Page 59 of Too Close To Home

Dead Air

“Harrison?”

Harrison bolted upright in his chair and blinked up at DCI Pollard standing over him in the incident room.

Shit.

He hadn’t meant to drift off. He never did that. He was still holding a pen; the ink bleeding into the pad beneath his hand. How long had he been out?

“What time is it?” He rubbed his eyes.

“Four.”

In the morning. Blimey.

He glanced around at the files surrounding him in uneven stacks. Statements clipped and re-clipped. Search logs filed. A printed map of the woodland annotated in three different inks. And beside it all sat the huge cardboard archive box labelled Robyn Whitton.

He hadn’t had time to read it in full. But he’d read enough.

Enough to know how quickly momentum could die.

Structure had drowned the afternoon. He’d chaired the initial strategy meeting once High Risk had been confirmed, allocating actions line by line: house-to-house on the immediate streets bordering the woodland. He’d authorised the woodland grid search and expanded it twice when the first sweep produced nothing. Dog units were brought in before dusk, and he’d kept them out longer than was comfortable once the temperature dropped and scent deteriorated with the torrential rain.

By early evening he’d rotated officers, refusing to scale down simply because it was dark and wet. During the changeover, he reviewed the initial statements himself rather than waiting for summaries. Tightened timelines. Cross-checked alibis. Flagged one witness who described a vehicle vaguely, but with enough certainty to justify ANPR pulls from the arterial road two miles out.

At nineteen hundred, he’d sat down with Emily Fisher’s father.

Not to interrogate him. And not because he lacked confidence in Murray in her role as FLO—she was thorough, measured, exactly what a family needed in the first hours. But liaison wasn’t only about updates and reassurance. It was about observation. Quiet pressure. Watching what surfaced when people believed they were simply being supported.

And the first place to look in any disappearance was the family.

Harrison wanted his own read.

His more experienced one.

Glen Fisher had been sitting at the kitchen table when Harrison joined him, still dressed in navy work trousers and a dark fleece bearing the logo of the firm he worked for. Steel-toed boots remained on his feet, leaving faint marks across the kitchen tiles. A mug of tea sat untouched between his hands.

He looked exhausted.

He worked at the Lancaster Industrial Estate on the edge of town as a maintenance supervisor. Locals still knew it as the old steelworks. The place was mostly fabrication by Harrison’s first look at it—cut steel, welded sections, parts stacked and shipped out rather than forged on site. Fisher oversaw teams, contractors and site access. People came to him with problems. He knew who was on shift, who wasn’t, who could be trusted with a job and who cut corners when no one was looking. It gave him reach without the sort of title that drew attention.

Connections, without needing to name them.

Local. Very local. The sort of job, and the sort of town, where Fisher would know people everywhere. And people would know Emily.

Harrison pulled out the chair opposite. “Mr Fisher, I’m DI Black. I’m leading the investigation into Emily’s disappearance.”

Glen nodded. “Murray said.”

His voice was rough. Yorkshire accent, local. He rubbed both palms over his face before looking at Harrison again. “Tell me you’ve found summat.”

“Nothing I can tell you yet.”

The disappointment was immediate.

Glen looked down at his tea. Harrison let him. Then he started simply. Routine first. Emily’s movements. Her friends. Work. College. Boyfriends. Whether there was anyone new in her life. Most of it Harrison already knew from Murray’s conversations with him, but that wasn’t really the point.

He wanted to hear it himself.