I had the address of Alistair Pumphrey’s parents and took the wheel as we drove over to their modest terrace house on the other side of the city, near Acomb. The city was full of people out enjoying the sun, dressed up in their best summer gear and eating ice creams.
“We gotta find an ice-cream van later today,” Stephen said, apparently reading my thoughts.
I hummed, glancing out of the open window as we drove past a family with two kids, one of which looked about Alistair’s age, fourteen. My mood sobered.
“That missing kid won’t be getting any ice creams.” I reached up to adjust the sun visor near my head, tilting it so that I could see better, “or water fights, or out enjoying this with his family.”
“At least he won’t be cold at night,” Stephen said, looking over at me as his tone became serious, matching mine. “That’s the biggest worry for missing children in winter.”
“Aye, true,” I conceded.
We turned onto the road where Alistair’s parents lived, and I slowed to a crawl so we could find the right house number.
“That one.”
Stephen pointed out of the open window, and I pulled up next to the curb. The house was on a steep slope, and I double-checked to make sure that the handbrake was fully on before unclipping myself and climbing out.
The front gate, heated to scalding under my fingers, creaked as I opened it, and I could hear the distant sound of a dog barking. The flowers in the Pumphrey’s front garden were all wilted, the soil bone dry beneath them, even though the garden itself showed signs of landscaping and long-term care. I pressed my lips together and thought about how if I was a parent whose child was missing, I wouldn’t much care about watering the garden either.
The Pumphreys opened up only seconds after I’d knocked on the door, and I blinked, startled.
“Have you found him?” a blond woman asked, her eyes wide with hope.
“No, no, I’m sorry,” I said, my heart breaking a little for her. We should have called ahead, I realised, as I watched her expression fade back into resignation. The pain on her face was awful.
“Are you Grace Pumphrey?” Stephen asked gently. “We’d like to talk to you and your husband.”
“Do you have any news for us?” she asked, looking between us.
“I’m afraid not,” I said. “We’d like to ask you both some questions.”
She visibly deflated at the prospect of more questions rather than the answers she really wanted. But she gestured for us to come in and called her husband, Alex, down from upstairs. He fixed us both cups of iced orange squash while his wife showed us into the sitting room.
“Another police officer, two of them actually, asked us a lot of questions already,” Alex said as he put our drinks in front of us and sat down beside his wife. “What do you want to know?”
“DCI Sedgwick is leading your case, yes,” I agreed. “I’m DCI Mitchell, and this is DI Huxley. We’re assisting DCI Sedgwick, we want to help find your son as soon as possible.”
Alex and Grace glanced at each other before Grace gave a small nod.
“What can we do? We just want him home.”
“I know,” I said, giving them both a sympathetic look. “We’re not asking you to go over it all, but we’d like to ask about any… indications there might have been before Alistair went missing.” When they looked at me blankly, I waved my hand and elaborated. “Any signs that he was unhappy or angry.”
“No, I mean, there was nothing that I can think of,” Alex said, frowning.
“He’s a good boy,” Grace agreed. “He’s smart, you know. He has friends, and he does well at school. He’s happy.”
I hid a frown and nodded in acknowledgement. For a child to leave home voluntarily and for as long as a week, there was usually a very strong driving motive. Of course, it was more than possible that Alistair’s parents might not know what that reason was, but there were usually signs: a child becoming withdrawn, not eating, or getting uncharacteristically aggressive.
“He’s never been bullied?” Stephen put in, and I nodded. It was a good question.
“No, he’s popular at school.” Grace looked at me with a frown. “Why? Is there something we don’t know? Have you got a new lead?”
“No, Mrs Pumphrey, I’m sorry,” I said. “We’re being thorough, that’s all. If we could understand why Alistair might run away, it would help us a great deal with finding him.”
Alex crossed his arms over his chest and sat back, drawing my attention.
“Something bad’s happened to him,” he said darkly, his shoulders visibly stiff. His wife looked sharply away from him and wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I swear to god, our child wouldn’t choose this. You should be out there, looking for him, helping him.”
I understood why he was finding it hard to believe that his son, who he clearly loved, would voluntarily choose to leave the family home.
“Okay,” I said, deciding to run with it. “Can you think of anyone who might want to hurt him? Or persuade him to leave his home?”
They both looked startled at that, and Grace stuttered over her words as she said, “He’s just a child. Why would anyone want to hurt him?”
“I’m not saying that they do,” I said hurriedly. “I was only-”
“What about that boy?” Alex said abruptly, and I straightened up in my seat.
“What boy?” Grace turned to her husband and raised her eyebrows.
“That really pale blond one. He looked almost albino or something.” He grimaced like he’d tasted something bad as he went on to say, “And he had one of those ugly little lip rings.”
Grace blinked. “Ali’s new friend? What about him?”
“He looked eighteen, Grace. What does he want with a fourteen-year-old? That’s what I thought. I didn’t like him one bit.”
“Honey, you only saw him for a few seconds. He seemed like a nice boy when he had dinner with us. You were working, remember?”
Alex glanced back over at Stephen and me like he just remembered that we were there.
“It’s strange, though, right?” he said, appealing to us. “At that age, kids usually stay within their age group, don’t they?”
“What was his name?” I asked, rather than agree or disagree with Alex’s question. I didn’t want to take sides with the couple, and really I couldn’t say whether this older boy was significant or not without knowing anything about him.
Alex looked stumped and turned to his wife, who sent him an unimpressed look.
“His name was Jules,” she said matter-of-factly, “but I really can’t see that he did anything to harm Ali. He really seemed like a sweet kid, polite and chatty. He offered to do the washing up, too.” She gave a tight laugh. “What seventeen-year-old does that, right?”
“Exactly,” Alex grunted. In response to his wife’s sharp look, he avoided her gaze and buckled down stubbornly. “Well, he wanted to charm you, didn’t he?”
“For goodness’ sake, Alex,” Grace said, “you can’t point fingers at every teenager out there just because you’re feeling guilty.”
“I’m not feeling guilty!”
They were both vibrating with tension, and I leaned forwards, planning to cut in and stop the argument from escalating, but Grace spoke before I could.
“You’re hardly here,” she hissed. “Ali going missing is the first time you’ve taken time off work for more than a couple of days in months! Years, even, I don’t know. You’re blaming some teenager who looked at you funny because you blame yourself.”
“I don’t-”
“If there was something wrong with him, you wouldn’t know it, would you?”
Before Alex could lash out with a response, I cleared my throat pointedly and cut in.
“This is a very stressful time for you both,” I said firmly. “But this isn’t productive to helping find Alistair.”
Both parents sat back, looking shamefaced and angry, still. I didn’t like it, but I guessed that this argument wou
ld continue after Stephen and I had left. Perhaps that’s why Alistair left, I thought privately, because his parents were frequently arguing. But it wasn’t fair to assume that based on one conversation.
“Was there anyone else in Alistair’s life who might have influenced him? Teachers, family friends? Anyone he’s close to and in regular contact with?”
“Influenced him? To run away? Why would they have done that?”
“I don’t know,” I said patiently. “But it’s always useful to look at the people around the child, in cases like this. Alistair might have gone to one of them, too.”
“We’ve called round everyone we could think of,” Grace said miserably. “But, well, he spends a lot of time with his granddad, I suppose.”
The pair went on to list anyone who normally spent time with Alistair and stiltedly answered the rest of our questions. The answers they gave us were mundane and didn’t give us much information of significance to work with. We excused ourselves after another half-hour of talking, and Alex and Grace saw us off at the door, the tension between them thick enough that it seemed to add a weight to the air.
Stephen and I walked down to their garden gate in silence and pulled the car doors open. It was too hot to get in after the car had been sitting in the sun for an hour, and I left the door open, letting it air for a minute. When I glanced over at the house, Alistair’s parents had gone back inside.
“What did you think?” I asked Stephen as we waited.
“Of the parents?” He shrugged. “They could be on the verge of divorce or just badly stressed because of the situation. It’s hard to tell.”
“Right,” I sighed. “It felt like an argument that had happened before, but who knows.”
“And that kid they were talking about? Do you think he’s relevant at all?”
“Jules? At this point, who knows. If he was older and a particularly new friend, then I suppose it’s possible. Grace seemed certain he wasn’t involved, though.”
The car had cooled off enough for us to climb in, and I blasted the air con as Stephen drove us back to the station.
“What’s the plan now, boss?”
“We’ll write up what we talked to them about,” I decided. Stephen had a half-empty packet of chewing gum in his glove box, and I took a couple, savouring the mint freshness as my hot skin cooled down. “I’ll have a look into this ‘Jules’ boy, and you can research whatever else takes your fancy. Whether the two of them have filed for divorce would be a good start. Sound okay?”
“Sounds good,” he agreed. “Though I don’t know what you’ll find on the teenager with just a first name to go on.”
“I’ll give it a shot,” I said but agreed with him that the chances of anything coming from the search seemed pretty slim.
We worked into the late afternoon, talking relatively little as we filled in outstanding paperwork, read and reread Sedgwick’s reports, and I did my best to track down who this friend of Alistair’s was, ‘Jules’. I made numerous phone calls, first to Alistair’s school to ask whether this Jules was a student of theirs and then to other schools in the area, but they were reluctant to share the information with me without a more convincing argument about why it was needed. Plus, it was difficult to get an initial reply from schools during the summer holidays, when most of the staff weren’t in.
Alistair’s school did agree to tell me about Alistair himself, reporting him to be a clever, sociable child with a good record for attendance, and had never been marked as a cause for concern.
“Well, Alistair’s parents haven’t filed for divorce, and there have never been any domestic violence reports from either of them,” Stephen told me, swivelling his chair around.
It was getting into the evening, now, and the office was finally beginning to cool down. All the windows that would open were pushed wide, and a pleasant draft occasionally swept past the back of my neck.
“So, it’s less likely that Alistair was running from problems at home,” I concluded. “Good to know.”
“Anything on the Jules kid?”
“Not really,” I sighed. “I might have to sic Keira on the case, ask her to look online for me. None of Alistair’s Facebook friends is called Jules, but with Instagram, their usernames can be anything, can’t they? So I don’t know.” I stretched my arms up, my shoulders clicking loudly. “If Mr Pumphrey was right and the two boys were four years apart, it might’ve been that they met online. He wasn’t wrong in saying that teenagers don’t usually interact that much outside of their year group at that age.”
A serious frown descended onto Stephen’s face. “Unless Jules was predatory.”
“There is that,” I gave a nod. “But we can’t jump to any conclusions. The only report of them being connected at all is Jules going to dinner at Alistair’s the once. It’s not very much.”
“Yeah, but we’ve built more on less, I think,” Stephen said. “If there’s something there, we’ll find out.”
I was about to respond when my phone started ringing in my pocket, buzzing noisily against my leg. I rubbed my clammy palm on my trouser leg and fished it out, surprised to see that it was Sam’s name and picture on the call screen. Stephen turned back to his computer to give me the illusion of privacy as I answered.
“Sam? You doing alright?” It wasn’t like her to call during my work hours, though it was getting near to five, I realised.
“I’m fine,” she said immediately. “I just, well, I wondered when I could expect you tonight? Shall I make dinner at mine?”
Recently, we’d started spending a little over half the week at Sam’s house, which was nicer than my flat, and the rest of the time at mine. So I’d been expecting to go back to hers at whatever time I managed to get off work, and I still wasn’t quite sure why she’d needed to call.
“Aye, that’d be great. I shouldn’t be too late this evening, it’s been pretty quiet,” I told her. “Is this about dinner timings?”
She hesitated for a moment, and something instinctual in my stomach made me feel uneasy.
“Are you sure you’re okay? You’re not feeling ill?”
“No, no, Darren, I’m fine.” I heard her take a breath. “Look, don’t panic, okay, but I just wanted to have a chat this evening. I didn’t want it to happen too late, okay?”
A chat? I thought, my heart speeding up. Was Sam… breaking up with me? Was she pregnant? Was one of her family sick or dying?
I rubbed a hand over my mouth, feeling agitated, but forced my voice to stay neutral when I spoke.
“I’ll come straight there after five, alright?” I said. “I won’t be long. There’s nothing urgent here.”
“Okay,” she said, sounding relieved and nervous all in one short word. “I’ll see you then.”
She hung up, and I lowered the phone, staring at it for a long moment.
“You alright, mate?” Stephen looked over at me with a concerned frown.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Sam wants to ‘talk’ this evening.”
“Oh.” Stephen looked about as worried by that as I was feeling. “I mean, it’s been going well, hasn’t it? I thought you were happy.”
“I am. We are.”
“Alright, go on,” he said abruptly, waving his hands at me.
“What?”
“Go home, Mitch. Bite the bullet. You’re not gonna be able to work with that bothering you, and it’s ten to five already. You’ve done enough paid overtime in the past. Go talk to your girlfriend.”
He was right. I was glad that Sam had waited until this close to the end of the day to tell me because if she’d mentioned it this morning, I think I would have struggled to focus all day. Right now, all I could do was hope that she wasn’t going to present me with a problem that we couldn’t overcome together.
Four
“Kent,” I repeated. “Kent, near London? That Kent?”
“Yes.”
Sam looked at me steadily, her eyebrows pulled together with concern, and her lips pr
essed tightly together. She was never one to fidget usually, but right now, she couldn’t seem to keep her hands still.
We were sitting at the kitchen table in her house, the pleasant smell of the stirfry on the stove making my stomach growl even though I thought I’d choke if I tried to eat at this moment.
“Sam,” I started and couldn’t figure out how to go on. My shoulders sunk as I processed the reality of what she was saying, and I looked down at the table, my eyes stinging. “I mean, I support you. Of course, I do. It’s a great opportunity.”
“I don’t have to go,” she said softly.
“No, no.” I looked up and forced my mouth into an approximation of a smile, reaching forwards to take her restless hands and squeezing them. “It’s a huge step up in your career. You’ve got to take the job, of course, you do.” I sighed. “Even if it is in Kent.”
She was looking about as miserable as I was feeling, and I could see the guilt, too, in her worried eyes. As upset as I was, I couldn’t stand to see her like that and I tried to reassure her.
“It’ll be alright. You’ll regret it if you don’t give it a shot, right? You’ll always be wondering what could have happened.”
“I can always come back if I don’t like it,” she offered.
“Of course,” I said, my smile strained. I didn’t think she would, though. She’d probably adore the job, and our six-month relationship would dissolve into memories and annual Christmas cards.
“I’m sorry, Darren,” she whispered, clearly seeing the hurt I was trying to suppress. She squeezed my hands. “I really am. I don’t want to leave you, you know I don’t. This has been the best months of my life.”
“Me too.” I managed a more genuine smile, but it still hurt.
Before I could start crying, I pushed up to my feet and came round the table to kiss her on the forehead and hold her tight. She clung back as if she held on tight enough, we wouldn’t have to be separated at all. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask her if there weren’t jobs like the one in Kent nearer by or whether the team in Kent could employ her on a part-time basis or as a work-at-home member of staff.
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