Chapter Three Last Known Location
Last Known Location
Harrison peered up at Hartswick Police Station.
There was no glass frontage here. No chrome signage.
No revolving doors and layered security like the Met buildings he’d walked in and out of for twenty years.
No, this was a squat, red-brick building, set back from the market square, looking as if it had edged there reluctantly decades ago and never quite grown into the century.
A Union Jack flag hung limply from a short pole above the entrance, matching those that had gone up recently around the village for nothing more than a political statement.
The blue and white POLICE sign had faded at the corners, and the narrow car park ran down one side of the building, containing three marked CID spaces and a row of mud-splattered response cars with grit caught in the wheel arches.
Beyond that, the land dipped into fields.
It smelled different.
Every station had its own version of police air.
Old filing cabinets, instant coffee, damp uniforms, floor polish never quite masking what it was trying to.
But Hartswick’s CID corridor carried an undertone of radiator dust and stale biscuits.
The heating clanked rather than hummed. Somewhere, a kettle clicked off.
Quiet, too.
London stations had a pulse. They throbbed even before sunrise.
Radios crackled. Custody doors slammed. Phones trilled in overlapping bursts.
People moved with urgency, almost aggressively.
Here, Harrison could hear his own footfalls as he crossed the corridor.
The scuff of leather on linoleum. The faint rattle of the old radiator against the wall.
The fluttering of village event flyers pinned on the noticeboard beside force directives, as if summer fetes and safeguarding policy carried equal weight.
It felt… contained.
As if crime here arrived politely. Knocked before entering.
He knew better.
The CID office sat at the rear of the building, overlooking a strip of scrub grass and, beyond it, the low rise of moorland.
Not much separated town from open country.
Not much at all. He could see how something might disappear out there.
How land could swallow things whole if people chose not to look too closely.
His first proper day.
And already a high-risk missing teenager.
London had thrown him straight into gangland stabbings, county lines deaths, bodies under railway arches. He’d asked for quiet. Smaller. Distance from what had happened.
He hadn’t asked for easy, though.
And it was obvious he wouldn’t get that here.
He adjusted his cuffs, feeling the familiar pull of responsibility along his spine. Small station or not, the expectations were the same. A girl was missing. Somewhere in this biscuit-scented, contained quiet, a family watched the clock.
He pushed open the briefing room door, and two detectives looked up.
Along with them was a sergeant, and three uniformed officers pulled from whatever they’d been doing.
A civilian analyst sat in the corner, tapping her mouse in a nervous staccato.
Every face was unfamiliar. In London, he’d walked into rooms like this a hundred times and always known the terrain.
Known who needed soft handling and who responded better to bluntness.
Who thrived under pressure. Who buckled.
Who he could nudge over procedural lines without them panicking. He’d built that knowledge over years.
Here?
He had a roomful of strangers studying him with a mixture of curiosity and expectation.
A sharp, unwelcome wave of apprehension rose. But he smoothed it down along with his tie.
DCI Pollard stood at the head of the table.
“Right, before we begin, this is DI Harrison Black. Joined us from the Met. He’s been in and out over the past couple of months, but this is his first full day with us.
Circumstances are, obviously, less than ideal.
” The chief gave a quick sweep of the room.
“He’ll be the senior investigating officer. ”
Six faces turned towards Harrison. Two polite nods. One stiffening. Calder, a veteran DS, offered nothing but a level, assessing look, one that said let’s see how long you last before the moor chews you up.
Harrison inclined his head. Not a smile; a professional acknowledgment.
Pollard gestured him forward. “Black, you want to take point?”
Harrison didn’t bother sitting. He preferred to stand during briefings. Easier to read the room. Let the room read him. And he scanned the expressions gazing back at him quickly: who looked competent. Who looked rattled. Who looked as if they wished the Met DI had stayed wherever he’d come from.
Then he stepped beside Pollard at the whiteboard.
“PC Knight, over there, is responsible for the action points.” Pollard pointed to the young female PC, and she smiled up at Harrison.
Pollard then tapped the map with the marker.
“Right. Missing person. Emily Fisher. Seventeen. Her second week collecting glasses at the King’s Arms. Last confirmed sighting approximately twenty-three twenty, heading towards the Fell Edge footpath. ”
The map had already been pinned. Village centre circled.
Woodland shortcut marked in red. The River Hart snaking along the lower edge of the woods before curving away towards the industrial estate.
And now the burden of leadership transferred to Harrison.
Cleanly, decisively, in a room that still wasn’t sure what to make of him.
But he felt the familiar investigative gear clicking into place regardless of postcode, size of station, or the state of the cottage ceiling.
So he got to it. “Has CCTV been requested from the pub?”
Pollard nodded. “Aye. We requested it from the landlord this morning, being sent over. Asked for the hour before her shift to end of night.”
“Parents?”
“Father reported her missing after three a.m. Woke up, she hadn’t come home. Tried calling, and it went straight to voicemail.”
“And the mother?”
“Divorced. Currently living in Spain. He’s trying to reach her.”
“Phone?”
“We contacted HQ for the duty SPOC for subscriber data and the last seven days of call and IP traffic. Waiting for that in. Luckily, the father had tracking enabled.” Pollard pointed to the map. “Last location twenty-three twenty-one. Right at the entrance to Fell Edge. Signal dropped there.”
“Battery dead or handset powered off?”
“Unknown.”
“Alright. That gives us our LKP.” Harrison glanced over to the analyst. “Can we get confirmation from the network provider on how the handset went offline? Battery depletion or deliberate power-down.”
The analyst nodded, already typing.
Harrison turned back to Pollard. “In the meantime, I want the father’s login credentials for the tracking app. With his consent.”
Pollard nodded. “He’ll cooperate.”
“Good. If the phone comes back online for even thirty seconds, I want a live notification. That buys us time without waiting on telecoms paperwork.” He tapped the red circle on the map.
“If the device was switched off deliberately at the path, that changes our risk assessment. If it died naturally, that’s different.
Either way, that stretch of woodland is our last confirmed point of contact with her. ”
The room absorbed that.
A seventeen-year-old girl.
A dead phone.
A dark path.
“Anything on social media?” Harrison asked.
“Nothing obvious yet,” DS Calder piped up.
He was an older sergeant. Looked relaxed in his surroundings, too.
Probably been here since his first posting and got comfortable.
His hair was greying, cropped short, face lined deep from years on the job rather than age alone.
With a bushy moustache that looked as if it’d been a permanent fixture on him since the seventies.
There was a stillness to him, too. Watchful.
Closed-off. A copper who didn’t waste words because he didn’t need to.
He’d seen enough to know how these things usually went.
“Accounts still active. No goodbye messages.”
“Good.” Harrison nodded. “Let’s keep it that way.” He glanced at the officers in the room. “Initial enquiries?”
“House-to-house started at eight.” DS Calder sat up, not so much eager to please, more to prove he had all this handled himself. Posturing. “We’ve seized CCTV from the shop units. Nothing showing her past the square.”
“Any indication she planned to disappear?”
“None at this stage, sir.”
Harrison took that in. “Previous incidents on this path?”
The pause was immediate and telling. And Harrison swept his gaze around the room to take in the hesitation. Or caution, as it probably was. Pollard had mentioned a “delicate past” but the subtle stiffening of shoulders, the exchanged glances, raised his hackles far more effectively.
Pollard rubbed his jaw. “We’ve had concerns raised before. Nothing recent.”
That was a neat lie of omission. Harrison recognised the shape of those. Had used them himself when a conversation needed steering away from what wasn’t ready to be said aloud.
“And the community?” Harrison asked. “How loud is this already?”
Pollard huffed. “Hartswick loud.”
So…whispers in shop queues, crossed arms outside the butcher’s, rumours travelling faster than fact, fear clinging to a town that remembered things too well and forgot them too slowly.
“But no media yet?”
“Not yet.” Pollard pointed at him. “You’ll front that when we need to.”
Harrison nodded. He didn’t revel in that, but it was the nature of the job. “Right. Search strategy.”
DS Calder sat forward. “Uniforms have secured the LKP. Line search underway. Dog unit deployed. Air support requested, but mist’s too thick.”
Harrison looked back at the map. “The river?”
“Other side of the woods. No direct access from the LKP.”
“No direct access, or difficult access?”
Calder paused. “Difficult. She’d have to leave the path, cross the old boundary and cover nearly a mile through rough ground.”