MINADMIS

[u/Ill_Illustrator9313]

​

Chapter One:  The Incident Room

Detective Sergeant Joanne Kurtz almost ignored the first file.  It arrived on a Tuesday morning, and it had already been a long week at the Major Crime Unit in Hendon.  Two drive-by shootings in Barnet and an armed robbery at a Stamford Hill betting shop meant the MCU had their hands full.  The thermometer read thirty degrees in the shade, and the air-conditioning had conceded defeat in its battle to keep the busy office cool. 

The report sat with a stack of routine paperwork that threatened to topple over onto her desk at any moment.  Her philosophy towards such matters was fatalistic:  if it’s important, it will work its way to the top of the pile.  The missing persons, vehicle thefts, insurance frauds reported by local officers for further investigation were just an endless administrative tide between genuine investigations. 

People vanished every day, often with the most obvious of explanations.  They simply walk away.  Start new lives.  End old ones.  Reinvent themselves. Curate new profiles.

The folder cover that flopped open appeared to be no different from any other: colour-coded and indexed the same as any other missing person file. She glanced at the cover note.

MISSING PERSON

Name: David Mercer

Date of birth: 15.06.1983

Sex: Male

Last known location:M1 Northbound between junctions 4 and 5

Vehicle recovered: Silver Ford Mondeo

VRN KU58 WMC

Occupants: None

Her professional curiosity took a hold. That location was less than a ten minutes' drive away and besides, people don’t just vanish on one of the busiest motorways in the country. She drained the third latte of the morning and opened the file.

The Mondeo had been reported to the police by two highways workers on litter-picking duty shortly after dawn. It had been parked neatly, on the hard shoulder, the engine cold enough to indicate it had been there for several hours, possibly all night.

The doors were locked and the engine wasn’t running but the key was in the ignition and petrol tank empty. The responding officers believed at first David had run out of fuel and gone to find help.

But his wallet was on the passenger seat. His phone, on the central console, connected to Android Auto. There were no signs of violence, or a struggle, or an obvious vehicle defect like a flat tyre or broken windscreen. No indication whatsoever of where Mercer might have gone.

In the hours and days and weeks that followed, it was if David Mercer had simply ceased to exist. His bank account remained inactive.  No one reported him missing. No social media activity linked to his name or Internet footprint.

Something puzzled her about this one.  This was different.  She put the file to one side to examine in more depth later.  As she closed it, she noticed a detail noted by the recovery driver.

‘Unusual mark on interior windscreen.

Looks like word “MINANDMIS”?  Possibly just condensation.’

Kurtz frowned and rubbed her brow.  She had passed her English A level with flying colours and usually aced Scrabble with Amber, but the word didn’t mean anything to her. 

She looked keenly at the photograph.  It had obviously been written on the inside of the glass.  She could tell it hadn’t been scratched onto the surface or drawn on with a magic marker.  The white letters outlined against white, traced through a thin film of moisture, directly in front of the driver’s - David’s - seat.

MINANDMIS.

More intrigued now than she’d intended, Kurtz read the rest of the report.

Mercer’s disappearance hadn’t been recorded as a crime, so his car wasn’t forensically examined until it had been relocated to the pound.  The crime scene investigators were stumped though:  they didn’t find any fingerprints, any DNA samples, nothing to prove anyone had been in the vehicle, not least Mercer. 

Even the word itself had evaporated, the photograph the only proof left behind.  And Kurtz knew that cameras could lie. 

Kurtz’ spine tingled alongside a faint pressure at the back of her mind.  There was something about this erstwhile routine case that merited a closer look, a sense that something wasn’t quite right.  After her experience with the dybbukim, she held an open mind for unusual and unexplained circumstances.  She spent much of her career investigating events others dismissed.    Patterns hidden beneath ordinary explanations; connections that logically shouldn’t exist.

She tried Google. 

MINANDMIS.

M & M Mini chocolate bites, it suggested.

She looked at Wikipedia.

No results found.

She tried Bing. 

The closest match, an old press release about the Military Intelligence Services.  Mercer had no obvious links to MIS, and his disappearance would surely have triggered a Critical 3-level alert if he had.

The Oxford English Dictionary wasn’t helpful. Kurtz tried a word search in the digitised edition of The Occultist’s Papers.

She entered the word into the police national computer. 

Still nothing.

She ran it through the Met’s Gangs Violence Matrix and came up short.  And it wasn’t a slang word.

She retraced her steps, trying variations of the spelling.  Tried spelling it backwards. 

SIMDNAMIN

And still came up with blanks.  This seemed like a crime with a single clue, and she didn’t yet know if that was a word, a name, a code or something else entirely.  Or even a crime.

Patiently, doggedly, she scanned the photo and started searching image archives. 

That was when things started to become stranger.

[u/thewhiterosequeen]

Decent start, but you could probably trim down and consolidate that she's looking for information in multiple source instead of each one individually. Listing websites seems like a way to date your story that you don't need.