Page 75 of Too Close To Home

“How?”

“Walking the same routes home. Showing up places she was. Standing about watching.”

“So…Obsessed?” Harrison asked. “Stalking her?”

“Maybe. Hard to say. Never touched her, far as we knew. Never threatened her either. He…liked her. Maybe a bit too much.”

Harrison absorbed that. “And it was all checked? His alibi? He was where he said he was at the time?”

“Course. There was nowt to it.” Calder shrugged. “He was working nights at the steelworks. Clocked in, clocked out. Plenty of witnesses.”

“So why was Jake Whitton convinced it was him?”

Calder gave a dry laugh. “You’ve met Jake Whitton.”

Harrison said nothing.

He had met him. More than once now. And it didn’t quite sit right in his mind that the man who quietly fixed old women’s roofs in exchange for a cup of tea could also be the man who broke into an innocent man’s house and violently assault him.

But Harrison also knew better than to let a single morning’s impression soften the facts.

“His sister vanishes,” Calder went on, oblivious to Harrison’s thoughts. “Andy’s the odd bloke who used to trail after her. Makes sense in Jake’s head.”

“And in yours?”

Harrison risked a glance at him as he guided the car through the centre of the town. They rolled past the bakery where he’d grabbed his breakfast earlier, the narrow pavement already filling with late-morning shoppers. A delivery van blocked half the high street outside the butcher’s, forcing Harrison to ease around it before turning onto the road climbing gently out of town.

“In mine?” Calder shrugged. “Andy’s an easy target. A loner, aye. But we found nowt in the allegations. We had no reason to go further with the inquiry. Jake Whitton needed someone to blame for cutting short his shot at superstardom, and Andy was there.”

Harrison quirked an eyebrow. Superstardom? Calder said it as if it was a joke. As if it meant nothing. But Harrison filed it away. It was another piece he didn’t have time to place. Not yet. He hadn’t asked Calder along for a character assessment of Jake Whitton. He was here to get him up to speed on Andy Mitchell.

The houses thinned and they left the town behind them, terraces giving way to older stone cottages and patches of scrubland where the fields began. Harrison followed the bend of the road past the petrol station where the CCTV camera had captured the vehicles on his list.

He tapped the folded sheet resting on the dashboard. “Now Andy’s car shows up near the woodland path around the time of a new disappearance.”

“Aye.” Calder notably shifted in his seat. “Course, it’s a small town.”

They passed the narrow lane leading towards the trees, the police tape visible in the distance where the path entrance sat between the hedgerows.

“Does he know Emily Fisher?” Harrison asked.

Calder shook his head. “Not that I’m aware of. Different circles. Different ages.”

Harrison nodded as the road widened ahead of them. “But he works at the steel works with her father.”

“Like I say, big employer. They might never meet.”

“Hm.”

The landscape altered quickly after that. The last row of houses gave way to open ground, then the industrial estate appeared ahead. Low warehouses first, squat and functional, then the taller skeletons of older structures rising behind them. Cranes stood idle in places, frozen mid-reach, while further in, newer units hummed with activity. The old steelworks still dominated the horizon, but not the way it once had. Rusted frameworks cut against the dull grey sky, smokestacks long since quiet standing beside newer vents that breathed out thin, controlled plumes. Pipes and gantries stretched between buildings, some maintained, others left to weather.

“Lancaster Group on paper.” Calder gave the sort of smile reserved for locals explaining how Hartswick really worked. “Walter Blackridge’s money, though. Always has been. Round here, if you follow the ownership of owt far enough, sooner or later you end up at him.”

At the security barrier, Calder flashed his badge through the window, and the guard lifted the gate with a nod, opening the yard out in front of them like a small industrial city, yet uneven. Active loading bays sat beside shuttered units. Freshly painted safety lines cut across cracked concrete. Forklifts weaved between stacked pallets of steel plate and prefabricated sections, cut beams, welded frames ready for transport, while lorries reversed into loading bays with the slow beep of warning alarms.

Harrison parked near the administration block and stepped out.

Noise hit him immediately. The deep thump of a press from somewhere inside. The rattle of chains. A forklift whining past with a load of coiled sheet metal. Then, just as quickly, pockets of silence beyond it.