“Jules has been linked with some troubling incidents in the area,” I said, deciding that staying vague might be best, to begin with. I turned to speak to the teenager directly. “Do you know a boy called Alistair Pumphrey?”
“No,” Jules said as he looked evenly at me, his stare flat and disdainful.
“That’s strange since you had dinner at his house,” Stephen said coldly. His hand was clenched on his thigh.
“Really?” Jules’s sullen expression shifted into a sideways grin that seemed calculated to be endearing. At that moment, I could see the angelic, polite boy that Alistair’s mum had described. “I must’ve forgotten that.”
“Weird, that. You forgetting going round to visit someone’s house,” Stephen pressed. Jules just shrugged.
“Why’re you asking about this kid?” Jules’s dad put in, frowning.
“Perhaps Jules could answer that,” Stephen said, still looking irritated by Jules’s blatant lies. “Why does he think we’re asking about Alistair?”
Jules looked at him coldly, the smile completely gone from his face. “No idea, mate.”
“You’ve spent time at the police station before, haven’t you?” I asked, changing the subject when it became clear that Jules wasn’t going to say anymore and that Stephen was getting wound up.
“Ages ago, yeah.” Jules settled back in his armchair, watching me with a bored expression.
“What was that for?”
“You tell me. I’m sure you pulled the report from up your-”
“Mind your tone,” his dad snapped. Jules looked unimpressed and unintimidated.
I sighed. “Jules, you’re looking at some serious charges here. Linked to robbery, assault, and arson. You’re not under-sixteen anymore, things will be worse this time, and you already have a record.”
“You trying to scare me?” he sneered. “Show me proof of any of that. You dunno what you’re talking about.”
“Is there proof?” his dad asked. “What’ve you got against him?”
“I assure you we have enough to make things difficult for you, Jules,” I said. “This is your chance to get on our side and help yourself. We can offer-”
“Blah blah blah,” he mocked. “Get to the point, will you?”
I sat back, considering him with a frown. We weren’t going to get through to him, and he wasn’t going to answer our questions. Of that, I was sure. He had exactly zero respect for authority, and he didn’t believe that we had anything we could prove. The problem was that he was part-way right.
I could talk in more detail about the witness statements we’d heard, the CCTV camera footage we’d seen, but I didn’t want to overplay our hand at this point.
“Thanks for your time, Mr Porton,” I said to Jules’s father as I got abruptly to my feet, ignoring Jules entirely. I pulled out a business card and put it down on the coffee table. “Please call us if you have anything you want to speak about.”
Stephen got up too and shook Mr Porton’s hand, which was clammy and firm. He showed us to the door, Jules hanging back to watch us go much like a territorial animal that wanted to be sure we’d left the area.
It was a relief to be out of the house which had been just as hot as outside but felt warmer because of the dim light and Jules’s oppressive frowns.
“We’re not taking him in, then?” Stephen said, sounding irritable.
The kid’s attitude had wound him, I knew, particularly when Jules refused to answer questions on Alistair. As a parent himself, Stephen no doubt felt for the parents whose son had been missing for over a week now.
“I don’t think we can,” I sighed as we climbed into the car.
“Not enough evidence,” Stephen grumbled as we set off back to the station, and I wound the windows down.
It was drawing towards the end of the day, though the sun would be up for hours yet. I wished we could have put Jules in the back of the car, but I’d reluctantly decided that we didn’t have enough to hold him. This was why I hadn’t wanted to tell him too much about what we knew because I guessed that the moment we left, he’d feed it back to his friends and then they’d be one step ahead. Jules certainly hadn’t been willing to give us any information at all.
“We’ll get him,” I assured Stephen. “It might take time, but we’ll dig up enough solid proof to bury him.”
Lips pressed together, Stephen gave a curt nod.
“I just hope by that time, it won’t be too late for the missing kid,” he said lowly. “For Alistair.”
“So do I,” I said, turning away towards the window.
We didn’t know where Alistair was, nor what state he was in after going so long without being in touch with his parents. My fellow DCI, Sedgwick, would do all that he could to find the fourteen-year-old. In the meantime, the only way we could help was by thoroughly investigating what Jules and his gang were getting up to and gathering the evidence we needed to arrest them for good. They had some involvement with Alistair, I was sure of it, and we’d find out whatever it was once we had them well and truly pinned down.
Thirteen
“What do you mean, they’ve moved it?”
“I mean, they’ve moved messaging sites,” Keira said, giving me a flat look.
I swore quietly and rubbed a hand over my face. I’d wondered why the teens’ chat had gone so quiet suddenly, with barely a fraction of the messages that had been there before. The messages that were being posted were all asking the same thing that I’d wanted to know.
Where had everyone else gone?
Clearly, those had been the kids that no-one cared enough to invite to the new site, wherever that was. Like me, they’d been left behind, uninformed about what the teens would do next.
“They must have realised we were onto them, somehow,” I reasoned.
“Could it have been our visit to see
