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“And get someone knocking on this Kayleigh Brennan’s door. Tonight, if possible. If not, first thing tomorrow. If she reported her missing, she means something to her.”

“I’ll get CID back in for briefing at eight.” Calder went for the door. “You heading home?”

Harrison looked back down at Lauren Pike’s custody photograph. Young. Tired eyes. Half-defiant expression. Someone who’d likely spent years being looked through instead of at.

“No.” He shook his head. “Not yet.”

Calder gave a small nod and headed back into the incident room, pulling his phone out to contact Humberside. The second he disappeared into the corridor, Harrison shut his office door and grabbed his phone back from his desk.

He called Jake.

It rang.

And rang.

Then cut off.

Chapter eleven

The Wrong Note

Jake had no real plan when he reached Hull.

Truth be told, he hadn’t had one when he’d set off either. All he had was a restless instinct clawing beneath his ribs, telling him to be here. To do something. Anything. Because sitting in his flat waiting for answers while another girl lay dead in the river felt impossible.

Admittedly, his instincts didn’t exactly have a stellar success rate.

Though…

There had been the girl in the loft.

So maybe he wasn’t entirely fucking useless.

Which was why he was parked up near Hessle Road, the place Brodie had mentioned and most people in Yorkshire knew by reputation alone, with the city half-asleep around him, waiting for some sort of sign to tell him he wasn’t deranged.

Hull was different down here. Older. Harder. The city still carried the shape of the docks in its bones. Rows of tired brick terraces crouched beneath orange streetlights. Shuttered takeaways and corner shops sat shoulder to shoulder with boarded-up units and ageing pubs whose signs glowed stubbornly against the rain.

Somewhere beyond the rooftops, hidden in the darkness, the docks worked through the night. Jake could smell them on the damp air drifting through the van’s vents. Diesel, saltwater, oil. They were permanently woven into this part of the city. Further along the road, figures moved between pools of amber light. Women mostly. A few men. Cars slowed beside them. Idled. Rolled away again.

Nothing dramatic. Nothing cinematic.

People trying to survive another night.

Jake scrubbed both hands over his face and reached for his phone. It was dead. The ancient thing had given up somewhere on the motorway after multiple calls to Harrison that had gone to voicemail and one deeply awkward, half-formed conversation with Gavin where Jake had tried, and failed, to casually ask whether Robyn had any tattoos. Specifically, a heart. On her hip. But Gavin had been wasted, as usual, and kept talking utter nonsense, swearing again he had nothing to do with anything, so he’d had to leave it. Now the phone refused to charge no matter how many times he jammed the cable into it. Black screen. Flickering battery symbol. Then nothing again.

He thumped his head back against the seat.

This was ridiculous.

Thirty-one years old, sat alone in Hull at gone midnight because of a tattoo he’d glimpsed on a bloke he used to fuck behind a pub. A tattoo that had somehow crawled its way back out of the dark and was now attached to a dead girl in a river. Which had brought him here, chasing it across Yorkshire, because some ugly instinct deep inside him wouldn’t let it go. Because Robyn might have had a tattoo he didn’t know about. And she might be that girl in the river. And he couldn’t wait around to have that confirmed or denied by police.

He was supposed to be back on a roof in six hours, pretending to be a normal, functioning adult with a harness and a drill instead of… whatever the fuck this was.

Harrison would tear strips off him for this.

The realisation hit him harder than expected.

Because it wasn’t just himself Jake was fucking over anymore. Not just his own life and that of Teddy, his mum and dad, he was running ragged chasing ghosts through the middle of the night. Somewhere between the cottage roof, the riverbank and Harrison’s body sliding against his that morning, someone else had started mattering too. Someone he didn’t want to disappoint.