“Yeah?” He grinned. “You want another one? ‘A man works best on a full stomach’.”
“Nonsense. You’ve gotta be lean and hungry in this job, keeps you sharp.” I glanced over at him and found him looking unimpressed. “And if that was your shoddy hint at wanting to go for lunch, it’s not even twelve yet.”
“I’m giving you a terrible review on Yelp,” he grumbled, “I hope you know that. ‘Zero out of ten, grumpiest work partner ever. Would not recommend.’”
I snorted. “Tough luck, you’re stuck with me.”
He grumbled at me but got to work on what I’d asked him to do, and I started making phone calls to the various companies who made patches. There were a lot of possibilities, and I was simply starting from the top of the Google search list. I had no idea whether the teenagers were sneaky enough to call some obscure company that didn’t even advertise online or if they ordered the patches from abroad. It was a needle in a haystack, but I gave it a shot, anyway.
We broke for lunch and ate outside in the shade, where the slight breeze made it cooler than inside the station. I was half-expecting another call on the radio about teenagers getting up to no good, but the day turned out to be a quiet one, for us at least.
“Here, look at this,” Stephen said a couple of hours later.
We’d been systematically slogging through our respective research, and I was tired and bored, despite getting up for coffee breaks or to splash water on my face and wrists to cool me off. The freshness of the morning and the cold shower I took felt like a long time ago.
Still, I perked up at Stephen’s tone and wheeled my chair closer to his screen. He pressed play on a piece of black and white CCTV that showed a nondescript street. I looked at it closely but couldn’t identify where it was located.
“Is this on the street where the elderly couple’s house was?”
“No, of course not,” Stephen said impatiently. “I tried looking for that first, hours ago, but there’s no CCTV on it. This is from another road, a while away.”
“Then how can you be sure that it’s them?”
“Just watch, will you?”
“Sorry, sorry.”
He restarted the clip, and I watched in silence as, at first, nothing happened. Then a group of people moved into view, though it was difficult to see the details because they were on the other side of the road from the camera, and the angle was poor.
“Steph-”
“Shut up, will you?” he grumbled. “I’m getting there. This is them beforehand, right?”
I didn’t say anything because it wasn’t possible to tell on the grainy image whether it was the gang of teenagers or not. It was too far away. But Stephen had asked me to hang on, so I waited for whatever he wanted to show or tell me.
“Now, look at this. This is them coming back,” he said, skipping the footage forwards.
I leaned forwards, hoping that the CCTV would have a better view this time, and I wasn’t disappointed. The group were walking on the nearer side of the pavement now, and the video had picked up their faces as clearly as the poor quality camera could manage.
“That’s Mickey,” I murmured, tapping a middling-height boy who, on the video, kept turning to look behind him. Even in just those few seconds of footage, it was clear how nervous he was.
Stephen replayed the video again.
“That’s Jules, isn’t it?” he said, and he didn’t need to point for me to know which one he meant.
The boy up front was one of the tallest and walked with a confident stride. He wasn’t laughing like a couple of the others were, but there wasn’t a hint of nervousness on him as he strode across the video.
“What about that one?” I muttered as Stephen ran the recording again.
I pointed to the shortest boy, who was almost hidden behind Jules as the teenagers moved across the camera’s view. He kept his head down, his hair as dark as Jules’s was pale, and seemed to keep up with the taller boys’ stride without trying too hard.
“I don’t know him.” Stephen shrugged. “Why, do you recognise him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
I hummed in thought, watching the footage again before pausing it to flick back through my notebook. I searched my notes until I found the part of my interview with Mickey that I was looking for, the part where he’d described all the gang members he’d encountered.
“Here, this is what Mickey said about the shortest guy. He said he looked young, thirteen or so, but that the blond guy - Jules, that is - kept him close.”
“The kid’s walking next to Jules here, too,” Stephen said, looking at the screen with a slight frown. “So he’s what? A sidekick?”
“Guess so,” I said, rubbing my hand over my jaw. I still thought that the kid looked vaguely familiar somehow, but I couldn’t quite place him.
“Christ, I can’t believe they’re pulling in kids as young as thirteen.” Stephen shook his head, looking disturbed and angry. “It’s disgusting.”
“I agree. We’ve gotta track this guy down, and then we can do something about it.” I patted him on the shoulder. “Good work finding that.”
He tipped an imaginary cap. “All in a day’s work.”
The phone rang before I could respond, and I picked it up, glancing at my watch as I did so. It was getting towards the late afternoon, and I really didn’t want to be called out on an incident that’d take hours, but there wasn’t much I could do about it if it happened. Criminals didn’t pick sociable hours to get up to trouble, much to my annoyance.
“DCI Mitchell speaking,” I said.
“It’s Mickey,” a quiet voice said, “Mickey White.”
Startled, it took me a moment to reply. “Mickey, hi. Thanks for calling. Did you have something else to tell me?”
“Look, I’m not totally sure, okay?” he said, sounding nervy and on edge. “But I
