Her eyebrows went up into her fringe when she saw us. Her face was round and friendly, and she looked familiar, so I’d probably seen her around the station at some point.
“DCI Mitchell? This is a little below your paygrade, isn’t it, sir?” She quirked a smile at me, and I chuckled.
“A bit, but we help out where we can. What can I do?”
“How are you at herding cats?” she said wryly, tilting her head towards the remaining teenagers. “We’ve got two in the back of the car already, but these three are giving us the run-around.”
“Alright, we’ll take the two brunettes,” I decided, leaving the tall, black-haired teenager to the officers since they’d already been talking to him when we arrived. “They can go in our car.” I jerked a thumb back towards where Stephen and I were parked up. As I turned back the way we’d come, I was reminded of the ambulance that’d driven away.
“Was anyone injured in the accident?” I asked.
“Yeah, the poor sod who was in that wreck,” she gestured over towards the smarter car, already towed off the road. “Hit his head pretty hard. He’s gone off to A&E for the stitches.” She sent an unimpressed, tight-lipped look over at the teenagers. “Those clowns got off with scrapes and bruises, of course. Bit of whiplash is the worst they’ve got.”
“Well, let’s at least get them booked, huh,” I said, rubbing my clammy hands on my shirt and turning to give Stephen a nod.
We headed over to the teenagers, standing around near the second officer who looked to be trying to get answers out of the black-haired one and failing. They were all slouching as if standing up straight was too great of an effort for them, and one was smoking even though he didn’t look to be anywhere near eighteen.
“Okay, put that out, lad,” I said, walking over and gesturing impatiently at him. “You, with me. Stephen, you get the other idiot.”
The boy continued smoking, glaring at me with that patented ‘what’re you going to do’ teenage look. I lifted an eyebrow at him and turned to the officer who’d been here before us. He was a tall, lean bloke with an exasperated look on his narrow face.
“What’re we writing this lot up for?” I asked him.
He didn’t question who I was before he flatly reeled off the rap list, “Stealing a car, driving underage, driving under the influence, breaking the speed limit-”
“Aw, come on,” the lad said, looking to be the youngest of the group. The cigarette still hung from between his fingers. “I didn’t have anything to do with that.”
“No? You won’t mind doing a test for weed done at the station, then, will you?” The rank smell of the stuff hung around him, as it did the other two, and I knew what we’d found if we took samples from the group to test.
He swore at me with a glare, his mates looking on and sniggering.
“Look, you can come to the station, where you’ll have to answer our questions, or you can start talking here and win some brownie points,” I said, already done with their attitude. “Up to you, kid.”
After a long pause to make clear his unwillingness, he grudgingly complied, sulkily digging out his wallet to show me his debit card and confirm his name. He didn’t have a driving license, nor a learner’s license, so I guessed that he wasn’t even seventeen yet.
Stephen managed to get his questions answered by the teenager I’d handed off to him, and the one I’d been speaking to finally finished his cigarette and tossed it into the bushes. A great way to start a fire in this weather, I thought tiredly. I sighed, contemplating telling him to go and pick it up or I’d add littering to the list, but I opted to pick my battles and let that one go. Eventually, we got the uncooperative pair of them loaded up in the back of the car to cart them off to the station for tests.
“Shame that they probably won’t get anything more than a warning,” Stephen grumbled, slamming the door shut.
“We’ll see if they’ve got any priors,” I said. “They could get a fine or community service. But aye, since those two weren’t driving, what can we do?”
I looked over at the older, black-haired teenager, who had his arms folded and was still refusing to talk to the other officer.
“Him, on the other hand, will most likely get landed with juvie, maybe. He was driving, wasn’t he?”
“I don’t know, actually,” Stephen said. “I was listening in, and he hasn’t admitted that he was driving if he was.”
“Oh, great,” I muttered. “Someone must know who the driver was.”
“Those kids do,” Stephen agreed, nodding towards our car, “but they won’t tell, will they? Snitches get stitches.”
“Nice,” I grunted. “That’s really helpful.”
I went to talk to the officers to check that they could manage without us if we headed off now, and they assured us that they could. The tallest teen was being loaded into a car as we were leaving, his face settled into an ugly scowl. The recovery team had cleared the road blockage while we’d been dealing with the kids, and the traffic was up and flowing again.
We climbed into the car, ignoring the two sullen teenagers in the back, and Stephen drove us back to the station, the air conditioner blasting out an artificially cool breeze that felt like heaven on my bare skin.
It wasn’t a long drive back to Hewford, though there was a heavy dose of morning traffic, and we pulled up outside before long. Stephen and I escorted the teenagers through the lobby to be processed at the back. They wouldn’t end up in custody, but they’d have their prints and photos taken, as well as a hair sample to test for cannabis. Depending on what came back would determine what consequences the kids would end up with and,
