Page 76 of In Too Deep

Cold coffee sat beside his elbow. Forgotten.

And in front of him lay one of the evidence boxes recovered from Andy Mitchell’s flat after the arrest last month, containing Andy’s collection of everything to do with Robyn Whitton.

The name sat differently now.

Heavier.

He didn’t want to look too hard at why that was.

He scrubbed a hand over his face and leaned back, eyes burning from the day. And it had been a very long day. Since he’d left Jake, he’d barely stopped moving. River scene. Recovery. Pathologist consultation. Contractor interviews at the estate. CCTV requests from surrounding roads. Missing persons cross-checks. CSI briefings. Media containment. Initial victimology. Then back here to go through old files once the possibility had lodged itself beneath his skin badly enough that ignoring it became impossible.

There was still nothing concrete, though.

So he turned another photograph under the desk lamp. Grainy print quality. Robyn outside the King’s Arms sometime around 2008 if the timestamp was right. Laughing at something beyond the edge of the frame, hair blown across her face by the wind.

Alive.

He’d spent the last hour going through every photograph Andy had hoarded. Every clipping. Every obsessive scrap connected to Robyn. Searching backgrounds. Looking for patterns. Landmarks. Jewellery. Tattoos. Anything that might connect the unidentified woman from the river to the girl Jake had spent thirteen years grieving.

So far he had nothing.

No black-stitched heart. No obvious overlap. No proof.

And Christ, he wanted proof.

He exhaled slowly and started gathering the photographs back into the evidence box. Enough. Robyn Whitton was still technically a cold case under review, and he’d already crossed the line from professional curiosity into something murkier about an hour ago. Then a photograph slipped loose from beneath the pile and he caught it before it hit the floor.

He looked at it.

Grainy. Night-time. Robyn halfway across a road somewhere on the edge of town, laughing over her shoulder at whoever had taken the picture. Andy, presumably. The timestamp placed it only weeks before her disappearance. And Christ, she looked like Jake there. Not just around the eyes. In the movement. The expression. That same unguarded grin Harrison had only caught flashes of. Her hair was lighter than Jake’s, dyed, judging by the darker roots visible beneath the flash glare, but the curls were unmistakable. There were enough photographs in both the seized evidence and the original missing persons file to show Robyn changed her appearance often. Different hair colours. Different cuts. Trying on versions of herself. But according to the timeline, blonde had been the last version anyone saw alive.

He drifted his gaze beyond her instead. To the background. Black iron gates. Industrial fencing. A brick pillar just visible at the edge of frame. He narrowed his eyes and brought the photograph closer to the desk lamp. Bolted to the brickwork sat a small oval plaque, half-lost in shadow beneath the grain.

BLACKRIDGE HOLDINGS UNIT 12 – AUTHORISED ACCESS ONLY.

Harrison stilled.

Blackridge owned half the bloody district in one form or another. Warehouses. Agricultural land. Old industrial units. Not to mention Blackridge Hall and all the personal holdings it had on private land. Most roads in Hartswick eventually led back to something with that name attached. But something about it niggled.

He pulled his laptop closer and opened the live investigation file, forcing himself back into the present case. Scene photographs loaded slowly across the screen. Riverbank. Recovery markers. CSI tents reflecting under floodlights. Then the clothing recovery images. The victim’s belongings had been found further upstream, tangled in reeds along the embankment approximately half a mile from the body. Harrison zoomed in carefully. Vegetation. Mud. Marker tent. Then he paused. In the distance beyond the towpath sat industrial fencing partially obscured by trees. Black security gates. Brick pillars. The outline of a building visible beyond them.

He zoomed in further. The image pixelated. But a familiar shape emerged from the grain. Four storeys. Broken upper windows. A newer extension grafted awkwardly onto older brickwork. Harrison sat back. It looked remarkably similar to the old administration block at the southern edge of the estate. The one currently listed as Unit Twelve on the site plans. He wasn’t prepared to call it a match from a blurred photograph.

But he wasn’t prepared to ignore it either.

He glanced across the desk at the photograph of Robyn. Then back to the screen. Not evidence. Not yet. But enough for an intelligence note. Enough to justify further enquiries regarding land ownership, access routes and historical use of the building. Especially given Andy Mitchell’s photograph placed Robyn near the same section of Blackridge property shortly before her disappearance. Coincidence existed, sure. And this was a small town. Its landmarks were probably in every resident photograph somewhere. But detectives survived by paying attention to the things that repeated.

And Unit Twelve had just appeared twice in less than ten minutes.

So Harrison reached for his notebook and wrote the connection down anyway. Confirm ownership of Unit Twelve. Establish current occupancy. Cross-reference access records with both investigations if appropriate. Then he dragged the post-mortem preliminaries back to him, forcing his attention where it belonged. Current victim. Female. Mid-twenties. Water exposure. Blunt force trauma. And the tattoo. Black stitched heart. Left hip. His gaze lingered there a moment before he reached for the keyboard again.

The tattoo was distinctive enough to be worth chasing. So Harrison searched the intelligence systems first, trying variations on the description before widening the parameters. Stitched heart. Black heart. Heart tattoo. Left hip. Humberside. South Yorkshire. West Yorkshire. Lincolnshire. Missing-person reports, safeguarding records, general intelligence.

The system churned.

Then the results began to appear.

One reference to a stitched-heart tattoo in a safeguarding report from Hull. Another attached to an outreach report in Grimsby. A third buried in an intelligence log concerning women being driven to private bookings along the Humber corridor.