Page 147 of Too Close To Home

In reality…

Harrison leaned back, tapping his pen on his notebook as he worked through it again. There was enough here to justify the extension. No question. The superintendent had signed it off with little pushback. CPS would at least entertain it. But charging? Not even close. Not for Emily. There was no property belonging to her. No clothing. No phone. No forensic link tying her to Andy’s flat, his vehicle, or anywhere under his control. No blood. No fibres. No trace of evidence. And no body.

What they had, though, was Robyn Whitton.

At least in pictures.

A scrapbook, if he wanted to be generous about it. A dossier, if he didn’t. Plastic wallets. Newspaper clippings. Printouts. Photographs. Some lifted straight from local press coverage at the time of her disappearance. School photos, family appeals, the usual. Others weren’t.

Those were the problems.

Long-lens shots. Grainy. Cropped. Taken from a distance. Robyn outside the pub. Pushing a pram. Laughing with someone half out of frame. Robyn alone. Unaware.

Harrison turned a page carefully with his gloved fingers.

Dates were scrawled in the margins. Times. Locations. Patterns. He’d mapped her. Not just watched—tracked. There were notes, too. Not a diary, not quite. More like observations. Routines. Habits. Who she spoke to. When she was alone. Speculation in places. Assumptions dressed up as certainty. Nothing overtly violent. Nothing crossing the line into a confession. But enough to paint a picture.

Harrison closed the folder, exhaling slowly.

Andy Mitchell wasn’t nothing. Far from it. He was exactly what the town had always said he was: fixated, inappropriate, too interested in a young woman who’d wanted nothing to do with him. A predator, in behaviour if not yet in law.

But that didn’t make him a killer. Or even a kidnapper.

And it didn’t put Emily Fisher in his flat.

He lifted his gaze to the whiteboard, tracking Emily’s last known movements, the gaps that still hadn’t been filled. Then back to Robyn. Two timelines. Running too close together.

Murray knocked on the doorframe. “Sir?”

Harrison looked up. “Go on.”

“I’ve spoken to Emily’s father. Ran Andy Mitchell past him.”

“And?”

Murray chewed on her lip. “He… didn’t seem convinced. Said it must be a mistake. That we should keep looking.”

Harrison stilled. “Really.”

He’d expected something else. Relief, maybe. Anger. Even vindication. Andy was known to them. He worked at the industrial estate he managed, drank in the same places. A man like that in custody should have raised something in him.

“And what’s your read on that?”

“Honestly, sir? He didn’t strike me as focused on Andy at all. More… on his ex-wife being back at the house.”

Harrison said nothing, waiting for her to add anything else.

“Kept checking his phone. Asked twice if we’d be needing the house again. Asked when we were going to put up a reward.”

Harrison narrowed his eyes. “A reward, hm.”

He rubbed his forehead, thinking it through.

A father with a viable suspect in custody… and no real reaction. Could be denial. Shock. People did strange things when they were clinging to hope. Or…something else. And what bothered him more was how quickly he’d moved past the family. Normally, he’d have them under a microscope from the outset. Background, relationships, pressure points. Instead, he’d let the Robyn Whitton case pull focus. Let it drag the centre of gravity somewhere else.

Or maybe—

Maybe it wasn’t just the cold case.