Chapter Three Last Known Location #2
“Then it stays in the wider search area. I don’t want difficult becoming impossible because it’s convenient.”
“Aye, sir.”
Harrison turned back to the board. “Family liaison?”
“Assigned. PC Murray’s with them now. Father’s rattled. Nothing to suggest she packed or intended to leave. No note. Bedroom undisturbed.”
Harrison absorbed each piece as it came. Internally sorting them. Cross-referencing. Filing them. She wouldn’t have made it far on foot. The path had limited exits. Time was already working against them.
He looked at the analyst. “Get me a radius breakdown of all footpaths leading off the moor, possible exit points, bus stops, and blind spots in CCTV.”
She nodded and started typing.
He turned back to the room. “I want statements from every member of staff she worked with last night. Names of every customer they remember. The father re-interviewed with attention to tone, timeline, and whether she seemed uneasy going to work. Check her messages, her social media, her friends.”
DS Calder piped up. “And the path, sir?”
“I’ll take a look at that myself.”
Curiosity and surprise rippled through the room. They weren’t used to an SIO pulling on boots in the first hour. Not here. Not in a station where hierarchy usually stayed clean and dry.
But Harrison needed to.
Not just because of Emily, but because he didn’t know this land.
He didn’t know the dips, the blind corners, the tricks mist played on sightlines.
In London he’d known every estate, every alleyway, every stretch of pavement where trouble gathered.
Here he was effectively working blind, and that wasn’t a luxury he allowed himself.
So he ignored the raised eyebrows.
“You all know the terrain better than I do,” Harrison said.
“But I know how fast a missing person case escalates. If she’s out there, we don’t wait for visibility or convenience.
” He tapped the map, tracing the highlighted artery of the footpath, feeling the shape of the ground even from the overhead view.
“Expand the search. Push another thirty metres either side of the trail. If the terrain widens, grid it. We don’t leave gaps.
Not today.” He capped the marker. “Questions?”
None.
Then the uneasy shuffling of officers caught between relief and anxiety started. It was that usual fragile mix he’d seen in stations big and small, when the reality of a missing child landed on shoulders.
“Alright.” Harrison clapped his hands. “Let’s move. DS Calder, you’re with me.”
“Aye, sir.”
Harrison caught the exchanged glance between two officers as he and Calder stepped out of the room.
He ignored it and kept walking, making for the exit where they crossed the rear car park.
Frost clung to the grass in thin crystals.
The mist was thickening again, drifting across the tarmac in slow bands.
Calder walked half a pace behind, quiet in that way seasoned sergeants were: always watching, always evaluating.
Harrison unlocked the pool car, slid behind the wheel, and waited until Calder got in.
The DS fastened his seatbelt. “Turn right out of here, sir. Road’ll narrow up quickly.”
That wasn’t advice. It was instruction dressed politely.
Harrison put the car into gear and let him have that one.
As they pulled away, the town unfolded in muted colours: low stone cottages, damp brick, the incongruously cheerful bunting still hanging from some fete or other.
An older couple walked a terrier, pausing mid-chat to stare at the passing blue lights.
Curtains twitched in upstairs windows. The butcher outside his shop stopped mid-sweep.
And Harrison noted how Calder tracked every pair of eyes following their car through the high street.
“This place pays attention,” Harrison said.
“Aye.” Calder shuffled in his seat. “Small town. Nowt happens without someone knowing about it.” He glanced at Harrison. “Bit different from city policing.”
Harrison kept his gaze on the road. “Policing is policing.”
“We’ll see.”
It wasn’t defiance. Not quite. And it certainly wasn’t mutiny.
But it wasn’t agreement either. Harrison glanced across at him to get a feel.
Early fifties, he guessed. Weathered rather than worn.
Someone who’d spent twenty years walking the same streets, knocking at the same doors, carrying the same names in his head.
And now he was sitting beside a DI in his early forties.
Younger, imported, handed command on day one.
There was a natural fault line there.
Calder didn’t need to say it aloud. The set of his shoulders did the talking.
The measured tone. The way his jaw tightened before he looked back out at the road.
He wasn’t challenging Harrison. He was marking territory.
This was his patch. His people. His history.
And Harrison, fresh from London with clean boots and a new warrant card for this district, was wearing authority he hadn’t earned yet.
Anyone would bristle.
So Harrison tried for some neutral ground. “Been in Hartswick long?”
“Coming up twenty years.”
“Long time.”
“Aye.”
“Your experience will come in handy.”
“That it will.”
The tone wasn’t rude, but it was flat enough to make the point: I know this place. You don’t.
Calder rested his elbow near the door, gaze fixed on the misted road ahead. But when they reached the narrow turnoff towards the moor, Harrison caught the hint of tension in his jaw. A tiny clench quickly smoothed over.
Harrison registered it. Filed it.
Whatever waited at the end of this road, Calder already felt it coming.
So Harrison tried to get to know him. Build rapport. “You local yourself?”
“Aye. Born ’n’ bred.”
“Family?”
“Wife. Two sons. Both flown the nest now. Did well, them two. One went to Exeter. Other one Kings.”
“London?”
“Aye.”
“Nice.”
Calder gave a small nod. “Cost me enough, mind.”
Harrison laughed. “I can imagine. City living is pricey.”
“Worth it, though. Both moved out now. Finally means me and the wife can get the extension done. She’s been after a downstairs bathroom for years.
” Calder glanced across, his gaze dropping to Harrison’s hand on the wheel.
His left. Where the gold band caught the faint light as Harrison changed gear. “You married, too?”
There was a note of doubt in it. Subtle, but there.
As if he couldn’t quite place Harrison in that life.
He’d probably detected he was gay, and the age-old preconceptions that weddings and marriage and rings were for the heterosexual made him not see Harrison as the sort who’d dragged a wife and kids up from London to start a new life in a town like this.
He wasn’t wrong either.
“Widower.”
That word still sat wrong in his chest. Heavy. Final. As if it belonged to someone else, every time he said it.
“Ah. Right.” Calder shifted uncomfortably. “Sorry to hear that.”
Harrison let it go. Got back to work.
“You worked a missing-person case here before?”
Calder’s exhale was thin. “We’ve had things crop up over the years.”
“Anything recent?” Harrison pressed.
“No.” Then, after a beat too long: “Not in a long time.”
Which was as good as admitting something had happened. But not something he was ready to unpack yet.
The mist thickened as the landscape opened up. Trees crowded the verges. Water dripped steadily from the overhead branches. The narrow road curved, then straightened, and finally, blue tape appeared, slicing across the Fell Edge entrance to the woodland like a wound dressing.
Harrison pulled in behind the patrol car and killed the engine. Beside him, Calder shifted forward to peer through the windscreen.
“Balls.”
Harrison followed his gaze to where a man stood beyond the cordon.
Arms folded tightly, work boots planted in the mud, shoulders rigid beneath a hoodie.
Heavy-duty reinforced trousers suggested he was a tradesman.
Not police. That and the filthy boots spattered with the sort of muck that said he’d come straight from a job rather than wandered over for a look.
Harrison somehow couldn’t take his eyes off him.
Dark curls fell to his shoulders, damp from the mist and frizzing around a face that could have been on magazine covers.
And there was a restlessness about him. Not nervous.
Angry. As if every part of him wanted to get beyond that tape, and he was using sheer force of will to stay where he’d been told.
Definitely not police.
Probably local.
And, from Calder’s reaction, definitely someone Harrison was about to become acquainted with.
“Comes with the territory.” Harrison unclipped his seatbelt. “We’ll have onlookers.”
“That’s not just any onlooker.”
Harrison glanced back at the man on the verge and collided with a pair of eyes staring straight back at him through the mist. Christ. They were intense.
Deep blue. Direct. And Harrison felt the impact of that stare somewhere low in his stomach.
It was that same stupid, disordered flip he’d felt earlier on the phone. Unwanted then.
Even more inappropriate now.
He shut it down before it could become anything worth examining and reached for the door handle. “Who is he?”
Calder let out a long, weary sigh. “Whitton.”
Harrison rolled the name around in his head. It tasted as if he already knew it. Then he noticed the van sidled half up on the road. White Transit, not a patrol vehicle or forensics. The block lettering along the side gave it away: Whitton Roofing and Repairs.
“Roofer?”
“Aye.” Calder narrowed his eyes out the window at the onlooker. “And Hartswick Police’s resident pain in the arse.”
Harrison didn’t have time to ask anything else because the moment Calder opened his door, Whitton pushed off the verge and strode towards them with purpose.
“Course it’d be you.” Whitton waved a hand as if batting away something old and festering. His accent was broader in person. Rougher. Charged. “Always bloody you.”