“Your mum, then. C’mon, lad.”
We moved back into the main space of the station since it was infinitesimally cooler than the cramped back room. I handed out more water and packets of biscuits to the two teenagers, who were both refusing to look at us or at each other.
“We can take it from here, sir,” DI Young came over to tell me a moment later.
“Oh?” I said, slightly amused by his directness. “You’re kicking us two out, huh?”
He blushed right down to his neck. “No! I mean, I just thought you’re busy, sir.” I was chuckling, and he raised a hesitant smile back at me as he added, “We can handle giving out biscuits to delinquent teens, sir, I promise.”
“I believe you,” I laughed. I patted the bloke on the shoulder. “Alright, we’ll be off then. Good luck with the parents, mate. They’re not going to be best pleased.”
“Oh, tell me about it,” he said with a dramatic sigh. I grinned at him, and we shook hands before Stephen and I headed outside.
The sun was beating down fiercely, and my stomach was beginning to rumble from lack of food, though I had helped myself to some of the station’s biscuits.
“You driving, or am I?”
“If you fancy it, go for it,” I said, waving my hand at the car. “This heat makes me want to take a nap.”
“I’ll do it then,” Stephen said with a wry smile. “And we’ll drop by the services, ‘cus I can hear your poor stomach from here.”
“I can’t help it,” I grumbled, climbing into the hot car with a grimace. We’d parked it in the shade when we’d arrived, but the sun had moved around. “I have a fast metabolism.”
“Sure you do.” Stephen sent me a disbelieving look. “You being a string bean has nothing to do with the miles you run every day.”
We traded friendly banter back and forth as Stephen got the car started up and set us on the route back to York. We were heading away from Roberts’ farm, but I thought I could still smell the acrid smoke on the air when I opened the window.
“Y’know what I was wondering about?” Stephen said as we sat in the motorway services car park half an hour later. I’d grabbed a pasta salad, and Stephen had picked out a Subway foot-long.
“No, what?”
“The fuel that was used to start it, right?” Stephen started once he’d swallowed his mouthful. “Where’d they get that? A petrol station?”
“I guess so,” I said with a shrug. “Or from their parents’ garage. They could’ve stolen it out of someone’s tank if they were determined enough.”
“Yeah, that’s fair,” Stephen said. “I thought that Mickey wasn’t old enough, and Tiger didn’t seem to have any ID on him to prove that he was sixteen either.”
“So, do they have an adult helping them? Is that what you’re saying?” I said, chewing my pasta as I thought it over.
“Or an older teenager, anyway.” He shrugged. “It was a thought.”
“Aye, it’s not a bad one,” I agreed. “It might help later on, but we can’t go looking at petrol station cameras now. It’d be worse than a needle in a haystack.”
Stephen agreed with a nod, and we went back to eating, digging into our late lunches. When I was out in the heat, I tended to lose my appetite a little, but once back in the air-conditioned car, I had quickly become ravenous. I ended up grabbing another sandwich from the drive-through as we were leaving the services, which I tucked into with gusto as we drove home.
“What’s our next steps then, Mitch?” Stephen asked as I was finishing up, cleaning mayonnaise off my fingers. “You got a plan?”
“The start of one, probably,” I said, leaning my elbow against the window and resting my chin on it. “We could do with following up what Mickey and Tiger were telling us, right?”
I patted my pockets until I found my notebook and flicked through it. The thing was getting pretty badly tattered, and the pages threatened to come loose as I found the one I wanted.
“We can check the train station cameras for a start,” I decided. “If Mickey was telling the truth, we might be able to get him and the rest of the group on the station CCTV.”
Stephen gave a slow nod. “We could do with talking to this ‘Jules’ kid too if we can find him. I don’t know what you thought-”
“I thought that Mickey recognised that name. That’s what I think,” I interrupted. “And Roberts gave the exact same description as Alistair Pumphrey’s dad did. I’m not saying it couldn’t be a coincidence still, but-”
“If it is, it’s a hell of a coincidence,” Stephen finished in agreement. He’d not been sure before this trip, but Mickey’s response, tiny though it had been, seemed to have convinced him.
“I wonder whether Sedgwick has got anything new on Alistair,” I said as we got closer to York. “If he was found, we could ask him about Jules.”
“He’s not our case, remember, Mitch?”
“I know, I know,” I sighed.
Alistair Pumphrey’s missing child case was Sedgwick’s responsibility, not mine, but it seemed to be overlapping with the couple of cases Stephen and I had worked on recently, and I wasn’t yet sure what to make of that. It was more than likely that Sedgwick’s case and these incidents had become tangled simply because they both involved troublesome teenagers in York, though the chances of that still seemed extraordinary.
Regardless of whether there was a connection or not, Stephen and I would keep going until we figured it out, I was sure of that. It might’ve been that we accidentally stumbled into the middle of this tangle, but we were never ones to quit when things got difficult. For now, I was sure that the blond teenager, Jules, was the key link, and I would make tracking him down our top priority until we found him.
Six
Once back at Hewford, I put Stephen on the task of digging up the train station footage. It would take him a while to sift through it, looking for Mickey, Tiger, and possibly a tall, blond boy. I fetched us both fresh glasses of water before heading off to find Keira. I hadn’t been able to find out anything online about this Jules boy, but I had faith that, if anything was out there, Keira would be able to pull it from the ether for us.
“Oh, you again,” she said flatly when she saw me approaching. I grinned, spotting the barely there smile on her mouth.
“Me again,” I agreed. “Got a spare minute?”
“No,” she tossed back, “but I never do, so what is it?”
“I’ve got another fun challenge for you,” I said with a crooked smile. “We’ve got-”
“By ‘fun’, do you mean ‘frustrating and time-consuming’?”
“It’s all about how you look at it,” I countered, and she shook her head with a quiet laugh. “There’s a teenage boy we’re looking for,” I started before outlining what little we knew about Jules.
“You have a first name, and that’s it?” She didn’t look impressed.
“Plus a detailed description,” I said hopefully.
She rolled her eyes at me. “Alright, Mitchell, shoo. I’ll give it a shot when I have time, but don’t hold your breath.”
“If anyone can do it, you can!” I told her cheerfully, grinning at the exasperated sigh I heard her give as I walked away.
“Any luck?” I asked Stephen as I sat back down, a fresh coffee in hand. It was too damn warm for hot drinks, but I needed the caffeine hit something awful.
“Nope,” Stephen sighed. His head rested on his chin as he watched the train station CCTV, which began to blur beneath my gaze after a few minutes of watching over his shoulder. “I’m looking, but it’s busy, Mitch. There’s a lot of people.”
“I know. Thanks for giving it a go.”
“What are you going to look into?” Stephen paused the footage he’d been watching and leaned back, stretching his arms up and making his back click. “You want me to send over some of these videos?”
“Mm, maybe,” I hedged, running a hand through my hair and pulling a face at the sticky feeling of it. “I was thinking of searc
hing the system for Jules, looking for teens around the right age.”
Stephen gave a noncommittal shrug. “Sure, you might find something.”
“Hopefully.”
The rest of the afternoon was spent engaged in the tedious work of looking through large amounts of material in search of the tiny piece that would fit into our puzzle.
Stephen and I took a brief break in the mid-afternoon to grab ice creams from the local shop, sitting on the bench outside the station to eat them, the melting sweetness dripping onto the tarmac.
Then it was back to the grindstone and to sweating through my shirt. The sun’s heat began to dip around four, but the warmth saved up in the walls and floors of the building during the day kept the temperature high.
My mind drifted as I worked through the police system, trying different combinations of searches as I tried to get the database to throw up the information that I needed. I was due over at Sam’s tonight, and as much as I badly wanted to see her again, I was worried about how things would be between us after she’d dropped her bombshell last night. I already had the feeling that we were running on borrowed time now that I knew that she’d be leaving for Kent, and I didn’t want that feeling to sour the time that we did have left.
“Hey, Darren, look.”
Stephen pulled me out of my thoughts, and I rubbed my tired eyes and shifted my chair closer to his desk.
“What am I looking at?”
“Here.” Stephen played the footage and tapped the middle of the screen.
It took a moment for me to process what I was seeing and pick out the relevant face from the crowd, but when I did, my eyes widened.
“Mickey wasn’t lying then.”
The CCTV showed a group of teens moving quickly through the crowds of York station towards the stairs. They all had their heads down, and several were wearing caps or hoodies, hiding or shadowing their faces and making it difficult to pick any of their features out for sure.
But the bright green T-shirt on one of the boys was instantly recognizable as belonging to Tiger, even though he was keeping his head well down. It was a challenge to try to count how many teenagers there were in the groups amidst the summer tourist crowds. One of them did stand out, however, as being taller than the others and, after Stephen had replayed the clip several times, I thought I could see blond hair peeking out from under his baseball cap.
“Do you reckon that’s him?” I said, tapping the screen. “Jules?”
“Couldn’t say for sure,” Stephen said, after squinting at the grainy image for a long moment.
“At least these cameras film colour,” I muttered, watching again as Tiger moved across the screen in his green shirt. “You probably wouldn’t have picked them out if it’d been in black and white.”
“Definitely.” Stephen nodded.
I wheeled my chair back to my desk and rested my chin on my clammy hands for a moment.
“Save that clip. If you can crop out even a half-decent shot of the one who might be Jules, we can show it to Alistair’s parents. See what they think.”
Stephen gave a nod of agreement, and I went back to trawling through the police records. I tried out every combination of search terms I could think of and spent a good deal of time getting through to page twenty or more of the results.
I was struggling for what else to try to on the verge of giving up on the idea when I noticed a case of arson that’d been recorded, and it gave me a thought. I tried a general search for fires that’d happened in the last few months, going back to April, and scrolled through the results without expecting much of anything. Police were often called to look over fires to see whether there was any evidence of interference or criminal activity, but it wasn’t really my department. I’d not particularly heard that the number of fires had gone up recently, and it was all new to me when I looked through the recent cases.
Almost all of them had been ascribed to teenagers or young people. They were generally small or set in remote locations, but they were happening with almost two-weekly regularity, though with no strict schedule. I widened the search terms and looked back further, wondering how long this had been going on for, but before April this year, the fires reported had had a wide range of causes or had been left uncertain, and they’d been spaced out further. I found only one other fire set by teens, which had happened back in October of last year.
Moving back towards the more recent results with a deep frown on my forehead, I tried to make sense of what I was seeing. Was this the work of one pyromaniac, who’d been systematically setting fires ever since April? Why had no-one noticed this new and odd pattern? Or perhaps they had, and it just hadn’t been on my radar. Hewford was a large enough station that I hardly got to hear about even half of the cases that passed through our doors.
I’d have to ask around, I thought, as I opened up each of the cases and scanned through what little had been written about them. There wasn’t much to go on, and the only reason that they’d been ruled as being set by teenagers were often a single witness statement from someone passing by late at night. Alcohol cans and cigarettes had also been found left at a couple of the scenes, as well as emptied cans of petrol. The problem was that we didn’t have the capacity to run prints for every single case, and these fires had all been minor, involving buildings already intended to be demolished or the occasional animal shed or stable. It was illegal, of course, it was, and the perpetrators would have been done for property damage if they’d been caught. Taken individually, though, the cases weren’t big enough to throw money or resources at, so they’d slipped through the cracks.
“Steph, stop doing that for a moment,” I said, angling my screen towards him.
“Did you actually find something on the kid?”
“What, Jules? No. But look at this.”
He wheeled himself forwards to take a look at my computer, his eyebrows rising at first as he read it and then settling into a frown.
“That is… weird.”
“Aye, and it started in April, for some reason.” I turned the screen back towards me, taking a screenshot of the page and saving it.
“So they’re not isolated incidents? Is that what you’re thinking?”
“It doesn’t look like it.”
“But the fire set at Roberts, and the one a few days back in York, they were set by groups of teens, weren’t they?” he said. I gave a nod, and he went on. “A whole gang is perpetuating these, then? Setting fires together every fortnight or so? That’s, well, that’s disturbing.”
I’d come to the same conclusion myself and gave a slow nod. “It is, I know.”
“And you think this Jules kid, a so-called friend of Alistair Pumphrey’s, is tangled up in it too.”
“I do,” I muttered, rubbing my chin as I thought. “I need to show this to Sedgwick, I think. He hasn’t emailed, but maybe he’s heard something. Keep at the CCTV, mate.” I gave him a pat on the shoulder and stood up.
“He might not take kindly to us muscling into this, you know,” Stephen pointed out, his gaze staying focused on his computer screen.
“We’re not muscling in.” I waved my hand in dismissal of the idea. “His case might have some correlation with ours, that’s all.”
“Yeah?” Stephen turned to raise his eyebrows at me. “And how’d it work out last time our case got mixed up with his? That student case, you remember that?”
“Of course I do.” I sobered. “Look, I get the concern, Steph. We don’t want to get on his wrong side while we still need him to work with us, but I’m just going to ask politely for updates. And, besides, he did work with us on the student case eventually, didn’t he?”
“Yeah, true. Reluctantly, though.”
I exhaled in exasperation. “Well, that’s not my fault, is it?” I said before heading off to find the man. It would’ve been nice if he could manage basic civility, but I’d settle for grudging cooperation if I had to.
I found him at his desk, his partner sitting beside him
as they both poured over Sedgwick’s computer screen. Greene was the first to notice my presence, and she looked surprised to see me. She gave her partner a nudge to get his attention, and Sedgwick looked up, his expression becoming disgruntled when he saw me standing there.
“What d’you want?”
I resisted the urge to say something snarky and instead gave him a neutral smile which might have turned out more like a grimace.
“I wanted to ask if there had been any updates with the Alistair Pumphrey case?”
“One,” he said after a long pause, making clear his disinclination to tell me.
“What was that?” I prompted when it didn’t seem like he was going to continue.
“We had witnesses claiming to have seen him in town,” Sedgwick said, turning his gaze back to his computer screen like he was already bored with me.
“Today? Are they credible?”
Sedgwick turned to give me a cold look. “Not your case, Mitchell.”
“I know, I know.” I put up my hands. “But look, Sedgwick, Stephen and me have been looking into these fires that have been happening recently. You heard about them.”
“Is this relevant?”
“Yes,” I said sharply. “Hear me out, okay?” He gave a hand wave, telling me to go on, I guessed. I dragged up a chair from a nearby empty desk, which made Sedgwick frown and began to explain what I’d found related to Jules and the series of fires.
Apparently, against his best intentions, he ended up paying close attention to me by the time I was finishing up.
“Now, this doesn’t help us- you find Alistair, I know, but if we can track down this Jules kid, I think he’ll have something useful to tell us.”
“You’ve no proof that he had anything to do with Alistair going missing.”
“Other than what his father said, no. But it’s suspicious, isn’t it? The timings?”
“I suppose so,” Sedgwick relented after a beat of silence. “Alright, keep me updated. I’m not convinced, but there might be something in it.”
“Okay.” I gave a mental shrug, knowing that I couldn’t expect anything more encouraging. Sedgwick didn’t like me, and he only worked on solid facts. He was a good detective, sure, with his steady thoroughness, but he wasn’t the most imaginative. “If there’s news, I’ll email you. And you’ll keep me in the loop too?” I said as I stood up and wheeled the chair I’d borrowed back into its place.
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