“So, remind me what this guy’s deal is?” Detective Constable Ian Harper asked sleepily, yawning widely, his jaw clicking with the effort as he ignored the irritated look his fellow detective gave him over her coffee cup from the passenger seat of their unmarked car.

  Detective Constable Elvira Knight grumbled unintelligibly under her breath for a moment before reaching over to flick Harper sharply on the ear before she huffily recounted the early morning briefing that they’d both attended. “John Doe, a seventy-seven-year-old pensioner from Hackney, absconded from his assisted living facility last night after waking up in an apparent fit of panic. He then scared the living daylights out of his wife of sixty years after he started ranting nonsense before suddenly pulling out a gun,” she re-read aloud from the file open on her lap. “Staff at the care home called the police at around four-thirty am this morning to report the incident, but Mr Doe had left the premises with his weapon before the AFO unit arrived on scene. And because no one has managed to locate him since, despite the fact that London has one of the most extensive camera surveillance systems in the world, we have been dispatched to question the man’s wife and try and help figure out where this pensioner has buggered off to.”

  Harper hummed in thought as he turned the wheel of their car to pull into the care home in question, squinting through the steady drizzle muddying the windscreen for a parking space. “Yep, that’s pretty much exactly what the Gov said during the briefing,” he nodded, earning himself another scowl from Elvira.

  “If you knew that then why bother asking me to repeat it?”

  “Maybe I just like hearing you talk?” Winked Harper, this time earning himself a punch in the arm. “Oww! What was that for?”

  “For being an arse!” Hissed Elvira, cocking back another fist to emphasise how very much not in the mood she was for her colleague’s sub-par flirting. She knew it was mostly harmless, neither of them being each other’s type. But Harper was the sort to shoot his shot at anything with a warm pulse that ventured within thirty feet of him, regardless of circumstances; mostly thanks to being just handsome enough – in a generically boyish, brown hair, brown eyes, stock photo kind of way – that if he kept asking, eventually someone would be tired enough or distracted by his police warrant card to actually say yes.

  “Sorry, sorry,” he chuckled, rubbing his arm theatrically, with his usual annoyingly confident grin stretching his face, “can’t blame a guy for trying, though!”

  “Yes, I can. We’re at work for one thing and I have told you more than once that it’s never, ever going to happen,” stated Elvira, her expression as unamused as she could physically make it.

  Annoyingly, if Elvira was brutally honest with herself, she could actually see herself falling into bed with Harper, one day. Assuming that neither of them managed to find someone outside of work, she could imagine such a horrendous lapse of judgement occurring. She’d have to be drunk, they both would, or else Elvira would get freaked out by the fact he looked slightly too generic to be a real person – like a shop mannequin. She would then suffer through what would almost certainly be highly mediocre sex that wasn’t bad enough to kick him out of her bed, but also not good enough for her to consider keeping him in it the day after. And then the following morning they would awkwardly return to being work colleagues, with her trying to ignore his inevitably unbearable air of smugness over the fact he had seen her naked.

  As if somehow able to sense Elvira’s inner turmoil, Harper just shrugged away her warning, looking entirely too confident in his future chances of success, though he at least had the sense to not push his luck any further. “Alright, alright, I hear you,” he relented, a small smile tugging at the corners of his mouth as he steered the car into a parking space near the care home’s front door.

  Not wishing to deal with the suddenly incredibly loud smug silence, Elvira snapped the file on her lap closed and all but launched herself out of the car into the rain, stalking through the automated doors to get directions to the Doe’s apartment from the receptionist. A short but wet walk later and they were welcomed inside a pleasantly homey living room by an elderly woman in her late seventies, who was wearing the fixed, pleasant expression of a woman doing her level best to put on a brave face despite being worried out of her god-damned mind.

  After taking a seat in the elderly woman’s living room and declining her ritualistically polite offer of tea, Elvira put forward her best professionally reassuring smile and got down to business. “So, Mrs Doe, could you please go over last night’s events for us?”

  “Again? I already explained everything with those uniformed officers three hours ago,” fretted Mrs Doe, wringing her hands as she perched precariously on the thinnest edge of her florally upholstered armchair. “Don’t you people communicate with each other?”

  Elvira paused for a moment to allow Harper to lean forward and send the woman his best disarming smile as he gently explained, “of course, Mrs Doe, however sometimes it is better to get information from the source, rather than a report,” he said, gesturing to the closed file that was now balanced on Elvira’s lap. “It helps us catch information that might have been missed or ask questions that the responding officers might have not thought to ask when halfway out the door trying to pursue your husband.”

  Mrs Doe didn’t exactly look happy with this explanation, but she did appear at least somewhat mollified by the confidence in Harper’s tone. Though she did frown a little at Harper’s wording. “Pursue? My husband is not a criminal, Detective!” She stated primly, her voice wobbling enough to cause Elvira to pull out a rumpled pack of tissues from her pocket and offer one to the elderly woman. She took the offered tissue gratefully, dabbing her eyes quickly as she wrestled herself back under control. “John is a good man, he’s just… he’s just confused.”

  “Of course, Mrs Doe. It wasn’t my intention to imply that John has done anything wrong,” soothed Harper, raising a placatory hand, despite the fact that a potentially illegally owned firearm was apparently in the mix. Though Elvira silently agreed that it was probably wise not to point this out to the woman, given how high strung she appeared to be at the moment.

  “We just want to ask you for any information you might have, anything that you might have forgotten to mention in all the confusion that could help us find him,” added Elvira, tapping her open notebook and adding her own encouraging smile, though it was perhaps less effective than Harper’s.

  Mrs Doe spared Elvira an uncertain glance, clearly not finding her presence as reassuring as her male colleagues. Elvira forced down the usual faint flicker of irritation that bristled through her at that, aware that Mrs Doe, as a lady of a certain age, was more likely to defer to the man in the room during times of stress, despite the fact that Elvira had introduced herself as the lead investigator. It wasn’t fair, but Elvira was well aware that she was unlikely to convince Mrs Doe otherwise by trying to assert herself this late into the conversation. The elderly in general tended to be stuck in their ways, so Elvira wasn’t going to waste time and effort fighting for pointless deference.

  “Well, I’m not sure if there’s anything I didn’t tell the first two officers, but alright,” sniffed Mrs Doe, smoothing her skirt absently as she seemed to brace herself for their questions.

  “Did anything precede last night’s outburst?” Started Harper, after Elvira’s subtle nod giving him permission to take the lead. “Was Mr Doe acting strangely or erratically at all, yesterday or at any time during the last week?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” replied Mrs Doe, shaking her head resolutely. “Everything was normal; as usual he’d been pottering around his garden for most of the week, and yesterday he had been helping me sort through my art supplies.”

  Elvira glanced at some of the paintings adorning the walls of the living room, finding a series of pleasant watercolours that mostly featured rivers or horses, or both. They appeared well done, and sat well within the apartment’s décor, though they didn’t seem to be professionally painted; at least to Elvira’s untrained eye.

  “I see,” continued Harper, not touching his own notepad, trusting Elvira to take better notes whilst he was concentrating on asking the questions. “And what of the night itself? When did you come to realise there was something wrong?”

  Able to keep an ear on the conversation enough to keep up with her note taking, Elvira continued to sweep her gaze around the pictures on the walls, moving on from the paintings to a set of black and white photos, clearly taken over a long period of time if the slowly shifting eras of the picture’s subject’s attire was anything to go by. Elvira’s attention eventually settled on one picture in particular, set not on the walls above them but in a well-polished brass frame on the coffee table beside Mrs Doe’s chair. Black and white, like many of the others, but lacking the evident ageing that the other photos appeared to have, leading Elvira to conclude that this photograph had either been exceedingly well cared for, or perhaps copied or restored.

  Leaning further forward to better see the image, Elvira studied the picture of a nurse sat on the edge of a man’s hospital bed, her arm slung around her patient’s shoulders with a beaming smile on her face as she presented the man with a what looked like some kind of homemade cake adorned with a single candle, and “Happy 1st Birthday” written on its surface in icing. The man’s expression is wry, but clearly trying to hide how pleased he was with the offered cake, or perhaps with whom was offering it. It was hard to tell, given the photograph lacked any colour, but his cheeks did appear a shade darker than the rest of his exposed skin.

  The nurse in the photo was clearly a much younger Mrs Doe, the similarities between the woman sitting before Elvira and her two-dimensional doppelganger too much for this not to be the case. The man however, took a second longer to place, needing her to flick open the file on her lap and compare John Doe’s driving licence photo with the one in the frame. It was him, though significantly younger, looking to be not much older than twenty by Elvira’s estimation, similar in age to the young Mrs Doe sat beside him at the very least.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Refocussing back to the conversation, Elvira rejoined just as Mrs Doe began describing the moment she really started to become alarmed by her husband’s sudden bout of erratic behaviour.

  “I could tell he was agitated, even when I listened to him pacing through the office door,” Mrs Doe says, gesturing towards what must be the door in question off to the side of the living room. “The middle of the night and he’s shut himself away and muttering nonsense under his breath, so as you might imagine I was quite alarmed.”

  “Was this when you confronted him?” Asked Harper, after pausing to take a glance at Elvira’s subtly tilted notepad, “Muttering nonsense (?)” scrawled hurriedly in her rushed handwriting and circled three times for good measure to catch his eye.

  “Yes, though he gave me quite the fright,” nodded Mrs Doe, a flicker of hurt flashing across her face. “When he turned and looked at me, it was almost as if he didn’t recognise me.”

  “Do you… think he’s had some sort of mental ‘break’?” Tried Harper delicately; or, at least, as delicately as he could.

  “No, no, not this time,” insisted Mrs Doe, shaking her head resolutely. “It only lasted a couple of moments, long enough to frighten me, but he addressed me by name in the next breath. Apologised too.”

  “What do you mean ‘this time’?” Interrupted Elvira, before Harper could ask his next question, her mind having snagged on Mrs Doe’s wording, rapidly joining with a thin thread of thought to what she’d seen in the brass framed photograph. “Would it have anything to do with his extended time in hospital?”

  Mrs Doe startled, as if she’d forgotten that Elvira was there. She frowned as she tried to follow Elvira’s line of thought, her eyes only alighting with understanding after following the detective’s pointed glance to the picture set beside her. “Hmm? Oh, that. Well… I would think it’s doubtful. That injury was so long ago, and full amnesiacs like John rarely regain their memories after so much time.”

  Elvira shared a surprised look with Harper; that particular titbit hadn’t been mentioned in John Doe’s admittedly rather scant medical information provided by the file they’d been issued. Likely a clerical error, since the incident had clearly occurred long before digitization of hospital records was possible, let alone commonplace.

  “Mr Doe was an amnesiac?” Repeated Harper slowly, his face pinched in the way Elvira knew it normally did when he felt members of the public were being dense and making his job unnecessarily harder.

  “Yes, complete loss of memory after being clobbered by a bus. Couldn’t even remember his own name,” sighed Mrs Doe, picking up the picture frame in question and staring down at it with a sad smile on her face. “I was the one who found him actually, just after the accident had happened. Ended up riding with him in the ambulance to the hospital where I worked. It was so awful, he couldn’t remember a thing; didn’t even have anything on him that could identify him either, and worse still, nobody came looking for him. It was all rather sad, really.”

  “Luckily, I worked on the ward that he eventually ended up on, so he had a friendly face to get used to amongst all that stress,” she mused, eyes distant as she recalled old memories, gesturing towards the photo. “This picture was taken after he’d been on the ward for a year, hence the cake. He was released not long after, since, whilst he couldn’t remember who he was or where he’d come from, he didn’t have to relearn how to read or write or anything, like some of our patients. Though he didn’t go far, the doctors were kind enough to recommend the hospital to employ him, which helped due to all the familiar faces. And, well, over time we rather hit it off. And the rest, as they say, is history.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Elvira could see Harpers eye twitch in irritation; a feeling that she wholeheartedly agreed with. Sometimes the public could be maddening when it came to revealing important information. Sometimes details that should be blinding obvious in their relevance got omitted for the oddest of reasons, which Elvira found leagues more infuriating than when people held back information intentionally, as oftentimes people in the latter group at least had good reasons for hiding things.

  “Mrs Doe, is it possible, however unlikely, that Mr Doe has finally recovered his previous memories?”

  Mrs Doe let out a disbelieving scoff, rolling her eyes dismissively; though Elvira didn’t miss the flicker that momentarily twisted the older woman’s lips. “As I said, it’s highly unlikely. In all my years working on that ward, if you didn’t show signs of recovery early on, you tended not to recover anything at all. It’s been more than sixty years since John’s accident, and he hasn’t remembered a lick. Not for a lack of trying either. He probably saw just about every specialist on the subject in the country, and he couldn’t remember so much as a sausage.”

  “Are you certain? You said he was mumbling nonsense earlier; with his amnesia in mind, does any of it strike a chord?” Pressed Elvira, leaning forward in her seat to stare imploringly at the dubious looking Mrs Doe. “If he remembered something important, it could explain why he dashed off into the night without so much as a backwards glance. With a gun, no less.”

  “Important? It’s been sixty years! I highly doubt he dashed out past midnight because he’d left the iron on half a century ago!”

  “Mrs Doe, please at least try,” entreated Harper, trying to curb the elderly woman’s sudden waspishness. “In our business, sometimes the most unlikely explanations end up being the truth. This may help us find your husband, hopefully before he hurts himself or someone else.”

  “Very well,” huffed Mrs Doe after a tense moment, folding her arms across her chest almost petulantly as she paused to sift through her memories. “The only thing that stands out to me was that he seemed adamant he was ‘late’ for something.”

  “Late?” Questioned Elvira, pausing her pen momentarily as she thought out loud. “Late for what?”

  “How should I know?” Snapped Mrs Doe, her patience with this line of inquiry clearly thinning. “He started waving the gun around not long after, so I decided that it was probably for the best I didn’t press him on it.”

  “Speaking of the gun, do you have any idea where he got it?” Rejoined Harper, flicking through his notebook. “He doesn’t have a firearms licence on record, not that he’d likely be eligible for one with his medical history, and the handgun you said he was waving is illegal to possess regardless.”

  “I found it on him after he was hit by the bus.”

  Both Elvira and Harper paused at this, Elvira feeling her blood pressure rise incrementally as another seemingly fairly crucial detail just fell out into the air.

  “You found a gun on him after the accident?” Said Harper, his tone a hair below incredulous. “And you didn’t hand it in to the authorities?”

  “Why would I? He was in uniform after all when I found him, the gun beside him on the street. So naturally I assumed that it was the one he’d been issued with and it had fallen out of his pocket,” replied Mrs Doe haughtily, as if they were the ones who sounded ridiculous. “In all honesty I put it in my hand bag and forgot all about it until I went home. Then after the whole business with his memory loss came to light, I decided to hold onto it for him for safe keeping.”

  Putting aside the whole ‘stashing a presumably loaded firearm in her purse for safe keeping’ for a moment, for her own sanity, Elvira focussed on the other apparently ‘unimportant’ piece of information Mrs Doe had just thoughtlessly dropped. “…Wait, he was in a uniform? Do you mean police or military?”

  “He was wearing army fatigues, like my father used to wear during the war. Though, before you ask, we checked with the army and they had no idea who John was either, so that ended up being another dead end. You’d have thought someone would have recognised him; it was beyond infuriating for us both.”

  Elvira’s mind began to whirr rapidly as she absorbed another thoughtlessly dropped cornel of information; an army uniform could mean he’d been a soldier before the accident, although soldiers tended to carry identification at all times when in uniform for security reasons, which would’ve made tracking down his identity relatively easy. There were instances where they wouldn’t, ones that ranged from the benign ‘he forgot his dog tags’ to ones that featured heavily in spy movies, namely special forces or espionage. Though with so little information, Elvira knew she was only letting her imagination run away with her at this point. Best stick to the facts before she let wild theories overtake her.

  “Mrs Doe, do you remember where John’s accident took place?” Asked Elvira, forcing down her frustration with her witness to a manageable level. At Mrs Doe’s confused frown, she added, “It is possible that Mr Doe has remembered something from his past before the accident and might have headed back towards wherever he had been going or coming from that day.”

  Sighing lightly through her nose in a prim manner that told Elvira that Mrs Doe thought she was absolutely barking up the wrong tree, the older woman responded, “it happened on the crossroads near the north end of Carnaby Street, though I can’t be more specific than that. London’s changed so much since then, I’d be surprised if it looks anything like it did back in the sixties.”

  Elvira nodded, making the note in her flipbook. “Anything else?”

  Another exasperated sigh, “he was hit by the number fifty-five bus, if that helps?”

  Elvira quickly jotted down “55” into her notes. Bus routes could change over the years, but not nearly as much as some might think. It was quite possible that this route hadn’t changed much at all in the intervening fifty years. Either way, a quick call to Transport for London would probably help locate the correct junction.

  “Thank you, Mrs Doe,” said Harper, finally after finishing making his own notes and readying one last question. “Is there anywhere else Mr Doe might have headed to in your opinion? Particularly anywhere he might feel the need to go armed?”

  “These days? I’d feel the need to carry a pistol through most of London!” Scoffed Mrs Doe, jerking her head haughtily at the nearby window. “The city really has gone to the dogs!”

  After a moment of indignant sniffing, Mrs Doe caught the return of Harper’s pinched expression and let out another sigh. “Oh, I don’t know… perhaps the Old Lion? His bridge club holds its games there, perhaps he went to collect on old debts?”

  “In the middle of the night?” Frowned Elvira, already discounting this ‘lead’ in her head.

  “Detective,” sighed Mrs Doe, tiredly, whilst still somehow managing to make Elvira’s title sound like an insult, “he was acting so out of character last night that I haven’t the faintest idea what was going through his head. Which is rather painful to admit after over fifty years of marriage.”

  Not really having anything to say to that, Elvira merely nodded and put away her notebook before making to stand. Mrs Doe had looked tired before they’d come in, but now she looked positively exhausted. She likely hadn’t slept a wink last night.

  “Is anyone coming to look after you, Mrs Doe?” She asked kindly, disliking the idea of leaving the clearly distressed woman alone. A pair of uniforms were being posted across the street from the care home in an unmarked car as they spoke, but that hardly gave the woman any real comfort.

  “My son is on his way down from Newcastle, he should be here in an hour or so to keep me company,” nodded Mrs Doe, finally giving Elvira something approaching a grateful smile.

  “Very well, we will be in touch if there are any developments.” Acquiesced Elvira, before turning smartly and walking out the door, Harper close on her heels.

  “He was running north,” said Mrs Doe suddenly, causing both detectives to stall in the doorway to peer over their shoulders at her. They find Mrs Doe still seated stiffly on the edge of her seat, brow twisted in thought, her eyes closed as she carefully sifts through her old memories. “Running like the devil himself was on his heels. Ran out into the street without looking just as the bus came round the corner. Bounced off it like a tennis ball,” she continued with a shudder, before blinking her eyes back open to give Elvira and Harper a pleading smile, showing her true state of distress for the first time during their meeting. “Please find him, detectives, John is so very dear to me. I’m not sure what I would do without him.”

  “We will do our best, Mrs Doe,” nodded Harper resolutely.

  Mrs Doe returned the nod, though she didn’t look all that reassured, her gaze slipping down to stare at the photograph still laid out on her lap.