Who: Devon Quigg and Derek Dobbs What: Missing Persons Report Where: Hit-Wizard Office When: Early, early Wednesday Morning
It was 3 o’clock in the morning when Devon Quigg finally rolled out of bed, having been tossing and turning for the last few hours. She kept trying to close her eyes, hoping that she would fall asleep, and when she woke up, Darren would be beside her, but whenever her lashes fluttered open to check the time, only a few minutes had passed.
She was exhausted, because she was 6 months pregnant, and hadn’t properly slept for a few days now. It had always been an issue, falling asleep when her husband wasn’t beside her, but she had trouble falling asleep even when she was pregnant with Ella. She had driven Darren crazy, what with the way she kept moving around all night, and she could never figure out if she was hot or cold. Lately, Darren seemed to be getting frustrated with her more so than usual - he seemed to be getting frustrated with everyone, including their daughter, which had caused a few fights between them. Honestly, if anyone had a right to be frustrated, it was Devon. Her husband was currently jobless, and didn’t seem to be taking any initiative to find a new one, which meant that she was paying for all their bills, taking care of Ella, cooking dinner, cleaning the house, and carrying their second child while Darren sat around moping.
That had caused some more fights between them. She had called him out on his behavior, and the fights usually ended with him storming off and leaving, claiming that he needed time to “clear his head”. The first time he left, he had been gone a few hours. The second time, an entire day.
This time, it had been 4 days, and she hadn’t heard from him. She had been angry, at first, but now, having been sleep deprived since he had left, she was becoming upset at the idea that Darren hadn’t come home yet. She had even asked Grail about his whereabouts, but even the bartender, who had been her husband’s best friend since they were 11, had no clue where he had gone off to.
Something was wrong. Something had to be wrong. If he had been hurt, surely Mungo’s would have contacted her, but that was if Darren was still in the UK. She might not have been so paranoid if her husband didn’t have a history of leaving the country when things got rough, but being exhausted and hormonal was making her think that maybe something terrible had happened to him, and she wasn’t going to be able to sleep until she knew for sure.
She felt terrible, waking her daughter up at such a late (or was it early?) hour. The 2 year old began howling as soon as she had been scooped into her mother’s arm, but she couldn’t contact someone right now to come and watch her, which meant she had no choice but to take her along. She stepped into their fireplace, and flooed her way to the nearest hit wizard precinct. She held Ella on her hip, and the sound of her daughter’s cries were muffled against her shoulder as she approached the desk.
“I need to report a missing person.”
Derek was preoccupied, his mind lingering with concern on the state of one of his closest friends and most assuredly not on his graveyard shift. The night had been a quiet one, thus far. There lay a mound of paperwork for him to go through, but when wasn't there? He wished he was on patrol, because he found it much easier to stay focused on the go than when manning the station and going through paperwork.
He was initialing some important document or other for a case they had closed last week, or at least he had been, when a commotion from the front room stirred him from his abstraction.
Curious, Derek got up to investigate, and the sight he took in at the front desk set his mouth in a hard line.
Their latest receptionist, one in a long line of failures so long that the position was thought to be cursed, truly left something to be desired. He missed the persnickety blonde that might have had ice running through her veins, but at the very least handled the office efficiently. This one, whose name he really could not be bothered to remember, fancied himself some sort of junior Hit-wizard in training, and was loudly trying to condescend to this woman clutching a cranky toddler what the guidelines for reporting a missing person were. Did she know for a fact that this person had been missing for 48 hours?
Derek didn't even bother with a verbal reprimand, just swatting the side of the receptionist's head with an aggrieved sigh. A pregnant mother of a toddler did not come in to the Hit-wizard offices at 3 o'clock in the morning on a whim.
"If you'll forgive this one," he jerked his thumb in the sulking receptionist's direction, "why don't you step into my office and tell me a little bit more about this report you'd like to file?" asked Derek, gesturing to the office door that was slightly ajar down the corridor.
She was not in the mood to be treated like she were some kind of idiot. Her jaw clenched and she shifted Ella in her arms, feeling the sting of tears behind her eyes. Normally, Devon wouldn’t have gotten so emotional because someone decided to cop an attitude, but these were extenuating circumstances. She glared at the man behind the desk, barely even noticing someone else had walked over. Her reaction time was delayed due to her exhaustion, but her brows shot up with surprise as the other hit-wizard gave the rude officer a smack to the head. She stared at the new face for a moment, processing his words before she nodded her head, giving the other man one final dirty look before she carried Ella into the office she had been lead to.
“Thank you for that,” she said, once they were alone in his office and the door was closed. She had to speak over the sound of her daughter’s cries, and she dropped herself down onto the seat so that she could adjust her again. Hearing her carry on like this wasn’t helping Devon keep her composure, and she placed the young girl on her lap so that she could try and calm her down, reaching into her bag to grab for a tissue, wiping at her chubby cheeks and tiny nose. She continued to fuss, since she was cranky, and probably hungry, so Devon just held her close, hoping she would eventually stop carrying on. It was heartbreaking to listen to, especially because she knew she was responsible for it. She had been sleeping so peacefully before she had woken her up to drag her to the hit-wizard station.
“I don’t know what you might have heard out there, but…I think my husband is missing. And yes, I do know for a fact that he’s been gone for at least 48 hours,” she added, realizing that she sounded testier than she had meant to towards this wizard who was trying to help her. She let out a sigh, reaching up to rub at one of her eyes. She was so bloody tired.
“I’m sorry, I just-…I don’t know what to do…”
Nodding, Derek listened intently as he opened one of his desk drawers and fished around the bits and bobs until he pulled out a large green lolly, holding it up for her to see. The child was young, but it seemed too big to be a choking hazard. He hoped. "It's sugar, but it might help calm her." He placed it at the end of the desk with a shrug.
Pushing aside the paperwork building on his desk was no trouble at all, and he still had the necessary form easily locatable. As an investigating Hit-wizard, he didn't often do intake and file reports anymore. But since that meant idiots like the one they had out there were left in charge of it, he was happy to make an exception in this case. The witch that sat in front of him was so clearly in need of help that no one seemed to want to give her.
That's what he was there for. "I'm Hit-wizard Dobbs. And I'm going to be asking you a lot of questions," he warned. "Some of it may seem trivial, some of it invasive. You can answer only what you choose or are able to, but know the more you can give us, the better able we are to find your husband."
Dipping his quill into the inkwell, he scratched the date onto the top of the form. Lifting his gaze, he asked, "Why don't we start with your names?"
Devon watched the officer rummage around with some interest, wondering what on earth he could be looking for at a time like this. When he pulled out the piece of candy, Devon stared at it for a moment, watching as he placed it down on the edge of the desk. She pressed her lips together, trying to keep herself from crying as she extended shaky fingers out to grab for the lollipop. She was already beginning to tear up, feeling like that she must have looked like the world's worst mother for not having been the one to produce anything to stop her own daughter from howling.
"Thank you," she said with a tight voice, adjusting Ella on her lap so she could begin unwrapping the candy. The young girl, who had her mother's eyes, watched Devon's fingers, letting out a disgruntled whine as she tried to get her take the green candy into her mouth. She continued to fuss, trying to push the candy away from her face while her mother tried to blink back tears, listening to the hit-wizard. Her brows furrowed when he told her that some of the questions might seem invasive, but she nodded to show that she understood.
"My name is Devon. Devon Quigg. My husband's name is Darren."
He nodded, taking down her first and last, clarifying spelling, and her relationship to the wizard in question. The beginning of the list Derek didn't even need to consult. These were the easy questions: his age, height, approximate build, his physical description and a request for his picture. Derek noted everything with precision in his report, meticulous to a fault so that the investigating hit-wizards would have a clear case to follow.
"Last known sighting?" he asked, glancing up at her, freshly-dipped quill hovering above the next line.
Devon may not have had any candy for her daughter, but when the hit-wizard requested a picture of Darren, she shuffled around in her back to produce their wedding photo. She always had it on her, so it was worn around the edges from sitting in her bag for the last 4 years. The moving photograph showed a smiling Darren being kissed on the cheek by Devon, who was all dolled up and dressed in her beautiful white gown. If she wasn't in such a state, she would have been much more aware of how awful she looked now in comparison.
"The last time I saw him was in our house about 4 days ago. I’ve asked his best friend if he’s seen him, but he hasn’t heard from Darren since I have.”
Derek's eyes fell to the picture Devon had given him. Nine years on the job kept him from making suppositions based on the witch in front of him and the photo that lay on his desk.
He knew better than most that appearances could be very deceiving. "Can you tell me any of the circumstances of his disappearance?"
"We-...we were arguing," she said, though she was quick to speak again. "We fight sometimes, like any married couple, but Darren-..." She looked away from him, chewing on the corner of her lower lip as she tried to figure out what she was trying to say.
"Things have been difficult, lately." The admission was spoken softly, and her eyes were glossed with tears as she looked back up the hit-wizard sitting across from her. "Sometimes he would leave if he was upset with me, but he's never been gone longer than a day."
Speaking the words out loud made her realize just how shitty it was that her husband would just leave his wife and daughter for hours at a time, just because he was upset with her. Normal couples didn't do that, but she and Darren had never exactly done anything by the books before. She turned away from the hit-wizard again, lifting one of her hands to wipe below her eyes before the first tear she shed could even make it to her cheek.
"I just need to find my husband..."
"I understand, miss."
This was the hardest part of any case, and something Derek had struggled with greatly in the beginning: the line between professional and unprofessional empathy. With time and guidance, exercising restraint became second nature. Now, although he understood why it was forbidden, that hit-wizards who allowed themselves to feel for the people who passed through their care burned out faster and more terribly, that it clouded one's judgment and ability to solve cases effectively, that it led to promises that could never reasonably be kept, he regretted that that part of him had been cut out.
Still, he tried to be as gentle as he could with this next question, tried to make sure there was no note of censure in his voice. "So this behaviour… is somewhat in character for him?"
Devon opened her mouth, but found that the answer to his question got stuck in her throat. He was asking if it was in in character for Darren to go missing. She wanted to tell him what a stupid question that was, but she couldn't, because it was in character for Darren to just disappear.
"He wouldn't just leave," she said instead, sounding somewhat defensive. She didn't want to admit it. She didn't want to say that her husband, a man she had fallen in love with despite all the reasons she had not to, was prone to just disappearing for days at a time.
"He wouldn't leave Ella," she reasoned, almost as though she were trying to convince herself at the same time. "He wouldn't-...he wouldn't leave when he knows we have a little boy on the way." Her hand went to her stomach, feeling the baby inside kick hard, almost as though he were doing so in protest. Ella was squirming again, and had dropped the lollipop giving her something new to cry about. She felt overwhelmed, and her lower lip trembled as she pulled her daughter closer.
"I don't want to answer any more of these bloody questions..."
"I'm sure he wouldn't," Derek lied, laying down his quill. He had seen this type of situation too many times to say with any faith that a daughter, even as young, as sweet, as cute as this one might be, would deter a man who was bound and determined to leave. "But this is enough for now."
He slid the parchment into a folder, knowing he'd be making additional notes for the officers following up with the case to look into.
"If your home was where your husband was last seen, it would be very helpful for a team to take a look around, try to look for clues as to where he might be. If you remember anything else you think important for us to know, you can also tell them," he suggested, neglecting to mention they would ask her, in a more roundabout way, similar questions to what she had answered here tonight, not only to see if she remembered something new or was inclined to disclose more, but also if her story matched with what she reported tonight.
Derek rose from his chair, walking around the desk in the relatively cramped office. "When you feel up to it, a list of places he frequents, some of his other family members, close friends, associates—these would allow us to investigate more fully, and give us a better chance of finding your husband."
He opened the door and gestured her out. "We'll do everything we can to find him, Mrs Quigg."
She blinked back some more tears, nodding to show she understood. She carefully rose to her feet, adjusting Ella in her arms as she sniffed, wiping her face again with her free hand as her daughter settled on her hip. Whatever she would supply for the hit-wizard team would be a very short list, seeing how Darren didn't have any family aside from her and Ella, Grail had no idea where he was, And Alland was about as useless as tits on a bull. They were her last hope, seeing how she didn't have the luxury of packing up her things and chasing after him herself, as she had done so many years ago.
"Thank you, Hit-Wizard Dobbs... I appreciate you taking the time..."
She forced a weak, almost obligatory smile, even though it was the last thing she wanted to be doing right now. What she wanted was to go back to their home and see Darren standing there. She wanted to throw something at his head for being such a bloody idiot, and scream at him for making her worry and drag their baby girl out of bed at three in the morning to file a report.
What she got was a house which seemed even emptier now than it had when she had left.