is … I don’t know. Something weird about it. The housemates add to that.”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“her.’ ‘Physically seeing someone matters,’ Julia says. ‘Does it? I have loads of online friends I haven’t met.’ ‘What did you think we’d do – not investigate?’ ‘Maybe. How could anyone say she’s missing if she wasn’t ever seen?”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“There is nothing I won’t do to help you: there is nothing I can’t do. All parents are superheroes, for this very reason.”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“Heaven would be great,” she once said, “if it was real.”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“Because, the thing is, not everyone should tell someone all their secrets, should they?”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“You’d sleep until eleven or twelve, once called it your natural pattern anyway, which is true: even as a baby, you were a night owl, never had the unhappy, tired witching hour other children did. You were always at your happiest and most relaxed in the evenings, grumpy if woken before nine in the morning.”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“I’m eighteen weeks down some celebrity’s time line on Instagram, trying to see when they took their engagement ring off (for what reason? I have no idea), holding a laundry basket in my other hand. I am sure I used to be more interesting than this, though I can’t quite remember in what way.”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“These worries are now mine. I will watch them.” And then: that smile.”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“But, nevertheless, we found, in that old-fashioned lift with its accordion doors, that we had that rarest of things: chemistry. I don’t mean flirtation—don’t panic—I just mean that spiced banter that propels a marriage forward, that makes you laugh in the middle of arguments, that makes you tolerate long hours and sleepless nights and snoring, and, too, the things you thought would never happen.”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“ditherer,”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“pedant”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“Some people want to know why things are the way they are, and some people don’t.”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“Price knows she was assisting Jonathan’s gang, taking a cut of the profits in return for failing to bring prosecutions. He was happy to keep quiet for her, but he’s not now. Lewis gives him a single salute, and then leaves, having done the wrong thing, but the right thing, once again, once more.”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“Very well,’ he says. He takes his glasses off. ‘Though one wonders why we got this far at all.’ ‘Your Honour, sometimes things become crystal clear only when one is faced with the immediacy of them,’ Patricia says evenly. ‘Many a defendant has changed their plea at the door of the courtroom.”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“You wear your love like armour against the world. The gang fell apart after Jonathan was murdered. Nobody wanted to pay a similar price for identity stealing and selling. ‘Come Dine With Me, no fucking”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“All he has done is betray her, a Brutus to her Julius, happy to dispose of her in pursuit of an enterprise, money, a dark-web syndicate of stolen passports. No wonder he was so content to help her. To help her to cover up and hush up what Lewis had done. To quietly drop the Olivia case. By this time, he knew: he knew she was on to Sadie. Julia’s not yet given up, even though she knows it’s futile.”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“But – Dad.’ You catch your breath. ‘He said he’d kill me.’ ‘Who? Sadie, we’ve got to tell someone. We’ve got to tell the police.’ ‘But he is the police. He’s called Jonathan.”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“We’d moved into an unfurnished rental. You’d got a new job. I’d sold my stake, was figuring out what I’d do next. And the bed, that cheap, second-hand bed, was a shitty emblem of it all.”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“You don’t remember,’ he seems to decide to say. He doesn’t need to interrogate her any more than this. It’s absurdly out of character that Julia wouldn’t remember something like that.”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“forty-something, rangy, tall, possessing a kind of wired charisma usually seen only in celebrities or sportspeople. The kind of obsessive character Julia felt an instant kinship with, but whom she now hates. How dare he – in his quest to frame and capture Matthew – involve her? She thinks of Emma and Olivia leaving the station to go home, coming back at nine o’clock tomorrow morning, bewildered, confused.”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“Something that allows her to avoid her husband, maybe. Julia is only able to face these thoughts now she is here: excited, hyped up, full of good old-fashioned delicious police adrenalin that forms a protective ring around her. Can we only be truly honest with ourselves when things are going well?”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“My eyes dart to the police station, but Day’s safe inside: they all are, in there in their ivory towers. Unthinking, unfeeling, unbothered if they don’t solve the crimes, they still get paid, still get their final salary pensions. Meantime, we – the unfortunate – we languish, our lives upended.”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“Suddenly, sleeping with him, being careless with him, feels like the biggest gamble of my life. Putting everything on red in a game of Russian roulette, without knowing what the bet is, what the stakes are.”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“Remember her father? God, you know, his heart was fucking broken. Absolutely cracked in two. That man would never be the same again. It was obvious. His whole body seemed to change, like the pain of losing her had carved him open and left him hunched over what remained.”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“I check the toilet cistern, underneath your mattress, down the back of the sofa, like a Mafia wife, like a drugs baron, like a gullible fucking mother.”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“He smells of Old Spice, and I wonder if he strays into cliché. Pinstripe suit, ink cartridges, an understated watch bought indirectly by repeat offenders. It’s only the same as me, I suppose, letting oligarchs outbid normal buyers and leaving the penthouse suites in Bristol and Portishead empty.”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“Don’t you think her Instagram is – I don’t know. Almost staged? The Zoflora, the overkill millennial slang, something in every single post … sometimes weird phrasing, like drug store.’ ‘That’s because of YouTube. Beauty tubers,’ Jonathan says immediately. ‘All American.’ ‘Yeah. All right.”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person

“These people, they don’t know you. They don’t know your politics, your feminism, your liberalism. They don’t know how much you love candles, that you can’t possibly sit and watch the television without ten burning, like you were some sort of effigy. I flick off and back to Facebook.”
― Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person