Heatwave, Oliver Davies [pdf ebook reader .txt] 📗

with Mickey, okay? And I don’t want to put any other kids through that, especially young ones.” I glanced at my watch and felt my stomach tighten. “Which reminds me, Mickey’s mum never called me back to say that he was home yesterday.”

“She would’ve called if he hadn’t, though, wouldn’t she?” Stephen’s eyes were widened in alarm.

“I hope so.”

I had my phone in hand and rang Mickey’s house phone, tapping my fingers against the desk impatiently as I waited for a response. Another missing kid was the very last thing we needed, and I wouldn’t be able to help feeling guilty if that kid was Mickey. It was Stephen and me who convinced the teen to talk to us and if some harm had come to him because of it-

“Hello?”

“DCI Mitchell speaking,” I said in a rush. “Is Mickey home?”

“Oh,” his mum exhaled in a rush. “I’m so sorry I didn’t call. He came back late last night, yes. He’s fine.” She gave an apologetic little laugh, and I released a breath of relief. “He won’t speak to me except in grunts, and he’s sulking in his room, but he’s home now.”

“Do you think he’d talk to me?”

“Probably not,” she said after a pause. “He’s pretty mardy today. I doubt you’ll be able to get anything useful out of him.”

“Okay, no worries. Thanks for telling me, Ms White.”

I hung up, and Stephen read from my expression that Mickey was home and well, at least for now.

A moment later, the phone rang to let us know that the two teenagers who’d gone to pick up the patches had arrived at the station. I didn’t have high hopes about what we’d manage to get from them, but we’d talk to them anyway and see what happened.

“Fingers crossed,” I said.

I recalled what Rashford had said as we headed down, thinking about how these teenagers seemed to stay one step ahead. Jules, if he was the leader behind all of this like we suspected, was certainly not to be underestimated. I shouldn’t have even considered that he might turn up to fetch the patches because he wouldn’t get his hands dirty like that.

And that was the core of the problem. To bring him in, we needed to catch him in the act, but so far, he was eluding us.

Fourteen

The next day rolled in as bright and hot as it’d been for weeks. It was the worst possible weather for sitting inside an office that had been egged in the night, the yolks splattered across the windows, congealed and slimy.

“Yeah, they don’t like us,” Stephen said as he turned up, a hand over his nose. All the windows had been closed, but the rotten smell still lingered.

“Do you think this is because of those kids we talked to yesterday?”

“Or because we seized the patches, yeah.” He sighed and dropped into his chair before turning to give me a grin. “Hey, at least now we can say whether it really is hot enough outside to cook an egg.”

“I really don’t care.” I rolled my eyes.

“But they’ve sent us a free lunch,” he teased, tipping his head towards the window. “I mean, if you grab it before the window cleaners arrive.”

“You’re disgusting,” I told him but couldn’t completely keep a smile off my face.

On my decision, we’d tried to get information from the teenagers brought in yesterday, but I hadn’t asked them to continue to report back to us. We spoke to their parents, so maybe they wouldn’t return to the gang at all, but that was possibly a vain hope, especially considering what the kids had done to the station in the night.

“I’d rather they covered Hewford in eggs than burned anything, at least,” I sighed. The smell in the air was making me feel vaguely nauseous, and I brought my coffee up to my face to breathe that in instead.

“True,” Stephen said seriously. “Better they throw eggs at us all summer than toss matches around.”

“I called security already to ask that they send over the CCTV from last night. If we could at least confirm that it was the teenagers, that’ll be another point against the group, even if we can’t identify their faces.”

“Judging from how you’re just complaining about the eggs and drinking coffee, I’m guessing the CCTV hasn’t arrived yet?”

“You’d be right.”

I took another sip of the iced coffee Sam had made. It was much sweeter than my usual black coffee, but the coolness was refreshing, and I was having to stop myself from drinking it too fast.

While we were waiting for security to contact us, I looked over my notes from the teens’ interviews last night. They’d had very little to say to us, other than protesting their innocence and calling us names. I’d tried offering them leniency as I’d done with Mickey, but one had clammed up and refused to say anything, while the other sneered at us and proudly said that he wasn’t a snitch.

The security team came through with the footage not long later, and Stephen and I split it between us. I took the first half of the night, and he took the second, both of us searching efficiently through it to find what we were looking for.

“Here we are,” I said a short while later.

At one AM, a group of six teens became visible on the cameras, carrying egg boxes as they ran across the car park after getting over the outer wall.

“There’s barbed wire on that wall. I’m surprised they didn’t cut themselves to pieces,” Stephen said, and I hummed in agreement.

The teens proceeded to lob the eggs at Hewford, celebrating on camera when they made a good shot. I just sighed. As incidents went, this was a relatively mild one, but I was sure Rashford would be incensed to hear about it. It was another example of Hewford getting embarrassed by a bunch of kids.

I paused and replayed the video as I tried to get a good view of the teens’ faces. They were