Page 48 of Too Close To Home

Experienced could mean a lot of things. Most of them none of his business. Didn’t stop him from wanting to know exactly what that word covered. How far it went. What it looked like up close. Whether Harrison had the same level of experience he did.

“What’s your instinct?”

Harrison sighed, warm breath misting the air. “My instinct is that someone like her doesn’t disappear without someone around here knowing about it.”

Jake gave a rough nod. “Agreed.”

Harrison’s mouth tipped at one corner. Not quite a smile, but close. And there was sympathy there. “Her photo will be on the local news within the hour. You won’t be the only one looking for her.”

“I know how these things go.”

Harrison waited a moment. Then, “I should ask—where are you intending to go next? I’m due to brief the press. If you’re planning to cover ground, it’s better we don’t duplicate effort. To prevent us tripping over each other, we could coordinate…share locations. Stop the chasing. On my part.”

Jake forced his shoulders to loosen. “Don’t have a next stop. I’m no detective. Investigation’s all yours, mate.”

It was a lie.

And from the slight narrowing of Harrison’s eyes, the faint stillness that followed, Jake had the uneasy feeling the DI knew it.

Chapter seven

Media Training

Harrison waited until Jake moved the van.

He didn’t make a show of it. Didn’t fix him with a pointed stare. Instead, he stood with his hands loosely clasped behind his back, gaze travelling the length of the high street as if assessing traffic flow and sightlines rather than watching a battered Transit shudder into gear.

Partly, it was optics. The local traffic warden had cast a curious glance their way, and Harrison had no intention of giving anyone reason to suggest CID endorsed pavement parking on his day one in Hartswick.

The other part?

He couldn’t stop watching Jake Whitton.

It had been a very long time since another man had registered in his body like that. Even prior to the three years he’d spent moving through grief as if underwater, where the rest of the world existed in muffled shapes and muted sounds. Harrison had been with Chris for so long, he could barely remember anyone before him. He’d met him at twenty-one, bright and certain and laughing, and had believed, with the naïve certainty of a man in love, that there wouldn’t be anyone else for him.

So uprooting his life, moving hundreds of miles to a market town on the edge of the moors, still waking some mornings with grief sitting heavy in his chest, to then, on a pressing job involving a missing girl, meet a roofer with wind-tangled hair and anger in his bones who’d reached inside him and tugged on a thread he’d thought he’d permanently knotted away…?

Unsettling didn’t quite cover that.

He could dismiss it as standard attraction. Jake Whitton was objectively attractive. The long, dark waves spiralling down to his collar. The artfully scruffy stubble. Broad shoulders under worn cotton. That careless, rocker edge suggesting music and late nights and fists through plasterboard was how he moved through life. Anyone with functioning eyesight could acknowledge that. But looks had never ruled Harrison. What he was attracted to had always been harder to name.

Soul.

And Jake Whitton had bared his without meaning to. It’d been there in the flash of temper, in the fierce protectiveness for a girl he hadn’t met and didn’t even know what she looked like. In the way every emotion moved openly across his face as if he’d never learned to disguise it. Harrison had built a career reading people. He’d spent years in the Met dissecting lies, parsing half-truths, searching for what sat beneath the surface. He was good at it. It was the one thing he trusted in himself.

And Jake Whitton felt far too honest for a man who’d spent time inside.

Which was ridiculous. He’d only met the man three times. He couldn’t claim to know a single thing about him. So he did what he’d trained himself to do.

He compartmentalised.

The engine growled. Jake didn’t look back, and only when he disappeared past the chemist and out of sight did Harrison allow himself to exhale. Because the other thing about Jake? He wasn’t just a distraction. He was an obstruction.

He meant well. That much was clear. He wasn’t meddling in the malicious sense. Wasn’t hiding anything. He was far too transparent for that. Everything he felt moved across his face like weather. And that, more than the hair or the shoulders or the quiet heat in Harrison’s gut, was what made him dangerous. Because civilians in active investigations were rarely helpful. They knocked on doors officers hadn’t reached yet. Asked loaded questions. Unknowingly warned potential suspects. Frightened vulnerable witnesses into silence. And could contaminate memory without realising it.

And occasionally, they fixated.

Harrison knew what fixation did to people.