“Or she’s at work.” Stephen glanced at his watch. “Are you sure you didn’t get another contact number for her? It doesn’t seem like you to forget a detail like that.”
I shook my head but flicked back through my notes to double-check.
“Oh, that was it, she said her phone was broken, so she gave me the house phone and that- no, wait, I did get a work number from her.” I grunted in annoyance at my own faulty memory. I glanced over at Stephen as I plugged the numbers into my phone. “Give Rashford a brief update while I call this, could you?”
“Do I have to?” he sighed, getting to his feet despite his words. “She’s not going to be pleased.”
I paused. “Aye, you’re right. Here, you call Donna White. I should probably be the one to see Rashford, anyway.”
“Really? You sure?”
I waved him off, giving him my phone and heading over to knock on Rashford’s office door. The conversation went about as well as I could’ve expected, by which I mean that Rashford was frustrated and worried to hear about Mickey not being in contact. But the news about the petrol cans somewhat pacified her, and I promised that we were doing all we could to find Mickey and get him safe.
“Missing children are not a good look for Hewford,” she reminded me firmly.
As if I could’ve forgotten, I thought, but I simply nodded.
“Alright,” she sighed. “Good luck, Mitchell. I do appreciate the work you’re doing. Go find that kid, okay?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Stephen had an expression on his face that I couldn’t read as I walked back to our desk, and I looked at him expectantly, eyebrows raised.
“Good news is that his mum picked up. She is at work. The bad news is she has no idea where her son is. Apparently, he was meant to be home today, and he’d promised her not to run off anywhere.”
“Great,” I groaned, dragging a hand over my face and then wincing at my still-tender nose.
“She’s coming back from work now. I tried to tell her that there wasn’t much she could do at this point, but she was adamant.”
“That might be helpful if she has any ideas for where he might’ve gone,” I said thoughtfully.
“Yeah, though she said she didn’t, off the top of her head. Just that he was probably out with those ‘no good boys’ again.”
“I don’t know if we did the right thing, encouraging him to carry on running around with that lot. What if he’s just been totally drawn back in?”
“That’d be better than them finding out he’s been feeding us information, right?”
“God, yeah, absolutely,” I agreed quickly.
“Well, she said she’s due home in ten minutes, so we might as well drive over and speak to her. You can keep obsessively checking the trackers and Mickey’s phone on the way.” He tried for a small smile, but I couldn’t manage to return it.
“Let’s go then.”
We headed out again, the mood sombre between us, and it wasn’t long before we reached Mickey’s house. His mum, Donna White, couldn’t seem to stay still after she’d shown us inside, flitting around nervously so that it put me on edge just to watch her.
“I know he’s been in some trouble, but he’s a good kid,” she insisted, not for the first time. “What if he’s hurt? Or something’s happened?”
“I promise, we’re doing everything we can to find him. Plus, it’s entirely possible that Mickey has merely broken his phone and is absolutely fine, right? He’s only been out of contact for a few hours, so let’s hope for the best.”
She reluctantly accepted that with a small nod. We went on to quiz her about Mickey’s possible whereabouts, when she last saw him, what time she left the house today and whether she’d been in touch with him. But her answers weren’t especially helpful, and she clearly knew it, the expression on her face heartbroken that she didn’t have any information that could help us locate him.
My phone rang as we were preparing to leave, and I politely excused myself. Seeing Sedgwick’s caller ID was a surprise, and I hastily picked it up once I was out of earshot.
“DCI Mitchell speaking.”
“Alistair Pumphrey’s parents have reported him found,” he told me, gruff and to the point as usual.
“What? He’s gone back home?”
“Yes.”
“Well, damn,” I muttered, blindsided by the news. “Have you been round to talk to them?”
“Not yet. I thought you would want to sit in,” he said, surprisingly thoughtfully.
“Aye, that’d be great, really great. Thank you. We can be over there in ten.”
He grunted an affirmative and hung up, leaving me slightly bewildered but nonetheless immensely curious to see what Alistair would have to say for himself.
“We’ve got to go,” I told both Stephen and Mickey’s mum when I came back to the living room.
“Have you found him?” she asked.
“No,” I said gently. “But we’ve got someone we can talk to who might help.”
That was possibly a stretch, but I was trying to be hopeful. Alistair may very well have information on Mickey’s whereabouts, and I intended to ask him, but it would be up to him whether he told us what he knew or not.
“We’re gonna keep looking for your son,” Stephen put in, “but please let us know immediately if he turns up back here.”
“I will.”
She saw us out, and we headed back to the car which was uncomfortably warm again. We’d spent long enough with Donna that all the effects of the air con had been defeated by the sun, and I wound the window down, sweating. My ribs were aching as I settled into the driver’s seat, and I touched my side briefly with a grimace. It was the extra movement and tension from the stress, I was sure, but there was nothing I could do about it right now.
“Do you need a painkiller?” Stephen asked once we were on the road over to Alistair’s house. I must not have been hiding my winces well when I reached for the gear stick, and Stephen had noticed.
“If you’ve got one,” I accepted.
“When did you last eat?” he asked whilst rummaging around in the glove box.
“I don’t know, breakfast, probably. Why?”
“Probably better if you have paracetamol, then.”
I’d have preferred something stronger, but I accepted the pills and a gulp of water from Stephen’s lukewarm water bottle to wash them down.
“I really feel for Donna,” Stephen said, staring ahead at the road as we cut across York. I didn’t have a good enough reason to put the siren on, the use of which was logged every time, but I wanted to.
“Aye, so do I. She definitely really cares for her son.”
“And he’s romping around, getting into all sorts of trouble.” He shook his head. “Teenagers can be so selfish sometimes.”
“Hey, you don’t know exactly what’s going on with him. He might have things going on under the surface, right? Life’s hard when your hormones are going on a random rollercoaster every ten minutes.”
“Yeah, I know, but doesn’t he see the pain he’s causing her?”
“Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t.” I sighed. “Look, Steph, I don’t know. For once, I think I’ve gotta be the one to tell you to pull your emotions back from this, okay? Our job is to find the lad and get him back to his mum. Any laws he’s broken, we’ll deal with. Beyond that, he isn’t our responsibility. It’s his mum’s and maybe social services if he needs some counselling or guidance or whatever.”
“I get what you’re saying,” he said with a slight grimace. “But I’m still going to have a serious chat with that kid when we find him. You try to stop me.”
I smiled slightly at that. “I won’t stop you. Maybe he needs a firm word from a relative stranger. It could do him good. Just consider that some teenage troublemakers are sad and coping with it badly, alright?”
“Of course,” he said before giving me a sidelong look. Perhaps he’d caught the slightly personal note that’d come through
in my words, or maybe he hadn’t, but I didn’t say anything more for now. I could admit that I had my own biases for why I wanted Mickey to turn out good, but for us to help him, we first had to find him.
If the kid turned out to have thrown his phone in the river and spent the day in McDonald's, I wasn’t sure whether I’d be more relieved or annoyed. Probably relieved, at this point, I thought. He’s fallen out of contact with us before, of course, but that, combined with the messages about a traitor on the chat, was enough to have my gut saying that something bad had happened. I only hoped it was wrong.
Nineteen
Alistair Pumphrey looked like a different lad when we went round to his parents’ house. We were there to listen in on Sedgwick’s interview, not to intervene or get in the way, so Stephen and I stood at the back of the sitting room and observed. His dad, Alex Pumphrey, offered us cups of tea, but I refused, wanting my hands free to make notes.
Alistair’s greasy hair had been washed and trimmed above his collar, as well as being tucked back behind his ear on one side. He was dressed much more nicely than the last time I’d seen him, with chinos and a smart shirt even though he surely wasn’t leaving the house to go out today. It was a display, I thought, put on either by Alistair or his parents to convince Sedgwick and perhaps me too that Alistair was a good, well-cared for, well-behaved kid.
“We’re so grateful to have him back,” Alistair’s mum said, emotion making her voice tight.
“Absolutely. The place was too empty without him.” His dad gave Alistair an awkward pat on the back. Alistair looked unimpressed, though when he noticed me looking, his expression lifted into something more neutral.
“Where have you been, Alistair?” Sedgwick asked, his voice far less gruff and abrupt than when he was speaking to me. “You had all of us very worried for you.”
“The stress got to him, didn’t it, Ali?” his mum, Grace, put in before Alistair could even open his mouth.
“Alistair?” Sedgwick said pointedly, ignoring the lad’s mother.
“Here and there. Friends’ houses. The cinema. Park.” He gave a shrug like it was no big deal. I couldn’t read his expression.
“You’ve been missing for over two weeks. Where did you get your food?”
“Lots of places.”
“Like where?”
“Is it really necessary to ask all this?” Alex interrupted with an awkward, forced laugh. “We’re happy he’s home. That’s the important thing, right? No need to interrogate the boy.” He laughed again, trying to make a joke of it even in the face of Sedgwick’s stony seriousness.
“I’d like to hear Alistair’s account,” he said evenly before turning back to the teenager. “Why did you run away?”
“Like my mum said, it was stress, I guess. School and that.” He looked down at the floor and scuffed his feet, but the fidgeting didn’t look natural to me.
“Was that all? You need to tell us the whole truth, even if it’s difficult.” Sedgwick gave the lad a slight frown. “I’ve heard that you’ve been involved with a group of teenagers, led by a blond boy called Jules. Is that true?”
Alistair gave a shrug.
“Jules? That’s the boy I told you about! I knew there was something off about him.” Alistair’s father put in, jabbing his finger forwards towards me. Alistair kept his head down.
“Alistair, I’m going to need an answer. Have you been involved with this group or not?”
Of course, we had it on CCTV cameras that Alistair had run with the gang, and Sedgwick knew it. What we needed to know was whether Alistair was going to admit it. The lad scuffed his feet against the carpet and stayed quiet until his mum put her hand on his knee.
“Answer the officer’s question, sweetie. The sooner this is over, the sooner we can just be together as a family. We can have a nice tea, okay, something filling because I’m sure you’re hungry.”
“I didn’t want to,” Alistair muttered finally, keeping his head down and sounding younger than his age. I couldn’t make sense of the difference between this apparently shy teenager and the cold-eyed one who’d walked away when I was going to be beaten. This one mumbled under his breath and wouldn’t look at us, where the other had looked me right in the eye and commanded respect from a gang of boys much older than he was. It was like two different boys entirely.
Which was the real one, I wanted to know, and which was an act? Had he been playing at being bold and stony-faced with the gang when he was actually feeling young and afraid, or was it this childish helplessness that was an act?
“What do you mean, you didn’t want to?” Sedgwick leaned forwards slightly. His partner, Alison Greene, was sitting on the sofa by his side and looked similarly intent on listening to what Alistair had to say.
“They made me go with them.”
Sedgwick and Greene exchanged a look. At my side, Stephen crossed his arms over his chest, and I glanced sideways, not quite able to read what he was thinking from his expression.
“How did they make you join them?” Greene asked, her voice gentler than Sedgwick’s.
“They came to me at school. They said I had to go with them, or they’d hurt me.”
I leaned backwards, my lips pressed together. I wanted to believe the lad, I really did, but I simply couldn’t. This apparent weakness he was showing, saying that he couldn’t have stood up to the gang, might look plausible at first glance, but it didn’t ring to me. Not now that I’d seen him interact with Jules and the others himself. True, maybe they could have threatened him into joining them and running away at the start, but I couldn’t believe that he’d been there unwillingly recently, nor that he’d been entirely helpless.
“Was it those boys who kept you away from home?” Grace asked, the urgency clear on her face and in her voice.
Alistair nodded, and his mum crumpled into tears and pulled him into a hug. At first stiff, the lad relaxed into it.
I knew why Alistair’s parents would want to believe it. A child who was abducted for over two weeks hadn’t chosen to leave them and to stay away. It absolved his parents from any blame and didn’t leave them feeling like they didn’t understand their son. Instead, they could simply blame a gang of no-good, law-breaking older boys and never have to do the difficult work of reassessing their kid’s actual character.
So I understood why they wanted so badly to believe it, but I thought that it was fiction, and I wanted to know why Alistair was trying to sell that to his parents. It was convenient for him for all of us adults to see him as a victim, that was true, but why had he chosen now to come home?
Part-way through the interview, Alistair’s mum called for a short break and took the empty mugs to the kitchen. I gathered up the ones she couldn’t carry and followed her through, partly simply to be helpful but also partly because I wanted to see the rest of the house and perhaps talk to Grace alone.
“Oh, thank you, detective,” she said when I arrived at the kitchen door. She gestured for me to put the mugs on the counter which I did before she started to run a bowl of hot water in the sink.
The kitchen was small but neat, decorated in a sunny, egg-yolk yellow with a framed print of a sunflower above the small table on the side.
“This must be very hard for you,” I said, wandering further into the kitchen and going to stand by the french doors, which looked out on the narrow back garden.
“We’ve been so worried,” she said quietly from behind me. “It’s such a relief to have him back.”
The water sloshed in the bowl as she washed up the mugs, and Alex came in a moment later, putting a hand on her shoulder. I was still standing looking out on the garden, where I’d noticed some strange blackened patches on the lawn. Of course, the scorching hot weather had left everyone’s grass an unhealthy shade of brown, but these patches didn’t look like sun damage.
“Have you had a barbeque recently?” I asked absently, wondering what had caused them.
“Not yet,” Grace said. “With Ali being missing
, how could we? Now he’s back, though, I’m sure we can have some of his friends round.”
“So these marks on the lawn, what caused them?” I asked, turning around to face Alistair’s parents. They both turned to look at me, Grace’s hands still submerged in the washing-up bowl.
“Marks?” Alex repeated.
“Aye, they look like they’ve been burned.”
Alistair’s parents glanced at each other, and I saw some sort of communication pass between them that I wasn’t privy to. Alex crossed the kitchen after a moment to join me at the french doors.
“Oh, those. They must have been the fireworks from, ah, my birthday.”
“When was your birthday?”
“In June. Why is this relevant?”
I glanced sideways at him and read the discomfort in his stiff posture and tight voice, but I didn’t understand why it was there. Nevertheless, I shook my head.
“It’s not relevant. I’m just a detective. It’s my job to be curious.” I gave him a slight smile, and he gave an awkward laugh, more heartily than my words deserved.
“Well, let’s get this done with, hm?” Grace said with forced cheer. “Did you want a cup of tea before we sit down again?”
“No, I’m fine, thank you.”
“I’ll call Alistair back down,” Alex said, leaving the room to fetch his son. Grace didn’t look at me as she finished putting the mugs on the draining board and dried off her hands, and so I left her alone, moving back towards the sitting room. Stephen raised his eyebrows at me, and I shook my head minutely to tell him that I’d fill him in later when there weren’t other people around to overhear.
Sedgwick and Greene continued to question Alistair and his parents whilst Stephen and I listened in. Alistair stuck to his story about the older teenagers coercing him into joining their gang and running away from home.
“I have a couple of final questions,” I put in as Sedgwick was rounding up the interview. He sent me an unimpressed look, but I pressed on regardless. “Alistair, do you know a lad called Mickey White?”
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