Free Think of the Children by Kerry Wilkinson

woods come from.’
    ‘You’re joking?’
    ‘Nope but it’s going to sound horribly familiar. Fourteen years ago an eleven-year-old boy went missing from around here. He was never found but, when he disappeared, he was wearing
a light blue Manchester City shirt and a pair of jeans.’

8
    Jessica struggled with what to say before finally managing to get the words out. ‘Why didn’t anyone remember this? There must be people around now who were working
back then?’
    ‘I have no idea, I’m just pulling everything together. Are you on your way back?’
    ‘Yeah, I won’t be long.’
    Lunchtime traffic was as infuriating as ever but Jessica avoided the main roads and managed to arrive at the station without too much swearing. She walked purposefully through to the main floor
but Izzy was nowhere to be seen. Rowlands told Jessica their colleague was in Reynolds’s office, which was down the hallway from her own. While Jessica’s half of her office was a
complete mess, the inspector was definitely one of the tidier colleagues she knew. An outsider would never have guessed after Jessica knocked and entered his room. His desk had been shunted off to
the side, while he and Izzy were sitting on the floor with a mass of papers spread across the surface. As Jessica opened the door, a gust of air sent half-a-dozen sheets of paper blowing across the
room to disapproving looks from both of them.
    ‘Sorry,’ Jessica said.
    Reynolds waved her in properly, pointing at a spot on the floor next to them. ‘Take a seat.’
    ‘Why are you working from the floor?’ Jessica asked but was met by pitying looks from her colleagues as if she had asked the stupidest of stupid questions.
    Izzy leant across and picked up the papers that had been dislodged, then answered. ‘There’s more room down here.’
    Jessica still wasn’t convinced. ‘We do have tables. Upstairs, in the incident room, in the Press Pad.’ It was clear her colleagues weren’t interested in her complaining
so she crouched and sat cross-legged next to Izzy. Reynolds winked at her to acknowledge her objections but she could see there was a serious look in his eyes.
    ‘We’ve already been upstairs to see the DCI if you were wondering,’ he said. ‘He’s busy trying to get an excavation team in to go through the woods properly while
we go over this. Some of the other officers have got photocopies of these documents too and are looking into things.’
    Jessica said what it seemed they were all thinking. ‘Are we assuming there’s a body buried in those woods?’ The other detectives said nothing but Jessica knew that was exactly
the reasoning. She leant back against the door. ‘What have we got?’
    Izzy handed Jessica a photograph of a boy with sandy-coloured short hair. He was grinning at the camera, wearing a school uniform. Izzy was clearly already familiar with the file as she spoke
quickly and confidently. ‘That’s Toby Whittaker. Fourteen years ago he was playing on a disused industrial park with some of his friends. It was just wasteland and, from what his mates
said at the time, was somewhere lots of young people would hang around playing football and so on.’
    Jessica knew the ‘so on’ probably referred to smoking and drinking if not a few other things as the constable continued.
    ‘Toby was only eleven at the time,’ Izzy went on. ‘But it looks like most of the people who hung around there were a bit older: fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds.’
    Izzy briefly paused, adjusting the position she was sitting in before pointing towards the papers on the floor. ‘There are all sorts of witness statements, not many of them that useful.
Toby went there with his friends to kick a football around but one by one they went home. There doesn’t seem to be anything fishy about their statements and none of them were suspects at the
time. It seems as if Toby was left on his own and then, at some point, he just disappeared.’
    ‘Did anyone see