‘Do you have some idea of what you might say to them?’ Darren asked as they set off down the stairs.

Simon clattered after him, pointedly ignoring Jaq.

‘The institute used to get some of the ex-offenders to give us talks. Telling us how hard their lives were because they’d been to prison and warning us not to go down the same path.’

It surprised Jaq that Simon was willing to talk about something he’d clearly wanted to keep a secret. Her experience as an interrogator made her decide he was trying to cover up his fear with chat.

‘Did it work? Hearing from reformed prisoners?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Did it convince you?’

‘I had no intention of going into a life of crime.’

Jaq wondered whether that was true. Clever criminals operated for years without being noticed. Simon’s father, aside from being a serial killer, had been a surgeon. He was well educated and meticulous, which was what allowed him to keep killing for such a long time.

Simon worked side by side with him, so had been trained for years. After that, they had locked him up with yet more criminals. Young offenders, admittedly, but he’d have learned a lot there too.

‘So it had nothing to do with the talks?’ Darren said, bringing Jaq back to the conversation.

‘I got lucky. Someone spotted that I could draw and got me accepted into an art school. I don’t know what I would have done otherwise.’

‘Yeah, you did get lucky,’ Darren said as they reached the ground floor. ‘Opportunity and support probably do more to help young guys go straight than a scary talk about what might happen if they don’t. I get that, but at the moment, all we’ve got is option two.’

‘Okay,’ Simon said as he climbed into the car. ‘So who else will be there? A social worker?’

‘And the parents,’ Jaq said, buckling herself in as Darren took off at speed.

‘What are they like?’

Jaq was glad Simon was asking. At least he was engaging.

‘The older boy, Chazza, only has his mum. She’s a cleaner and has been giving him hell for getting involved. We had to remove her from the interviews because she was getting physically and verbally abusive to him, us and the social worker.

‘The younger boy, Miles, has a very respectable doctor father, who is adamant his son couldn’t possibly have done anything wrong. The mother is a stay at home mum who’s a bit of a mouse. She’s the one sitting in on all the interviews while the father’s been on his mobile hunting around for a lawyer. Fortunately, he hasn’t had any success so far.’

‘Okay,’ Simon said, and looked unenthusiastically up at the police station entrance as Darren came to a halt at the front door.

‘You go in. I’ll park and follow you,’ Darren said.

So Jaq led Simon up the stairs, through a foyer filled with the usual drunks from the evening’s revelries, some passed out on the chairs before the desk sergeant, two men bellowing football chants, arms over each other’s shoulders, while a girl shouted abuse at every person who passed her.

‘We’re upstairs. It’s quieter there,’ Jaq said, leading the way to their incident room on the first floor.

She nodded a greeting to the few members of the team collating all the information coming in from the people on the ground. Some hunched over monitors. Others were making phone calls, or filling in the hundreds of forms every case required.

‘Here.’

Jaq stopped before the two monitors that displayed feed from the interrogation rooms.

Simon shuddered and said, ‘Not there. I can’t talk to them there.’

‘Where else can you talk to them?’ Jaq asked, not entirely surprised by his visceral reaction.

‘Anywhere else. Don’t you have another room? Somewhere… less intimidating.’

‘Oh, okay, we’ve got a room we use for interviewing victims. It’s still got cameras. We’ll be recording everything and the social worker will be present, but it fits your criteria.’

***

Simon was in a daze. This was partly because of the anxiety meds he’d taken to help him sleep but mostly because of the surreal situation. He stepped into an interview suite that was laid out to look like a living room with facing sofas and a low table between them.

The social worker was a thin, older woman who was so tired she was nodding off in the comfortable chair she’d occupied in a corner of the room away from the main group of chairs. At least she wasn’t right beside the boy.

He was a big kid, as tall as an average adult male, and chubby, which added to his imposing look. He’d sat down, but then flopped over onto the sofa, his head resting on his arms, half asleep. Simon sat on the opposite sofa, wondering what the hell he should say.

He’d specialised in avoidance at the institute, keeping away from everybody else. Mainly because he’d grown up alone and didn’t know how to approach kids his own age, or people in general. He’d also had it hammered into him by his father to never say anything, which was a hard habit to break.

The kids around him had been a scary bunch. Half of them were violent, the other half suicidal. None were good at expressing their feelings with anything other than their fists.

In this, the kid in front of him was familiar, and he supposed after three years locked in with similar boys, he knew something about them. This boy was tough, but exhausted and probably feeling like he was out of options.

Simon opened his case and took out his sketchbook and pencil case and selected one of his soft black pencils. Art therapy would probably not cut it, but he could do some work of his own while he waited. He had an advert concept he needed to prepare, after all.

Simon flicked through to the storyboard he was working on. At least yogurt was an easy product to promote. Most people liked it and considered it healthy.

Chazza sat up, blinking in the bright light of the room and watched. Simon was super aware of him but carried on drawing.

‘What are you doing?’ Chazza asked.

‘My work.’

‘What is it?’

‘I’m a designer at a media company.’

‘So what the fuck are you doing here?’ Chazza’s voice drawled. Swearing seemed to be a habit because they’d been no emphasis on the word. ‘You’re in the wrong room.’

‘No, I’m in the right room.’

Experience had taught Simon that the best way to treat violent boys was to keep them confused. He flicked back to a piece of earlier work he didn’t need, and wrote something on the paper, making sure the angle wasn’t readable by the camera. He tore the page out and put it on the table, along with another of his soft pencils. No sense in giving the boy anything sharp he could use as a weapon.

‘What the fuck is that?’

‘An example of my work, take a look.’

‘I don’t care about your work.’

‘No, but by now you must be bored out of your mind, aren’t you?’

‘I just want to sleep,’ Chazza said, but glanced at the paper. Put it down, then picked it up again and looked a bit more closely.

Simon kept his eyes on his work.

‘Do you want to get out of here?’

‘I’m going to get out of here. I’m a minor. They can’t hold me much longer.’

‘Anyone over the age of ten is considered capable of telling right from wrong and is therefore liable for prosecution. They would send you to a young offenders’ institution, but that’s still a prison, no matter what they call it. Didn’t they already tell you that?’

‘Didn’t believe them,’ Chazza muttered.

‘Why not?’

‘We were told different.’

‘Who told you?’ Simon asked, keeping his head down, apparently absorbed in his work, although currently all he could focus on was drawing swirls and blobs.

‘Some guy.’

‘Older?’

Chazza just shrugged and Simon sensed that he’s say no more. That he probably suspected he shouldn’t have said as much as he already had.

‘Do you like your mother?’

‘What kind of a fucking question is that?’

‘Just wondering whether you’d rather spend time with her than in a young offenders’ institution.’

‘Oh, so here comes the lecture, huh? Is that what you’re here for, to frighten me?’

‘Actually,’ Simon said, looking Chazza straight in the eye. ‘If they had given me the choice, I’d have picked the young offenders’ over my father.’

That astonished Chazza, who muttered, ‘My mum’s a cow.’

Simon just smiled.

‘They didn’t give me a choice. They sent me to the young offenders’. It was shit, but better than home. That’s all I’ve got to say.’

Simon tilted his head at the paper he’d given Chazza. The kid looked at it for a while, doodled on it briefly and handed it back to Simon.

‘Nah, man, they’ve got nothing on me. I’m not saying anything.’

‘Fair enough.’

Simon folded the paper and then waved to the camera. It was the signal for Chazza to be removed. Jaq appeared at the door, looking irritated as she told the social worker to accompany Chazza back to the interrogation room, along with a uniformed police officer.

‘Are you even trying?’ Jaq asked once the boy was out of earshot.

‘What do you want from me?’ Simon said, angered by this woman who thought nothing of hauling him out of bed in the middle of the night, then having the cheek to be annoyed. ‘Just send in the other boy.’

‘We started you off on Chazza because he’s the leader. Miles is just a little shit.’

‘But he’ll also know where the kid is, won’t he?’

‘Yeah, so try harder this time, okay?’

Simon didn’t bother responding, not that Jaq gave him a chance. He just sat down on the sofa again and flipped through his sketchbook, looking for another disposable page. He’d just finished writing his note when a weaselly, skinny kid walked in, accompanied by a similar, worn down looking woman and a large social worker, doing her best to keep alert. The kid looked small for a fourteen-year-old, but cocky and wide awake.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ Miles said as he threw himself on the sofa, leaning back like a gangster rapper. His mother settled on the sofa, on the far end from her son. She looked like her son intimidated her. That was saying something for a fourteen-year-old.

The boy’s arrogant attitude probably came from the father. It was the advantage of well-off parents. Money bought confidence. Much as he hated to admit it, as the son of a doctor himself, he’d come across as arrogant to some of the other boys at the institute, too. He’d always thought that highly ironic.

‘Is it entertaining hanging around with the lower classes?’ Simon asked, pretty sure that was Miles’s aim. That and avoidance of bullies by hanging out with the biggest bully.

Miles gave him a wide grin, cleared his throat and spat on the carpet. He was definitely aiming to shock, but Simon had seen human excrement smeared on the walls in protest and just turned his attention back to his sketchbook.

‘You’re just a nobody who’s been called in because the police are getting desperate, aren’t you?’

‘Pretty much,’ Simon said. ‘And you think you’re cleverer than the cops, don’t you?’

‘Phffft, obviously. In about three hours, they’re going to have to let us go.’

‘It was pretty sloppy of you to have got caught in the first place, and for what? Abducting some kid? ’

‘You think you could do better?’

‘I did do better,’ Simon said, looking up to give Miles a cool stare.

The boy’s confidence carried the day and his grin merely got wider.

‘So… you’re just some loser who got caught and is now trying to make me confess to get in good with the cops. That’s really pathetic.’

‘You got me.’ Simon tore a page from his sketchbook and put it down on the table along with a pencil. ‘I got done for six murders. Yet here I am, free as a bird, while you’re looking at some serious time, especially if you’re tried as the instigator.’

‘At worst, I’m just an accomplice.’

‘Are you? That doesn’t get you much protection under English law. Have they not told you about joint enterprise?’

‘So you’re a lawyer now?’

‘I’m a graphic designer,’ Simon said, holding his sketchpad up, a design facing Miles.

‘You call that art?’ Miles said, grabbed the paper on the table and spent some time scrawling on it before he handed it back with a sneer. ‘You’re just a pathetic loser. Six murders, my arse.’

Simon looked down at the paper Miles gave him, nodded, held out his hand and said, ‘Pencil.’

Miles threw it at him, but more because he was caught off guard. Apparently, he’d planned to hold on to the pencil.

‘Good luck,’ Simon said and left, closing the door behind him with a firm click.

‘Is that it?’ Jaq said, dashing over from the monitor where she and Darren had been watching the meeting.

‘That Miles is a snake. I wouldn’t be so sure he wasn’t the ring leader.’

‘You got that from the five minutes you spent with him, did you? Thanks for bloody nothing, Simon. We’ve just wasted one hell of a lot of time and got absolutely bugger all for it.’

‘I told you I couldn’t help.’

‘I didn’t expect you to put in so little effort. Why did you even bother coming?’

‘I told you!’

‘It was a total disaster.’

‘Fuck you!’ Simon said, shoved the papers he was clutching in his hand at Jaq and stormed out.

***

‘Shit, I’m sorry,’ Jaq said to Darren, who’d strolled over.

‘It’s okay, I’m also disappointed.’ Darren bent down to pick up the papers Jaq had left on the floor. He unfolded the two sheets, looked at the first, then flicked it over, and looked at the second. ‘Hold on,’ he murmured. ‘Look at this.’

For the second time, Jaq had the papers thrust at her but this time she took them.

‘What is it?’

A host of scrawled dicks of the sort teenage boys drew everywhere were the first thing she noticed. Followed by a couple of pencil sketches that seemed to be an advert for a car. Above that was the line, If you want to get out of this, give me a location.

The script was so beautiful Jaq didn’t register the meaning right away. Then she did a double take before she flicked to the second page. In amongst the pencil sketches for a dieting app was the same beautifully written line. Below that in thick black pencil was a childish scrawl: Scout hut by the canal.

Jaq looked up at Darren, who was watching her with one raised eyebrow.

‘You don’t think that’s where Brad Davis is, do you?’

‘Only one way to find out.’

‘If it is, then I owe Simon a huge apology.’

‘Worry about that later,’ Darren said as he ran for his desk and picked up a walkie talkie whilst shouting to the rest of the room to find the address of the scout hut and get an ambulance sent to the same location.