Chapter Ten Soundcheck
Soundcheck
Jake left Harrison’s cottage with a knot sitting low in his gut.
There were a few reasons for that.
The first was simple. The DI had read the file.
His file. Robyn’s file. All those statements and photographs and timelines boxed up in neat police language, where grief got flattened into paragraphs and Jake became nothing more than male, violent, prior conviction.
No matter what Harrison had said, no matter how calm or reasonable he’d sounded, Jake knew how it worked.
Coppers saw the file first.
The person second.
If they ever got that far.
Didn’t matter that Harrison was new here.
Or that he was some southern blow-in with soft vowels and sharp suits and none of the town’s history weighing on him yet.
It certainly didn’t matter that he had kind eyes, or that quiet, crooked smile that made Jake want to keep seeing it. Keep bringing it out. Make him smile.
It didn’t even matter that Jake had recognised something in him.
Grief recognised grief. Didn’t need a file to see that.
Because he was still a copper.
Pulling out of the narrow lane, Jake headed down towards town, the van rattling as it hit the first stretch of uneven road and early morning Hartswick waking up.
Grey light sat heavy over the rooftops, a sky that never quite committed to being day in Yorkshire.
Shop shutters were still half down along the high street.
The butcher’s van was parked crooked outside the square.
Somewhere a bin lorry groaned as it reversed.
Normal sounds. Normal morning. Except there was nothing normal about the town today.
Jake tightened his grip on the steering wheel.
Second reason for the knot in his stomach.
Emily Fisher hadn’t been found yet.
Which meant one of two things. Either she’d turn up safe somewhere, embarrassed and hungover, and the town would breathe again.
Or she wouldn’t.
And if that happened…
Jake exhaled hard and turned onto the main road towards the estate where his first job waited, forcing himself to focus.
Roofing wouldn’t forgive distraction. So he’d bury himself in it.
Rather than under it. But as he drove past the petrol station on the edge of town, past the familiar rows of terraces and the narrow lane, eventually leading up to the woodland path, his mind kept circling back.
Because that third reason for the knot?
Harrison himself.
Jake hadn’t meant to go inside the cottage.
He’d only meant to fix the slipped tiles, make sure the rain didn’t get in before the next storm rolled through.
Quick job. Twenty minutes tops. In and out.
Except when he’d climbed down and pushed open the door to tell the man he was done, Harrison had been asleep on the sofa, a chipped mug slipping dangerously from his hand as his head tilted back on the cushion.
He’d looked exhausted. Yet somehow, content.
So Jake had stood there longer than he meant to.
Long enough to notice the shadows under the man’s eyes.
He could’ve left. Should have. Instead, he’d taken the mug before it dropped, rinsed it along with his own in the sink, shoved a couple of half-packed kitchen boxes further out of the walkway so Harrison wouldn’t trip over them, then rummaged through some boxes until he’d found a blanket. Then draped it over him.
As if he had any right to do that.
As if he was someone who looked after him.
Jake slowed for the junction lights. It meant nothing. That’s what he told himself, anyway. He’d known the man less than twenty-four hours. Whatever this strange pull was, this flash of recognition and awareness every time Harrison looked at him, it couldn’t mean anything.
Jake Whitton didn’t do relationships.
He’d tried. A couple of times. Blokes who lasted longer than a few nights, longer than the usual hook-ups filling the quiet hours after gigs or long weeks on roofs. But they all reached the same conclusion, eventually. Jake came with too much baggage. Too much anger. Too much history.
So they moved on.
And Jake stayed right where he was. Where hook-ups became the norm. Not getting to know the men he fucked became the norm. Not caring became his norm. Blokes like Brodie with no substance or sticking power became the norm.
The traffic lights turned green, and Jake drove onto his first job.
Work. That was usually the answer to most things in his life.
When Robyn disappeared, he’d searched the woods until his boots fell apart.
When the police packed up the tape and the town decided it was time to move on, he’d buried himself in labour instead.
Roofs. Scaffolds. Drums. Anything loud enough to drown out the noise in his head.
He could do it again.
The first job was a slipped slate on a narrow terrace off the high street. The owner was already outside waiting with a mug of tea.
“Y’alright, Jake. Won’t take long, will it?”
“Half hour.”
He fixed three slates and a rusted nail before the tea had properly cooled. From the roof he could see half the town waking up below him. Chimneys, delivery vans, a faint siren somewhere in the distance. And when he climbed down, he drank the tea, pocketed thirty quid cash, and moved on.
Second job was a chimney stack on the edge of the estate where the mortar had started crumbling between the bricks.
Bigger job. Jake mixed fresh mortar in the back of the van and spent the next hour repointing the stack while the van blasted out the morning news.
Emily Fisher’s name came up. He tried not to listen.
And when he climbed down this time, there was another mug waiting.
Coffee. Too sweet. Fifty quid folded into his palm.
Two drinks. Eighty quid.
The last job was gutters on a bungalow near the old school. Leaves and moss had clogged the run so badly water spilled down the walls. Ten minutes with a scoop and a hose and it ran clear again.
Another cup of tea.
No cash this time. He knew they couldn’t pay. So he took the tea and pretended he’d been gasping for it, then chucked most of it into the bush.
Three drinks. Still eighty quid.
That was the problem with small-town jobs. People paid in gratitude and hot beverages more often than they paid properly.
By late afternoon he’d run out of roofs he could pretend to concentrate on, and he wiped his hands on a rag, tossed the tools into the van, to head home along the back road skirting the woodland.
The police tape was still there. Bright blue against the trees, fluttering between two fence posts. No search teams now. No uniforms.
Which meant they still hadn’t found her.
Jake slowed as he passed the path entrance. For a moment he considered pulling over, walking it again like he had a hundred times thirteen years ago. But the thought of that bend in the trees, the place Robyn had last been seen, sat heavy in his chest.
So he drove on.
Past his street.
Past the turning he should’ve taken.
Ten minutes later, he pulled onto a cracked driveway he hadn’t been on in years. He’d barely killed the engine when his phone rang. Unknown number.
He frowned and answered. “Aye. Jake Whitton.”
“Jake, lad. Ron Briggs. Knew your old man.”
That narrowed it down to roughly half of Hartswick.
“Eh up, Ron. Y’alright?”
“Aye, not bad. Listen, our loft wants insulating. Been meaning to get it done for bloody years. You do that sort of thing?”
“Aye, I can have a look.”
“Good lad. Your dad said you were handy.”
“My dad says a lot of things.”
Ron chuckled. “You want to pop round sometime, give us a price?”
“Send me your address. I’ll fit you in.”
“Right y’are. Cheers, Jake. Ta-ra.”
“Ta-ra.”
Jake hung up, shoved the phone back into his pocket and glanced at the house.
The place hadn’t improved with time. It sagged into itself as if it had given up somewhere around two thousand and eight.
Pebbledash stained with long brown rain tracks.
The wooden porch slats had rotted through in places, paint peeling back in thin curls.
Even the guttering had bowed away from the roofline where the brackets had rusted loose.
But he got out.
The path up to the house was a narrow strip of cracked concrete half-eaten by weeds.
An empty lager can rolled gently when his boot nudged it.
The yellowing net curtains twitched in the window before settling again.
So he knocked. It took a while. Long enough for Jake to wonder if the man inside was pretending not to be home.
Then the door dragged open with a scrape.
The smell hit him first.
Stale smoke. Damp plaster. Weed.
The man standing there looked about the same as the house.
As if maintenance had stopped years ago.
Big fella, too, though less rugby forward these days and more Michelin Man gone to seed.
A vest hung loose over a gut that had long since surrendered to a poor diet, joggers stained down one leg.
Dark stubble shadowed a heavy jaw, and his hair stuck out in sleep-flattened clumps as he squinted into the daylight as if he’d not seen sun in years.
“Fuck you want?”
Jake grimaced. “Jesus, mate. Open a bloody window.” He then brushed past him into the hallway.
The place was worse inside. Even Harrison’s half-packed house had more life in it than this.
So Jake pushed through into the living room to open a window and rid it of the dank smell.
The curtains stuck to the frames before peeling away with a soft tear of fabric.
The television muttered to itself in the corner, the sofa half buried under empty beer cans and collapsed takeaway boxes.
He started clearing that, too.
Gavin shuffled into the doorway behind him, scrubbing a hand through his matted hair. “What you doing?”
Jake glanced over his shoulder. “Clearing your mess.”