Chapter One Loose Slates
Loose Slates
Harrison glanced up at his brand-new cottage.
Then sighed.
And wondered, not for the first time, if he’d made a mistake.
Silence folded neatly over him. Not London silence. There was no such thing here. The quiet in the city carried movement: distant trains, late-night laughter, the restless pulse of millions of people refusing to sleep.
Here was different.
Here was the bottom of a well.
Wind threaded through the hawthorn hedge in long, low breaths. A crow called somewhere across the fields. One sharp note, echoing off stone. His gut cramped with apprehension.
God, it was quiet.
He hoisted the box in his arms, adjusting it against his hip, and walked up the short stone path towards his new home.
Not new, exactly. That much was obvious.
Decades of rain had bleached the low dry-stone walls silver.
The slate roof dipped ever so slightly at the ridge, the chimney leaning with the faint resignation of having held itself upright longer than anyone had thanked it for.
Moss threaded the guttering. The windows were small, deep-set, the glass faintly warped at the corners.
But it was new to him.
And strange.
Vastly different from the terrace townhouse he’d been living in for the past fifteen years.
This was a single-storey, detached bungalow cottage, set a fraction apart from the others along the lane, overlooking vast woodland and farmland, as if time had nudged it sideways and forgotten to nudge it back.
The neighbouring houses sat at uneven intervals.
Not close enough for casual familiarity, nor distant enough for full isolation, but far enough to allow privacy.
He might not hear the neighbours having sex here. Or have them complain he was.
Not likely anymore.
The thought came uninvited. An observation rather than a meek attempt at humour. It’d been a long time since he’d heard those mortifying bangs on the wall. And he doubted the plaster would flake behind his bedposts anytime soon.
For many, many reasons.
He paused at the gate, gravel crunching under his shoes, and looked back down the narrow lane. No traffic. No sirens slicing through the night. No bass bleeding through brickwork. It was only soft wind dragging along hedgerows and the distant, unhurried hum of nothing in particular.
This was a long way from London.
From glass and concrete and the permanent thrum beneath the city’s skin. From the shared smoggy air, breathed in by thousands before it even reached his lungs. And a world away from the Camden townhouse that had felt cramped and overheated and alive with movement.
Then, almost overnight, cavernous.
Airless.
Empty in a way that no amount of square footage could soften.
He adjusted the box again and mounted the shallow step to the door.
The key felt unfamiliar in his hand. This was what he’d asked for.
What he’d argued for in a meeting room smelling of mocha lattes and echoing with compromise.
What he’d told his superiors he needed after his extended leave and hours of counselling.
A clean transfer, a smaller force, somewhere quieter.
Somewhere he could work without the noise of a city that knew his name.
Where problems strayed onto roads on four legs and got guided back through gates, not zipped into bags under blue lights.
Where the worst call might be a missing sheep, not a teenager bleeding out on concrete.
Where he could start again.
Where he could heal.
He turned the key in the lock and pushed inside with his shoulder, nudging the door shut behind him with his heel, scents of dust and stone holding damp, welcoming him into his new home.
He’d never been one much for DIY. That had been Chris’s job.
Here, he’d have to muddle through or learn to love floral.
The floorboards creaked under his weight as he carried the box through to the sitting room, announcing every step to no one.
It looked the same as it had when he’d viewed it and put in his offer on the spot.
Someone had inexpertly boarded over the fireplace, and the plaster cracked at one corner as if the house were trying to shrug the covering off.
A faint discolouration marked the ceiling near the window, paint lifting in a subtle ripple.
The windows looked out over the ridge of moorland pressed low beneath a heavy, iron-grey sky.
It felt temporary.
As if the house were waiting to see whether he would stay.
He was, too.
Maybe this was a mistake. Him moving away this far. Everyone believed he’d come running back to the city, eventually. His old chief was keeping his job open. His dad was keeping their game of chess untouched. Nigella was holding onto the clothes he’d left down there.
Just in case.
He set the box down beside the others as the quiet eased around him again.
Vast.
And as he stood there, listening to the unfamiliar silence of a place that didn’t yet know him, he wondered if he’d always feel slightly misplaced. As if he’d stepped sideways into someone else’s life and forgotten the map back to his own.
Then—
Drip.
He frowned.
Drip.
Faint, but unmistakable.
Harrison followed the sound to the far corner of the sitting room and looked up. A damp stain spread across the ceiling, the plaster beginning to bow beneath it. As he watched, water gathered along a hairline crack, swelled into a heavy bead, then dropped to the floor.
Drip.
“Wonderful.” He planted his hands on his hips and stared at the ceiling. “Welcome to Yorkshire, I suppose.”
He then climbed onto an unopened box marked Books – Study and pressed his fingers to the stain.
It was damp. Fresh. The survey had mentioned the roof in the vague, arse-covering way surveys mentioned everything.
Age-related wear. Monitor condition. Maintenance recommended within five years.
And Harrison had skimmed it somewhere between grief counselling paperwork and transfer forms, signed what needed signing, and bought the cottage anyway.
He let out a breath bordering on a resigned laugh. There was something almost cruelly symmetrical about it. He’d left London after a life that had collapsed inward under scrutiny and failure, and within hours of arriving, his new house was about to do the same.
He stepped down and raked a hand through his hair.
He could ignore it.
He had bigger things to deal with. A new station. A new team. A town that would assess him before he’d even set foot inside the briefing room.
Drip.
“Why put off until tomorrow what you can do today, Harry, my love.”
“Yes. Thanks, Christian,” he replied to the ghost who’d unfortunately followed him here, too. “This is your area. Not mine.”
Chris had always hated problems that waited.
And he, too, hated leaving things undone.
The same way an unsolved case gnawed at him, he could already feel the itch at the base of his skull to get this sorted.
Unfortunately, he was better at solving murders than patching slate, though.
So he went into the kitchen where the estate agent had left a neat stack of local information on the table.
He assumed it would be takeaway menus and bin schedules.
But alongside recycling days and parish council notices sat a single, plain business card.
J. Whitton Roofing and Repairs
Call anytime.
Cash preferred.
No logo. No website. No review stars. Just a name and a mobile number.
Harrison turned it over. Blank. He should use TrustATrader. Vet quotes through Trustpilot. But he glanced back towards the sitting room at the persistent drip and realised he didn’t have time for any of that. Not when he was due at HQ in less than an hour.
Drip.
He exhaled sharply and reached for his phone, dialling the number on the card. It answered before the first ring.
“Aye, Jake Whitton.”
The accent hit Harrison before the greeting properly registered.
Northern. Broad, but not the lazy caricature.
Gravel under honey. There was background noise, too.
An engine rumbling, the hiss of tyres on a wet road.
The man was clearly driving. Harrison closed his eyes in subtle resignation.
He’d signed off on too many collision reports in his career.
Seen too many grainy photographs of twisted metal and blood pooled beneath steering columns because someone believed they could split their attention at fifty miles per hour.
The instinct to ask if he was hands free surfaced on his tongue.
He swallowed it.
He wasn’t here to reprimand anyone. Wasn’t anyone’s traffic enforcement sermon. He wasn’t that man.
No, he was someone else. Someone who, for reasons unknown even to him, thought it was the right time to have a stomach-flipping reaction to the sound of a fucking voice. “It’s a nice voice,” Chris’s ghost commented unhelpfully.
“Bugger off.”
“Sorry, what?” the man on the other end said, clearly aggrieved. “You called me, mate.”
“Uh, no, sorry.” Harrison pinched the bridge of his nose. “I wasn’t talking to you.”
“Oh aye.”
“And sorry to call so early, but I found your number from a card left at a property—”
“If you found my number on a card, mate, I absolutely want you to ring it. Anytime.”
There was a grin in the words. Harrison could feel it.
He straightened instinctively, as if the man could see him. “Of course. Yes. Sorry.”
“No need t’apologise. Not yet, anyhow. What can I do you for, mate?”
The cadence was nothing like London. Or Chris.
His vowels were wider, rounder. Less clipped precision, more breath in them.
Consonants didn’t snap; they rolled and softened, settling into one another as if the language had nowhere urgent to be.
There was warmth threaded through it, too. Ease. And beneath that, something else.
He sounded young.