Page 14 of Too Close To Home

Because another girl was missing.

Another family was sitting at a kitchen table, staring at a clock.

Jake stepped forward anyway. Right up to the tape. Close enough for it to brush his stained hoodie.

The young constable placed her hand on his chest. “Sir.”

Jake curled his hands into fists, opened them, then curled them again. One more step and they’d have him. Part of him almost wanted them to. But he breathed in. Once. Twice.

Then he stepped back. “Fine. I’ll wait.”

“For what?” the officer asked.

“Whoever’s in charge.”

The sergeant nodded. “CID are on their way.”

“Good.” Jake folded his arms over the ketchup stain on his jumper. “Be pleased to meet them.”

He then moved off to the verge, fixing his gaze on the mist swallowing the treeline, as if staring hard enough might force it to give something up.

If they missed something.

If they walked past it.

If this became another one of those searches…

His jaw tightened until it hurt.

He couldn’t let it.

Not again.

chapter three

Last Known Location

Harrison peered up at Hartswick Police Station.

There was no glass frontage here. No chrome signage. No revolving doors and layered security like the Met buildings he’d walked in and out of for twenty years. No, this was a squat, red-brick building, set back from the market square, looking as if it had edged there reluctantly decades ago and never quite grown into the century.

A Union Jack flag hung limply from a short pole above the entrance, matching those that had gone up recently around the village for nothing more than a political statement. The blue and white POLICE sign had faded at the corners, and the narrow car park ran down one side of the building, containing three marked CID spaces and a row of mud-splattered response cars with grit caught in the wheel arches. Beyond that, the land dipped into fields.

It smelled different.

Every station had its own version of police air. Old filing cabinets, instant coffee, damp uniforms, floor polish never quite masking what it was trying to. But Hartswick’s CID corridor carried an undertone of radiator dust and stale biscuits. The heating clanked rather than hummed. Somewhere, a kettle clicked off.

Quiet, too.

London stations had a pulse. They throbbed even before sunrise. Radios crackled. Custody doors slammed. Phones trilled in overlapping bursts. People moved with urgency, almost aggressively. Here, Harrison could hear his own footfalls as he crossed the corridor. The scuff of leather on linoleum. The faint rattle of the old radiator against the wall. The fluttering of village event flyers pinned on the noticeboard beside force directives, as if summer fetes and safeguarding policy carried equal weight.

It felt… contained.

As if crime here arrived politely. Knocked before entering.

He knew better.

The CID office sat at the rear of the building, overlooking a strip of scrub grass and, beyond it, the low rise of moorland. Not much separated town from open country. Not much at all. He could see how something might disappear out there. How land could swallow things whole if people chose not to look too closely.