Heatwave Read online

  “A big show, yeah. It makes sense.”

  I sighed. “Did you get anything off the jerry can?”

  “I was just about to try when you called me.”

  I waved him off to finish what he’d started while I headed back round to the front of the burnt house. The firefighters were heading off, and I watched them go, the last of the bystanders also turning away once the fire engine had left. There was tape ringing the property’s boundary, and the junior officer who Rashford had sent over was standing there, making sure that nobody else with trouble on their mind got in. We didn’t need some foolhardy school kids falling through the house’s second floor because they wanted to explore.

  The day was wearing on, but I was aware that time was of the essence when it came to finding a witness and getting them to recount what they saw. I was pinning my hopes on someone having seen the teenagers, even if only for a moment and only from the back. Someone who could confirm that a group of young people was there.

  At this stage, a person playing devil’s advocate could argue that there wasn’t much proof that this fire linked to the others at all. I was convinced that it was, partly because it fit the pattern but primarily because of the messages I’d seen exchanged on the site. But that wasn’t concrete evidence, evidence that the teenagers were here on the ground and set the fire with their own hands.

  Stephen approached me from the side, carrying the fingerprints kit and the jerry can in an evidence bag.

  “Anything?” I asked him.

  “Possibly. They’re probably partials, but we can hope.”

  We moved back towards the car together, and Stephen put the things away in the boot.

  “What now, boss?”

  I glanced along the length of the street which was relatively quiet now that the commotion of the fire had mostly passed. Still, there was usually at least someone in sight on the suburbian road, even if they were a short way down the pavement. I just hoped that there had been someone watching when we needed them to.

  I turned to Stephen. “Now we need a witness.”

  Twelve

  Leaving the junior officer to keep an eye on the house, me and Stephen resorted to good, old-fashioned police work: knocking on people’s doors. To my relief, it wasn’t too long before we found someone who’d witnessed the teenagers at the site of the fire.

  “Must have been ten of them,” he said, after inviting us into his house and fetching glasses of water for us. He’d offered us a cold beer, which had been honestly tempting, but we were on duty, so I had to refuse.

  “What were they wearing?”

  “Those hooded jackets,” he said, gesturing vaguely. Our witness, who’d introduced himself as Clive, was a slender man, about fifty, with a raggedy beard that made him look like he ought to wear a motorbike club jacket. “That’s why I noticed them first. I thought, how can they be wearing that in weather like this, y’know?”

  There was a squeal from outside, and I looked up, but Clive waved his hand at me.

  “Don’t worry. It’s just the kids larking about. I’ve got them for the day.”

  “If this is a bad time-” I started.

  “No, no, they’re old enough to play by themselves for a bit.”

  “Alright, we appreciate you helping us,” I told him, taking a sip of water as I considered what to ask him.

  “Did you get a look at their faces?” Stephen asked while I was thinking.

  “Not too much.” Clive gave a shrug, taking a gulp of his own beer. “They all had their hoods up, pretty much, or caps on. I didn’t think they were adults though, some of them were pretty short. Kids, really.”

  I gave a hum of acknowledgement as I made a note.

  “Did you see the fire being set?” Stephen said, and I nodded, looking up to catch Clive’s response.

  “Well, not really. They’d gone round the side of the house, hadn’t they? Some round the one side, and the rest round the other.”

  “So they split up?” I said, eager to see whether my theory was correct.

  “Yeah. And a couple stood at the front, like, which looked mighty suspicious to me, like they were pretending to be bouncers.”

  “Lookouts,” Stephen said and pulled an expression that might’ve been surprise or dismay, or a mix of the two.

  “I guess,” Clive said with a nod. He had a gold earring in his right ear, I noticed, and it moved when he shifted his head. “I was properly watching them now and thinking about getting my phone, y’know? I was told this was a good area, a safe area, when I got the house. I don’t want anything going on over the street; my kids are right out back, for chrissake.”

  “Absolutely,” I agreed. “We’re glad you took an interest, that’s for sure. Where were you watching from?”

  “Right there,” he said, gesturing over to the front sitting-room window. The downstairs of the house was fairly open plan, and the kitchen, where we were sitting, connected directly to the lounge.

  “Did any of the teenagers stand out?” I asked. “Anything distinctive about them?”

  “Uh, I don’t know, really. There were a couple of girls, I think, but the rest were lads. And they were all sorts of heights. I didn’t get a good look at their faces or anything like I said.”

  I held back a sigh. I’d been hoping Clive would mention a blond-haired teenager, Jules, but it wasn’t to be.

  “Did you see them carrying anything?” Stephen queried.

  “Can’t say I did.”

  One of them must have had the jerry can unless they’d stashed it near the house earlier in the day. But it was perfectly possible that Clive just missed it since he only saw them briefly and was watching from across the road.

  “And did you hear anything? Did they yell anything?”

  “I saw ‘em run off, and they were shouting a bit then, yeah,” he said. “But nothing I could make heads or tails of, like.”

  “How long were they at the house before they ran off, do you think?”

  “Aw, I couldn’t say. Not long. A few minutes, maybe.”

  “And there were about ten of them? Did you count?”

  “Nah, that’s just a guess,” he said with another shrug. “But there was quite a group of them. Could’ve been as many as fifteen, maybe.”

  He sucked his teeth in disapproval and seemed about to say more, but a girl of eight or so came running in. She was wearing a t-shirt and shorts but was soaked head to toe, dripping water all over the carpet.

  “Come join in, Dad,” she demanded of Clive before she seemed to notice Stephen and me and shrunk back slightly. “Who’re they?” she asked her father.

  “Christ, Cindy, you’re getting water everywhere. I’ll be out in a minute, okay. Scram.”

  “We’ll leave you to it.” I got to my feet and gave Clive a grateful smile. His daughter went running out the room back towards the garden, leaving a damp patch on the floor.

  “Enjoy the afternoon with your kids,” Stephen said.

  “We appreciate you taking the time to talk to us,” I added, and Clive nodded.

  “No problem. Can’t believe they did it in broad daylight, to be honest. Absolutely crazy.”

  I agreed with him, and we saw ourselves out, leaving the family to muck around outside with the hosepipe and make the most of the sunshine.

  “It is bizarre that they’re doing this in the daytime, isn’t it?” Stephen said as we were sitting in the air-conditioned car and slowly cooling down. “Why not wait until it’s dark?”

  “More attention?” I guessed. “I don’t know, honestly. Doing it in daylight when there are more people around is riskier, but maybe they like that.”

  With nothing else to follow up on for the moment, Stephen and I went to collect the junior officer from where she’d been standing by the burned house. Police couldn’t keep an eye on the place indefinitely, and standing under the sun for hours was unthinkable on a day like today, so we put police tape up and a warning about it being unsafe and left it at that. I
f someone got hurt going inside, it wouldn’t be on us.

  The junior officer happily accepted a drink from Stephen’s water bottle, and the three of us picked up some more iced drinks on the way back to the station. The day was wearing on now, but we still weren’t over the heat of the day, and the sluggish, lethargic feeling lingered on me.

  Back at our desks, I sweated within the confines of the station as I typed up what the witness had said and our assessment of the fire. Stephen had gone to drop the jerry can off at the lab, and I’d sent Sam a quick text to let her know I was thinking of her. I regretted having to run off at lunch and cut our time together short, but the case had demanded it, and I knew that Sam understood the demands of the job. If an urgent request had arrived at the lab, she could just have easily been called back to attend to it and then it would have been her rushing off early.

  I sent off an email to Rashford with my report attached, keeping her updated on our progress and the way the case seemed to develop, as well as my concerns. Whilst I was looking at my inbox, an email came in from a junior officer, the one I’d asked to look into Jules for me. It’d been a big ask, and I’d been a little sceptical about whether it would return any results, but the sight of the email made me tentatively hopeful.

  They’d helpfully screenshotted several pictures of the police system, as well as providing links, and I scanned over it with mounting interest.

  “Huxley,” I called when I saw Stephen approaching across the office. “Get over here.”

  Even though my attention was primarily on my computer monitor and not on Stephen, I knew that he’d rolled his eyes.

  “What’s so important that it couldn’t wait for me to walk ten yards over here?” he demanded as he sat down. His face was red just from the little bit of walking he’d done around the station, and I was probably the same, simply from excitement.

  “I think we’ve got a proper ID on Jules,” I grinned, ignoring Stephen’s initial lack of enthusiasm. “The officer I asked to do research? They’ve turned up a kid that matches Jules’ description exactly and guess what?”

  “What?” Stephen said obligingly.

  “He has a record for arson!”

  Stephen was looking grudgingly interested now, and he rolled his chair over to have a look. But it was too warm for him to be crowding me, so I shooed him away and sent the emails over to him so he could view them on his own computer.

  “Crikey,” he muttered. “This is great if it actually is the kid. Mickey was saying he’s the ringleader, isn’t he? We grab this one, and it all falls down like a pyramid of cards.”

  “That’s the hope.”

  “So can we contact this ‘Jules Porton’? Get him in here to ask him some questions?”

  “We can try. His record is from when he was under sixteen, but there are his parents’ details on here. Do you reckon we should call them first or?”

  “No point going round if Jules isn’t there, I suppose.” Stephen gave a shrug. “We’ll just have to hope he doesn’t run off.”

  So that’s what we did. I put a call through to Jules’ home phone, assuming he still lived at that address, and waited for a reply. The house listed on our system wasn’t far away, at least, so if we got confirmation that Jules was at the property, we could be over there within twenty minutes.

  “He’s there,” I said, hanging up the phone. “His dad sounded worried, but he told me that Jules was up in his room.”

  “Right, let’s go then.”

  We headed out, moving with purpose despite the heavy heat.

  “What do you want to do if it is him?” Stephen asked as we drove over, me at the wheel this time. He had to raise his voice over the whirring of the air con.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted, having been wondering the same myself. “We’ll have to see how he reacts when we meet and confront him and how it goes when we try to question him.”

  If this lead turned out to be on the money and this kid was the Jules we were after, as I was expecting it to be, then that brought up the question of what we would do next. I didn’t want to bring him in whilst we still had little, if any, evidence against the kid and risk losing him because we couldn’t hold him. On the other hand, leaving him to roam and continue his exploits with starting fires and gathering more teenagers into his group wasn’t even close to deal, either.

  Not to mention that we believed Jules to have connections with Alistair, the kid who remained missing, and I had no idea yet whether Jules would answer questions on that. Alistair’s parents must be frantic, I thought, and getting answers on the fourteen-year-old’s whereabouts was essential. The question was whether it would be better to play the long game or not, meaning that we would release Jules and follow his movements so that we could get to the heart of Alistair’s disappearance and the gang who was setting fires.

  It all depended on how Jules reacted when we tried to talk to him, I thought. It seemed very unlikely that, like Mickey, Jules could be convinced to answer our questions in return for leniency, but we could always try that angle, too.

  We reached Jules’s house quickly, though there were patches of traffic, and pulled up outside. The house looked absolutely ordinary, a small terrace property with a slightly neglected garden but a newly painted door and flower pots near the step.

  Stephen went ahead to knock on the door, and a ginger cat came up to us and curled itself around my ankles as we waited.

  “Who do you belong to?” I asked it, crouching down to rub its bony head, making it purr and press its ears against my fingers.

  The front door opened, and I straightened up, the cat darting in front and disappearing into the house. I looked up to see a bulky man at the door, his hair a greying-blond, who was dressed in a t-shirt and jogging trousers. He looked nervous to see us but stopped to rub his hand down the cat’s back after he’d gestured for us to step into the house’s narrow hallway.

  “You met the cat already, then,” he said, voice sounding gruff.

  I could smell the cigarette smoke on him, but the house itself was clean and tidy, though in that cluttered way that comes with having a lot of things in a small house. He led us through to a sitting room and left us alone while he went to fetch Jules, who was playing loud music upstairs.

  Stephen stroked the friendly ginger tom while we waited for father and son to come back downstairs, and I looked around the sitting room. There weren’t many pictures up around the place, with the shelves instead filled with stacks of DVDs and CDs. A record player sat in the corner, and its dust-free state gave me the impression that it was highly valued.

  Jules came down the stairs on heavy feet, looking tall and lanky from where I was sitting on the low sofa. I stood up as the teenager, and his father came in, glancing over at Jules’s face and finding him looking sullen and resentful. If he was at all unnerved or anxious about our visit, he was hiding it completely.

  “Sit down, son,” Jules’s father grunted, nudging Jules towards an armchair. Jules shook his dad off but sulkily did as he was told, crossing his arms over his chest as he glared at us.

  The teen’s hair was just as pale blond as everyone had described it as, and I didn’t think it was dyed. The kid had his silver lip ring, and it made the disgruntled look on his face seem even more pronounced.

  “Alright, why’re you here?” Jules’s dad was the first to speak. He seemed more resigned than anything else, and I wondered how many times in the past he’d had police come to give Jules’s a warning or teachers calling up to complain.

  “Jules has been linked with some troubling incidents in the area,” I said, deciding that staying vague might be best, to begin with. I turned to speak to the teenager directly. “Do you know a boy called Alistair Pumphrey?”

  “No,” Jules said as he looked evenly at me, his stare flat and disdainful.

  “That’s strange since you had dinner at his house,” Stephen said coldly. His hand was clenched on his thigh.

  “Really?” Jules’s sullen
expression shifted into a sideways grin that seemed calculated to be endearing. At that moment, I could see the angelic, polite boy that Alistair’s mum had described. “I must’ve forgotten that.”

  “Weird, that. You forgetting going round to visit someone’s house,” Stephen pressed. Jules just shrugged.

  “Why’re you asking about this kid?” Jules’s dad put in, frowning.

  “Perhaps Jules could answer that,” Stephen said, still looking irritated by Jules’s blatant lies. “Why does he think we’re asking about Alistair?”

  Jules looked at him coldly, the smile completely gone from his face. “No idea, mate.”

  “You’ve spent time at the police station before, haven’t you?” I asked, changing the subject when it became clear that Jules wasn’t going to say anymore and that Stephen was getting wound up.

  “Ages ago, yeah.” Jules settled back in his armchair, watching me with a bored expression.

  “What was that for?”

  “You tell me. I’m sure you pulled the report from up your-”

  “Mind your tone,” his dad snapped. Jules looked unimpressed and unintimidated.

  I sighed. “Jules, you’re looking at some serious charges here. Linked to robbery, assault, and arson. You’re not under-sixteen anymore, things will be worse this time, and you already have a record.”

  “You trying to scare me?” he sneered. “Show me proof of any of that. You dunno what you’re talking about.”

  “Is there proof?” his dad asked. “What’ve you got against him?”

  “I assure you we have enough to make things difficult for you, Jules,” I said. “This is your chance to get on our side and help yourself. We can offer-”

  “Blah blah blah,” he mocked. “Get to the point, will you?”

  I sat back, considering him with a frown. We weren’t going to get through to him, and he wasn’t going to answer our questions. Of that, I was sure. He had exactly zero respect for authority, and he didn’t believe that we had anything we could prove. The problem was that he was part-way right.