by Kevin Brooks
‘It’s not easy, is it?’ I heard Winston say.
‘Hmm?’ I said distractedly.
‘Being a kid. It’s not easy.’
I looked at him. Grey eyes, grey hair . . . a grey man. What are you? I found myself thinking. I mean, really . . . what are you?
‘Are you OK?’ he asked me.
‘Can I go now?’ I said. My voice sounded strangely distant, almost as if it didn’t belong to me.
‘Where do you want to go?’ Winston asked.
I shrugged. ‘Anywhere. I just don’t want to be in this car any more.’
‘Do you want us to take you to your nan and grandad’s house?’
‘No.’
‘Do you want your bike?’
‘The CIA slashed my tyres,’ I told him.
He turned to Shaved Head and said, ‘Stop the car. Pull in over there.’
Shaved Head did as he was told, slowing down and manoeuvring the BMW into a bus stop. As we rolled to a halt I saw Winston glance back through the rear window. I followed his gaze and saw a black Mercedes van pulling up behind us. There was no way of telling if it was the same van I’d seen in the background of the warehouse photograph, but I’d be willing to bet that it was. There were two men in the van. The driver, who was already getting out, was gaunt-faced and wore rimless glasses. I’d never seen him before. The man in the passenger seat was the guy with the goatee beard.
‘What’s going on?’ I said to Winston.
He smiled at me. ‘We pride ourselves on our customer service.’
‘You what?’ I said, frowning at him.
He nodded his head, indicating that I should look out of the rear window again. When I did, I realised what he meant. The driver had opened the side door of the van and was removing a bike from inside. It looked a lot like my bike. When he started wheeling it along the pavement towards the BMW, and I could see it more clearly, I realised that it was my bike. Brand-new tyres had been fitted to the wheels, and it even looked as if it had been cleaned.
‘All right?’ Winston asked me.
‘Yeah . . .’ I muttered. ‘Yeah, thanks . . . but how—’
‘We’re very resourceful,’ Winston said.
The gaunt-faced man had reached the BMW now and was just standing there on the pavement with my bike, waiting patiently.
‘Off you go then,’ Winston said.
I looked at him.
He smiled. ‘It’s been nice talking to you, Travis.’
I opened the car door and started to get out.
‘Don’t forget what I said,’ I heard Winston say.
I paused, glancing back at him.
‘Twenty-four hours,’ he said, looking into my eyes. ‘OK?’
I held his gaze for a second or two, and then I looked down and nodded in the direction of his left wrist. ‘You need to tighten your watch strap,’ I told him. ‘It looks a bit loose to me.’
I watched as he looked down at his wrist, and I saw the flicker of surprise in his eyes as he noticed that his Omega tattoo was showing. As he turned back to me with a questioning look, I got out of the car and closed the door.
37
I wasn’t entirely sure where I was going when I got on my bike and set off along the pavement. All I knew for certain was that I wanted to be somewhere where the Omega men couldn’t see what I was doing. So rather than carrying on in the direction we’d been travelling, which would have made it quite simple for them to keep track of me, I headed off in the opposite direction, back the way we’d come.
That’s why I passed the black Mercedes van.
And that’s when I noticed the dent in its bodywork.
I wasn’t even aware that I’d noticed it at first. I was concentrating on where I was going, scanning the layout of the roads and the roundabout up ahead, looking for any kind of route that was too narrow for cars and vans. It was only when I’d passed the van, and spotted a little footpath that led down into a pedestrian subway, that I suddenly realised what I’d just seen.
A dent over the front-left wheel arch of the Mercedes van.
It wasn’t a massive dent or anything, and there was nothing particularly remarkable about it, and for a moment or two I had no idea why I was even thinking about it. It was the kind of minor crash damage you see on cars and vans every day. A dent in the bodywork, crumpled metal, scratched paint . . .
And then it suddenly dawned on me.
Crash damage . . .
Scratched paint . . .
I slammed on my brakes, skidded to a stop, and looked back at the bus stop. The van wasn’t there any more. Neither was the BMW. The bus stop was empty. I looked along the road, and I thought I caught a glimpse of the black van in the distance, but it was so far away now that it didn’t matter whether I’d seen it or not.
Hoping the memory was still fresh in my mind, I quickly closed my eyes and tried to visualise the moment I’d passed the van and seen the dent over the wheel arch. It was really hard to concentrate with the noise of the traffic filling the air all around me, but I did my best to block it from my mind and focus on what was inside my head. Eventually the image I was looking for came back to me. The jagged-edged dent in the shiny black metal, about the size and depth of an upturned fruit bowl . . . scrapes in the paintwork, flashes of silver showing through . . . and there, embedded in the crudely gashed metal . . .
Was I imagining it?
I held my breath and mentally zoomed in on what I thought I’d seen.
There wasn’t much of it, and it was hard to make out with any real clarity.
But I wasn’t imagining it.
There were definitely flecks of yellow paint embedded in the gouged-out metal.
Yellow.
The colour of Mum’s car.
38
After fifty yards, turn right . . .
It felt kind of weird listening to Dad’s sat nav while I was riding my bike. I couldn’t actually see the sat nav – I’d put it in the top pocket of my T-shirt – so I didn’t have a map to guide me, just the disembodied voice of a slightly odd-sounding woman (who for some reason pronounced the word ‘roundabout’ as ‘roun-t’pout’).
After one hundred yards, enter the roun-t’pout then take the second exit . . .
It also felt weird because I kept having this stupid idea that when the navigation satellites that the sat nav used realised I was riding a bike and not driving a car, they were going to instruct the sat nav lady to tell me off for misusing their services – at the next lay-by, dismount from your bicycle and turn off the satellite navigation device, and DO NOT use it again unless you’re driving a car.
I knew it was a stupid idea. It was beyond stupid.
But I just couldn’t get it out of my head.
Turn around if possible . . .
I wondered if my brain was making me think of stupid things in order to distract me from the things it didn’t want me to think about. The complicated things, the painful things, the things that were too hard to think about . . .
Like Mum’s car.
And the yellow paint on the Mercedes van.
And the possibility that maybe, just maybe, the two were connected.
I knew it was highly unlikely. The colour of Mum’s Volvo may well have been quite distinctive, but that didn’t mean she was the only person in the country, or even the county, to own a bright yellow car. There were probably thousands of bright yellow cars driving around, and any one of them could have been involved in a minor collision with the black Mercedes. The collision could have happened months ago. For all I knew, the Mercedes might not have hit another car at all. The dent could have come from anything – a wall, a bollard, a fence . . .
Recalculate . . .
The truth was, there was virtually nothing at all to suggest that the black Mercedes had anything to do with the car crash that killed Mum and Dad.
Just a few tiny flecks of bright-yellow paint . . .
Plus the inescapable feeling that was still nagging away in the
back of my mind, the feeling that I’d missed something Winston had said, something really important . . .
Your destination is nearby . . .
I stopped pedalling, pulled up at the side of the road, and glanced across at the street sign on the corner. SOWTON LANE, it said. The sat nav had done its job. I took it out of my pocket and double-checked the address.
Sowton Lane, Barton BR10 6GG
The second-last address that Dad had keyed into his sat nav. I stared at the screen for a moment, imagining Dad entering the numbers and letters . . . then I turned off the sat nav, put it back in my pocket, and gazed around. I’d been reasonably sure that one of the addresses in the sat nav was going to lead me to the warehouse that Dad had photographed, but I’d had no way of knowing which one. The only reason I’d picked Sowton Lane first was that it was the next address on the list after Bashir’s. But as I looked around now at the bleak industrial landscape, I felt fairly certain that I was in the right place. The street was situated on the outskirts of a busy industrial estate about three kilometres north of town. It wasn’t completely deserted – I could see a few buildings with cars and vans parked outside – but most of the warehouses and small factories in the street were clearly no longer in use. There was a feeling of disuse and emptiness in the air – litter rustling quietly in the street, weeds taking over the pavement, wild grasses growing tall in stretches of wasteground.
It was the perfect place to hide someone away.
Or lock someone away.
As I carried on looking around, I spotted an official-looking poster fixed to some railings at the side of the road. I went over for a closer look. It was a typed message on a sheet of A4 paper in a clear plastic folder. The message read:
FINAL NOTICE OF INTENTION TO DEMOLISH
Notice Is Hereby Given
That Barton Borough
Council intends to demolish
the properties listed in
the Schedule below (the
Properties). The reasons
for the intended demolition
are that the Properties are
located within the proposed
development scheme for
the regeneration of Sowton
Industrial Estate. The
proposed demolition date is
5 August 2013.
The Schedule
1 Sowton Lane, 1a Sowton
Lane, 2 Sowton Lane
3 Sowton Lane, 4 Sowton
Lane . . .
The list continued all the way up to 38 Sowton Lane, which I guessed covered every building in the street. I looked at the date again – 5 August – and now I knew that I was in the right place. The warehouse was here. It was due to be demolished, along with all the other properties in the street, on 5 August. That’s what the note on the back of Dad’s surveillance photo referred to.
dem 5/8
Demolition, 5 August.
And now, at long last, I knew what the other part of Dad’s note meant as well.
last day 4th?
If the warehouse was being demolished on 5 August, the last day it could be used for anything was the 4th.
It felt so good to finally get a definite answer to something that for a few seconds I forgot about everything else. It didn’t take long for my sense of reality to return though, and I soon realised that solving the riddle of Dad’s note didn’t actually help me all that much. I still didn’t really know anything.
I didn’t know if Omega had Bashir. And if they did have him, I didn’t know why. Maybe Winston had been telling me the truth, and Omega were just protecting him, defending his safety and well-being. But maybe they weren’t. Maybe Winston was lying. And if he was lying about Bashir, maybe he was lying about everything else too.
Maybe this, maybe that . . .
I was letting myself get carried away.
I hadn’t even located the warehouse yet. Until I’d done that, and found out if Bashir was actually there or not, there was simply no point in thinking about anything else.
Shielding my eyes from the sun, I began scanning the road up ahead, studying the layout, trying to work out the probable location of the warehouse and the best way to approach it without being seen.
39
I’d looked at Dad’s surveillance photograph so many times that I practically knew it off by heart, so it wasn’t too difficult to work out that the warehouse had to be on the right-hand side of the street. The tall chimneys I could see in the distance over to my left would definitely have been visible in the photograph if the warehouse was on the left-hand side of the street, and they weren’t.
The warehouse had to be on the right.
Which meant that Dad must have taken the pictures from somewhere on the left-hand side of the street. I thought about that for a while, wondering if he’d just parked opposite the warehouse and taken the picture from his car, but that didn’t seem likely. The street was too deserted for that. A parked car around here would stick out like a sore thumb. So he must have left his car somewhere else, somewhere nearby, and then . . .
And then what? I asked myself.
How had he got near enough to the warehouse to take photographs without being seen? And where had he taken them from? I gazed over at the buildings on the left-hand side of the street again, wondering if he’d used them as cover . . . and that’s when I saw the pathway. A narrow dirt track, with buckled mesh fencing on either side, it ran all the way along the backs of the buildings. From what I could see, it offered a fairly good view of the buildings across the street.
It wasn’t hard to find the entrance to the pathway, and once I’d started wheeling my bike along it, I was pretty sure that this was the way Dad must have come. Although the view across the street was partially blocked by the buildings to my right, there were plenty of gaps to see through, so I was pretty sure I’d be able see the warehouse when I came to it. At the same time I was reasonably certain there was enough cover to see across the street without being seen.
I walked slowly, my head turned to the right, my eyes fixed on the buildings across the road.
It was a strange feeling, knowing that I was quite literally following in Dad’s footsteps. My feet were stepping on the very same ground he’d stepped on – the same packed dirt, the same sun-baked grass, the same powdery dust. I was seeing the same things he’d seen, smelling the same smells, taking up the same space. It was a good feeling, in a way. It made me feel very close to him. But it also brought home to me the emptiness of the spaces he’d left behind . . . the spaces where he’d once been.
Him and Mum . . .
Empty spaces.
God, it hurt.
I stopped walking then. Stopped, blinked, and slowly backed up. I’d seen something. At least, my eyes had seen something. My mind had been somewhere else for a while. But now it was back. And now I knew what I was looking at. Directly in front of me, immediately to the right of the path, was an abandoned car-repair place. There were piles of tyres all over the place, a couple of ramshackle workshops, a rusty old car chassis propped up on bricks. The two workshop buildings were quite close together. A rubbish-strewn alleyway ran between them, with a low wooden fence at the far end, providing a tunnel-like view of the other side of the street. It was through this tunnel that I’d seen a flash of grey brick wall and a blur of wire-mesh fencing.
As I peered through the tunnel, there was no doubt in my mind that I was looking at the warehouse from the photograph. I could still only see a narrow strip of it, but that was more than enough. I’d know that grey brick wall anywhere. I closed my eyes for a second, picturing the photograph again, just to make sure. When I opened my eyes and looked over at the car-repair place, I not only knew that I was in the right place, I knew exactly where Dad had taken the photograph from.
I leaned my bike against the fence, squeezed through a gap in the buckled wire-mesh, and headed towards the workshop buildings. The sun was burning bright in the sky, and the hot air was thick with the smell o
f petrol and oil. As I approached the alleyway, other smells began drifting in the heat – the stink of old rubbish, rotten food – and I could hear the sound of flies buzzing around an overflowing wheelie bin.
I carried on down to the wooden fence at the end of the alley. It was an old fence, cracked and faded, and some of the boards were loose. It was about the same height as me, so I didn’t have to stoop down to keep out of sight. But I guessed Dad must have had to. I could see him quite clearly in my mind . . . stooped over, keeping his head down as he approached the fence, his camera in his hands. I was with him now. I was right where he’d been. I was taking hold of the same loose board he’d taken hold of . . . we were it pulling it back together, jamming it to one side, looking through the gap, seeing the warehouse across the street . . .
It was exactly the same as it looked in the photograph. The grey brick walls, the blinds in the windows, the solid-looking doors, the small car park surrounded by a tall wire-mesh fence, the BMW and the Mercedes van parked in front of the warehouse. The only things missing were the three Omega men and the time and date printed in the bottom right-hand corner.
16:08 15/07/13
Eight minutes past four, 15 July.
The day before Mum and Dad died.
I looked at my watch. It was six minutes past nine.
3 August.
Today. Right now.
The day before the last day.
I sat down on the ground, facing the gap in the fence. I adjusted my position until I was satisfied I had the best possible view of the warehouse. Then I just watched and waited.
40
An hour and a half later, at just gone 10.40, I stretched the stiffness from my neck, got to my feet, and dusted myself down. I hadn’t seen everything I’d wanted to see, but I could have sat there all day and still not seen everything.
