DS Jessica Daniel series: Think of the Children / Playing with Fire / Thicker Than Water – Books 4–6 (16 page)

Dawson nodded, clearly thinking something similar. She assured them she would call if anything came up.

Back in the car, Reynolds rang Cole and told him there was little going on. It was a similar story in Manchester, with frozen ground again impeding the dig in the woods where Toby
Whittaker’s clothes had been found and no sign of Lloyd Corless. Jessica sent a text message to Esther asking how Rachel Corless was faring but the reply simply told her the boy’s
mother was still quiet and borderline uncooperative. It was becoming clear everything further south had stalled.

‘What do you reckon?’ Jessica asked.

Reynolds sounded resigned. ‘Between you and me, officers are being moved back to other jobs or the districts they came from. Someone up top isn’t happy with our progress.’

It was the first Jessica had heard of it. She stumbled over her words, trying to hide at least part of her annoyance. ‘But we’ve got so many things going on. How are we going to get
through it all with less people?’

‘I think that’s the problem. Jack told me he’s been trying to hold things off for a day or two but it goes way above him and the super. There’s the investigation into
Isaac Hutchings’s murder, everyone’s expecting Toby Whittaker’s body to be found in those woods at any moment, then there’s the allotment, the list of kids, whoever Glenn
Harrison is, the driver of the stolen crashed car and now Lloyd Corless. Plus everything in between, including Simon Hill. Jack’s tried to keep it all to himself but I’ve heard whispers
people upstairs are unhappy with a lack of focus and so on.’

‘It’s not his fault, is it?’

‘I agree but there’s not much we can do. I don’t think anyone knew how big this would get. One minute it was a missing child, the next we’re trying to run multiple cases.
It was always going to be too big for a DCI.’

‘So who’s going to run things?’

‘Chief super I guess.’

Jessica wasn’t convinced. ‘Why would he be taking people off the case?’

‘Probably just to focus on finding Lloyd. I guess if we can find him, it might lead us on a trail back to everything else.’

‘Or finding out what happened with Toby or Isaac could lead us to Lloyd?’

‘Maybe, but it’s not got us far yet, has it?’

‘If we find Simon Hill with Lloyd it will have.’

Reynolds didn’t reply but his silence said more than words. Jessica herself had thought about the trail that had brought them to a freezing supermarket car park in Sunderland. Aside from
the fact Simon Hill had been involved in a petty dispute fourteen years previously – and that he had lied to his wife about what he was up to – there wasn’t anything to link him
to Lloyd or Isaac’s disappearance.

‘Let’s find somewhere to eat,’ Jessica said. ‘Maybe we’ll strike lucky and our man will come in for a fry-up with Lloyd in tow.’

The cafe they ate in was as greasy as Jessica could have hoped for. Reynolds munched his way through a bacon sandwich while she had a full English breakfast, although the lack of black pudding
was a cause of concern.

‘I don’t know how you eat that,’ the inspector said as Jessica wiped up an egg yolk with some fried bread.

‘What?’

‘All that fat. Even looking at your plate makes me feel like I’m putting on weight.’ He held up the remains of his sandwich. ‘My wife would be annoyed if she knew
I’d eaten this.’

Jessica grinned as she finished off a hash brown. ‘This is a bit of a treat. Usually I just eat pot noodles and toast.’

‘Together?’

‘Of course not . . . although that’s not a bad idea. It’s just fair to say that I definitely wasn’t a gourmet chef in a previous life.’

‘What do you reckon you were?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. You see all those dickheads on TV and everyone reckons they were some Roman emperor or a Greek goddess or something. I was probably a chimney sweep or something
else not very interesting.’

‘Ever the dreamer, then?’

‘You know me.’

Jessica finished off the last of her sausage and looked at the clock on the wall above her colleague’s head. Because of the journey, the time spent in DCI Dawson’s office, plus
eating, Jessica had lost track of the day. As she thought about the fact it would be dark within an hour and a half or so, she had an idea, taking out her phone and checking for further
directions.

‘Are you ready?’ she asked.

‘I finished ten minutes ago.’

‘I’ve got an idea.’ Jason rolled his eyes and leant back in his seat. ‘What?’ Jessica added indignantly.

‘I know what your ideas are like. Whenever you’ve come to me with an idea before it usually ends up with me doing something I don’t particularly want to.’

‘This one’s simple. There’s a school a few hundred yards away from that supermarket. All the kids will be leaving in a few minutes. Let’s go and watch.’

Reynolds narrowed his eyes and, for a moment, Jessica thought he was going to say no but instead he started fumbling in his pockets before pulling out his car keys.

They parked around fifty metres from the school gates, just outside of some zigzag yellow lines where people were not supposed to stop. Reynolds had one of the pictures of Simon Hill on his lap,
Jessica had the photo on her phone. She knew it was desperation but then so was the journey. There was no particular reason to believe the man they were looking for might be around but, as it was
the only school in the area and they thought he might have some connection to either Isaac Hutchings or Lloyd Corless, it was at least worth a go.

Jessica was trying to watch as many of the adults as she could, looking for someone who could possibly be Simon Hill. As they were observing, a black 4x4 skidded to a halt on the zigzag lines,
blocking their view. Reynolds motioned as if he was going to move but Jessica opened the car door. ‘I’ll handle it.’

Jessica marched around the vehicle and hammered on the driver’s side door. A woman with long blonde hair peered out of the window towards Jessica. She looked half-annoyed, half-perplexed.
In case she was in any doubt about what the problem was, Jessica bashed the door with her fist a second time. The window slid down with an electric hum, any trace of confusion on the woman’s
face replaced by absolute fury. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ she said angrily in a sharp north-east accent.

‘I’m telling you to move your car. Now.’

The driver screwed up her face even further. ‘I’ll have ya if you touch my car again.’ The woman was clearly fuming but something about her pristine appearance told Jessica
she’d never been in anything that could even loosely be described as a fight. For a few moments, Jessica thought about banging on the door again just to see what the woman would do. Instead,
she reached into her pocket and took out her identification, holding it up for the woman to see.

Jessica smiled just to antagonise the woman even further. ‘Tell you what, you take your shit hair extensions and stuck-on nails and piss off and I’ll pretend you didn’t just
threaten a police officer.’

The driver stared at Jessica but re-started the engine and pulled away just as students began to spill out of the school gates in small groups. Jessica banged on the back of the vehicle as it
moved, before turning to face Reynolds in his car. As she swivelled, her eyes were drawn to a small blue hatchback parked on the opposite side of the road a little behind the inspector’s car.
A man in a red coat was roughly hauling a boy onto the back seat before slamming the door. As he turned around, Jessica got a clear view of the person’s face.

Simon Hill stared down the road before quickly stepping around the front of the vehicle and opening the driver’s door.

For a moment Jessica felt fixed to the spot, focusing on Simon Hill’s face. She didn’t need to check the pictures on her phone to know he was the person they had
come to look for. It was only when he turned away that she fully took in the fact she had just seen him force a child into the back seat and slam the door. Jessica sprinted across the road but had
forgotten about the conditions. As she reached the kerb on the opposite side, she skidded across a patch of frost, cannoning onto the pavement with a painful crunch.

For a moment she could just hear ringing in her ears but it was soon replaced by people laughing.

Children laughing.

Jessica rolled over and could see a handful of kids in school uniform standing nearby. A few of them looked concerned but some of the older ones were giggling. Jessica stood awkwardly, wincing
as a jolt of pain shot from her hip. The palms of her hands felt raw but she wasn’t concerned as she looked frantically towards where the blue car had been.

It wasn’t there.

Jessica glanced quickly from side to side. Everything had happened in a matter of seconds, so it couldn’t have gone far. She stepped gingerly back off the kerb, still looking around before
finally seeing a blue shape moving away from her in the opposite direction to which Reynolds’s car was facing. Jessica shook her head to try to clear it.

‘What happened to you?’ a man’s voice said.

Jessica hadn’t realised it but Reynolds was standing next to her with a hand on her upper arm.

‘It’s Hill, he’s in a blue car.’ Jessica pointed to where she thought he had headed. The inspector started to say something but instead helped her hobble across the road
into the passenger seat. He did a three-point turn and began to drive in the direction Jessica had indicated.

‘Did you see him turn off anywhere?’ he asked. Jessica mumbled a ‘no’ while trying to pull her phone out of her pocket. She was relieved to see she hadn’t fallen on
it and dialled DCI Dawson’s phone number before passing on what had happened.

The entire time from her falling to Reynolds turning his car around was likely less than a minute, so Simon Hill couldn’t have gone far. Jason reached the end of the road as Jessica was
still talking and turned right, back towards the supermarket.

Now she was sitting, Jessica was beginning to feel the pain through her body. She tried to ignore it as she ended the call.

‘Linda says the message will go out to all officers to look for a blue hatchback,’ Jessica said. ‘More cars will be on their way. She reckons the estate is so much of a maze,
there’s no way he’d be able to make the main road without being seen by one of the officers on duty.’

‘He forced a kid onto the back seat?’

Jessica hadn’t told the inspector that but he had overheard her half of the phone conversation.

‘It looked like it, I only saw the end. There was some sort of struggle and he just pushed the kid in and slammed the door.’

‘Did you see if it was a boy or girl?’

Jessica winced uncomfortably and wiped grit from her hands, letting it fall into the foot well. The skin on her hands had been scraped off and her palms were red and painful. ‘Boy, I
think. Maybe nine or ten?’

Reynolds took his eyes from the road for a moment, looking sideways at Jessica. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yeah, I just slid on the frost and crashed over the kerb. If I wasn’t so concerned about that blue car I probably would have abducted one of those little shits who were laughing at
me.’

Despite the seriousness of the moment, Jason laughed. ‘It was pretty funny. One minute you were standing there arguing, the next you’d taken off across the street. Then I saw you
sprawling across the pavement. There’s bound to be a CCTV camera somewhere . . .’

Jessica chose to ignore him. ‘Are we heading back to the shops?’

‘Yes, these are about the only roads I know around here and that’s only because it’s where we came from.’

Jessica clung onto her mobile phone willing it to ring with news the car they were after had been stopped. She looked from side to side, hoping to see something. As the inspector turned back
onto the road that circled around the supermarket and shops, Jessica banged the dashboard without thinking.

‘Stop.’

Reynolds screeched the car to a halt, much to the annoyance of the driver behind, who beeped his horn. Jessica opened the passenger door and dashed as quickly as she could given the pain in her
knees and hip across someone’s front garden. This time, she was careful to keep an eye on where she was going, hopping across a flower bed and skirting around another patch of frost. Wind
whipped around her, blowing her hair into her face, but Jessica kept moving, sliding around a bollard which separated the main through-road from a cul-de-sac.

As she neared her target, she felt her knee almost give way. Jessica gritted her teeth and kept moving before almost collapsing onto the boot of the blue hatchback she had seen at the school. It
was parked on a driveway. Using the car to pull herself back into a standing position, Jessica peered through the rear window but there was no one there.

‘Oi, what do you think you’re doing?’ The voice was loud and angry, carrying on the wind in Jessica’s direction. She leant back onto the vehicle, letting it take her
weight as she turned to see Simon Hill charging down the driveway towards her. He was still wearing the red jacket he’d had on when she had seen him outside the school but his face was full
of annoyance. ‘Get off it,’ he added, pointing an angry finger towards Jessica.

She stood up straight, the man only a few feet from her. ‘Are you Simon Hill?’

He stopped, taking a half-step backwards, all of a sudden confused. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘I’m from Greater Manchester CID and you are under arrest.’

Jessica could tell Izzy was trying not to smile. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘You can laugh, everyone else has.’

The constable’s lips crinkled upwards into a grin. ‘So all in all, you didn’t have the best of times in the north-east?’

Jessica was sitting in the Longsight canteen picking at a sausage. She rarely risked eating at work, having been warned off the food early into her career by Jason when he was a sergeant. He was
very much in her bad books at that exact moment and Jessica’s dining choice was a fairly pitiful act of rebellion. ‘You could say that. At least we got something of a result from it
all.’

‘Let’s hear it, then.’