Chapter Nine Dead Air
Dead Air
“Harrison?”
Harrison bolted upright in his chair and blinked up at DCI Pollard standing over him in the incident room.
Shit.
He hadn’t meant to drift off. He never did that. He was still holding a pen; the ink bleeding into the pad beneath his hand. How long had he been out?
“What time is it?” He rubbed his eyes.
“Four.”
In the morning. Blimey.
He glanced around at the files surrounding him in uneven stacks. Statements clipped and re-clipped. Search logs filed. A printed map of the woodland annotated in three different inks. And beside it all sat the huge cardboard archive box labelled Robyn Whitton.
He hadn’t had time to read it in full. But he’d read enough.
Enough to know how quickly momentum could die.
Structure had drowned the afternoon. He’d chaired the initial strategy meeting once High Risk had been confirmed, allocating actions line by line: house-to-house on the immediate streets bordering the woodland.
He’d authorised the woodland grid search and expanded it twice when the first sweep produced nothing.
Dog units were brought in before dusk, and he’d kept them out longer than was comfortable once the temperature dropped and scent deteriorated with the torrential rain.
By early evening he’d rotated officers, refusing to scale down simply because it was dark and wet.
During the changeover, he reviewed the initial statements himself rather than waiting for summaries.
Tightened timelines. Cross-checked alibis.
Flagged one witness who described a vehicle vaguely, but with enough certainty to justify ANPR pulls from the arterial road two miles out.
At nineteen hundred, he’d sat down with Emily Fisher’s father.
Not to interrogate him. And not because he lacked confidence in Murray in her role as FLO—she was thorough, measured, exactly what a family needed in the first hours.
But liaison wasn’t only about updates and reassurance.
It was about observation. Quiet pressure.
Watching what surfaced when people believed they were simply being supported.
And the first place to look in any disappearance was the family.
Harrison wanted his own read.
His more experienced one.
Glen Fisher had been sitting at the kitchen table when Harrison joined him, still dressed in navy work trousers and a dark fleece bearing the logo of the firm he worked for.
Steel-toed boots remained on his feet, leaving faint marks across the kitchen tiles.
A mug of tea sat untouched between his hands.
He looked exhausted.
He worked at the Lancaster Industrial Estate on the edge of town as a maintenance supervisor.
Locals still knew it as the old steelworks.
The place was mostly fabrication by Harrison’s first look at it—cut steel, welded sections, parts stacked and shipped out rather than forged on site.
Fisher oversaw teams, contractors and site access.
People came to him with problems. He knew who was on shift, who wasn’t, who could be trusted with a job and who cut corners when no one was looking.
It gave him reach without the sort of title that drew attention.
Connections, without needing to name them.
Local. Very local. The sort of job, and the sort of town, where Fisher would know people everywhere. And people would know Emily.
Harrison pulled out the chair opposite. “Mr Fisher, I’m DI Black. I’m leading the investigation into Emily’s disappearance.”
Glen nodded. “Murray said.”
His voice was rough. Yorkshire accent, local. He rubbed both palms over his face before looking at Harrison again. “Tell me you’ve found summat.”
“Nothing I can tell you yet.”
The disappointment was immediate.
Glen looked down at his tea. Harrison let him. Then he started simply. Routine first. Emily’s movements. Her friends. Work. College. Boyfriends. Whether there was anyone new in her life. Most of it Harrison already knew from Murray’s conversations with him, but that wasn’t really the point.
He wanted to hear it himself.
Glen answered carefully, like a man accustomed to being asked a question and giving the information required. He wasn’t even annoyed at being asked the same things again and again.
Then Harrison came to the argument. “What was it about?”
Glen’s jaw tightened. “Same bloody thing everything’s about lately. Her wanting to do what she wants and me apparently being the bastard who won’t let her.”
“What did she want to do?”
“Go to Manchester.”
“To meet Leo Young?”
A flicker of surprise crossed Glen’s face. “You know about him?”
“We do.”
Glen sat back, shaking his head. “Some lad off the internet. She’s never even met him. And I’m supposed to wave her off to Manchester on her own?”
“You said no.”
“Course I bloody said no.”
There was heat there. Harrison watched it rise and disappear almost as quickly.
One officer had already tracked down Leo Young after a conversation with one of Emily’s distraught friends.
The boy in Manchester whom Emily had met online and asked to meet her in person.
Local police had spoken to him. He confirmed that he didn’t know where she was.
But he had admitted they planned to meet the following weekend to attend the Neon Arcade gig in Manchester Arena.
Emily had told him she wasn’t allowed to travel without permission.
He’d tried to persuade her to come anyway.
But since that morning, he’d sent her several more texts.
None had been answered. None had been opened.
Harrison had screenshots of the conversation sitting in his inbox, the timestamps stark against the blank silence that followed.
Glen rubbed a hand across his mouth. “She’s seventeen. Nearly an adult. She reminds me often enough. But that don’t mean she knows everything, does it?”
“About?”
“People. Lads. Men!” Glen flapped a hand. “Fucking strangers off the internet. She thinks cause she’s nearly an adult she can do whatever she likes. But she’s my daughter, for fuck’s sake!”
His voice cracked and he looked away sharply.
For several seconds he said nothing. Then his shoulders moved once and he pressed the heel of his hand hard against one eye. “Sorry.”
“You don’t need to apologise.”
“I should’ve just let her fucking go.”
Harrison stayed quiet.
Glen shook his head. “That’s what keeps going round in my head. If I’d said yes, she wouldn’t have stormed out. If I’d gone and picked her up myself…” He stopped, swallowed hard and looked up at the ceiling. “Christ.”
A tear slipped down his cheek. He wiped it away almost angrily. It looked real. More importantly, it felt real.
Guilt frequently did.
Harrison waited until Glen had pulled himself back together before continuing. “You said you expected Emily home around eleven?”
“Usually, aye.”
“But you went to sleep.”
Glen’s eyes came back to him. “I’d been at work since half six.”
“And you’d argued with her.”
“Aye.”
“You knew she was angry.”
“Aye.”
“But when she didn’t come home, you went to bed.”
Glen stared at him for a moment. “I fell asleep.”
“Where?”
“Sofa.”
“What time?”
“I don’t know. Half eleven? Maybe earlier.”
“So after you text her?”
“Aye.”
Harrison waited.
Glen’s expression tightened. “I’d done a twelve-hour shift. Got home, had the row with Emily, she went to work and I had a couple of beers in front of the telly. I text her to ask if she were on her way then I fell asleep. I didn’t decide to go to fucking bed while my daughter was missing.”
That had been the first real flash of anger.
Glen seemed to realise how sharply he’d spoken and immediately looked away. “Sorry.”
“It’s alright.”
“No, it’s not.” He dragged both hands over his face. “Nowt about this is alright.”
Harrison continued with the questions.
And Glen’s answers aligned with what he’d already given Murray. If anything, they aligned a little too cleanly. No drift. No hesitation. No need to circle back and correct himself. Straight lines, laid carefully end to end.
But people mistook inconsistency for deception far too often. Some witnesses rambled. Some contradicted themselves. Others repeated the same account almost word for word because they’d already gone over it fifty times in their own heads.
Glen Fisher struck Harrison as the latter.
So he let the silence stretch once or twice, to see what the man filled it with.
Very little.
Then Harrison asked, “If Emily got stuck somewhere, who would she call for a lift?”
Glen darted his gaze towards the hallway. To the stairs. Then turned back to Harrison. “She had an arrangement with Claire’s mum.”
Not exactly the question he’d asked.
“If Claire’s mum wasn’t available?”
“She’d ring.”
“You?”
A beat. “Me. Aye.”
“Would she accept a lift from somebody else?”
Something changed.
Not much. A slight tightening around the mouth. A straightening of the shoulders. “She’d know better than that.”
Harrison regarded him.
Not no.
Not I don’t think so.
She’d know better.
“What does that mean?”
Glen frowned. “Exactly what I said. She knows not to get into cars with people she doesn’t know.”
“What about somebody she does know?”
“She’d still ring me.”
“Always?”
“Aye.”
Firm.
Defensive.
More force than the question required. But Harrison had just spent ten minutes listening to a father blame himself for not collecting his daughter from work.
Of course the subject of lifts struck a nerve.
And it painted a picture of the household.
Rules. Boundaries. Control. Not necessarily aggressive, but perhaps overzealous.
A father struggling with the fact his daughter was reaching a milestone age and his authority over her was rapidly disappearing.
On balance though, Glen Fisher aligned with expectations: protective, reactive and overwhelmed. A man used to managing situations, tightening his grip when things slipped out of it. A man whose daughter was missing and who had already begun constructing all the ways he could have prevented it.
Nothing there that justified pulling focus.
Not yet, at least.