Page 52 of Too Close To Home

The reporter pushed. “But the woodland path is the same, isn’t it? And she’s a young girl of near the same age. Same time of night she went missing? From the same pub?”

“We’re following all lines of inquiry,” Harrison cut her off. “Speculation doesn’t assist an active investigation.”

He then stepped back before momentum could build. The microphones lowered. The camera light switched off. But the conversation swelled instantly, reporters already framing headlines in their heads. And as Harrison nodded his thanks, he turned back through the station doors with one name running around in his head.

Whitton.

If that was one of the first questions out of the gate, then this town hadn’t forgotten. Which meant the history ran deeper than the thin briefing Calder had handed him that morning, which had been nothing more than a summary skimming the surface and sidestepping the significance. More commentary on Jake than on Robyn. Emphasis on temperament than on tragedy.

Which meant it hadn’t been accidental.

Calder, and everyone else in that building, had chosen not to front-load it. To keep Robyn Whitton in the margins. But once the bulletin aired, that choice wouldn’t matter. The name Whitton would be back in circulation. Passed between kitchen tables. Repeated in shop stockrooms. Murmured at the school gates under the guise of concern. Thirteen years of dust disturbed in a single news cycle.

And Harrison didn’t know what that would do to this town.

To Jake Whitton.

His family.

Nor to Emily Fisher, whose disappearance threatened to blur into old grief.

He pictured Jake seeing it. Hearing his sister’s name spoken aloud again, framed beside another missing girl. Watching the past dragged into the daylight.

Would the appeal steady him?

Or would it strike a match to something that had been waiting, dry and ready, all this time?

Harrison turned on his heel and pushed back through the station doors; the change in atmosphere immediate. Warm air, ringing phones, officers glancing up as he passed. He didn’t slow as he reached the incident room.

“Someone get me the Whitton case file.”

Chairs stilled. A pen stopped mid-scribble.

The lack of response went on for far too long.

So Harrison swept his gaze across them all and let out his Met voice, “Now!”

chapter eight

Rotten Timber

Jake tapped out a restless rhythm on the cracked leather of the steering wheel.

Kick. Snare. Kick-kick. Snare.

It was his beat. The one living inside him and keeping his head from running too far ahead of him. It kept his hands busy, too. From launching out of this van and knocking on the door he was court-ordered not to go near.

Parked along a narrow side street off the market square, he kept the old stone terraces in his periphery. They leaned into one another, slate roofs dipping unevenly with hanging baskets swinging from black iron brackets. A butcher’s van had double-parked further up the road, back doors open, raw meat scents drifting in the air. Somewhere nearby, a church bell marked the quarter-hour. And across from him, above a small hardware shop with sun-faded paintwork and a handwritten “Back in five” sign in the window, sat a modest first-floor flat. Cream curtains, too thin to hide anything properly. A plant on the sill that had seen better days.

The curtain twitched.

Jake didn’t turn his head fully. He wouldn’t stare. That way led to trouble.

But he caught the motion all the same.

This was a typical Hartswick mid-afternoon lull. No traffic beyond the occasional tractor rumbling past the end of the street. A pensioner shuffling along with a shopping trolley. The smell of someone’s washing drying somewhere out of sight.

Ordinary.