Heatwave by Oliver Davies (the red fox clan txt) 📗

break in the mid-afternoon to grab ice creams from the local shop, sitting on the bench outside the station to eat them, the melting sweetness dripping onto the tarmac.

Then it was back to the grindstone and to sweating through my shirt. The sun’s heat began to dip around four, but the warmth saved up in the walls and floors of the building during the day kept the temperature high.

My mind drifted as I worked through the police system, trying different combinations of searches as I tried to get the database to throw up the information that I needed. I was due over at Sam’s tonight, and as much as I badly wanted to see her again, I was worried about how things would be between us after she’d dropped her bombshell last night. I already had the feeling that we were running on borrowed time now that I knew that she’d be leaving for Kent, and I didn’t want that feeling to sour the time that we did have left.

“Hey, Darren, look.”

Stephen pulled me out of my thoughts, and I rubbed my tired eyes and shifted my chair closer to his desk.

“What am I looking at?”

“Here.” Stephen played the footage and tapped the middle of the screen.

It took a moment for me to process what I was seeing and pick out the relevant face from the crowd, but when I did, my eyes widened.

“Mickey wasn’t lying then.”

The CCTV showed a group of teens moving quickly through the crowds of York station towards the stairs. They all had their heads down, and several were wearing caps or hoodies, hiding or shadowing their faces and making it difficult to pick any of their features out for sure.

But the bright green T-shirt on one of the boys was instantly recognizable as belonging to Tiger, even though he was keeping his head well down. It was a challenge to try to count how many teenagers there were in the groups amidst the summer tourist crowds. One of them did stand out, however, as being taller than the others and, after Stephen had replayed the clip several times, I thought I could see blond hair peeking out from under his baseball cap.

“Do you reckon that’s him?” I said, tapping the screen. “Jules?”

“Couldn’t say for sure,” Stephen said, after squinting at the grainy image for a long moment.

“At least these cameras film colour,” I muttered, watching again as Tiger moved across the screen in his green shirt. “You probably wouldn’t have picked them out if it’d been in black and white.”

“Definitely.” Stephen nodded.

I wheeled my chair back to my desk and rested my chin on my clammy hands for a moment.

“Save that clip. If you can crop out even a half-decent shot of the one who might be Jules, we can show it to Alistair’s parents. See what they think.”

Stephen gave a nod of agreement, and I went back to trawling through the police records. I tried out every combination of search terms I could think of and spent a good deal of time getting through to page twenty or more of the results.

I was struggling for what else to try to on the verge of giving up on the idea when I noticed a case of arson that’d been recorded, and it gave me a thought. I tried a general search for fires that’d happened in the last few months, going back to April, and scrolled through the results without expecting much of anything. Police were often called to look over fires to see whether there was any evidence of interference or criminal activity, but it wasn’t really my department. I’d not particularly heard that the number of fires had gone up recently, and it was all new to me when I looked through the recent cases.

Almost all of them had been ascribed to teenagers or young people. They were generally small or set in remote locations, but they were happening with almost two-weekly regularity, though with no strict schedule. I widened the search terms and looked back further, wondering how long this had been going on for, but before April this year, the fires reported had had a wide range of causes or had been left uncertain, and they’d been spaced out further. I found only one other fire set by teens, which had happened back in October of last year.

Moving back towards the more recent results with a deep frown on my forehead, I tried to make sense of what I was seeing. Was this the work of one pyromaniac, who’d been systematically setting fires ever since April? Why had no-one noticed this new and odd pattern? Or perhaps they had, and it just hadn’t been on my radar. Hewford was a large enough station that I hardly got to hear about even half of the cases that passed through our doors.

I’d have to ask around, I thought, as I opened up each of the cases and scanned through what little had been written about them. There wasn’t much to go on, and the only reason that they’d been ruled as being set by teenagers were often a single witness statement from someone passing by late at night. Alcohol cans and cigarettes had also been found left at a couple of the scenes, as well as emptied cans of petrol. The problem was that we didn’t have the capacity to run prints for every single case, and these fires had all been minor, involving buildings already intended to be demolished or the occasional animal shed or stable. It was illegal, of course, it was, and the perpetrators would have been done for property damage if they’d been caught. Taken individually, though, the cases weren’t big enough to throw money or resources at, so they’d slipped through the cracks.

“Steph, stop doing that for a moment,” I said, angling my screen towards him.

“Did you actually find something on the kid?”

“What, Jules? No. But look at this.”

He wheeled himself forwards to take a look at my