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But Harrison knew she understood more than that.
The problem was, so did he.
But he needed an ID before this all got out of hand.
The briefing dissolved then; the room breaking apart into overlapping conversations, chair legs scraping along the floor, mugs gathered up while officers went about fulfilling the actions Harrison had assigned them. Calder cornered Patel near the whiteboard, filling with names and times. Irvine was halfway through a phone call before he’d even made it through the doors. Murray remained seated for a moment longer, calmly writing in her notebook while the noise built around her in layers.
“How well do you know the Whittons, sir?” she asked once everyone else had gone.
Harrison glanced up. How the fuck was he supposed to answer that? He couldn’t very well tell her he’d been in bed with one that morning. That he’d seen Jake come apart in his hand. “I’m new to everyone. Why?”
Murray met his gaze. “Because I don’t think it’s leaks to the press you need to be concerned about.”
“No?”
“This is Hartswick.” She tilted her neck. “Donnie Whitton worked half his life at the steelworks before setting up his own roofing business, fixing one Hartswick roof at a time. Maggie worked the bakery everyone got their bread from. Jake grew up here. Robyn disappearing wasn’t just another case, sir. It happened to one of ours.”
Harrison frowned. “You think someone already told them we recovered a female?”
“Highly likely.” Murray stood and gathered her notebook. “And Jake? He might forgive bad news. But he won’t forgive feeling as though we kept it from him.” She headed for the door. “We’ve hurt that family enough.”
Harrison stayed where he was at the head of the table, curling one hand around the cooling cardboard sleeve of his coffee as he watched his team move. This was the part he usually liked. The transition from chaos to structure. The moment an investigation stopped being a dead body and became actions, timelines, pathways. Something he could control through process and discipline.
Today it all felt slightly out of reach.
He checked his phone again. Still nothing.
No missed call. No message. No demand to know why Harrison had spoken publicly before privately. Rationally, Harrison knew silence could mean anything. Jake could be working. Busy. Up on a roof somewhere, maybe his roof, with a nail gun in his hand and music playing through a speaker balanced on the guttering. But it sat badly with him anyway, a persistent pressure beneath his ribs that wouldn’t go away.
Pollard intercepted him before he could leave the incident room, pulling him into the cramped office overlooking the bullpen. The DCI closed the door and immediately launched into questions about press handling, community reassurance, and whether Harrison thought they were looking at homicide.
Harrison gave him what he could. No embellishment. No instinct. The facts. And the whole time Pollard spoke, Harrison watched the activity beyond the office glass. Officers crossing between desks. Phones ringing. Murray leaning over Calder’s shoulder to point at something on a map. The machinery of an investigation beginning to turn properly.
And all of it felt stalled on the same point.
Who was she?
By the time Pollard finally released him, the station was in that strange rhythm investigations develop a few hours in, where urgency and routine existed side by side. Whiteboards filled quickly. River maps pinned up with coloured markers showing search grids and recovery points. ANPR requests filtering back. CCTV actions allocated across shifts. Someone had taped printed stills from nearby industrial units onto the glass board near the HOLMES terminal.
Harrison moved through it all automatically, signing off actions, redirecting resources, approving the extension of the house-to-house radius along the river trail. He listened to Calder summarise the first batch of witness statements from dog walkers and shift workers. Heard Murray quietly pushing for careful handling of any potential family notifications. Heard all of it.
But his mind kept circling back to pathology.
To the body in the hospital mortuary.
And until she had a name, or an age range broad enough to place her safely beyond the terrible possibility that she might be Robyn, he couldn’t bring himself to go near Jake with certainty.
So he stopped pretending he could concentrate on anything else and passed by Calder’s desk. “I’m going to pathology.”
He looked up. “You want me to come?”
“No. I need you to handle things here.”
Calder nodded. “Aye, sir.”
Harrison grabbed his blazer from the back of the chair, carrying it over one shoulder as he headed back to his car.
The hospital was fifteen minutes away, but the drive felt longer. Rain had started during the briefing, a thin, humid drizzle turning the roads silver and blurring the edges of the moors in the distance. The industrial estate loomed dark against the landscape as he passed it, the river somewhere beyond the warehouses and fencing, hidden from sight but impossible to stop thinking about. And by the time he reached the hospital, the sky had flattened completely into low cloud. Almost as if spring had decided not to bother anymore.
