“You were smooth there, kid.” He casually slung his arm over Ali’s narrow shoulders, jostling and leaning on him. The kid shot him a cold look but didn’t respond. “What d’you you say, then? Gonna join the pack?”
“You never answered my question,” Ali said, stepping abruptly sideways, out from under Jules’s arm. “What do I get? I know what I can do for you layabouts, but what will you do for me?”
“You talk like you’ve got a stick up your arse,” Jules muttered, for lack of a better response to Ali’s impertinent question. From experience, he was expecting that Ali would try to worm his way out of giving them an answer, or agree eagerly, or say that he’d join only to get them off his back. He’d not expected a goddamn negotiation.
“You talk like an idiot,” Ali fired back before turning his back on them and walking away.
“Can you believe this?” Jules had to laugh. “The audacity of this guy.”
“A three-syllable word, I’m impressed,” Ali tossed back.
The sun was beating down hard, bringing up the sweat on Jules’ skin and igniting his anger, which had been simmering for a while now. He reached forwards, grabbing Ali’s shoulder and spinning him round. The kid was almost knocked off balance, his tortoiseshell of a backpack making him stagger.
“Watch your mouth,” Jules gritted out, his hand clenched tight on Ali’s shoulder. He kept his voice down since they were still out on the pavement, and there were kids walking home and nosy parents milling around, walking slower in the heat.
“Why do we even need this little-?” Jules’ mate started, but Ali cut him off.
“I’ll join your little gang,” he said, not pleading but calm and rational like they were in a freaking business meeting. “But I want something in return.”
“Yeah, what?” Jules snapped. “Protection?”
“That,” Ali said, giving a shrug. “But what I really want is for you to find me somewhere to live.”
Somewhere along the way, Jules had lost control of this whole situation, which had derailed some time ago by Ali’s off-script responses and attitude. And now, Jules was thrown off course again.
“To live? Why d’you-?” Jules broke off, clicking his fingers. “Ah, I get it. Trouble at home, right? Stepdad, is it? Brothers?”
“No,” Ali said. “School bores me. My parents bore me. Find me a house, and I’ll help you.”
Jules grabbed the kid by the collar and shook him hard, like he’d wanted to do since the lad first talked back at him. Didn’t he have any kind of respect? Or, failing that, survival instinct? Jules and his mates could’ve been set on beating the kid to a pulp for all he’d known, and yet he’d still riled them up. It was a good thing that Jules had a longer fuse than some blokes, or Ali would’ve needed carting off to A&E by now, no matter how much they needed him.
But Jules restrained himself, letting go of Ali’s school collar with a light push that made the youngster take a step backwards. He told himself that he was merciful, that Ali would turn out to be useful, and didn’t admit to himself that the look in Ali’s dark eyes unsettled him.
As Jules had shaken the lad, Ali hadn’t resisted, but he’d glared up at Jules with the look of someone much older, someone with violence on their mind. Jules had seen enough looks like that to recognise it. The fact that those eyes were in the face of a scrawny fourteen-year-old somehow made the look more, not less, disturbing. Jules had heard rumours about Ali Pumphrey, but he hadn’t entirely believed them until now.
“You get away from your folks, and we’ll fix you up with a place,” Jules told Ali, folding his arms over his chest. “We’ll find you.”
Jules turned angrily away, feeling annoyed by how uncomfortable the teen had made him. He made to stride away after having the last word, but Ali ruined that too.
“Don’t take too long, Julian Sharp,” he called in his thin voice. “I won’t wait.”
Jules gritted his teeth and slapped the back of one of his friends to get him to stop gawking at the mouthy kid.
“Come on. We’re done here.”
As he walked away, he couldn’t shift the feeling that there were eyes on his back and his tongue fidgeted with his lip ring. He resisted the urge to turn around all the way down the street but, at the corner, he glanced back. Ali stood still on the spot, watching him silently. Despite the hot air and the bright daylight, Jules shuddered.
Two
The heatwave was unrelenting, and I was not enjoying it. Sam thrived in the warmth, happily soaking it up as she ventured out on long jogs and did her daily yoga sessions on the prickly grass of her small back garden.
“Ruddy heatwave,” I grumbled as I came back from a run, dripping with sweat and scowling. The exercise usually left me buzzing, but the heat was too much for me and made my head swim. I gulped down the glass of cool water Sam offered me as she came to greet me at the door, lifting an eyebrow at my complaints.
“You’d much rather it be grey and miserable, wouldn’t you?” she said, half-exasperated and half-fond. “You’re my little raincloud.”
I smiled at that, setting my empty glass down on the side and grimacing at the feeling of my shirt sticking to my chest. Even as a kid, I’d never liked the hot weather, preferring to climb up into a shady tree and suck on ice cubes.
“Go and lie down on the kitchen tiles,” Sam said, shaking her head at me. “That’d cool you down.”
“Not a bad idea,” I smiled, “but a cold shower will sort me out.”
I relished the gush of chilled water, scrubbing my head to get the sweat out of my stubbornly curly hair and staying under the spray until I was shivering. As soon as I got out, I was almost immediately too warm again, and I had to resist the urge to get straight back in the shower.
The hot weather might not be my cup of tea, but the rest of York seemed to have been enjoying it. We’d been rushed off our feet at the station dealing with everything from drunk university students to a child abuse complaint about a kid whose arm got burnt on the side of a barbeque. Tomorrow, I’d be back in the thick of it and sweltering inside the sticky, non-air-conditioned confines of the station building if this heatwave continued on as it has these last couple of weeks.
Surely enough, the hot weather hung on into Monday, digging its claws in and turning the British greenery a Mediterranean brown. The weather forecasts predicted another scorching week, and the evenings were the only time when I could run comfortably.
After work, with sweat prickling my back and the city alive around me, I relaxed into the rhythm of the exercise, pounding Monday’s stresses into the hard, hot pavement. The light hung around until nine or ten o’clock these days, and I made the most of it, pushing myself to a peak of fitness and enjoying the rush of it.
I ran out of York and towards Strensall army base, keeping pace with the sluggish traffic along the main road. Stretching my legs out, I picked up the pace, shifting the lactic acid from my knees and leaving me breathless as I ate up the ground.
I was slowing back down to my usual loping jog when the ringing wail of a siren cut through the relative quiet. I kept going until I reached a bus stop, leaning against the chipped paint and smeared windows marred with cigarette burns as I stretched out my legs and glanced back down the way I’d come. Familiar blue and red lights whirled nearby, the siren getting increasingly louder as it approached, and I watched with a faint frown. Cars manoeuvred around each other, clumsy and awkward, to let the patrol car by, its siren broadcasting its impatience as it cut through the dawdling, clustered traffic and sped off.
A minute later, another police car went wailing past and, in the distance, I could see a plume of smoke climbing up into the dusky sky. I was heading in that direction on the course of my run regardless and let my legs carry me steadily closer. The smell of smoke in the air thickened, bringing the tang of chemicals that came from burning something that wasn’t meant to be set alight.
I caught sight of the fire engine not long later, the smoke now strong en
ough to sting my eyes, and saw the blackened wreck of a building. I’d run this route enough times to know what should’ve been there: a run-down agricultural barn, the rusted corrugated roof caved in, and the sides decorated with amateur graffiti.
Now, there was little more than a charred outline, like a reversed x-ray against the washed-out sky. As I caught my breath and my heart rate slowed back to normal, I stared at the smoking ruin and wondered how it’d caught alight. The threat of a summer storm had been hanging in the hot air for a while now, but we’d not had any thunder or lightning yet. When it was this hot and dry, it was more than possible that the sun had been focused by a shard of glass or cast off the metal roof and created a spark that sent the whole place up in flames. Or maybe it wasn’t an accident of nature at all.
I gave a mental shrug and turned away, running onwards and leaving the smoke and police cars behind me. I’d be able to find out what happened at the station tomorrow if I wanted to. Tonight was about forgetting work, not getting dragged into more of it, and I channelled my attention into my running. My trainers hit the pavement beneath me, and I ran on.
Stephen was already at his desk by the time I arrived the next morning, raising his eyebrows at my grimace as I sat down.
“You haven’t injured yourself again, have you?”
“Might’ve overdone the running a little last night,” I said, rubbing my hands over my sore thighs with a wince. “I’ll be fine.”
“You’ll have to come round to ours for a movie night or drinks, mate. We’d make sure you had the laziest night of your life, no exercise at all.”
“Oh yeah?” I chuckled. “What, you’ll carry me from the car to the sofa?”
“If that’s what it takes,” he said, grinning back at me.
I shook my head at him and got my computer loaded up, checking through the emails I’d received since yesterday and sorting through them. There wasn’t anything that was critically important right now, but several would need attending to, and I flagged them. Despite the busyness around the station, there hadn’t been any big cases since last November’s horrific serial murder case, and I was fine with that. I was more than willing to chip in with other people’s cases and make myself generally useful, rather than having a case to myself if it meant that nobody was getting attacked, or murdered, or kidnapped.
“Typical teenagers, huh?” Stephen said, startling me out of my thoughts.
“What?”
“The fire last night, over near Strensall?” he prompted. “Did you hear about it?”
“Aye, I saw it when I was out running. Teenagers, then, was it? Are they sure?”
“That’s what the firefighters’ reckon, anyway. There was definitely an accelerant used, so it wasn’t an accident.”
“No-one was hurt?” I asked. I hadn’t seen any ambulances around the area when I’d gone past, but they could have already left.
“No. And if it was done by kids, they weren’t caught either.”
I grunted, unimpressed. Starting fires when it was as dry as it was right now was even more stupid than doing it at other times of the year. There wasn’t much we could do, though, I predicted. The summer had already been stretching our resources, and I would be surprised if there was any evidence left after a big fire like that to tell us who might have set it. I also knew from experience that there wasn't much in the way of useful CCTV near where the fire had happened, and it wouldn’t count as a serious enough incident to warrant getting forensics involved.
“They’ll get away with it, then,” I summed up, “unless a witness comes forward.”
“Yeah, they haven’t yet.” Stephen gave a broad-shouldered shrug. He had a cup of tea he was working through, and I headed off to get some caffeine for myself.
“They’ve got another one,” Stephen said when I came back, fresh coffee steaming in my hand.
“What now?”
“Big car accident. Joyriding teenagers high on something.”
“Great,” I sighed, taking a sip of coffee and burning my mouth. “Are we heading over?”
“You’re the boss,” Stephen said, looking amused.
“Oh, why not?” I shrugged. “Put it out on the radio. We can enjoy the car’s air conditioning on the way there.”
Stephen huffed a laugh, radioing in to let everyone know that we were going over to assist, and then we headed downstairs, out to the carpark. The tarmac was hot enough to shimmer in the distance, and I half-expected the soles of my boots to stick to the dark surface. The car had been sitting out in the sun, and getting in felt like climbing into an oven, the seatbelts too hot to hold.
“‘Enjoy the air conditioning,’ he said,” Stephen grumbled, his face florid as he shifted in the sticky seat, jabbing and fiddling with the air conditioning buttons as he tried to coax the car into cooling down faster. “Start driving, Mitch.”
“Aye, I’m doing it.”
We drove over towards the accident with the windows wound down, the breeze taking the edge off the heat while we waited for the air conditioning. A heat-heavy quiet settled between us as we savoured the rush of cool air. The wind would undoubtedly tangle my hair into a bird’s nest, but the relief was worth it. Stephen’s hair was cropped short enough that it’d look exactly the same, no matter what happened, and it certainly kept him cooler on a day like today. Regardless, I left the windows open even once the air conditioning had gotten going, spilling chilled air over my sticky hands where they rested on the steering wheel.
“No-one was badly injured, were they? In the collision?”
“Not that’s been on the radio,” Stephen said. “An ambulance went over, but I’ve not heard more.”
“Damn teenagers, I swear,” I muttered.
“They’ve always been the same,” Stephen said, his head tilted towards the open window. “Stirring up trouble like it’s their god-given right to create mayhem.”
I snorted at that. I’d dealt with enough sulky, rebellious teenagers over the years, all of whom seemed to think there was something unique in their kick-back against society.
“I bet you were never like that.”
“Of course not,” Stephen grinned. “I got my fill of violence and trouble-making at rugby.”
“Aye, I bet that was a teenage testosterone fest, Jesus.”
“At least it’s legal to give someone a bloody nose out on the pitch, y’know?” he teased back. “As long as you tackle whoever pissed you off in a convincing sort of way.”
“Telling me all your secrets today, Steph?” I said.
“It seems I am.” He grinned. “Should I be worried?”
“Definitely,” I laughed.
My thoughts turned back towards the joyriding teenagers we were heading out to deal with. They could probably do with taking part in some kind of high-energy contact sport too. Something vicious, like hockey.
“I hope you’ve signed your kids up for rugby or something,” I said. “They’re not gonna get to act out much, with a cop for a dad.”
“Yeah, damn right,” Stephen said, shaking his head. “They can dye their hair green, get piercings or whatever, but if they start turning up at the station, we’re gonna be having words.” He grimaced.
“Your kids wouldn’t, don’t worry, mate,” I said, catching the genuine concern in his tone. “You wouldn’t let it get that far.” I sent him a grin as I added, “Plus, they’re only tiddlers right now. You’ve got a while yet.”
“There’s that, at least,” Stephen said, releasing a dramatic breath of relief. “And, I can always threaten them with having to run laps against you if they start playing up.”
“Geez, thanks, Steph,” I snorted. “Exercise shouldn’t be punishment, you twit.”
“Yeah, yeah, rubbish,” he laughed.
We continued to bicker as I drove us over to the accident, the atmosphere between us sobering as we pulled up alongside. Stephen held his badge out of the car window so that we could go through the police tape, and I drew the car to a stop
once we were past it.
Just as we were arriving, an ambulance pulled away, and I watched it go with a concerned frown, hoping that it’d turned up as a precautionary measure and that there wasn’t anyone inside it. Looking at the state of the cars, though, that might be an overly optimistic hope.
After the ambulance wove its way out between the traffic and sped off, I got a good look at the scene itself. The accident recovery teams were working quickly to get the road clear again, and one of the wrecked cars had already been towed to the side. The other vehicle, a banged-up thing that didn’t look like it had been road-worthy even before it was involved in a high-speed accident, was still squatting in the road, blocking the way.
Off to the side, on the dry, coarse grass of the verge, two officers were trying to deal with a group of teenagers, who looked to be anywhere between fourteen and eighteen. The officers were looking harassed and tired, and I looked back at Stephen.
“Let’s go and give them a hand.”
“Looks like they could do with it,” Stephen agreed, and we strode over. The heat was oppressive after the coolness of the air-conditioned car, and I started sweating immediately. But we had work to get on with right now, and I ignored my own discomfort to focus on what needed to be done.
“How’re you getting on here?” I asked one of the two officers.
Her eyebrows went up into her fringe when she saw us. Her face was round and friendly, and she looked familiar, so I’d probably seen her around the station at some point.
“DCI Mitchell? This is a little below your paygrade, isn’t it, sir?” She quirked a smile at me, and I chuckled.
“A bit, but we help out where we can. What can I do?”
“How are you at herding cats?” she said wryly, tilting her head towards the remaining teenagers. “We’ve got two in the back of the car already, but these three are giving us the run-around.”
“Alright, we’ll take the two brunettes,” I decided, leaving the tall, black-haired teenager to the officers since they’d already been talking to him when we arrived. “They can go in our car.” I jerked a thumb back towards where Stephen and I were parked up. As I turned back the way we’d come, I was reminded of the ambulance that’d driven away.
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