The Ultimate Truth

by Kevin Brooks

  There was no arguing with the voice’s logic. Grandad had told me to stay at home. There was no reason to do this on my own. I should just leave it to Grandad. It was the only sensible thing to do.

  And I was fairly sensible, wasn’t I?

  I wasn’t thoughtless or stupid. I usually did what I was told.

  I definitely wasn’t the kind of kid who sneaks out of his bedroom at six o’clock in the morning, creeps along the landing in his socks, tiptoes down the stairs, puts on his trainers, grabs a key off the rack in the kitchen, then quietly opens the back door, steps out into the morning light, and hurries down to the shed to get his bike.

  That wasn’t like me at all.

  So why did I do it?

  Because today was the third of August, the last day before the ‘last day’. And although I still didn’t know what ‘last day 4th?’ meant, I knew it had to mean something. If it wasn’t important, Dad wouldn’t have written it down. So if I was going to find Bashir and get all the answers I needed, it had to be done today. There just wasn’t time to wait for Grandad and explain everything to him. And what’s more, if I did leave everything to him, as I’d said I would, he might take too long deciding what to do. He might even decide not to do anything at all. I don’t know if any of us are at risk at the moment, he’d told me, and until I find out, I’m not taking any chances.

  The way I saw it, I didn’t have a choice.

  I had to do what I was doing.

  I just had to.

  Besides, if everything went as planned – and there was no reason it shouldn’t – I was only going to be gone for an hour or two. I should be back by seven thirty, eight o’clock at the latest. With a bit of luck, Nan and Grandad would still be in bed then, and Granny Nora wouldn’t hear me coming in even if she was awake. So hopefully I could just sneak back into my room without anyone knowing I’d been anywhere.

  But what if you are gone for more than a couple of hours? the voice in my head said. What if you’re delayed or something? Or what if Nan or Grandad do get up before you get back? They’re not going to know where you are, are they? They’re going to be really worried . . .

  ‘All right, all right,’ I muttered, wheeling my bike out of the shed.

  Having a conscience can be really annoying sometimes. I leaned my bike against the shed and went back into the kitchen. I paused for a moment, listening hard, but I didn’t hear anything. Everyone was still asleep. I tiptoed over to the message board on the wall, wiped off all the old messages – GET SPAGHETTI! CALL JOAN. DENTIST WED 2PM – and quickly wrote out a new one. NAN, GRANDAD, I scrawled in big black capital letters. I’VE HAD TO GO OUT SOMEWHERE. SORRY, I KNOW I SHOULD HAVE WAITED, BUT IT’S REALLY REALLY IMPORTANT. I’LL EXPLAIN EVERYTHING WHEN I GET BACK. LOVE TRAVIS.

  ‘Satisfied now?’ I asked my conscience.

  Not really, it said. But I suppose it’s better than nothing.

  The CIA surveillance team were bound to see me if I went out the front way, so I wheeled my bike down the garden path and left by the back gate instead. The gate leads directly to the footpath, and if you turn left along the path and carry on for about fifty metres, you come to another little path that takes you back up to Long Barton Road.

  There was no one around as I cycled along the path, and when I came out onto Long Barton Road, there was hardly any traffic at all.

  I glanced at my watch.

  It was still only 6.20.

  I looked over to my left, gazing back along the road towards the house, trying to spot the white van. I was quite a long way from it now, and I could only just make it out among all the other cars and vans parked along the road. Hopefully that meant that I couldn’t be seen from the van either.

  I spent a while just sitting there on my bike, checking to see if anyone else might be watching me. Mum and Dad had taught me what to look for – anyone who seems out of place, anyone trying too hard to appear casual, anyone who goes out of their way not to look at you.

  I didn’t see anyone to worry about. In fact, apart from the few early-risers driving past in their cars, I didn’t see anyone at all.

  I looked at my watch.

  6.24.

  Time to go.

  It’s not too late to change your mind, my conscience said. If you turn round right now, just turn round and go back to the house, no one will ever know.

  I pulled out across the road, turned right, and headed off towards Kell Cross.

  30

  Although some of the older inhabitants of Kell Cross still refer to it as ‘the village’, it’s not really a village any more. It’s still got a few old-fashioned village shops, and there’s a patch of grass near the bus stop that’s officially known as the village green, but the vast majority of Kell Cross is taken up by a massive retail park and a sprawling housing estate that backs onto the Barton bypass. Not everyone likes the park and the estate. There’s always someone complaining about something – the village isn’t what it used to be, the housing estate ‘lowers the tone’ of the neighbourhood, there’s too much out-of-town traffic these days, the local shops can’t compete with the megastores. But, to me, Kell Cross is simply the place where I’ve always lived. I was born there, I grew up there. I know every inch of it – every street, every lane, every field, every shop. Whether I like it or not is kind of irrelevant.

  It’s where I live.

  Simple as that.

  Except I didn’t live there any more.

  As I cycled into Kell Cross that morning, following the all-too-familiar route to my house – left off Long Barton Road, left again into Broad Avenue, then right into Dane Street – I realised that things weren’t quite so simple any more. I suppose I’d just assumed that everything would be the same. I was going back to my house, riding my bike along my street . . . why shouldn’t everything be the same? And in some ways, it was. The bumps and potholes in the street hadn’t changed, the drain covers were still in the same place, the broken kerb where I hopped my bike onto the pavement was still there, and as I pulled up and stopped at my front gate, my house looked exactly the same as it always had too. The white walls, the grey-tiled roof, the cherry tree in the front garden . . .

  Nothing had changed.

  But nothing felt the same any more. The street I’d walked a thousand times, the house I’d lived in all my life . . .

  They’d gone.

  All that remained were lifeless replicas.

  It was a very weird feeling, and I didn’t really understand it, but as I opened the gate and wheeled my bike up the driveway, the sense that I no longer belonged here grew stronger and stronger with every step. It was like being in some kind of parallel universe, a world in which everything is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time – the sound of the gravel crunching under my feet, the scratches on the wall where I leaned my bike, the brush marks in the paintwork on the front door. I knew it all, but I was a stranger to it all.

  When I opened the front door – with the key I’d taken from Nan and Grandad’s – and went inside the house, the intensity of that familiar-yet-unfamiliar feeling was so bewildering that I very nearly turned round and left. It was all I could do to shut the door and stay where I was. For a minute or two I just stood there in the hallway, staring at the floor, listening to the absolute silence of the house.

  It was so quiet.

  So empty, so still . . .

  So lifeless.

  It felt like a house that hadn’t been lived in for years.

  I didn’t like it.

  And I hated not liking it. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair to the house. I mean, it wasn’t its fault that it felt like this. It was just . . .

  It was just the way it was.

  But I couldn’t let it get to me.

  I had things to do.

  I closed my eyes for a moment, took a few deep breaths, then moved off down the hallway.

  There were no obvious signs that the house had been searched, and to an unacquainted eye it probably would have l
ooked perfectly normal, but as soon as I went into the sitting room I knew that someone had been in there. It was just a feeling at first, an instinctive sense that something wasn’t right, and it wasn’t until I started looking around and examining things more closely that my instincts were confirmed. It was mostly just little things – an ornament slightly out of place, Dad’s DVDs lined up in the wrong order, the curtains tied back incorrectly, a settee cushion the wrong way up. I was perfectly aware that on their own these things didn’t necessarily prove anything, and it did occur to me that maybe Grandad had moved things around when he’d come here to pick up my stuff. But the more I looked, the more things I found out of place. By the time I’d been through all the rooms, upstairs and down, there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that the house been searched.

  I tried to deal with it rationally. I went into my bedroom, sat down at my desk, and did my best to stay calm and think logically. Who could have done it? The CIA, MI5, Omega? And why? What were they looking for? Did they find it? I gazed around my room, trying to stay focused, trying to control my emotions, trying to convince myself that whoever had been in here and gone through my stuff, they’d just been doing their job. It wasn’t personal. It wasn’t worth getting angry about. Just because someone had been in here and opened the little wooden box where I keep all my special things – the funny little notes from Mum, a photo of Dad when he was a kid, the tiny brass frog with jewels for eyes that Mum’s mother had left me in her will.

  They’d opened it . . . they’d opened my box.

  I could tell.

  It wasn’t closed properly. The lid gets stuck, and you have to squeeze the sides of the box in just the right place to get it to close. I always close it properly.

  Always.

  I stared at the box now, my heart pounding, my fists clenched, my head bursting with fury and hate.

  Not personal?

  Like hell it wasn’t personal.

  It took a while for the worst of the anger to leave me, and although I was still seething when I left my bedroom and went downstairs, I was composed enough to remember why I’d come here in the first place. I hadn’t just come here out of sentiment or curiosity, I’d come for a reason. I’d come here to get something.

  The answer to everything.

  31

  There hadn’t always been a door from our hallway into the garage. But a few years ago I’d been sitting with Dad watching The Simpsons on TV, and at the end of the opening sequence – the bit where Marge’s car chases Homer through the garage into the sitting room – Dad had suddenly pointed at the TV and said, ‘We should get one of those.’

  ‘One of what?’ I’d asked him.

  ‘A door from the garage into the house.’ He grinned at me. ‘What do you think, Trav? It’d be pretty cool, wouldn’t it?’

  I gave him a look. ‘Pretty cool?’

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘It’s a door, Dad,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘There’s nothing cool about a door.’

  I didn’t like to admit it at the time, but when he finally got round to putting the door in, it actually was pretty cool. Not that I went into the garage all that much, but somehow it just felt kind of nice having a door at the end of the hallway that led into the garage.

  As I unlocked and unbolted the door that morning, then opened it up and paused, peering into the windowless gloom, the memories of Dad came flooding back to me. I gave myself a moment or two, breathing in the familiar garage smells and letting the memories soak in, and then I did what I knew Dad would want me to do – I got on with the job in hand.

  When I turned on the garage light, everything was just as I remembered it. Dad’s car was still there – his beloved Saab 900 – and it was still surrounded by the kind of stuff that always gets piled up in garages: shelves stacked with tools, cardboard boxes full of God-knows-what, the remains of my old bike, a never-used exercise machine, unwanted books, rolls of wallpaper, cans of paint . . .

  There was just enough room for the car to fit in among all the clutter, and Dad had always made sure there was a clutter-free gap on the right-hand side so he could open the car door and get out. It was still a tight squeeze for him to get out of the garage, and the only way he could do it was by edging along sideways with his back to the wall. I was probably about half Dad’s size, so it wasn’t quite as awkward for me, but it still took me a while to shuffle my way along the wall to the front of the garage. I kept looking around as I went, checking for any signs that the garage had been searched. I hadn’t been in there for quite a long time though, and it was all in such a mess anyway that it was hard to tell if anything had been disturbed or not. But if the people who’d searched the house were professionals – and I was pretty sure that they were – I couldn’t see how they wouldn’t have searched the garage, if only to check Dad’s car. I just had to hope that they hadn’t had the time or the inclination to go through everything that was piled up in here.

  I’d reached the front of the garage now.

  I closed my eyes for a second and took myself back to the day of the car crash. I pictured the scene outside the house again, the scene from last night’s dream – Mum and Dad arguing about the sat nav, Dad sighing, turning round, taking his sat nav back to the garage. And then rather than squeezing his way back into the car to put the sat nav away, he’d just dropped it into a cardboard box full of odds and ends that was sitting on the shelf inside the door.

  I opened my eyes and looked at the shelf.

  The cardboard box was still there.

  I leaned over and looked into the box.

  The sat nav was still there.

  Dad’s got no sense of direction at all.

  He always uses a sat nav when he’s driving.

  Even for local journeys.

  I reached into the box, pulled out the sat nav, and turned it on. As I watched the screen start up, I wondered how much battery was left. The sat nav had been lying in the box for almost three weeks now . . .

  The sat nav chimed quietly – bing-bong – and the opening screen lit up.

  The battery icon showed two bars. Good enough.

  I pressed the NAVIGATION icon, then MENU, then GO TO.

  I paused for a second, mentally crossing my fingers, then selected RECENT DESTINATIONS and held my breath. A second later, a list of addresses appeared on the screen. As I read the one at the top, I recalled Mum and Dad arguing about the sat nav again.

  I’m not having that thing in my car.

  We’re driving into the middle of London. You know what the roads are like—

  I don’t care. I’d rather get lost than use one of those.

  But I’ve already keyed in the address. All we have to do when we get to London is turn it on . . .

  He’d already keyed in the address. The address they were going to in London. He’d already keyed it into the sat nav.

  I was looking at it right now.

  Thames House, 11 Millbank, London SW1

  It took me a moment to work out why the address seemed so familiar, and even then I wasn’t sure if it meant anything or not. The reason I recognised the address, I realised, was that I’d seen it on TV. It was always being shown on Spooks, the BBC series about MI5 agents. In the TV programme, when the spies are in their HQ in London, the location comes up on the screen to let us know where they are: Thames House, it says. London MI5 Central HQ. Of course, that didn’t necessarily mean the real MI5 was based at Thames House, but it didn’t take me long to find out. I took out my mobile, opened up Google, and typed in MI5 HQ.

  The entry at the top of the list was from Wikipedia. It read:

  Thames House is an office development in Millbank, London, on the north bank of the River Thames adjacent to Lambeth Bridge, designed originally as commercial head offices. Since December 1994, it has served as the headquarters of the UK Security Service (commonly known as MI5).

  So now I knew that on the day they died, Mum and Dad were driving down
to London to meet with someone at MI5. But what did that mean? Did Mum and Dad know about Bashir’s undercover work? Had they found out where he was? Were they meeting with MI5 to let them know they’d found him? Or maybe they didn’t know anything about Bashir’s MI5 connection. Maybe someone at MI5 had requested a meeting with them, possibly to warn them off, and Mum and Dad had agreed to go, but they’d had no idea what the meeting was about.

  It seemed as if I’d answered one question – why were Mum and Dad going to London? – but in doing so I’d uncovered a dozen more. None of which I could answer.

  ‘Great,’ I muttered to myself, turning back to the sat nav. ‘More unanswered questions . . . just what I need.’

  I wasn’t too despondent though, because hopefully I was going to find the answer to everything in one of the other addresses in the RECENT DESTINATIONS list. I didn’t know which one it was yet – I was guessing it’d be the second or third – and I wouldn’t really know until I’d done some more checking. But for now I just wanted to make sure the addresses were there. I wanted to know where Dad had been the day before he died.

  I studied the list.

  They were all fairly local addresses, and most of them were in or around Barton. I looked at the most recent entry first, the second address on the list.

  Sowton Lane, Barton BR10 6GG

  It didn’t ring any bells. As far as I knew, I’d never heard of Sowton Lane.

  But I recognised the next entry.

  42 Roman Way, Beacon Fields, Barton BR11 8TW

  The Kamals lived at 42 Roman Way.

  I already knew that Dad had been to the Kamals’ house, but had he been there more than once?

  I started fiddling around with the sat nav menu, looking for anything that would tell me the time and date of a saved destination. If I could find out exactly when Dad had entered the addresses into the sat nav, I’d know which one to concentrate on.