Chapter Seventeen Cold Ground #3
“Stopping the interview at twelve fifty-eight.” Harrison clicked the stop button on the recorder. “Andy, you’ll remain in police custody while we review the evidence gathered so far. I suggest you calm down before we resume.”
Andy held up his hands. “Perfectly calm here, Detective. I didn’t do it. Jake Whitton did. Go fucking arrest him.”
The solicitor tapped Andy’s arm as Harrison stood and Calder followed suit, them both stepping out into the corridor and leaving the uniformed officer to escort Andy back to the holding cells.
Then they walked through the station towards the incident room, the usual background noise of ringing phones and murmured conversations like static in Harrison’s jumbled mind.
Jake Whitton. Donald Whitton. Abuse. Murder.
The rumour sat there like grit under his skin.
By the time they reached the CID office, the tension pressed behind Harrison’s eyes, and he dropped the case file onto the desk to pinch the bridge of his nose.
Christ.
He hated cases at this stage. The point where every thread seemed possible and none of them felt solid enough to hold. When facts and speculation started tangling together, and the wrong word in the wrong ear could send the whole thing spiralling.
Behind him, Calder stopped. Said nothing. Watched him. Then, cautiously, “You alright, sir?”
Harrison dropped his hand to slap the desk. “Is there any possible shred of truth in what he said in there?”
God, he fucking hoped not.
Calder leaned his hip against the desk. “Small towns run on stories, sir. Half of them are lies and the other half are worse.”
Harrison said nothing.
Because the professional part of him knew that was exactly right.
But the image of Jake standing outside the station an hour earlier, him furious, shaking, desperate for answers, sat somewhere uncomfortably close to the surface.
And now Andy Mitchell had dragged his name straight into the middle of the investigation.
Calder studied him for another moment. “You want me to keep trying to trace Whitton’s alibi?”
God. Jake’s alibi.
The man in the Nirvana T-shirt.
The man Jake had been having sex with.
Harrison forced his attention back to the evidence. “Multiple witnesses already put Jake at the gig, and the photographs back them up. He wasn’t anywhere near Emily when she disappeared.”
Saying it aloud helped.
Facts. Evidence. Things he could trust.
“Aye, but still worth tying up the rest of his movements?”
Harrison sighed. Annoyingly, Calder was right.
“Yes. Fine. Keep trying to identify him.” He straightened the file in front of him.
“But Mitchell throwing Jake’s name at us doesn’t change what we already know.
Let’s see what the search team comes back with.
Get forensics onto the vehicle and the house. ”
Calder pushed away from the desk.
Harrison opened the file again, but Andy’s words were still there, lodged somewhere uncomfortable in the back of his mind.
Not the accusation that Jake had anything to do with Emily.
Nothing they had found supported that, and the evidence they already had put him elsewhere when she disappeared.
Tracing the man from the pub would close the remaining gap in his movements, but Harrison had no reason to believe it would change anything.
It was everything else.
Robyn. Donald. Teddy. And Andy’s claim that he’d confronted Jake with the same allegations thirteen years ago. Rumour or not, Harrison couldn’t afford to ignore it.
Especially when those rumours concerned a girl who’d vanished without a trace.
But as he stared down at the case notes spread across the table, the words refused to stay still.
He read the same paragraph twice without taking any of it in.
And for the first time he’d allowed himself in years, he desperately wished he could talk to Chris.
Lay the whole mess across the dining table the way they used to.
Case files between coffee mugs, the low hum of the kitchen light above them while Harrison talked himself around the problem.
Chris would listen. He’d always been good at that.
Never rushed him. Never dismissed the instincts Harrison sometimes struggled to trust in himself.
He’d wait until Harrison had worked through every angle, then tell him what he always had.
Trust yourself, Harry.
Then he’d pull Harrison into him and, for a while, make everything else stop. Sometimes that meant nothing more than Chris’s arms around him on the sofa. Sometimes it meant sex.
Christ, Harrison missed that too.
He shut his eyes.
No. He couldn’t do this. Chris was gone.
But the need didn’t disappear with the thought of him. If anything, it sharpened. The need for release. For closeness. Strong arms around him. Someone else taking over for long enough that Harrison didn’t have to think, or decide, or carry another fucking thing.
Just for a little while.
The thought lingered.
And somewhere between one breath and the next, it stopped being Chris he was thinking about.
Chris’s ghost was suddenly silent.