Page 62 of Too Close To Home

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.

But Harrison told Murray to keep close to him. FLO coverage would continue around the clock, and Harrison wanted to know if anything changed.

So by twenty-one hundred, he’d pushed for land ownership data bordering the woodland perimeter. It wasn’t suspicion yet, more instinct. He didn’t like blank edges on maps. At twenty-two hundred, he reviewed the search logs line by line. Where officers had walked. Where they hadn’t. Which patches of undergrowth were too dense for a quick sweep and would require daylight and proper resources.

After midnight the station quietened.

That was when his real work had begun.

Not visible work. Thinking work.

He’d spread Emily’s timeline across the desk and worked through it piece by piece, pressing on the weak spots. Testing for gaps. Assumptions. Anywhere the story might bend. If she’d planned to leave voluntarily, there would usually be signs. Preparation. Money withdrawn. Clothes missing. Digital chatter with friends about where she was going or how she’d get there. So far, there had been none of that. No missing belongings. No unusual banking activity. No messages suggesting she’d been planning an escape.

So he’d requested deeper background checks. Not because there was an obvious suspect—Deacon’s alibi with his girlfriend checked out, meaning he was off the official suspect list—but because the absence of one bothered him.

Around half-past one, the Robyn Whitton case file arrived, dropped onto Harrison’s desk by an overly eager constable who looked pleased to have been trusted with it. He already had access to the digitised material in the system, but old investigations lived differently on paper. Original statements. Hand-drawn maps. Search logs. Decision records. Sometimes the truth sat in the margins of those.

So he hadn’t started with the witness statements.

He’d started with the search strategy.

That was where investigations failed. Not in what people said, but in the decisions made about where to look.

The initial perimeter map lay folded inside the file, yellowing at the edges. Harrison had flattened it across the desk.