“I’d like to hear Alistair’s account,” he said evenly before turning back to the teenager. “Why did you run away?”
“Like my mum said, it was stress, I guess. School and that.” He looked down at the floor and scuffed his feet, but the fidgeting didn’t look natural to me.
“Was that all? You need to tell us the whole truth, even if it’s difficult.” Sedgwick gave the lad a slight frown. “I’ve heard that you’ve been involved with a group of teenagers, led by a blond boy called Jules. Is that true?”
Alistair gave a shrug.
“Jules? That’s the boy I told you about! I knew there was something off about him.” Alistair’s father put in, jabbing his finger forwards towards me. Alistair kept his head down.
“Alistair, I’m going to need an answer. Have you been involved with this group or not?”
Of course, we had it on CCTV cameras that Alistair had run with the gang, and Sedgwick knew it. What we needed to know was whether Alistair was going to admit it. The lad scuffed his feet against the carpet and stayed quiet until his mum put her hand on his knee.
“Answer the officer’s question, sweetie. The sooner this is over, the sooner we can just be together as a family. We can have a nice tea, okay, something filling because I’m sure you’re hungry.”
“I didn’t want to,” Alistair muttered finally, keeping his head down and sounding younger than his age. I couldn’t make sense of the difference between this apparently shy teenager and the cold-eyed one who’d walked away when I was going to be beaten. This one mumbled under his breath and wouldn’t look at us, where the other had looked me right in the eye and commanded respect from a gang of boys much older than he was. It was like two different boys entirely.
Which was the real one, I wanted to know, and which was an act? Had he been playing at being bold and stony-faced with the gang when he was actually feeling young and afraid, or was it this childish helplessness that was an act?
“What do you mean, you didn’t want to?” Sedgwick leaned forwards slightly. His partner, Alison Greene, was sitting on the sofa by his side and looked similarly intent on listening to what Alistair had to say.
“They made me go with them.”
Sedgwick and Greene exchanged a look. At my side, Stephen crossed his arms over his chest, and I glanced sideways, not quite able to read what he was thinking from his expression.
“How did they make you join them?” Greene asked, her voice gentler than Sedgwick’s.
“They came to me at school. They said I had to go with them, or they’d hurt me.”
I leaned backwards, my lips pressed together. I wanted to believe the lad, I really did, but I simply couldn’t. This apparent weakness he was showing, saying that he couldn’t have stood up to the gang, might look plausible at first glance, but it didn’t ring to me. Not now that I’d seen him interact with Jules and the others himself. True, maybe they could have threatened him into joining them and running away at the start, but I couldn’t believe that he’d been there unwillingly recently, nor that he’d been entirely helpless.
“Was it those boys who kept you away from home?” Grace asked, the urgency clear on her face and in her voice.
Alistair nodded, and his mum crumpled into tears and pulled him into a hug. At first stiff, the lad relaxed into it.
I knew why Alistair’s parents would want to believe it. A child who was abducted for over two weeks hadn’t chosen to leave them and to stay away. It absolved his parents from any blame and didn’t leave them feeling like they didn’t understand their son. Instead, they could simply blame a gang of no-good, law-breaking older boys and never have to do the difficult work of reassessing their kid’s actual character.
So I understood why they wanted so badly to believe it, but I thought that it was fiction, and I wanted to know why Alistair was trying to sell that to his parents. It was convenient for him for all of us adults to see him as a victim, that was true, but why had he chosen now to come home?
Part-way through the interview, Alistair’s mum called for a short break and took the empty mugs to the kitchen. I gathered up the ones she couldn’t carry and followed her through, partly simply to be helpful but also partly because I wanted to see the rest of the house and perhaps talk to Grace alone.
“Oh, thank you, detective,” she said when I arrived at the kitchen door. She gestured for me to put the mugs on the counter which I did before she started to run a bowl of hot water in the sink.
The kitchen was small but neat, decorated in a sunny, egg-yolk yellow with a framed print of a sunflower above the small table on the side.
“This must be very hard for you,” I said, wandering further into the kitchen and going to stand by the french doors, which looked out on the narrow back garden.
“We’ve been so worried,” she said quietly from behind me. “It’s such a relief to have him back.”
The water sloshed in the bowl as she washed up the mugs, and Alex came in a moment later, putting a hand on her shoulder. I was still standing looking out on the garden, where I’d noticed some strange blackened patches on the lawn. Of course, the scorching hot weather had left everyone’s grass an unhealthy shade of brown, but these patches didn’t look like sun damage.
“Have you had a barbeque recently?” I asked absently, wondering what had caused them.
“Not yet,” Grace said. “With Ali being missing, how could we? Now he’s back, though, I’m sure we can have some of his friends round.”
“So these marks on the lawn, what caused them?” I asked, turning around to face
