The hot weather might not be my cup of tea, but the rest of York seemed to have been enjoying it. We’d been rushed off our feet at the station dealing with everything from drunk university students to a child abuse complaint about a kid whose arm got burnt on the side of a barbeque. Tomorrow, I’d be back in the thick of it and sweltering inside the sticky, non-air-conditioned confines of the station building if this heatwave continued on as it has these last couple of weeks.
Surely enough, the hot weather hung on into Monday, digging its claws in and turning the British greenery a Mediterranean brown. The weather forecasts predicted another scorching week, and the evenings were the only time when I could run comfortably.
After work, with sweat prickling my back and the city alive around me, I relaxed into the rhythm of the exercise, pounding Monday’s stresses into the hard, hot pavement. The light hung around until nine or ten o’clock these days, and I made the most of it, pushing myself to a peak of fitness and enjoying the rush of it.
I ran out of York and towards Strensall army base, keeping pace with the sluggish traffic along the main road. Stretching my legs out, I picked up the pace, shifting the lactic acid from my knees and leaving me breathless as I ate up the ground.
I was slowing back down to my usual loping jog when the ringing wail of a siren cut through the relative quiet. I kept going until I reached a bus stop, leaning against the chipped paint and smeared windows marred with cigarette burns as I stretched out my legs and glanced back down the way I’d come. Familiar blue and red lights whirled nearby, the siren getting increasingly louder as it approached, and I watched with a faint frown. Cars manoeuvred around each other, clumsy and awkward, to let the patrol car by, its siren broadcasting its impatience as it cut through the dawdling, clustered traffic and sped off.
A minute later, another police car went wailing past and, in the distance, I could see a plume of smoke climbing up into the dusky sky. I was heading in that direction on the course of my run regardless and let my legs carry me steadily closer. The smell of smoke in the air thickened, bringing the tang of chemicals that came from burning something that wasn’t meant to be set alight.
I caught sight of the fire engine not long later, the smoke now strong enough to sting my eyes, and saw the blackened wreck of a building. I’d run this route enough times to know what should’ve been there: a run-down agricultural barn, the rusted corrugated roof caved in, and the sides decorated with amateur graffiti.
Now, there was little more than a charred outline, like a reversed x-ray against the washed-out sky. As I caught my breath and my heart rate slowed back to normal, I stared at the smoking ruin and wondered how it’d caught alight. The threat of a summer storm had been hanging in the hot air for a while now, but we’d not had any thunder or lightning yet. When it was this hot and dry, it was more than possible that the sun had been focused by a shard of glass or cast off the metal roof and created a spark that sent the whole place up in flames. Or maybe it wasn’t an accident of nature at all.
I gave a mental shrug and turned away, running onwards and leaving the smoke and police cars behind me. I’d be able to find out what happened at the station tomorrow if I wanted to. Tonight was about forgetting work, not getting dragged into more of it, and I channelled my attention into my running. My trainers hit the pavement beneath me, and I ran on.
Stephen was already at his desk by the time I arrived the next morning, raising his eyebrows at my grimace as I sat down.
“You haven’t injured yourself again, have you?”
“Might’ve overdone the running a little last night,” I said, rubbing my hands over my sore thighs with a wince. “I’ll be fine.”
“You’ll have to come round to ours for a movie night or drinks, mate. We’d make sure you had the laziest night of your life, no exercise at all.”
“Oh yeah?” I chuckled. “What, you’ll carry me from the car to the sofa?”
“If that’s what it takes,” he said, grinning back at me.
I shook my head at him and got my computer loaded up, checking through the emails I’d received since yesterday and sorting through them. There wasn’t anything that was critically important right now, but several would need attending to, and I flagged them. Despite the busyness around the station, there hadn’t been any big cases since last November’s horrific serial murder case, and I was fine with that. I was more than willing to chip in with other people’s cases and make myself generally useful, rather than having a case to myself if it meant that nobody was getting attacked, or murdered, or kidnapped.
“Typical teenagers, huh?” Stephen said, startling me out of my thoughts.
“What?”
“The fire last night, over near Strensall?” he prompted. “Did you hear about it?”
“Aye, I saw it when I was out running. Teenagers, then, was it? Are they sure?”
“That’s what the firefighters’ reckon, anyway. There was definitely an accelerant used, so it wasn’t an accident.”
“No-one was hurt?” I asked. I hadn’t seen any ambulances around the area when I’d gone past, but they could have already left.
“No. And if it was done by kids, they weren’t caught either.”
I grunted, unimpressed. Starting fires when it was as dry as it was right now was even more stupid than doing it at other times of the year. There wasn’t much we could do, though, I predicted. The summer had already been stretching our resources, and I would be surprised if there was any evidence left
