Chapter Seven Media Training
Media Training
Harrison waited until Jake moved the van.
He didn’t make a show of it. Didn’t fix him with a pointed stare. Instead, he stood with his hands loosely clasped behind his back, gaze travelling the length of the high street as if assessing traffic flow and sightlines rather than watching a battered Transit shudder into gear.
Partly, it was optics. The local traffic warden had cast a curious glance their way, and Harrison had no intention of giving anyone reason to suggest CID endorsed pavement parking on his day one in Hartswick.
The other part?
He couldn’t stop watching Jake Whitton.
It had been a very long time since another man had registered in his body like that.
Even prior to the three years he’d spent moving through grief as if underwater, where the rest of the world existed in muffled shapes and muted sounds.
Harrison had been with Chris for so long, he could barely remember anyone before him.
He’d met him at twenty-one, bright and certain and laughing, and had believed, with the na?ve certainty of a man in love, that there wouldn’t be anyone else for him.
So uprooting his life, moving hundreds of miles to a market town on the edge of the moors, still waking some mornings with grief sitting heavy in his chest, to then, on a pressing job involving a missing girl, meet a roofer with wind-tangled hair and anger in his bones who’d reached inside him and tugged on a thread he’d thought he’d permanently knotted away… ?
Unsettling didn’t quite cover that.
He could dismiss it as standard attraction.
Jake Whitton was objectively attractive.
The long, dark waves spiralling down to his collar.
The artfully scruffy stubble. Broad shoulders under worn cotton.
That careless, rocker edge suggesting music and late nights and fists through plasterboard was how he moved through life.
Anyone with functioning eyesight could acknowledge that.
But looks had never ruled Harrison. What he was attracted to had always been harder to name.
Soul.
And Jake Whitton had bared his without meaning to.
It’d been there in the flash of temper, in the fierce protectiveness for a girl he hadn’t met and didn’t even know what she looked like.
In the way every emotion moved openly across his face as if he’d never learned to disguise it.
Harrison had built a career reading people.
He’d spent years in the Met dissecting lies, parsing half-truths, searching for what sat beneath the surface.
He was good at it. It was the one thing he trusted in himself.
And Jake Whitton felt far too honest for a man who’d spent time inside.
Which was ridiculous. He’d only met the man three times. He couldn’t claim to know a single thing about him. So he did what he’d trained himself to do.
He compartmentalised.
The engine growled. Jake didn’t look back, and only when he disappeared past the chemist and out of sight did Harrison allow himself to exhale. Because the other thing about Jake? He wasn’t just a distraction. He was an obstruction.
He meant well. That much was clear. He wasn’t meddling in the malicious sense.
Wasn’t hiding anything. He was far too transparent for that.
Everything he felt moved across his face like weather.
And that, more than the hair or the shoulders or the quiet heat in Harrison’s gut, was what made him dangerous.
Because civilians in active investigations were rarely helpful.
They knocked on doors officers hadn’t reached yet.
Asked loaded questions. Unknowingly warned potential suspects.
Frightened vulnerable witnesses into silence.
And could contaminate memory without realising it.
And occasionally, they fixated.
Harrison knew what fixation did to people.
He’d seen it in parents. In partners. Within entire communities who’d decided on a culprit before evidence caught up.
Obsession felt righteous when inside it.
But it was almost impossible to argue against. And if Emily Fisher had left of her own accord, if she was sitting in a friend’s spare room somewhere, cooling off after a row, the last thing she needed was a man like Jake storming through town demanding answers. That kind of noise kept people hidden.
Still.
There was something about Jake Whitton.
Intensity was one thing. But there’d been recognition in his reaction to the photograph. As if it had unearthed something deep within him.
Harrison filed it away.
He would look into Jake Whitton properly later. Not because of suspicion, or even his untimely and unwanted interest. No. He’d do it for due diligence.
But for now, he needed to get back.
He reached his car, legally parked and precisely aligned with the kerb, and slid in behind the wheel. The headache that had been needling at his temples since early morning was heavier. A low, constant pressure behind his eyes. Too much caffeine. Not enough sleep. Too much thinking.
This wasn’t how he’d imagined his first day as DI in the smallest force he’d found with a vacancy.
He’d told himself it would be quieter here.
Slower. Administrative, perhaps. A chance to rebuild credibility without the glare of the London media or the pressure of national oversight.
Instead, it was midday and thirteen hours since the last confirmed sighting of a teenage girl.
The window between missing and endangered didn’t slam shut.
It narrowed. Quietly. Incrementally. With every hour passing without contact.
He knew the statistics.
He also knew they didn’t comfort families.
So he started the engine and pulled away from the kerb, heading back towards Hartswick station, running through what the next few hours would demand.
Word travelled fast in towns like this, so by the time he stepped inside CID, two uniformed officers were already fielding calls from concerned residents who had “definitely seen something suspicious” at some vague point in the last six months.
“Press are gathering outside,” DS Calder said without preamble. “Radio Harstwick. Local paper. Someone from regional telly is on the way.”
“Good.” Harrison shrugged off his coat and draped it over the back of the nearest chair.
He still hadn’t worked out which desk was technically his.
Then he looked around the room, making sure he had everyone’s attention.
“No one speaks to the press, or to anyone else about this, unless it comes through me. Is that clear?”
It wasn’t a suggestion. One careless comment, one off-hand remark to a journalist, and a case could unravel before it had even begun.
A chorus came back immediately. “Yes, sir.”
He then stepped into the incident room. For now, this was his office. The whiteboard was already crowded. Timings boxed and re-boxed. Arrows looping back on themselves. Names scrawled in different inks, as if urgency had been measured in marker colours.
The room carried that strain he recognised from a hundred other Day Ones.
The energy wasn’t frantic yet, but it was fraying.
Conversations cut off when he entered. Officers moved with exaggerated efficiency, as if speed alone might shrink the timeline.
So he picked up a marker, uncapped it with a soft click, and rewrote the timeline in a single clean column.
Straight lines. No clutter.
Order first. Speculation later.
“Status.”
“Phone’s still off,” PC Murray replied as she hurried into the room.
She was a young officer. Blond hair pulled back into a tight bun.
Late-twenties, Harrison guessed. Which meant she was still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
She’d been first on scene the night before and had since been formally assigned as Family Liaison Officer.
Technically, she should’ve clocked off by now.
Realistically, she should’ve been halfway home.
She hadn’t taken a single step towards the door.
If anything, she looked more rooted than she had at three in the morning.
And Harrison suspected she’d roll seamlessly into the next shift without complaint, fuelled by bad station coffee and stubbornness.
A decent officer.
A good one.
And in his experience, that wasn’t as common as it ought to be.
She’d sat with the father through the night.
Asked the hard questions without sounding accusatory.
There was steel under the softness, and something else too.
A personal vested interest. Whether it was instinct or identification, Harrison didn’t know, but she wasn’t treating this as just another log number.
But he’d since learned she had two small daughters herself, so that might have something to do with it.
“Last activity was 23:41,” she said. “No outgoing traffic after that. No calls, no messages.”
“Bank?”
“Nothing. No transactions.”
“CCTV?”
“Collecting from the pub and high street. Shop owners cooperating.”
“Good.” He wrote another timeline on the whiteboard. “Family?”
She paused, glancing down at her notes. “There was an argument yesterday afternoon.”
Harrison shot a look over his shoulder, arching an eyebrow. “Between?”
“Emily and her father.”
He frowned. “Nature?”
“She wanted to go to Manchester for a gig.” The constable looked up at him. “Neon Arcade?” She said it lightly, almost apologetically, as if the name might mean nothing to him.
Harrison held her gaze for a beat. “I’m aware of who they are.”
Aware was an understatement. He’d watched the band rise to fame after having seen them twice in small, sweat-slick venues before they’d broken through.
Knew exactly how a room felt when the band’s first chords hit and the crowd surged forward as if pulled by gravity.
But that belonged to another life, one he didn’t discuss at briefings.