Day 2,132

We must have driven right past it almost every day and not even realised he'd been lying dead in there the whole time. The usual cheerful adverts all covered up with flowers and posters of his face, last known location and a contact number that nobody had ever rung.

Who would think to check for a missing person in their own office?

We didn't. Not when the building's main secretary showed the police footage of him heading out the evening he never came back. What she didn't show, what she never checked, was the footage about an hour later when he came back for his house keys, closing the office door behind him and never opening it again.

He was only found when the heating was repaired and the building was safe to inhabit again but by that point it had been three weeks and the stench of decay was finally too much for the steel door to contain. Even then it took a further week for the complaints to stack up enough for someone to unlock the door and come face-to-rotting-face with our missing uncle.

An accident they eventually said. Slipped, cracked his head on the corner of the table and the resulting hematoma killed him slowly. He would have been unconscious for most of it, all alone behind a locked steel door with us none the wiser back home waiting.