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“Aye.”
“That’s mental.”
“It’s self-preservation. He admits he’s seen that car, police crawl all over the yard. Start checking records, stock, chassis numbers, everything that’s come through those gates for the last however many years.” Raff shook his head. “Davo’s spent twenty years making sure no one looks too closely at how he does business.”
Jake’s stomach tightened. “And if they do?”
“Fuck knows. That’s the point. Neither me nor Davo particularly wants to find out.”
Jake shoved upright so fast the drum stool screeched backwards across the concrete floor. “Ted, get your stuff. We’re off.”
Ted looked up from his phone.
Jake jabbed a finger at Raff. “Call it in. Anonymous if you have to.”
Raff swore under his breath. “Jake—”
“Call it in. For me.” Jake widened his eyes. “Thirteen years people have decided summat weren’t worth mentioning because they didn’t think it mattered. What if someone did that with Robyn? What if one stupid little thing someone kept to themselves were the thing that could’ve brought her home?”
Raff held his gaze before sighing and pulling his phone from his pocket. “He’s already had time to hide whatever might’ve been there.”
“Don’t care. Just do it. Get it in a file somewhere. Give the police summat they can actually follow.”
Raff muttered something under his breath, but he unlocked his phone, so Jake packed away his kit, got Teddy moving and left Raff to make the call.
He should’ve driven straight back to the bedsit, blown up the airbed for Ted and called it a night. Instead, Raff’s words followed him all the way out of town.
If someone wanted a motor disappearing round here, they’d take it to Davo.
Jake told himself there was no harm in driving past.
That was all.
He wouldn’t stop. Wouldn’t get out. Definitely wouldn’t do anything Harrison Black could reasonably classify as getting himself involved.
Yet half an hour later, he sat behind the wheel of his van opposite the locked gates of Blackridge Autos and Scrap, knowing full well he was a fucking idiot.
The place was only a few roads over from where he’d spent all day roofing, yet somehow it felt like a completely different world once night swallowed it. Bigger. Meaner. The stacked silhouettes of crushed cars beyond the fencing looked almost skeletal in places, jagged metal rising behind coils of barbed wire. Another corner of Hartswick that seemed determined to ruin lives.
The yard was closed.
That was problem number one.
Problem number two sat beside him in the passenger seat, eating a sausage roll from the petrol station while staring down at his phone. Teddy didn’t even seem remotely bothered by where they were, though. Which made Jake feel worse.
And problem number three?
Harrison had explicitly told him to stay the fuck away from the investigation.
Jake scrubbed a hand over his jaw and stared through the rain-speckled glass at the dark yard beyond the gates. He had every intention of listening this time. He did. Yet here he was, anyway, engine idling while his eyes tracked over stacks of scrap cars and shuttered garages, wondering whether Lauren Pike’s Fiesta had passed through here before ending up God knew where.
The police would already be onto this, surely.
CID weren’t stupid. Harrison definitely wasn’t stupid. A scrapyard tied to the industrial estate would already be somewhere on the enquiry list. They’d pull CCTV. Vehicle records. Financials. Interview staff.
But Raff had a point, too.
Davo wasn’t exactly the type to sit politely in an interview room admitting he took cash jobs, fiddled records and occasionally stripped motors no one asked questions about. Men like Davo talked differently to blokes like Jake than they did to the police.
