Page 118 of In Too Deep

But Harrison could feel the problem unfolding in his own head.

Because officially, Brodie Simmons was simply a local man with Hull connections worth speaking to.

Unofficially?

Harrison was about to question him based almost entirely on the fact Jake Whitton had recognised a hidden tattoo during sex. A tattoo he should not have known had been on the body of the murder victim. And somehow, he was going to have to ask about it without revealing all that.

Luckily, Harrison had spent most of his career learning how to get answers from people without ever letting them see the real question underneath. And the best time to do that was early. Before someone fully woke up. Before they’d had coffee.

Before they’d built their walls for the day.

He stood, grabbing his coat from the back of the chair. “Tell Calder to handle the morning briefing.”

“Yes, guv.”

Then Harrison left the station before he could think too hard about what exactly he was doing.

He walked to the King’s Arms. Partly because it gave him time to order his thoughts. Partly because turning up in an unmarked police car would put Brodie Simmons on edge before Harrison had even knocked on the door. The other reason was simpler: he wanted Brodie caught off guard.

During the Emily Fisher enquiry, Brodie had danced around questions with infuriating ease. Helpful enough to avoid suspicion. Vague enough to avoid commitment. The sort of witness who always sounded cooperative while somehow giving away very little of actual value. The reason Harrison had never charged him with obstructing the investigation was equally straightforward: he couldn’t prove it.

Which meant Brodie Simmons was clever enough to spend his life skirting the edges of police attention without ever getting burned by it.

Neither possibility appealed.

And now his name had surfaced again.

The tattoo. Hull. Lauren Pike. Jake.

Always somehow Jake.

Harrison exhaled heavily. He’d warned Brodie to stay away from him after the Fisher enquiry. A perfectly reasonable warning given the stalking history, the fixation, and the increasingly obvious attempts to steer a missing person investigation towards a particular outcome. Whether Brodie had listened was apparently another matter.

The King’s Arms came into view across the market square. Rain had left the old brickwork dark and slick beneath the late afternoon sun. Hanging baskets dripped steadily from wrought-iron brackets beside the pub sign, which creaked faintly whenever the wind caught it.

Annoying place for him to live, really. Particularly given how much time Jake spent here. The King’s Arms was his local. His band’s regular venue. The place he drank, laughed and belonged to in a way Harrison suspected he never fully would. And Brodie, his ex-hook-up, lived upstairs. Never far away. Always seeming to appear eventually, leaning in a doorway or wandering through the bar as though proximity came naturally. Harrison had started to notice a pattern, though. However ordinary the evening began, Brodie somehow always seemed to end up within arm’s reach of Jake by the time it was over.

He hated it.

The pub occupied the ground floor, but there were two cramped flats sitting above it. One faced the square. The other overlooked the narrow alley running alongside the beer garden and commercial bins. Harrison knew which one belonged to Brodie. The other one? No clue. Maybe it was Pete’s, the landlord.

Then, annoyingly, irrationally, his mind supplied an image of Jake stumbling down those stairs sometime after midnight following a gig. Jeans half-fastened. Mouth bruised from kissing. That restless energy of his worked out of his system with someone who asked nothing more complicated of him than whether he wanted to come upstairs.

Easy.

The word landed with irritating precision.

Harrison had told Jake he deserved easy.

Apparently, what he’d actually meant was that Jake deserved easy provided Harrison was the one giving it to him. Which was both spectacularly unfair and rather inconvenient, considering Harrison was probably the least uncomplicated man Jake could have chosen.

His jaw tightened as glanced up to the flat.

No. On further consideration, Harrison wasn’t feeling nearly as generous about easy as he’d been the other morning in Jake’s bed.

But he got himself back under control by climbing the staircase instead, dress shoes thudding over wet metal while the railing groaned beneath his hand. He knocked once. Waited. Nothing. So he knocked again, louder. The third knock finally produced movement inside. A muffled curse. Crashes. Then locks clicked one after another before the door opened partway.

Brodie blinked at him sleepily, hair flattened on one side from bed. Shirtless beneath the weak hallway light, loose grey joggers hanging low on narrow hips. Slender. Attractive. Young enough looking that most people underestimated him immediately. A twink, Harrison supposed, if he wanted to use the proper terminology. Which he hadn’t in years.