Free Angels Passing by Graham Hurley Page A

Supt wouldn’t go beyond a dare-you squad car, the cheapo option. Now he was spending serious money. How come?
    All eyes turned to Winter. Part of his legendary reputation for getting results rested on the fact that no one in the office really knew him. He was loud and boastful, and gloried in a congratulatory lager or two when his latest punt came good, but he rarely shared his trade secrets, preferring to hide behind the word ‘hunch’. The fact that there were no forms for hunches never bothered him in the least. On the contrary, he revelled in his contempt for paperwork, believing that a good detective spent as little time at the keyboard as possible.
    ‘Well?’ It was Ellis again.
    Winter glanced at his watch then shrugged.
    ‘Some bloke belled Crimestoppers,’ he murmured. ‘Never fails.’

Five
    FRIDAY , 9 FEBRUARY ,
early evening
    Faraday was still at his desk when the file arrived from the Child Protection Unit. They were currently fielding twenty referrals a day from every corner of the county and this morning’s request hadn’t been actioned until after lunch. More to the point, the keyword ‘Doodie’ had found no echoes in the database, and only a PC with a good memory had recognised the nickname from inputting additional details a month or two back.
    The fax stretched to two pages, a digest of information from every agency in the city touched by Doodie’s young life. His real name was Gavin Prentice and his date of birth put him at ten years old. He’d first appeared on the police radar screen nearly nine months earlier after an incident in Somerstown. A neighbour had watched him setting fire to a wheelie bin, something at which Doodie evidently excelled, and she’d called the police. In the dry, spare prose of the local beat man, Gavin Prentice had a history of nuisance, and a number of other householders had confirmed similar incidents. Several days later, his mother was invited to attend Central police station where her son was given an informal warning by the duty Inspector.
    Faraday reached for a pen. Doodie’s mother went by the name of Denise Prentice and lived in one of the busier Somerstown blocks, five minutes’ walk from Chuzzlewit House. There was a mobile number entered beside her name but a later note suggested the phone was no longer operational.
    After this first brush with the law, Doodie’s young life went rapidly out of control. Entries from the Educational Welfare Officer established that he was no longer attending school. Automatic notifications to Social Services and the Youth Offending Team had followed the visit to Central, but letters to Mum from both organisations had gone unacknowledged. Two months later, Doodie had been detained again, this time in Woolies where he’d been caught nicking Pokémon cards. A second informal warning had followed but Doodie plainly hadn’t been listening because – within three weeks – he was back in front of the Inspector after breaking into an empty property in Southsea and – once again – getting busy with the matches. There’d been no element of gain in this escapade but the Inspector had nevertheless issued a Final Warning.
    Doodie was still a child, of course, but the age of ten marks the start of legal responsibility, and when he started taking a hammer to parked cars, reaching through the shattered glass to lift whatever he could, he found himself before the magistrates in the Juvenile Court. On 17 November last year, he’d been given a two-year Supervision Order. That meant reporting for regular sessions with a supervising officer at the Youth Offending Team, a woman called Betsy, but she’d quickly recognised that parts of Doodie lay way beyond her reach, and he’d been referred on to the city’s Persistent Young Offender project. In a parting shot, Betsy had described her brief relationship with young Gavin as ‘particularly challenging’, a form of words which clearly did Doodie scant justice. The kid was a