She released a long breath, her shoulders sinking, and took a sip of tea.
“I shouldn’t have shouted at them. I know I should’ve kept my temper. And I ought to have taken the child to someone senior right there and then so that they could see his burnt sleeve. I didn’t think of that at the time, not when the boy kept saying he just wanted to go home. He didn’t want me to speak to his parents, either, so I just decided to leave it until the next day.” She sighed, running out of words and going quiet.
“Thank you for telling us, Miss Sheridan,” I said gently since her emotions seemed raw after telling the story. “When did this happen?”
“Oh, it must have been a year ago now, or more.”
“So when he was thirteen.” I gave a nod, making a note on my pad. “What was the name of the other child?”
“He won’t admit that it happened. I tried speaking to him several times, but he was adamant that it was just a game and that he didn’t want to tell anyone,” she warned me.
“Did you think he’d been threatened?”
“By Alistair?” she said before giving a helpless shrug. “I’ve considered all sorts, but it might be the age-old rule between kids that they don’t snitch on each other.”
“And there were no marks at all on the child?”
“I slapped my hand on his sleeve as soon as I got there and patted the fire out. He could’ve ended up in hospital if the jacket had caught fire properly, but it was a damp night. He was really lucky, I tried to tell him that, but he wouldn’t listen.”
“Has Alistair tried to talk to you since?” Stephen asked.
“No, not at all. Sometimes in lessons, I’d…” she trailed off, looking uncomfortable.
“Go on, please, Miss Sheridan. It’s really essential that we understand everything we can about him.”
“It’s probably nothing, but I’d get the sense he was glaring at me or watching me anyway, and he would be. Just cold, cold eyes.” She shook her head and forced a tight laugh. “It’s my imagination, silly, really. He’s a fourteen-year-old kid, right?”
I couldn’t say anything reassuring to her, so I just nodded seriously.
“Was there anything else you could tell us? Anything at all that might be important?”
Her gaze drifted away from us as she thought it over, her hand rubbing her knee. Her house must have thin walls, or the insulation wasn’t good because it felt much warmer inside here than it had at the Pumphrey’s house, and my hair was sticking to my forehead and the back of my neck. It was reaching the hottest part of the day, though, and I was dying for a glass of Sam’s iced coffee when we returned to the station. But for now, I focused back on Anna Sheridan as she came to an answer.
“I doubt it’s really important, but Alistair did seem to have more friends on the playground before he went missing. Or not friends, exactly, but people talking to him, crowding around him. I only saw it a couple of times when I was out on playground duty, so it may have been nothing.”
“Alright, that’s helpful. I can’t thank you enough for telling us this.”
“I may misinterpret some of it, you know. Not the part where he burnt that boy’s sleeve because I’m absolutely sure of that, but perhaps I was too imaginative with the other parts.”
“We’re interested in all of it,” I tried to reassure her. She almost seemed to want to undermine her own statement, and I wasn’t really sure why. Self-doubt, perhaps, or a desire to protect Alistair, despite what she’d seen him do.
We took our leave soon after, both of us quiet as we made our way back to the station. The heat today felt especially oppressive and sticky against my skin, with my hair curling up more than usual.
“Feels like a thunderstorm,” Stephen said as we drove back to Hewford.
The sky was mostly still a pure, glowing blue, but a scattering of clouds had begun to gather for the first time in what felt like weeks.
“I hope it does. We could use the rain.”
“Mm, we don’t need the lightning, though. And if there’s too much rain all at once, we could get a flood.”
“Jesus, yeah, we don’t need any more of that,” I agreed.
“What will be, will be, I guess,” Stephen said with a shrug.
Inside the building, it wasn’t much cooler or less sticky than outside. I shared the last of the iced coffee with Stephen, and we headed back to our desks.
“Are you convinced Alistair isn’t a little angel, now?” I asked, deliberately provoking him. I was settled back in my desk chair, too lethargic to mind how my back was sticking to the chair.
“I never thought he was an angel. It was you who painted him as some manipulative devil-child-”
“I mean, he was burning holes in his back garden. That’s a little devilish right?”
“Darren, be serious.”
“Okay, okay.” I straightened up in my chair, taking a sip of coffee to wet my throat. “I don’t doubt what Sheridan was saying, do you?”
“No. Although she didn’t sound all too sure of it herself, did she?”
“Aye, I don’t know why that was. Probably because she had all the other teachers telling her that Alistair was a ‘pleasure to teach’ or whatever the phrase is they use. Anyway, I think we can conclusively say that Alistair has a history with starting fires and being a danger to others, right?”
“And that he was talented with computers, Sheridan said that,” Stephen added.
“Absolutely. So I don’t think it’s an unreasonable jump to assume that he was lying about being coerced into the gang and actually joined of his own free will
