Heatwave Page 12

  “You might want to take her a caffeinated offering, too,” Stephen said gravely, “if you’re gonna make requests of her before nine o’clock.”

  “Sage advice,” I chuckled, heading for the break room.

  As I’d expected, I found Keira already at her desk. Her boss was in, too, but other than him, she was the only one in the tech team who’d shown up yet.

  “I hope you’ll get the next promotion, doing all these extra hours,” I told her as I came over, presenting her with a mug of coffee before she could glare at me for interrupting her.

  “So do I,” she grumbled. She accepted the drink, and I guessed that it must have been acceptable because she didn’t pull a face when she tried it. “What do you want, Mitchell? I’m busy.”

  “I know, I know. Do you remember me asking you to look into-?”

  “A blond kid with no picture and only his first name. Yeah, I remember.”

  “And have you had time-?”

  “It’s not been the most urgent of my priorities,” she said, exasperated.

  “Aye, I guessed that. But look, the urgency just got pushed up, okay? There have been developments.”

  I explained to her concisely about the fires, the teenage gang, the elderly man currently still in hospital.

  “They’re not stopping, and we don’t know much of anything about them. And this blond kid, Jules, he’s at the centre of it somehow. If you can just-”

  “Okay, Mitchell, I understand,” she waved a hand at me, her nails perfectly manicured. “You send me any new, relevant information, and I’ll push it up the list.” She looked flatly at me, making it clear that it was the best I was going to get, and I gave her a nod of thanks.

  “Any luck?” Stephen asked.

  I flopped into my chair with a sigh. “Well, it’s Adams, you know how she is. Always busy.”

  “She’s the best tech, so everyone wants her to help on their case.”

  “Aye, too right,” I agreed. “But, c’mon, me and Sedgwick are the only DCIs at Hewford. Couldn’t she prioritise us a little? And I recognised her brilliance when she was brand new here.”

  Stephen laughed, and I had to join him. I could imagine too well Keira’s response to my slightly whiny comments. She wasn’t one to play favourites, not for any reason. She’d work out the urgency of the tasks she’d been asked to do, and nobody would tell her otherwise, probably not even the superintendent.

  “She’ll see that it’s important and get round to it,” Stephen assured me.

  “I better send her an update so she knows about the online stuff. If we could find out how the teens are meeting, it would be a huge breakthrough.”

  “Agreed.”

  I checked over the reports I’d already completed and updated them before emailing them off to Keira. In the meantime, I asked Stephen to talk to the superintendent, Rashford, about getting a couple of junior officers to help us with researching the case. Keira was too busy to help out much right now, especially with how frenetic this summer was turning out to be, so we could do with an extra helping hand.

  “She’s willing to give us one,” Stephen said as he sat back down with a sigh.

  “But did you-?”

  “I told her how urgent it was, and how you thought it would escalate, etc. etc.,” Stephen said, a touch impatient. “I laid it all out, but she made it clear that they’re rushed off their feet and can’t spare anyone else.”

  “Okay,” I sighed. “One will have to be enough then.”

  So I sent an email over to the officer who’d been assigned to help us out, laying out clearly that they were to shift through the police records, looking for any teenagers called Jules who matched the boy’s description.

  “And what’ll we be doing while the rookie’s sweating over that research?”

  I rubbed a hand through my hair, which had long dried off and was beginning to stick to my forehead with sweat. The day was warming up quickly, and several others around the office had copied me in shutting some of the blinds. It kept some of the sun off but intensified the feeling of being confined in the dull, hot building.

  “I want you to have a look over the CCTV around the area near where the gang were last seen, okay?” I said, and Stephen nodded. “And I’m gonna try giving some of these businesses a call.”

  “Which businesses?”

  I tapped my list with a finger. “Companies that make custom patches. That flammable symbol is distinctive. Surely it’s traceable.”

  “Mm,” Stephen said noncommittally, looking unconvinced. “The internet is a big place, Mitch.”

  “I am fully aware, thanks.” I rolled my eyes. “Really appreciate that gem of wisdom. Keep ‘em coming.”

  “Yeah?” He grinned. “You want another one? ‘A man works best on a full stomach’.”

  “Nonsense. You’ve gotta be lean and hungry in this job, keeps you sharp.” I glanced over at him and found him looking unimpressed. “And if that was your shoddy hint at wanting to go for lunch, it’s not even twelve yet.”

  “I’m giving you a terrible review on Yelp,” he grumbled, “I hope you know that. ‘Zero out of ten, grumpiest work partner ever. Would not recommend.’”

  I snorted. “Tough luck, you’re stuck with me.”

  He grumbled at me but got to work on what I’d asked him to do, and I started making phone calls to the various companies who made patches. There were a lot of possibilities, and I was simply starting from the top of the Google search list. I had no idea whether the teenagers were sneaky enough to call some obscure company that didn’t even advertise online or if they ordered the patches from abroad. It was a needle in a haystack, but I gave it a shot, anyway.

  We broke for lunch and ate outside in the shade, where the slight breeze made it cooler than inside the station. I was half-expecting another call on the radio about teenagers getting up to no good, but the day turned out to be a quiet one, for us at least.

  “Here, look at this,” Stephen said a couple of hours later.

  We’d been systematically slogging through our respective research, and I was tired and bored, despite getting up for coffee breaks or to splash water on my face and wrists to cool me off. The freshness of the morning and the cold shower I took felt like a long time ago.

  Still, I perked up at Stephen’s tone and wheeled my chair closer to his screen. He pressed play on a piece of black and white CCTV that showed a nondescript street. I looked at it closely but couldn’t identify where it was located.

  “Is this on the street where the elderly couple’s house was?”

  “No, of course not,” Stephen said impatiently. “I tried looking for that first, hours ago, but there’s no CCTV on it. This is from another road, a while away.”

  “Then how can you be sure that it’s them?”

  “Just watch, will you?”

  “Sorry, sorry.”

  He restarted the clip, and I watched in silence as, at first, nothing happened. Then a group of people moved into view, though it was difficult to see the details because they were on the other side of the road from the camera, and the angle was poor.

  “Steph-”

  “Shut up, will you?” he grumbled. “I’m getting there. This is them beforehand, right?”

  I didn’t say anything because it wasn’t possible to tell on the grainy image whether it was the gang of teenagers or not. It was too far away. But Stephen had asked me to hang on, so I waited for whatever he wanted to show or tell me.

  “Now, look at this. This is them coming back,” he said, skipping the footage forwards.

  I leaned forwards, hoping that the CCTV would have a better view this time, and I wasn’t disappointed. The group were walking on the nearer side of the pavement now, and the video had picked up their faces as clearly as the poor quality camera could manage.

  “That’s Mickey,” I murmured, tapping a middling-height boy who, on the video, kept turning to look behind him. Even in just those few seconds of footage, it was clear how n
ervous he was.

  Stephen replayed the video again.

  “That’s Jules, isn’t it?” he said, and he didn’t need to point for me to know which one he meant.

  The boy up front was one of the tallest and walked with a confident stride. He wasn’t laughing like a couple of the others were, but there wasn’t a hint of nervousness on him as he strode across the video.

  “What about that one?” I muttered as Stephen ran the recording again.

  I pointed to the shortest boy, who was almost hidden behind Jules as the teenagers moved across the camera’s view. He kept his head down, his hair as dark as Jules’s was pale, and seemed to keep up with the taller boys’ stride without trying too hard.

  “I don’t know him.” Stephen shrugged. “Why, do you recognise him?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  I hummed in thought, watching the footage again before pausing it to flick back through my notebook. I searched my notes until I found the part of my interview with Mickey that I was looking for, the part where he’d described all the gang members he’d encountered.

  “Here, this is what Mickey said about the shortest guy. He said he looked young, thirteen or so, but that the blond guy - Jules, that is - kept him close.”

  “The kid’s walking next to Jules here, too,” Stephen said, looking at the screen with a slight frown. “So he’s what? A sidekick?”

  “Guess so,” I said, rubbing my hand over my jaw. I still thought that the kid looked vaguely familiar somehow, but I couldn’t quite place him.

  “Christ, I can’t believe they’re pulling in kids as young as thirteen.” Stephen shook his head, looking disturbed and angry. “It’s disgusting.”

  “I agree. We’ve gotta track this guy down, and then we can do something about it.” I patted him on the shoulder. “Good work finding that.”

  He tipped an imaginary cap. “All in a day’s work.”

  The phone rang before I could respond, and I picked it up, glancing at my watch as I did so. It was getting towards the late afternoon, and I really didn’t want to be called out on an incident that’d take hours, but there wasn’t much I could do about it if it happened. Criminals didn’t pick sociable hours to get up to trouble, much to my annoyance.

  “DCI Mitchell speaking,” I said.

  “It’s Mickey,” a quiet voice said, “Mickey White.”

  Startled, it took me a moment to reply. “Mickey, hi. Thanks for calling. Did you have something else to tell me?”

  “Look, I’m not totally sure, okay?” he said, sounding nervy and on edge. “But I think something’s going to happen. I think they’re planning something.”

  “What kind of thing?” I sat up straighter, tension making my shoulders stiff. I fumbled to get my notebook and a pen as I waited for Mickey to speak again.

  “I don’t know. I’d say if I did, but he wouldn’t say. They’re just planning something.” When I didn’t immediately reply, Mickey’s tone turned almost defensive as he added, “You told me to call you if there was anything. It’s not my fault they won’t tell me.”

  “I know, I know it’s not your fault, and I really appreciate the heads up,” I assured him quickly. “This ‘he’ you mentioned, do you mean the blond teen? The leader?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. Did he give any hint at when this event might happen?”

  “Soon. I don’t know, in the next few days.”

  “Did he say where?”

  “No. Sorry.”

  “Alright,” I said, making a note of what little he could tell me. I turned my pen over in my fingers, agitated by the news. “And there was no suggestion of what kind of thing he was talking about? A fire, a robbery-?”

  “No,” Mickey sounded impatient, but I thought I could hear the worry underneath it. “He just said something, okay? If you won’t believe what I tell you, what’s the point-?”

  “Hey,” I said sharply, not appreciating his tone. “I’m not doubting what you’re telling me, I’m simply asking questions. It’s my job, Mickey.”

  “Yeah. Sorry,” he muttered. “I have to go.”

  “Call me if you hear anything more. Anything,” I stressed. “Even something small, okay?”

  He mumbled his agreement before hanging up, and I sighed, dragging a hand over my face.

  “That was Mickey? What did he want?” Stephen took in the frown on my face and looked concerned.

  I relayed the little Mickey had told me, and Stephen shook his head.

  “This doesn’t help. We can’t do anything about this- this mysterious ‘thing’ they’re planning. It’s useless.”

  “It’s not totally useless,” I said wearily. “It indicates that Mickey feels comfortable calling to tell me what’s going on, so if he finds out bigger information in the future, we can trust that he’ll let us know.”

  “Yeah, but that’ll be too late to stop this.”

  “We’re playing the long game, Steph. This is a big web, and there are a lot of moving parts.”

  Stephen looked unconvinced, and I understood his frustration. I wished Mickey had given us information that we could act on, but he clearly wasn’t high up enough in the teenagers’ group to be accessing that kind of intel.

  “He could be playing both sides, you know,” Stephen said, resting his head on his hand. “What he just told you is so vague it doesn’t help us at all, but it does make us more likely to trust him like you said. Convenient, no?”

  “He’s not a professional spy. He’s a scared kid. I offered him a way to get leniency, and I hope he’s doing the smart thing and cooperating with us.”

  “Just don’t underestimate him, okay?”

  “Aye, this case is already making clear that teenagers shouldn’t be underestimated,” I said. “Especially when they’re getting together like this.”

  “It is weirdly organised,” Stephen agreed. “Erratic, sure, but there seems like there’s some bigger plan, do you think?”

  “Mm, maybe. Though what that might be, I have no idea.”

  With no word from Keira and our research revealing nothing particularly urgent, Stephen and I called it a night at five, and I went to meet Sam. We were set to run back to my flat tonight, and she’d stay at mine over the weekend. I was hopeful about getting to spend some time with her, lounging around in the shade and drinking the homemade lemonade she liked to make when the weather was this hot.

  We ate takeaway together in the small communal garden beside my block of flats, sitting in creaky fold-up chairs and laughing over nothing much at all. The air was a pleasant temperature by then, but the insects eventually drove us indoors.

  “My family’s having a barbeque on Sunday,” she told me as we were lying stretched out on the bed. The duvet had been shoved off, and I’d set up a fan on the windowsill nearby, which lethargically moved the warm air around the room.

  “Are you going to go?” I asked. The heat made me sleepier than usual, and my eyelids were already half-shut.

  “I was hoping we could both go.” She rolled over onto her stomach, resting her chin on her hands so she could look at me. “You’ve met my parents, but my cousins and aunts and uncles will be there too, you know?”

  For a brief, bitter moment, I wondered what the point was of me meeting her wider family. She was moving so far away soon, and as much as I wanted to hope that we’d be able to ride it out, I was worried that we wouldn’t. But I couldn’t say that, it would be too hurtful.

  “Sounds nice,” I said after a moment.

  She lay back, looking up at the ceiling. “I don’t know much about your family,” she said. Her tone was casual, but I tensed, and I knew she felt it. “You don’t talk about them.”

  I made a noncommittal noise, closing my eyes as if that would stop her from asking.

  “Darren.” She touched my shoulder a moment later, and I startled slightly, opening my eyes again. “We don’t have to talk about it now, but I’d like to know someday. You can trust me, you know t
hat?”

  “Of course I trust you,” I said, and it was true. It didn’t mean that I wanted to drag up the past, though.

  “Okay,” she said quietly, knowing me well enough to tell that I wasn’t going to be pressed into saying anything more tonight.

  She moved her hand down to link her pinkie finger with mine since it was too hot to hold hands, and I smiled. We lay there for long enough that I slipped into sleep, Sam’s finger still curled around mine.

  Eleven

  Keira approached our desks on Monday afternoon, and both Stephen and I gave her our full attention.

  “You’ve found something?” I asked.

  “You could say that,” she said, coming around to my side of the computer. “I’ve sent you an email. Click on the link.”

  Bemused, I did as she asked, startled when my screen shifted into dark tones. It took me a moment to figure out what I was looking at.

  “Some kind of messaging site? A message board- oh damn,” I said, realising what this was. “This is where they’re talking?”

  “And meeting, yes. I looked into the blond boy, Jules, and followed the nickname, or codename, that Mickey White had given you.”

  “That’s how you found this?”

  “I searched for anything linked to the nickname, and this is what came up.”

  “Adams, you’re amazing.” I gave her a grateful smile before turning back to the screen, scrolling through the messages.

  “It was behind some level of encryption,” she said. “Weirdly sophisticated considering we’re talking about seventeen-year-olds.”

  “Kids are tech-savvy these days,” I said absently.

  “No, it was more than that.” Her words were firm enough to make me look up. “One of them, at least, is talented. And that group is talking some big game on there,” she warned me. “Anti-police, anarchist, violent stuff.”

  “Terrorism?” I asked, alarmed.

  “No, not yet.”

  “Christ,” Stephen muttered. He’d been listening in, and we shared a dismayed look.

  “Thanks for this, seriously,” I said, scanning through the messages and grimacing at what was there. This was worrying, to say the least, but it was also a big step in the right direction. Better to know about a threat so we could worry about it, I thought, than to fumble around in blind ignorance.