Page 162 of In Too Deep

So Harrison stood before anyone could linger too long on the subject of Jake Whitton’s fingerprints, suddenly feeling as if they could see them plastered all over his body, too.

“Let’s go make Mr Garfield’s Monday considerably worse.”

He ended up in the pool car with Calder driving while Harrison sat in the passenger seat, half-listening to his DS complain about how his home extension had gone up by another ten thousand pounds.

“At this rate,” Calder muttered, “I’d’ve been better off building the bloody thing before I paid to put two lads through university. And as the wife don’t work, she’s putting up with it all at home…”

Harrison barely listened; his own cottage renovations were hard enough to keep up with. Especially with the new rates Jake had set for him. Though, at least that was mildly less stress inducing than Calder’s was.

Hartswick drifted past the window in flashes of ordinary Monday life. School kids in untucked uniforms. Vans unloading bakery deliveries. Pensioners queuing outside the chemist before it properly opened. The mundane normality that always felt strange beside murder investigations. Then the industrial estate came into view. Concrete. Steel. And Harrison’s eyes immediately tracked upward to the contractors moving across the warehouse roof in the distance. He smiled before he could stop himself. A stupid fucking smile too.

Soft.

Private.

Dangerous.

So he killed it by putting a balled fist to his mouth.

The convoy of police vehicles rolling through the gates of Blackridge Autos looked almost obscene against the grime and decay of the industrial estate. Uniformed officers moved first, stepping out to secure the perimeter while CSI vans reversed carefully into the yard between stacked scrap shells and stripped engines. White-suited forensic examiners climbed out carrying evidence cases, cameras, and scene kits while a vehicle recovery truck idled further back near the road, waiting for authorisation. The whole scrapyard tensed at their arrival. Workers stopped what they were doing. Radios lowered. Conversations died. And standing outside the office, mirrored sunglasses on and a grease-black rag slung over one shoulder, Davo Garfield watched Harrison climb from the car as if he’d been expecting him all morning.

“Bit dramatic for a Monday morning, int it?”

“Morning to you too.” Harrison handed over a copy of the warrant. “Because you seemed determined for me to produce one.”

Davo took the paperwork between grease-blackened fingers and barely glanced at it. “You lot planning on tearing the whole place apart?”

“If necessary.”

“Got a business to run.”

“And I’ve got a murdered woman in the river.” Harrison wiped his hands together. “We all have jobs to do, Mr Garfield. Reasons we get paid.”

Davo said nothing.

Behind Harrison, officers moved through the site methodically. One team headed for the office while CSI photographed vehicles row by row before anything got touched. Another pair moved towards the isolated lock-up unit at the rear of the yard, the one Harrison had noticed on Friday through the grimy office window.

Davo noticed him looking.

“Careful where your lot walk.” He jabbed a finger across the yard. “Some of that stack’s unstable.”

“We brought experts.”

“In what?”

“A lot of things.” Harrison held his gaze for a moment.

Davo looked irritated. Resigned, even. But not surprised. People genuinely blindsided by warrants rarely reacted like this. They panicked. Protested. Demanded solicitors before anyone had finished introducing themselves. Davo had done none of those things. He just looked tired. As if he’d spent the entire weekend waiting for this knock on the door.

Meaning he’d likely been tipped off.

Any obvious evidence would almost certainly be gone by now. Davo wasn’t stupid. If there had been paperwork worth shredding, phones worth disposing of, or vehicles worth moving, he’d have had two full days to deal with them. But people rarely got caught because they missed something important. They got caught because they missed something small. A receipt. A timestamp. A forgotten key. A tyre track. A witness they never realised was watching. And sometimes the thing that stood out most wasn’t what investigators found.

It was what they didn’t.

And a scrap yard this size should have been chaotic. If everything looked too clean, too organised, too carefully stripped of anything useful, that told its own story.

“We’ll be talking to your staff, too,” Harrison told him. “Was it seven mechanics you hire?”