by Kevin Brooks
We spent the next few hours just talking to each other. While I stayed slumped on the bed, Grandad made himself comfortable in an armchair in the corner and told me stories about Dad when he was a kid – growing up in south London, getting into trouble sometimes, going to see Millwall play. As the sun went down and the night turned dark, the talk gradually turned to more personal stuff. How was I really feeling? Grandad wanted to know. What did I have in my head? My heart? Was there anything I wanted to tell him? Anything I wanted to talk about? Did I have any questions about anything, anything at all?
I didn’t know what to say at first. My head and my heart were full of stuff about Mum and Dad – feelings, questions, confusion – but I didn’t know how to put any of it into words. It was just there. Inside me. Part of me. No matter how much I wanted to express it, it didn’t seem to want to come out. It was somehow as if it just wasn’t ready yet. The other stuff though, the jigsaw-puzzle stuff, that was ready to come out. And although I knew it wasn’t the kind of stuff that Grandad had in mind, I also knew that I just had to tell him about it.
‘Do you remember the man in the car park at the funeral?’ I said to him. ‘The one I took a picture of on my mobile?’
Grandad frowned for a moment. ‘The man with the black BMW?’
I nodded, glad that he remembered.
Then I started telling him everything.
23
They say that the eyes are the window to the soul, and as I sat in my room with Grandad that night, telling him everything I’d found out about Bashir Kamal and the mysterious men, it was pretty obvious from the look in Grandad’s eyes that his soul couldn’t make up its mind what to think. He was clearly intrigued by what I was telling him, and no matter how much he tried to hide it, I could see an instinctive curiosity twinkling in his eyes. But the more I told him, the darker the twinkle became, and gradually his eyes took on a hard-edged look of growing concern and suspicion. He was worried about me, frightened for me. And that almost made me wish I’d kept my mouth shut about everything.
But it was already too late by then.
Besides, however much I wished I hadn’t told him anything, I was still incredibly relieved that I had. I felt so much lighter now. It was as if I’d been walking around all day with a boulder strapped to my shoulders, and now suddenly the boulder was gone.
‘You should have told someone about all this, Travis,’ Grandad said sternly. ‘You should have let someone know what you were doing.’
‘I did,’ I said. ‘I told Courtney. She came to see Mrs Kamal with me.’
‘You should have told Nan.’
‘I didn’t want to bother her.’
He sighed sadly. ‘I suppose that’s why you didn’t come to me, is it? You didn’t want to bother me.’
It was a hard question to answer, and I wasn’t sure how to do it. I didn’t want to lie to him, but I didn’t want to make him feel bad about himself either. He felt bad enough as it was. So I didn’t say anything for a while, I just looked at him, trying to let him see that I didn’t blame him for anything, that I knew he couldn’t help sinking down into his dark moods, and that everything was OK now anyway. He was better again, we were talking, and that was all that mattered.
After we’d both sat there for a minute or two, looking at each other in the moonlit darkness of my room, Grandad eventually just nodded his head. It wasn’t much – a brief silent nod – but it was all either of us needed. I smiled quietly to myself, nodded back, and then we got on with it.
I thought he’d want to see the pictures first – the photo on my mobile and the printout I’d taken from the safe – but instead he started asking me questions. Questions about the two Audis, questions about the man at the funeral and the man with the shaved head, questions about everything. What kind of men were they? Calm? Angry? Clever? Agitated? How did they speak? Did they have accents? What exactly did they say? Are you sure the
Audi was following you? Did Evie Johnson give you a description of the men she saw in the Audi with Bashir?
It was surprisingly difficult to remember the details, and I was kind of annoyed with myself for having to say ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I can’t remember’ all the time. Grandad assured me it was nothing to worry about. He said that almost everyone struggles to remember the little things, and that most people, when asked to describe someone they’ve only seen once, can’t even recall the most basic details – hair colour, height, clothing.
‘I’ve interviewed a lot of eyewitnesses in my time, Trav,’ he said. ‘And, believe me, you’re better than most of them.’
‘They must have been pretty useless then.’
‘Don’t put yourself down. You know a lot more than you think.’
I wasn’t sure he was right about that, but I was happy enough to accept it.
‘Right,’ he said, ‘let’s see those pictures you told me about.’
I went over to the armchair and passed him the printout. He took a pair of reading glasses from his cardigan pocket, cleaned them on his shirt, then put them on and looked at the picture. While he was doing that, I took out my phone and opened up the photo of the man at the funeral. Grandad was studying the printout very closely, taking his time, examining every little detail in concentrated silence. I watched quietly as he took off his glasses and held them over the image of the three men, squinting through the lenses to get a better view. He didn’t seem too pleased with the result though, and after a while he shook his head and put his glasses back on again.
‘Dad wrote a note on the back,’ I told him.
He turned over the printout and read the scribbled note.
‘What do you think?’ I asked him.
He carried on studying the note for a while, then he looked up slowly, took off his glasses, and stared straight ahead, his brow furrowed in concentration. After a good minute or so, he let out a sigh of frustration and shook his head. ‘It’s obviously got something to do with the fourth and fifth of August, but I’m damned if I can figure out what.’ He looked at me. ‘Have you got any ideas?’
We spent the next five minutes discussing what ‘dem’ and ‘last day’ might mean, but we didn’t come up with anything useful. In the end, Grandad suggested that we leave it for now and put it to the back of our minds.
‘You never know,’ he said. ‘Sometimes the best way of solving a puzzle is by not thinking consciously about it.’ He turned over the printout, put his glasses back on, and looked at the picture of the three men again. ‘Which one was it who came to the office?’ he asked.
‘Him,’ I said, pointing out the man with the shaved head.
‘And this one?’ he said, indicating the man with the goatee beard. ‘He’s the one your friend says paid for the riot?’
I nodded.
‘And this is the man from the funeral,’ he said, indicating the man with the steely grey eyes.
‘Yeah.’ I passed Grandad my phone. ‘This is the picture I took of him in the car park.’
Grandad took the phone and studied the photograph. He stared hard at the man in the picture, and after a while I saw his eyes narrow to a frown. He brought the phone closer to his eyes, trying to focus on something, then he moved it away again and held it at arm’s length, angling his head and squinting over the top of his glasses at it. Still not satisfied, he took off his glasses again, held the phone in his left hand, and with the thumb and index finger of his right hand he began adjusting the size and position of the photo on the screen. It took him a while to get it how he wanted it, but eventually he stopped fiddling around, and then he just sat there for a while staring thoughtfully at the image he’d ended up with. He’d zoomed in quite a lot, so the image was a bit blurred, but I could still just about make out that it was a close-up view of the man’s left arm, showing his hand on the boot of the BMW just as he was about to close it.
‘Can you see it?’ Grandad asked quietly, still staring at the image.
‘See what?’ I said.
He pas
sed me the phone. ‘Look at his wrist.’
I gazed at the screen, focusing on the man’s left wrist. He was wearing a watch. It wasn’t very clear, but from what I could see of it, it seemed perfectly ordinary. Just a plain, silver-coloured watch, with an expanding metal strap.
‘It’s just a watch,’ I said, shaking my head.
Grandad leaned over and carefully pointed to a darkish smudge on the back of the man’s wrist, just above the watch.
‘See that?’ he said.
I looked closer. It wasn’t just a smudge. It was a tattoo. I brought the phone closer to my eyes. It wasn’t a very big tattoo, about two centimetres across at most, and it was really hard to make out what it was. It looked a bit like the letter O, with a bit missing at the bottom and two little feet.
Like this: Ω
‘His watch strap is loose,’ Grandad muttered, almost as if he was talking to himself. ‘That’s why you can see it. If the strap wasn’t loose, the tattoo would be covered up by the watch. But when he reached up to close the boot –’ Grandad raised his arm, mimicking the man’s pose ‘– the watch slipped down his wrist, revealing the tattoo underneath.’
‘What is it?’ I asked Grandad, staring hard at the tattoo. ‘It looks vaguely familiar, but I don’t know why.’
‘It’s a Greek letter,’ he said, looking at me. ‘Omega. The last letter of the Greek alphabet.’
I frowned. ‘What does it mean?’
‘I’m not sure,’ he said, sighing. ‘It might not mean anything. It might be that this man, whoever he is, just happens to have an Omega symbol tattooed on his wrist. On the other hand . . .’
‘What?’
‘Well, if it means what I think it might mean, I’m not sure I want to believe it.’
24
Although I knew a little bit about Grandad’s career in the Army Intelligence Corps, he’d never really told me exactly what he did as an intelligence officer, and he’d always been particularly reluctant to talk about the work he’d done in Northern Ireland during the 1980s. I’d assumed this was because his memories of that time were overshadowed by the trauma of the car bomb that almost killed him, but as we sat together in my room that night, and Grandad began telling me what he knew about an organisation known as Omega, I realised that it wasn’t just the car bomb he was trying to forget.
‘Between 1982 and 1990,’ he told me, ‘I was an officer with a covert military intelligence squad based in Belfast called the FRU – the Force Research Unit. Our main job was to recruit informants from the paramilitary forces and run them as undercover agents. Most of the assets we handled were either members or supporters of the IRA, but we also recruited agents from some of the Loyalist groups.’ Grandad looked at me. ‘You know enough about the Troubles in Northern Ireland to know what I’m talking about, don’t you?’
I nodded. My history teacher had told us a bit about the conflict in Northern Ireland, and although I didn’t understand everything about it, I knew that it was basically a war between the Nationalist and Unionist communities over the status of Northern Ireland. The Nationalists, or Republicans, were Catholic; the Unionists, or Loyalists, were Protestant. The Nationalists wanted a united Ireland and an end to British rule, the Unionists wanted Northern Ireland to remain as part of the United Kingdom. Both sides used paramilitary forces to fight for their cause. The IRA was the main Republican force, and for almost thirty years they’d fought a guerrilla campaign against both the Loyalist forces and the British people, who they saw as their enemy. The Troubles claimed the lives of thousands of people on both sides – soldiers, paramilitaries, police, civilians – and many more thousands were seriously injured and maimed.
‘It was a long and dirty war, Travis,’ Grandad said quietly, ‘and a lot of really bad stuff happened. It always does in a war, of course. People get killed and terribly wounded, lives are shattered, everything changes. Wars always bring out the worst in the human race.’ He sighed. ‘But as well as the hell that everyone knows about, there’s another kind of hell that goes on during a war, a hidden hell. And that’s where I spent most of my time.’
His eyes darkened as he went on to tell me about his work with the FRU, and I could see that it pained him to talk about it.
‘We had to recruit informants who had inside information,’ he explained, ‘and that meant working with people who were still active members of terrorist groups. So we knew they were personally involved in the planning and execution of all kinds of atrocities – bombings, murders, assassinations – but most of the time we couldn’t do anything about it. Because if we did, we’d be putting our informant at risk and in the long term that could lead to the loss of more lives. So sometimes we just had to accept that we were dealing with killers, paying them for information looking after them, keeping them safe.’ Grandad shook his head. ‘It wasn’t an easy situation to live with. What made it even worse was that we didn’t have any control over what we were doing. We were soldiers, we worked for the army. We did what we were told. The army did what it was told by the British government. And the government was constantly being influenced by other forces – MI5, Special Branch, counter-intelligence services, the Royal Ulster Constabulary. There were so many different organisations involved, all of them with different strategies and different motives, that sometimes it was almost impossible to get anything done Grandad looked at me again. ‘I know it all sounds a bit complicated and confusing, Trav, but the point I’m trying to make is that it was so complicated and confusing that after a while a lot of us became totally disillusioned with it all. There were people like me who just hated what we were doing and didn’t want to be part of it any more, and there were others who really believed in it, but were sick of being constrained by all the rules and politics of intelligence work. They wanted the freedom to do their job properly, and to them that meant no rules, no restrictions and no accountability.’ Grandad got up then and began pacing quietly around the room. ‘I first heard the rumours about an organised group of disaffected intelligence officers in the mid-1980s,’ he continued. ‘There was no real substance to the rumours, no evidence to back them up and the so-called facts about this secret organisation kept changing all the time, depending on who you listened to. But the basic story was always the same – a small group of intelligence officers had got together and formed an unofficial security service. Some of them were still active in their official units others had resigned or retired, and they came from all kinds of different backgrounds. Army Intelligence, FRU, MI5 MI6, Special Forces . . .’ Grandad stopped at the window and gazed out into the night. ‘There was a lot of speculation about this rogue security service – who was involved, how big the organisation was, where they got their funding from – but no one really knew anything. Even when people began referring to the group as Omega, there was no way of telling if that’s what they called themselves, or if it was just another rumour.’
‘What did people think this group was actually doing?’ I asked.
Grandad turned from the window. ‘The general consensus has always been that Omega works for the good of the country. They do the same kind of work that all the official security services do – counter-intelligence, counter-terrorism, internal and external national security – but they do it on their terms.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘They do what they think has to be done,’ Grandad said. ‘No rules, no restrictions, no accountability. Whatever it takes to get the job done, they’ll do it. No matter what.’
‘So you think Omega really exists?’
He shrugged. ‘I’ve never been able to make up my mind. Sometimes I think it’s all a myth, just one of those stories that people like to talk about, especially people in the security services. But strange things have happened over the years, things that can’t easily be explained unless you accept that Omega does exist, or at least an off-the-grid organisation like Omega.’
I looked at the photo on my mobile, staring at the Omega symbol tattooed on the m
an’s wrist. ‘Is that how they identify themselves?’ I asked Grandad. ‘With the tattoos?’
‘I honestly don’t know, Travis,’ he said. ‘Someone once told me they’d seen an Omega symbol tattooed on the wrist of a man whose body was found at the scene of an attack on a suspected terrorist cell in Glasgow. When the official report into the attack came out, there was no mention of this body, and no conclusive evidence was found as to who carried out the attack.’
‘Is that the kind of thing Omega would do?’ I asked. ‘I mean, would they carry out an attack on suspected terrorists?’
‘Well, from what I’ve heard, they’d definitely carry out an attack on confirmed terrorists. They wouldn’t care how they got their evidence either.’
‘So if Omega is real . . .’ I said slowly, turning my attention to the photograph again. ‘If it really exists, and this man is part of it . . .’ I shook my head, unable to finish the question. I was so confused now that I didn’t even know what to ask any more.
‘I need to make a phone call,’ Grandad said abruptly. ‘And I need those registration numbers you’ve got.’
‘Which ones?’
‘All of them.’
I found a scrap of paper and copied down the numbers of the two Audis from my hand, then I looked at the photo on my mobile and wrote down the registration of the black BMW. I passed the piece of paper to Grandad.
‘Tell me again what Courtney found out,’ he said, studying the numbers.
‘The BMW is registered to a company called Smith & Co Digital Holdings Ltd. They’re supposedly based in Dundee, but she couldn’t find anything about them on the Internet.’
Grandad nodded. ‘And she couldn’t get anything at all on the first Audi.’
‘Her contact told her the registration record was restricted. She said she was going to try checking the other Audi’s number tonight.’
