Chapter Twenty-Three Containment
Containment
Blue lights bled across the terraced houses of Dew Lane, pulsing through net curtains and windshields.
By the time Harrison turned in, the place was choked with response units.
Two marked cars angled across the kerb, an ambulance half-mounted on the pavement, its rear doors flung wide as paramedics hauled equipment in and out.
He pulled up hard behind them, cutting the engine to breathe out his apprehension.
He’d kept Jake on the line long enough to get the essentials.
Address, condition, confirmation she was breathing.
Then everything else snapped into place.
He’d notified control and the job had been graded as an immediate response.
The nearest units were deployed within seconds.
An ambulance was requested, the priority changing in an instant from search to preservation of life.
By the time Harrison had grabbed his keys, the response was already moving.
He’d circulated the vehicle Jake had described and placed a marker against it so ANPR could pick it up across the network.
That wasn’t something to sit on. Not tonight.
Then he’d redirected Calder and sent him straight to the King’s Arms with explicit instructions to find Brodie and keep him there.
Not an arrest, but he wasn’t someone Harrison was prepared to lose sight of either.
Murray stayed where she was, exactly where Harrison needed her.
With the family. Holding that line as FLO, keeping them informed without letting the situation unravel before they had something solid to give them.
And to provide feedback on how the father responded to the news his daughter had been found and where.
Because in the background, the intel caught up.
The address had come back first. Mick Underwood.
Lancaster Industrial Estate staff. A direct-line employee of Emily Fisher’s father.
That slotted into place alongside everything else they’d been circling without quite reaching.
The van. Hired, not owned, raising its own questions.
Where from, when, under what name. Whether it matched the vehicle that had brushed the edge of their enquiries earlier whose driver had never come forward.
Harrison set that running before he’d even turned the ignition.
He got out of the car, smoothing his tie against the breeze. Officers glanced up, recognised him, moving to make space. He took it in as he walked. Numbers, positioning, containment. Registering what had been done right.
“Where is she?” he asked a uniformed officer in high-vis, not breaking stride.
“Paramedics have her, sir. Bringing her out now. Found in the loft. Male who located her is outside.”
Harrison nodded, turning his attention to the front of the house as movement gathered there. The stretcher came through the doorway a second later. And for a moment, the rest of the scene narrowed around it.
Emily Fisher lay swallowed beneath blankets, an oxygen mask covering most of her face as a paramedic leaned in, speaking low, keeping her comforted whether she was fully conscious or not. Her skin was pale beneath the wash of blue light, lips dry, hair tangled where it had been pushed back.
But her chest rose.
Faint. Uneven.
Alive.
Harrison’s breath left him slowly, the impact of the past days drifting enough to allow it. Not relief exactly, but something close to it.
“Clear a path,” someone called, and the officers nearest moved, guiding the stretcher through. The tight choreography of it continued without pause as she was loaded into the ambulance. Doors slammed, engine revved, lights flaring brighter as it pulled away, carrying her out of it.
Harrison watched it go, then he turned back to the uniform. “Any sign of the suspect?”
“Negative so far. Vehicle’s circulated. ANPR’s live.”
“Keep the outer contained.” Harrison gestured. “No one in or out unless they’re logged. I want door-to-door started now. Anyone saw that van leave, I want times and direction.”
“Yes, sir.”
It was only then, with the immediate movement settling into something more controlled, that his attention drifted properly across the street. To him.
Jake.
He stood beyond the cluster of officers, near his van, as if that was where someone had told him to be and he hadn’t yet worked out how to leave.
There was something about him that felt misplaced here.
Or maybe it was that all-consuming presence he had.
The essence Harrison had noticed the first time he’d stood on a woodland path and demanded answers.
Jake Whitton belonged somewhere louder, brighter.
On a stage. Behind a drum kit. Anywhere but here, under the wash of blue lights, among mist and rain and the dreariness of the aftermath of a young girl having almost been lost forever.
Like his sister.
Dust clung to his clothes, his hair, his skin.
And his hands…the hands Harrison had noticed before for entirely different reasons, were scraped and dirt-lined, evidence of what he’d forced his way through to get to her.
That damage didn’t come from thinking things through.
That came from acting before anyone could stop him.
From reckless impulsivity. From a desperate man.
A hero.
But even from where he stood, Harrison could see the tremors. Subtle, but there. Adrenaline leaving him in uneven waves.
Harrison moved towards him.
Not because procedure demanded it.
Because something else did.
Up close, the effects of what he’d done were clearer.
There was no fight left in him. No edge, no anger waiting to snap at those in uniform around him.
Just the aftershock of it all, sitting too close to the surface.
The body caught up with what the mind had pushed through.
Harrison had seen it countless times. On victims. Witnesses.
Officers who weren’t as hardened as they thought they were.
Harrison lived in this world.
Chris had, too.
Jake didn’t. And it wasn’t fair that he had to.
Jake looked up then, as if he knew he was being watched.
Their eyes met. And everything else—the radios, the movement, the officers stepping in and out of the house, the job Harrison still had to run—fell away in an instant.
It was just them. Not detective and witness.
But two men, finding each other amidst the chaos.
And all he could think was how a day ago, Harrison had stood in his bedsit and unravelled enough to let something as simple as a kiss knock the breath out of him.
And Jake had been the one to steady him.
Ground him. Pull him back from the brink without asking for anything in return.
Now it was Harrison’s turn.
“Hey.” Harrison kept his voice low as he came to a stop in front of him.
Jake glanced over Harrison, to the ambulance pulling away, blue lights and sirens cutting through. “How is she?”
“Alive.” Harrison tilted his neck to put himself in Jake’s line of sight. “Because of you.”
Jake hung his head, teeth catching on his bottom lip. The reaction wasn’t pride. Not relief either. That was uncertainty. Fear. “Am I in trouble?”
Harrison frowned. “For what?”
“Breaking in.”
“You had grounds. I’d have done the same with the information you had.” Then, softer, “Though next time, you can call me first.”
“Can I?”
“Course.”
Jake seemed to think about that. Then he took a breath, chest rising, making the pendant on his necklace glint against the blue lights. “Can I call you for something that isn’t…this?”
That caught Harrison off guard in a way nothing else had. Highly inappropriate. Poor timing. Entirely the wrong place. And yet…it was the way Jake looked at him. Open. Unfiltered. Not asking for anything more than the possibility.
So Harrison gave him it, “Yeah. I’d like that.”
Jake smiled, but it was brief. Then he shook his head. “I could’ve been wrong. I didn’t know if he’d come back. Or what he’d done. I didn’t…” He dragged a hand through his hair, leaving more dust behind. “I didn’t think. I just…went in. Like I always do.”
Harrison stepped in, rubbing his hand up and down Jake’s arm. “Hey. It’s alright. You did what needed doing. Nothing is coming back on you about this. You followed your instincts, and it paid off.”
“This was luck. That’s all it were. I was wrong about Andy. About Brodie. I could’ve been wrong about this but—”
“You weren’t.” Harrison lifted his hand from Jake’s arm to cup his face. “You were right. You got her.”
Jake stilled under his touch. And he looked at him, as if trying to take that in and couldn’t quite make it fit. Then his eyes shuttered, lashes lowering as he swallowed hard. As if struggling with what he felt. What he was going to say.
God, Harrison ached for him.
“When I saw her…” Jake swallowed. “When I pulled that blanket back and saw her hair…” His voice faltered, catching somewhere between his chest and his throat.
“I wanted it to be Robyn.” The confession hung between them, stripped of everything but the truth.
“And I were…” He shook his head. “I were so fucking gutted that it weren’t.
” He looked up then, meeting Harrison’s gaze head-on, not hiding from it, not softening it.
“I hate that. Hate that I have to feel fucking guilty about that.”
Harrison drew a breath. Not because it surprised him, but because it didn’t.
He understood it. Too well. And he brushed his thumb along Jake’s cheek, feeling the grit of dust and stubble, the heat of his skin beneath it, and wanting, so very badly, to tell him.
To share the pain. But it wasn’t that moment.
He wasn’t sure he’d ever get the words out anyway.
So he said, “That’s understandable.”
And it was.
God, it was.