Heatwave

by Oliver Davies

  “The biggest thing? There were other incidents?” Stephen put in. Sheridan glanced over at him and gave a small nod.

  “He was often abrupt or rude to me, which, you know, I didn’t really have a problem with. Some kids just aren’t the best at socialising,” she hurried to add.

  “But?” I prompted.

  “He was unkind to the other kids, too, you know. Especially when he first joined in year five. Later on, he seemed to stop, but there were other things.” She rubbed her hands over her jeans and left a slight smear on the fabric, her hands clammy.

  “Such as?”

  “I couldn’t prove it, but I was sure that he’d stolen one of the school’s laptops. He wears this huge rucksack, right, and he’d asked once previously about borrowing a laptop. I would’ve let him, but it was against school policy. And a month later, the number of laptops didn’t add up, but I couldn’t say for certain that it’d been him.”

  She seemed keen to make sure we didn’t come down too hard on Alistair or take her word as gospel, and I wondered why that was. Did she feel guilty for asking the teenager to leave the club?

  “Were there any other incidents before he was violent against the other child?” Stephen said after she’d been quiet for a moment.

  “Not really. Well, there were little things. I’d find him in the computer suite when he wasn’t meant to be there. Or he’d turn off the screen when I walked past, so I couldn’t see it. He was dealing with some advanced stuff, and I was… concerned about what he might use it for, but he wouldn’t talk to me.” She pressed her lips together. “He made it very clear that he didn’t trust me.”

  “And what did he do to hurt this other kid?” I asked.

  She shifted in her seat and reached for her mug of tea, wrapping her hands around the china even though it was warm inside her house. She frowned down at the coffee table between us, and I wondered what she was thinking but stayed quiet. She’d tell us in her own time.

  “It was after the club had ended one evening, and it was winter, so it was already dark by then. The kids headed out, and I packed up, but I heard this yelling when I was walking to my car.”

  She swallowed and reached up to tuck a stray bit of hair away, her hand visibly shaking slightly.

  “I saw this little light going on and off, way off on the playing field, near the trees. And it sounded like kids getting up to trouble, and like someone might get hurt, so I didn’t really think before I went over.”

  She stopped, taking another sip of her tea, her forehead crinkled with discomfort.

  “Take your time,” I said after a moment. “It’s hard to talk through memories like this, I know.”

  She gave me a weak, appreciative smile and a small nod.

  “Alistair was there, and a couple of bigger teenagers that I didn’t know. And he had a lighter- He was burning a child’s sleeve.”

  My breath caught as I listened as I shared a loaded look with Stephen, who gave me a nod of acknowledgement.

  “I was so horrified. I ran in there, got the flames out, and shouted at all of them. Alistair just stood there, looking at me, before he said that it was only a g-game.” She shook her head, giving a humourless laugh. “I tried to tell the head of the year, but the child swore it didn’t happen, and he hadn’t actually been burned, so I had no proof. Even if they believed me, they couldn’t do anything without the child saying that it happened.”

  “But you still told Alistair not to come to ICT club anymore,” I concluded.

  “Yes, there wasn’t anything I could do.” She gave a helpless shrug. “Alistair was otherwise a model student. None of the other teachers had had any problems with him. Maybe it was just me, but he seemed so- so cold. And off. There was no remorse or shame or anything when I was yelling at him, wanting to know what the hell he was doing.”

  She released a long breath, her shoulders sinking, and took a sip of tea.

  “I shouldn’t have shouted at them. I know I should’ve kept my temper. And I ought to have taken the child to someone senior right there and then so that they could see his burnt sleeve. I didn’t think of that at the time, not when the boy kept saying he just wanted to go home. He didn’t want me to speak to his parents, either, so I just decided to leave it until the next day.” She sighed, running out of words and going quiet.

  “Thank you for telling us, Miss Sheridan,” I said gently since her emotions seemed raw after telling the story. “When did this happen?”

  “Oh, it must have been a year ago now, or more.”

  “So when he was thirteen.” I gave a nod, making a note on my pad. “What was the name of the other child?”

  “He won’t admit that it happened. I tried speaking to him several times, but he was adamant that it was just a game and that he didn’t want to tell anyone,” she warned me.

  “Did you think he’d been threatened?”

  “By Alistair?” she said before giving a helpless shrug. “I’ve considered all sorts, but it might be the age-old rule between kids that they don’t snitch on each other.”

  “And there were no marks at all on the child?”

  “I slapped my hand on his sleeve as soon as I got there and patted the fire out. He could’ve ended up in hospital if the jacket had caught fire properly, but it was a damp night. He was really lucky, I tried to tell him that, but he wouldn’t listen.”

  “Has Alistair tried to talk to you since?” Stephen asked.

  “No, not at all. Sometimes in lessons, I’d…” she trailed off, looking uncomfortable.

  “Go on, please, Miss Sheridan. It’s really essential that we understand everything we can about him.”

  “It’s probably nothing, but I’d get the sense he was glaring at me or watching me anyway, and he would be. Just cold, cold eyes.” She shook her head and forced a tight laugh. “It’s my imagination, silly, really. He’s a fourteen-year-old kid, right?”

  I couldn’t say anything reassuring to her, so I just nodded seriously.

  “Was there anything else you could tell us? Anything at all that might be important?”

  Her gaze drifted away from us as she thought it over, her hand rubbing her knee. Her house must have thin walls, or the insulation wasn’t good because it felt much warmer inside here than it had at the Pumphrey’s house, and my hair was sticking to my forehead and the back of my neck. It was reaching the hottest part of the day, though, and I was dying for a glass of Sam’s iced coffee when we returned to the station. But for now, I focused back on Anna Sheridan as she came to an answer.

  “I doubt it’s really important, but Alistair did seem to have more friends on the playground before he went missing. Or not friends, exactly, but people talking to him, crowding around him. I only saw it a couple of times when I was out on playground duty, so it may have been nothing.”

  “Alright, that’s helpful. I can’t thank you enough for telling us this.”

  “I may misinterpret some of it, you know. Not the part where he burnt that boy’s sleeve because I’m absolutely sure of that, but perhaps I was too imaginative with the other parts.”

  “We’re interested in all of it,” I tried to reassure her. She almost seemed to want to undermine her own statement, and I wasn’t really sure why. Self-doubt, perhaps, or a desire to protect Alistair, despite what she’d seen him do.

  We took our leave soon after, both of us quiet as we made our way back to the station. The heat today felt especially oppressive and sticky against my skin, with my hair curling up more than usual.

  “Feels like a thunderstorm,” Stephen said as we drove back to Hewford.

  The sky was mostly still a pure, glowing blue, but a scattering of clouds had begun to gather for the first time in what felt like weeks.

  “I hope it does. We could use the rain.”

  “Mm, we don’t need the lightning, though. And if there’s too much rain all at once, we could get a flood.”

  “Jesus, yeah, we don’t need any more of that,” I agreed. />
  “What will be, will be, I guess,” Stephen said with a shrug.

  Inside the building, it wasn’t much cooler or less sticky than outside. I shared the last of the iced coffee with Stephen, and we headed back to our desks.

  “Are you convinced Alistair isn’t a little angel, now?” I asked, deliberately provoking him. I was settled back in my desk chair, too lethargic to mind how my back was sticking to the chair.

  “I never thought he was an angel. It was you who painted him as some manipulative devil-child-”

  “I mean, he was burning holes in his back garden. That’s a little devilish right?”

  “Darren, be serious.”

  “Okay, okay.” I straightened up in my chair, taking a sip of coffee to wet my throat. “I don’t doubt what Sheridan was saying, do you?”

  “No. Although she didn’t sound all too sure of it herself, did she?”

  “Aye, I don’t know why that was. Probably because she had all the other teachers telling her that Alistair was a ‘pleasure to teach’ or whatever the phrase is they use. Anyway, I think we can conclusively say that Alistair has a history with starting fires and being a danger to others, right?”

  “And that he was talented with computers, Sheridan said that,” Stephen added.

  “Absolutely. So I don’t think it’s an unreasonable jump to assume that he was lying about being coerced into the gang and actually joined of his own free will and has been helping with their activities.”

  “If he is the one in charge of technology, he’s been playing a significant role, too.”

  I made a noise of acknowledgement at that and rubbed my palm over my jaw as I thought it over. “What bothers me, still, is the timing of it all. Why has he suddenly turned back up now?”

  “Maybe he got bored with living rough?”

  “No, he’s smart. He plans these things out meticulously, so there’s got to be a reason.” I blinked as a thought occurred to me and turned sharply towards Stephen. “If you look at this a certain way, it looks like Alistair was creating an alibi. He’s established himself as an unwilling participant in the gang and anything they do from now on…”

  I trailed off as my train of thought hurtled forwards, and I hurried to get on my computer, bringing up the trackers on the petrol canisters.

  “What’re you doing?”

  I cursed, loud enough to startle Stephen.

  “They’ve moved the petrol, Steph, we’ve-”

  But before I could get my words in order, none other than Rashford came hurrying over to us. The urgency in her face and movements made me instinctively get to my feet, ready to go, and Stephen followed my lead.

  “There’s another fire,” she said when she reached us, slightly out of breath.

  I closed my eyes briefly, fearing the worst already. Despite the trackers we’d put on the petrol, we’d still realised too damn late to stop it.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “At a school.”

  I swore again and glanced over at Stephen, who looked just as grim.

  “Let’s go.”

  Twenty-One

  Rashford couldn’t spare the time to come with us to the fire itself, but she ordered me to keep her updated. We sped off over to Rose Heath school, a small secondary school just off the main road into York, with the sirens wailing and lights on.

  “Do they have some connection to this school?”

  “No idea,” Stephen said tightly as he took us around a sharp corner. I reached up to hold on to the handle above the car door.

  “It’s not the school of the headmaster who was targeted before.”

  “No. Maybe it’s a link to one of the others,” he said, and I grunted in agreement. A moment later, he asked, “Explain to me why you suddenly checked the petrol, back at the station. You knew something was about to happen.”

  “Aye, but not fast enough.” I grimaced, wishing that I’d thought to check the tracker just ten minutes earlier, but I hadn’t. “I realised that if Alistair was setting himself up with an alibi by coming home to his parents, he must have something big planned. And we knew the gang had stolen all that petrol.”

  “Darren, it’s not your fault.”

  “It damn well is,” I said tightly. “We should’ve confiscated the petrol straight away. I thought we could watch the trackers and act fast enough, but I was wrong. And now Alistair’s gonna get away with it, anyway.”

  “You don’t know that, we-” Stephen started before we hit a knot of cars on the road, and Stephen had to concentrate on negotiating the city roads. I stayed quiet for the rest of the journey, letting Stephen put his full focus into driving. We were near rush hour now, and traffic had picked up as the day-trippers and commuters left the city to head home. The clouds had continued to gather overhead, but I wasn’t sure yet whether they’d come to anything.

  Up ahead, I saw the curling plume of blackened smoke right before I smelled it. It caught the light breeze up above the buildings and carved a ragged, dark cut through the early evening sky.

  A moment later, a fire engine came racing down the road behind us, and Stephen pulled the wheel sharply to the side to let it through. It thundered past, its sirens piercingly loud, and Stephen accelerated sharply after it. He followed in its wake, like a fish catching a ride behind a boat, as the fire engine ploughed through the traffic and soon arrived at the school.

  The stench of acrid burning had only gotten worse as we approached, despite me closing all the car’s air vents and setting the air con to recirculating. Or perhaps it was my fear that was making the smell seem so overpoweringly strong, catching in the back of my throat.

  “At least it’s the holidays,” Stephen said, just as we were pulling up in the school’s car park.

  The place was crowded with spectators and emergency services personnel alike, plus the usual journalists, who somehow managed to turn up at scenes even before we did.

  “Aye, that’s a godsend,” I said as we strode forwards into the fray, looking for someone who could fill us in.

  Since it was still the summer holidays, I could only hope that there’d been no-one in the building at all, pupils or staff. They’d have to make sure that the caretaker or any cleaners had definitely not been on site, but I fervently hoped that we were looking at property damage here, not a risk to life.

  As we got closer to the burning building, I realised that it was worse than I’d thought. The left-hand side of the building was almost fully alight, and firefighters were struggling to tackle a smaller blaze on the left, too. There was a wide-open space around the school, but it was all bone dry, and the light wind was catching the sparks and ash coming from the fire.

  “Everywhere’s a tinderbox right now,” I said grimly, my words almost caught up in the roar.

  “If this spreads, we’re in serious trouble,” Stephen agreed.

  The school might have some space around it, but there were several clusterings of trees not far away, all of them dried out by the drought. Beyond the school’s fences was a residential area, with packed-together houses that would go up like dominos if one of them caught fire.

  I turned back to the school, trying to judge whether the firefighters were winning against the flames. I had to shade my eyes against the glare of it, and the smoke kept gusting in our direction, making my eyes sting and my lungs feel tight.

  I ran a hand over my hair and was briefly glad that my ribs didn’t twinge too badly as I made the movement. My hair was collecting fine particles of ash that left my hand slightly grey, and I grimaced to look at it, knowing that my clothes and skin would reek of smoke for days after this, even after multiple showers.

  Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I was wound tight enough with worry that I startled, twisting around like a cat taken by surprise. A younger officer looked up at me, clearly surprised by my reaction.

  “Hi, can I help you?” I said when she didn’t speak.

  “Uh, are you DCI Mitchell?” she asked. At my nod, she pointe
d through the gathered people to a couple of firefighters standing not far away. “The firemen want to talk to you, something about this being your case?”

  “Yes, it is,” I said, already moving towards the men she’d pointed to. “Thank you.”

  The firefighters looked up as we approached, and one of them looked familiar. I’d seen him before, maybe at the headmaster’s house or maybe at the barn fire, I couldn’t remember. Still, I reached out to shake his hand, and he clasped mine in a firm grip.

  “I’m guessing this links to your case, so thought you ought to be filled in,” he told me, getting directly to the point.

  “We’d appreciate that. How’re your efforts going?”

  “The fire’s big and spreading. I’m guessing that a good deal of fuel was used to get it started, and it’s well and truly got going now.”

  I flinched at the mention of the fuel and rubbed a hand over my face.

  “Alright. Anything else I should know?”

  “Yeah, there was some clear graffiti on the back of the building, which is still mostly intact. We were hoping it would mean something to you.”

  “Show us.”

  The firefighter took us around the side of the building at a jog, staying well away from the fire. The heat was tremendous even at this distance, and I was sweating heavily, my hair and shirt clinging to my clammy skin. Stephen didn’t look much better, though his buzzed-short hair looked the same as it always did.

  “Here,” the firefighter said, gesturing up the brick wall of the school.

  “Oh god,” I murmured as I read it.

  Splashed across the building at about head-height was a word written in bright green spray paint: Traitor.

  “What’s wrong?” the firefighter asked, catching the fear on my face. I wasn’t sure that Stephen had realised the implications of this yet either, but I didn’t have the time to talk.

  I scrambled to get onto the phone to Mickey’s mum, pacing back and forth over the parched grass despite how overheated I already was. My fear for the teenager made me unable to keep still.