“Yeah, that’s fair,” Stephen said. “I thought that Mickey wasn’t old enough, and Tiger didn’t seem to have any ID on him to prove that he was sixteen either.”
“So, do they have an adult helping them? Is that what you’re saying?” I said, chewing my pasta as I thought it over.
“Or an older teenager, anyway.” He shrugged. “It was a thought.”
“Aye, it’s not a bad one,” I agreed. “It might help later on, but we can’t go looking at petrol station cameras now. It’d be worse than a needle in a haystack.”
Stephen agreed with a nod, and we went back to eating, digging into our late lunches. When I was out in the heat, I tended to lose my appetite a little, but once back in the air-conditioned car, I had quickly become ravenous. I ended up grabbing another sandwich from the drive-through as we were leaving the services, which I tucked into with gusto as we drove home.
“What’s our next steps then, Mitch?” Stephen asked as I was finishing up, cleaning mayonnaise off my fingers. “You got a plan?”
“The start of one, probably,” I said, leaning my elbow against the window and resting my chin on it. “We could do with following up what Mickey and Tiger were telling us, right?”
I patted my pockets until I found my notebook and flicked through it. The thing was getting pretty badly tattered, and the pages threatened to come loose as I found the one I wanted.
“We can check the train station cameras for a start,” I decided. “If Mickey was telling the truth, we might be able to get him and the rest of the group on the station CCTV.”
Stephen gave a slow nod. “We could do with talking to this ‘Jules’ kid too if we can find him. I don’t know what you thought-”
“I thought that Mickey recognised that name. That’s what I think,” I interrupted. “And Roberts gave the exact same description as Alistair Pumphrey’s dad did. I’m not saying it couldn’t be a coincidence still, but-”
“If it is, it’s a hell of a coincidence,” Stephen finished in agreement. He’d not been sure before this trip, but Mickey’s response, tiny though it had been, seemed to have convinced him.
“I wonder whether Sedgwick has got anything new on Alistair,” I said as we got closer to York. “If he was found, we could ask him about Jules.”
“He’s not our case, remember, Mitch?”
“I know, I know,” I sighed.
Alistair Pumphrey’s missing child case was Sedgwick’s responsibility, not mine, but it seemed to be overlapping with the couple of cases Stephen and I had worked on recently, and I wasn’t yet sure what to make of that. It was more than likely that Sedgwick’s case and these incidents had become tangled simply because they both involved troublesome teenagers in York, though the chances of that still seemed extraordinary.
Regardless of whether there was a connection or not, Stephen and I would keep going until we figured it out, I was sure of that. It might’ve been that we accidentally stumbled into the middle of this tangle, but we were never ones to quit when things got difficult. For now, I was sure that the blond teenager, Jules, was the key link, and I would make tracking him down our top priority until we found him.
Six
Once back at Hewford, I put Stephen on the task of digging up the train station footage. It would take him a while to sift through it, looking for Mickey, Tiger, and possibly a tall, blond boy. I fetched us both fresh glasses of water before heading off to find Keira. I hadn’t been able to find out anything online about this Jules boy, but I had faith that, if anything was out there, Keira would be able to pull it from the ether for us.
“Oh, you again,” she said flatly when she saw me approaching. I grinned, spotting the barely there smile on her mouth.
“Me again,” I agreed. “Got a spare minute?”
“No,” she tossed back, “but I never do, so what is it?”
“I’ve got another fun challenge for you,” I said with a crooked smile. “We’ve got-”
“By ‘fun’, do you mean ‘frustrating and time-consuming’?”
“It’s all about how you look at it,” I countered, and she shook her head with a quiet laugh. “There’s a teenage boy we’re looking for,” I started before outlining what little we knew about Jules.
“You have a first name, and that’s it?” She didn’t look impressed.
“Plus a detailed description,” I said hopefully.
She rolled her eyes at me. “Alright, Mitchell, shoo. I’ll give it a shot when I have time, but don’t hold your breath.”
“If anyone can do it, you can!” I told her cheerfully, grinning at the exasperated sigh I heard her give as I walked away.
“Any luck?” I asked Stephen as I sat back down, a fresh coffee in hand. It was too damn warm for hot drinks, but I needed the caffeine hit something awful.
“Nope,” Stephen sighed. His head rested on his chin as he watched the train station CCTV, which began to blur beneath my gaze after a few minutes of watching over his shoulder. “I’m looking, but it’s busy, Mitch. There’s a lot of people.”
“I know. Thanks for giving it a go.”
“What are you going to look into?” Stephen paused the footage he’d been watching and leaned back, stretching his arms up and making his back click. “You want me to send over some of these videos?”
“Mm, maybe,” I hedged, running a hand through my hair and pulling a face at the sticky feeling of it. “I was thinking of searching the system for Jules, looking for teens around the right age.”
Stephen gave a noncommittal shrug. “Sure, you might find something.”
“Hopefully.”
The rest of the afternoon was spent engaged in the tedious work of looking through large amounts of material in search of the tiny piece that would fit into our puzzle.
Stephen and I took a brief
