“I think we’ve got a proper ID on Jules,” I grinned, ignoring Stephen’s initial lack of enthusiasm. “The officer I asked to do research? They’ve turned up a kid that matches Jules’ description exactly and guess what?”
“What?” Stephen said obligingly.
“He has a record for arson!”
Stephen was looking grudgingly interested now, and he rolled his chair over to have a look. But it was too warm for him to be crowding me, so I shooed him away and sent the emails over to him so he could view them on his own computer.
“Crikey,” he muttered. “This is great if it actually is the kid. Mickey was saying he’s the ringleader, isn’t he? We grab this one, and it all falls down like a pyramid of cards.”
“That’s the hope.”
“So can we contact this ‘Jules Porton’? Get him in here to ask him some questions?”
“We can try. His record is from when he was under sixteen, but there are his parents’ details on here. Do you reckon we should call them first or?”
“No point going round if Jules isn’t there, I suppose.” Stephen gave a shrug. “We’ll just have to hope he doesn’t run off.”
So that’s what we did. I put a call through to Jules’ home phone, assuming he still lived at that address, and waited for a reply. The house listed on our system wasn’t far away, at least, so if we got confirmation that Jules was at the property, we could be over there within twenty minutes.
“He’s there,” I said, hanging up the phone. “His dad sounded worried, but he told me that Jules was up in his room.”
“Right, let’s go then.”
We headed out, moving with purpose despite the heavy heat.
“What do you want to do if it is him?” Stephen asked as we drove over, me at the wheel this time. He had to raise his voice over the whirring of the air con.
“I don’t know,” I admitted, having been wondering the same myself. “We’ll have to see how he reacts when we meet and confront him and how it goes when we try to question him.”
If this lead turned out to be on the money and this kid was the Jules we were after, as I was expecting it to be, then that brought up the question of what we would do next. I didn’t want to bring him in whilst we still had little, if any, evidence against the kid and risk losing him because we couldn’t hold him. On the other hand, leaving him to roam and continue his exploits with starting fires and gathering more teenagers into his group wasn’t even close to deal, either.
Not to mention that we believed Jules to have connections with Alistair, the kid who remained missing, and I had no idea yet whether Jules would answer questions on that. Alistair’s parents must be frantic, I thought, and getting answers on the fourteen-year-old’s whereabouts was essential. The question was whether it would be better to play the long game or not, meaning that we would release Jules and follow his movements so that we could get to the heart of Alistair’s disappearance and the gang who was setting fires.
It all depended on how Jules reacted when we tried to talk to him, I thought. It seemed very unlikely that, like Mickey, Jules could be convinced to answer our questions in return for leniency, but we could always try that angle, too.
We reached Jules’s house quickly, though there were patches of traffic, and pulled up outside. The house looked absolutely ordinary, a small terrace property with a slightly neglected garden but a newly painted door and flower pots near the step.
Stephen went ahead to knock on the door, and a ginger cat came up to us and curled itself around my ankles as we waited.
“Who do you belong to?” I asked it, crouching down to rub its bony head, making it purr and press its ears against my fingers.
The front door opened, and I straightened up, the cat darting in front and disappearing into the house. I looked up to see a bulky man at the door, his hair a greying-blond, who was dressed in a t-shirt and jogging trousers. He looked nervous to see us but stopped to rub his hand down the cat’s back after he’d gestured for us to step into the house’s narrow hallway.
“You met the cat already, then,” he said, voice sounding gruff.
I could smell the cigarette smoke on him, but the house itself was clean and tidy, though in that cluttered way that comes with having a lot of things in a small house. He led us through to a sitting room and left us alone while he went to fetch Jules, who was playing loud music upstairs.
Stephen stroked the friendly ginger tom while we waited for father and son to come back downstairs, and I looked around the sitting room. There weren’t many pictures up around the place, with the shelves instead filled with stacks of DVDs and CDs. A record player sat in the corner, and its dust-free state gave me the impression that it was highly valued.
Jules came down the stairs on heavy feet, looking tall and lanky from where I was sitting on the low sofa. I stood up as the teenager, and his father came in, glancing over at Jules’s face and finding him looking sullen and resentful. If he was at all unnerved or anxious about our visit, he was hiding it completely.
“Sit down, son,” Jules’s father grunted, nudging Jules towards an armchair. Jules shook his dad off but sulkily did as he was told, crossing his arms over his chest as he glared at us.
The teen’s hair was just as pale blond as everyone had described it as, and I didn’t think it was dyed. The kid had his silver lip ring, and it made the disgruntled look on his face seem even more pronounced.
“Alright, why’re you here?” Jules’s dad was
