Free DS Jessica Daniel series: Think of the Children / Playing with Fire / Thicker Than Water – Books 4–6 by Kerry Wilkinson Page A

disappeared.’
    ‘Did anyone see anything?’ Jessica asked.
    Izzy picked up a page from the floor and skimmed it, looking for a certain detail. ‘Apparently not. Have you ever been with your mates on a night out and, before you know it, there’s
only one or two of you left standing? It sounds like that. He’d gone to play, it started to get dark and he was left by himself. A couple of the witnesses, people who weren’t his
friends but were hanging around the site, say they saw him on his own, while one of his mates say they went their own ways when it was just the two of them left. It sounds a bit odd but I remember
things like that happening when I was a kid.’
    ‘Eleven’s a bit young, isn’t it? How close was the land to his house?’
    Izzy put down the paper and reached for another. ‘Not that far, maybe half a mile? I don’t really know the area.’
    ‘And how close is this site to the woods where we found the clothes?’
    Izzy returned the set of papers to the floor and shuffled her position. ‘Pretty close, a few hundred yards maybe?’
    Jessica said nothing for a moment but there was something concerning her. ‘Why do you think we found the clothes now? We know they were washed relatively recently and presumably buried at
more or less the same time? Someone must have been keeping them ever since Toby was taken. Not only that but the driver who had Isaac Hutchings in the back of his car had a map directly to the
spot.’
    It was more a statement than a question. The similarities between the two abductions were obvious and Jessica wondered if their unknown driver was the person who had kidnapped Toby all those
years ago. If that was true, why would he need a map to the boy’s clothes? It seemed that every time they found an answer, it opened up another set of questions.
    There was another short silence before Jessica spoke again. ‘So what happened with the investigation?’
    Reynolds and Izzy exchanged a look before the inspector answered. ‘From what we can tell, not a lot because there weren’t any leads. Parents, uncles, aunts, all the relatives were
accounted for and no one seemed to have a motive. Apart from the witnesses who said they saw him walking away from the site, there were no suspicious car sightings, no signs of a struggle, nothing.
There weren’t as many CCTV cameras back then, so there’s nothing from that. One of the parents said something about having a falling out with one of their neighbours because of an
incident involving Toby riding a bike across the person’s front garden but it sounds very petty and it looks as if it was discounted.’
    ‘So it was just unsolved and he was never found?’ Jessica asked.
    Izzy nodded. ‘Exactly. When I was going through things I was surprised by how many unsolved missing children cases there are. It’s not just our district, obviously, but over the
years there are hundreds of kids unaccounted for. You never hear about them.’
    Jessica knew the statement had extra meaning for the constable because of her own pregnancy. ‘Does anyone here remember the case?’
    ‘We’ve asked around but no one knows anything specifically,’ Reynolds said. ‘I wasn’t here but the DCI says the boundary of who investigated what was much more
blurred back then – although he wasn’t here either. I’m sure someone will remember but we’ve not really had time to properly ask yet.’
    Jessica knew what he was talking about. She worked for the Metropolitan branch of Greater Manchester CID, while there were separate divisions for the north, south, east and west areas of the
city. Everything had been broken up not long after she joined as a uniformed officer around a decade ago. She knew that fourteen years back there was just one CID branch covering the entire area.
Because of that, it was no wonder the paperwork was so disorganised as detectives and officers would have been moved to new departments and things would have been lost along