If You Were Me

by Sam Hepburn

  Trent was sweaty, pale, wiping his forehead. ‘I don’t know. One minute he says he’s got them cornered, the next, nothing.’

  ‘Then Aliya’s going to have to help us out.’ Clarke relaxed his grasp just a little. ‘You’re going to call your friends Connor and Dan and tell them that you’re here, that anti-corruption officers are on their way and that I’ll send a car to wherever they are to pick them up.’

  ‘No!’ I bucked and wriggled. ‘I won’t.’

  He snatched my arm and twisted it behind my back. The strength in his hands was paralysing, like steel clamps stopping my blood, tearing my muscles, ready to break my elbow. I crumpled forward, reaching my other hand to my mouth to stifle a sob. ‘I can’t remember Connor’s number and . . . and Dan lost his phone when Mark Trent tried to drown him!’

  ‘That’s not a problem. We’ve got Dan’s phone right here, with Connor’s number in the contacts.’ He called over to Trent. ‘Block the caller ID and give it to her.’

  Through a haze of agony I saw Trent pull a second phone from his pocket and walk towards me, thumbing the keys. ‘There’s another message from his dad, asking where he is.’

  ‘Ignore it,’ Clarke said.

  It wasn’t just that I was desperate to delay making that call, there was something I needed to know. I blurted it through the waves of pain, ‘His father . . . does he know what you did to Behrouz?’

  ‘Abbott?’ Trent gave a dismissive snort. ‘Nah, he’s just Jez Deakin’s runaround, but he comes in useful, now and then. Just like you.’ He rammed the phone to my ear and his voice hardened. ‘Talk!’

  He’d put it on speaker and as the connection went through my thoughts swarmed and buzzed, trying to work out how I could warn Connor without alerting Trent and the colonel to what I was doing. My heart tripped when a voice came on the line. But it was a woman. ‘The number you have dialled is unavailable. Please try later.’

  Trent snatched it away and Clarke growled at him angrily, ‘Keep trying until you damn well get through. This is your fault for not checking the barge properly.’ I could almost feel the fury coming off him.

  Trent hit the keys again and, for all his attempts to hide it, I could see he was terrified. The same message crackled out of the phone. Relief gave me strength.

  ‘The hospital will know Behrouz was murdered,’ I hissed. ‘They will find out who did it and they will trace the killer to you.’

  Clarke shook his head and pushed his face so close to mine I could feel his spittle on my skin. ‘No one’s going to look further than Al Shaab, not once they’ve claimed responsibility.’ His gentle voice was a shocking contrast to the venom in his eyes. ‘They’ll say they did it to stop him cracking under interrogation. The press will love that.’

  I didn’t understand. ‘Why would they say this when Behrouz has never worked for them?’

  Trent was trying Connor again, looking increasingly worried, and I think to mask his panic he sneered at me, ‘Because we’ve just shot the video. Same deal as the one with Behrouz, only this time it’s his friend Arif on camera.’

  ‘Arif?’ I whispered. ‘He’s alive?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Trent, get a move on!’ the colonel snapped.

  I pressed my cuff to my mouth. ‘Al Shaab! It’s you!’

  Clarke said genially, ‘Let’s just say that my wife isn’t the only one with a taste for the theatrical.’

  His eyes slid back to Trent, who was pressing the phone to his ear, frowning hard and shaking his head. ‘Sorry, boss. I still can’t get through.’

  ‘Then we’ll just have to keep our guest safe till you do.’

  A twist of his grip, a powerful jerk of his wrists and I was pitching forward into that dank stone-lined hole. I reached out to stop myself falling, slammed my hands against the rough wall and whipped round to catch a narrowing wedge of light. Then there was nothing. Just silence and total, utter blackness.

  DAN

  The drive was a dark blur of terror. Rain pounding the windscreen, engine straining, chassis rattling and groaning, pain shooting through every bone in my body, nerves jangling, Connor yelling that we didn’t stand a chance against Clarke, me panicking that we wouldn’t get there in time or we’d get pulled over by bent cops, or worst of all that Hamidi was going to come burning out of nowhere and run us off the road. Trent’s voicemails were coming every thirty seconds, his voice thick with clamped-down fury. I’d have chucked Hutch’s phone out the window if I hadn’t been using it for directions. What was it Aliya always went on about – having a plan? Good idea. Trouble was, I didn’t have one.

  ALIYA

  Islithered to the floor, hands clasped over my head, trying to hold down the roaring panic. The blackness was like nothing I’d ever known and the air was so musty and still it felt like the breath of a tomb. If priests really had been hidden in here, how long had they lasted? Hours? Days? Months? Did they pray and eat and dream in darkness, or did they share this cold dead air with candles? Terror flooded my mind. I pushed it back, forcing myself to stay calm. The boys had been right about the colonel and I had been wrong. But at least I had stayed on my guard.

  I still had the grid in my hand. I slipped it into my pocket and fumbled for the phone nestling in the torn cuff of my hoodie and hit the buttons. No signal of course, just a pale glow from the screen that eased the darkness and fed my hope. I crawled across the stone floor, pressed my ear to the handleless slab of wood that served as a door and listened to the muffled bark of Clarke’s angry voice and Trent’s low jerky mumble as he tried to calm him down. I couldn’t make out any of the words but that’s not what I was listening for. I turned off the phone to save the battery and, dazed with hunger, fear and cold, I leant against the door and waited, praying for one particular sound. It could have been ten, fifteen or even thirty minutes later when it came, snapping me out of a halfway world between nightmare and waking. There it was: the slam of the study door. I forced myself to wait some more, listening for footsteps, taps, coughs, anything that would betray a human presence in that room, and then, counting slowly to twenty to quieten my nerves, I got up from the floor. I switched on the phone and in the spooky glow from the screen I felt in my pockets for my grid, folded the paper into a narrow strip and ran it carefully down the hairs-breadth gap between the stone wall and the wooden door. It caught on the locking mechanism. With my eyes fixed on that vital spot I reached deep into my sock for Behrouz’s gun and slid back the safety catch, the way I’d seen so many fighters do in the streets of Kabul. But I wasn’t a fighter and I clasped it in my hand, doubting my courage to pull the trigger. A ghostly image crept into my mind of that hospital orderly leaving to go to work and kill Behrouz. A deafening bang and a blinding flash threw me back against the wall. Light punched a jagged hole through the door. I fell back, hitting the stone floor, cordite burning my nose and my ears ringing so badly it was like a hundred sirens going off inside my head.

  I dragged myself up, pocketed the gun and rammed my shoulder against the door until it opened. I sprinted across to the window and pulled the catch on the glazing panel. It fell back on a hinge. I rattled the window. It was locked. I spun round, grabbed the sculpture of Clarke’s head from its plinth and slammed it through the glass. A piercing alarm shrieked through the house. I scrambled over the window ledge, ripping my leg on the broken pane, stamping on the head lying in the mud, and ran blindly, slashing through rose bushes and stumbling round tree trunks. Halfway across I turned and through the screen of foliage saw faces peering from an upper window. I ducked low, trying to shake the ringing from my skull.

  The slam of the front door echoed through the darkness. I kept running till my lungs tore with pain, scrambling through flower beds, squelching through rows of vegetables, swerving round the back of sheds, thorns tearing at my hands and face as I dived through the thick hedge on to the lane. Behind me on the drive cars were starting up, engines revving, tyres squealing. I cringed back into the hedge, stabbed by a hundred tiny kni
ves, head pressed on to my knees, heart stopped as Trent’s pale-blue hatchback turned right out of the drive and crawled past me, then Chivers’ black people carrier shot out of the driveway, turned left up the hill and moved slowly into the darkness, searching for me. Shouts rang out behind me. Torch beams criss-crossed the trees, coming closer, forcing me out of the hedge. Hands and face sticky with blood, I ran on to the darkened lane, feeling along the fences on the other side. No gaps to slip through, no ditches to hide in, just endless railings like prison bars, trapping me in the open. All I could do was run as I had never run before. A pair of headlights blazed towards me, blinding me with their brightness. I threw myself flat, like my teachers had told us to do when foreign missiles rained from the sky, and I prayed that this car held a stranger. The tyres screeched to a halt. A black figure leapt out and ran towards me through the light. Shielding my eyes from the glare. I fumbled for the gun, raised it with quaking fingers and screamed out, ‘Get away from me!’

  DAN

  I pulled the gun from her hands and yanked her to her feet. She was sobbing and gasping, her face bloody and scratched. Her legs buckled and I had to prop her up and drag her to the car. I pushed her across the back seat and jumped in the front.

  She jolted upright, her eyes opened wide and she screamed, ‘Hospital! Go to the hospital. They will kill my brother tonight!’ She shook Connor’s shoulders, her voice rising way off the register. ‘Behrouz! They will kill Behrouz!’

  Connor slammed the Honda into reverse, made a sharp turn in the narrow lane and thumped the accelerator to the floor.

  I stuck my head out the window and looked back. ‘There’s a car turning at the top of the hill and people with flashlights running down Clarke’s drive.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ he yelled. ‘Just tell me where to go!’

  I punched the keys on Hutch’s phone, searching for directions, panicking when I looked up and saw the blue hatchback roaring back up the lane towards us. I ducked down.

  ‘That’s Trent. Did he see me?’

  ‘I bloody hope not.’ Connor looked back, didn’t see the bump, the front wheels took off and the undercarriage landed with a horrible crunch. For a second he lost control, banging along the sides of a couple of parked cars, somehow managing to steady us again as we shot on to the dark spooky road by the cemetery. ‘Where now?’

  ‘Down there!’ I kept shouting and pointing, zigzagging a route to Highgate Hill.

  ‘Quickly, quickly!’ Aliya gripped the back of Connor’s seat. ‘They will guess that I will go to the hospital. That I will try to save him.’

  ‘Calm down,’ Connor said. ‘They don’t know we switched cars.’

  The Honda rattled and wheezed but Connor drove like a crazy man, pushing up tight behind buses and cars, running lights, dodging in and out of bus lanes. My heart juddered as we weaved between cyclists and drunks, beating boy-racers through gaps the width of a wheel-barrow, flashing past shop windows, the street lights blurring into one until I saw a sign saying ‘Hospital’ and the entrance a hundred metres ahead of us. The traffic slowed, held up by roadworks – too thick for any of Connor’s tricks, and one-way only, so he couldn’t even turn around. It didn’t matter. It was only a hundred metres. We were going to make it. I turned to see how Aliya was holding up. Her eyes were swivelling in their sockets, her lips drawn tight in pain and panic. But she’d seen the entrance and there was hope there too, just a glimmer.

  And then I saw the raindrops on the back window flash blue. Probably an ambulance. The light was threading its way through the traffic thirty metres back. The cars were shifting to give it space. It gained ten metres. We slowed right down again as the lights ahead turned red. A howl came from behind me. It was Aliya.

  I swung round. I could see now that it wasn’t an ambulance – it was Trent’s blue hatchback with one of those magnetic lights they stick on top of plain-clothes police cars. Luckily the cars were jammed too tight to let it pass and maybe, if the lights changed quickly, we could still make it without him seeing us. Connor revved the engine. I gripped the broken dashboard, willing the lights to go green. ‘Come on, come on.’

  Then suddenly Trent swung on to the pavement and squeezed past the side of a white van six vehicles back. In the wing mirror I could see him coming, scanning the faces in every car he passed. Searching for us.

  I still had Aliya’s gun in my hand. I waved it towards the back seat.

  ‘Is this thing loaded?’

  Aliya shook her head. ‘There was only one bullet. I used it.’

  Connor grabbed the gun out of my hand, threw it on the floor and glanced in the mirror. Trent’s car was fifteen metres back, alongside a Mini.

  ‘Now . . .’ Connor said, his face and his voice very calm. ‘Aliya, move across to the seat behind me and get a hold of the door handle, and you, Danny boy, climb in the back, nice and quick . . . and when I say “now”, we’re going to jump out and run like hell.’

  My body wasn’t up to gymnastics but I squeezed myself over the seats and landed beside Aliya. I glanced back. Trent was moving on, level with our rear bumper now.

  Pumping the accelerator, Connor wrenched the wheel to his left, yelled, ‘Now!’ and cut the Honda straight across Trent’s front wheels. We were off through the traffic as Trent piled into the passenger side of the Honda, stoving in the door where I’d been sitting, crushing the rusted old metal almost over to the gear stick.

  And, just like Connor said, we ran like hell.

  ALIYA

  We raced into the hospital car park, past the vans with satellite dishes on the roof and the clumps of journalists chatting and sipping coffees. I made for the entrance, saw Hamidi with two hard-faced men standing beside the doors and swerved back.

  The news reporter with the long black hair and red lipstick was standing in front of a camera talking into a microphone. I ran towards her. Her eyes flickered nervously but she kept talking, expecting me to join the little crowd of onlookers who had gathered to watch her. I didn’t stop. I ran right up to her. A voice rose from my belly and screamed into the camera, ‘I am Aliya Sahar, the sister of Behrouz. He is innocent!’

  Strong hands grabbed me from behind and tried to wrench me away. I took strength from desperation and clung on to the microphone. ‘The guilty ones are Colonel Mike Clarke and a man called Farukh Zarghun.’ I flung one hand towards the hospital. ‘And Tewfiq Hamidi, who is standing there by the entrance.’ Lights flashed, people were shouting, running with cameras, jostling to get a better view of me. ‘They sell drugs. They kill people. They bribe policemen, and they’ve paid an orderly to kill Behrouz tonight.’

  The reporter threw her arm around me, shouted over my head and shoved the microphone into my face. The hands fell from my shoulders.

  ‘Can you prove this, Aliya?’

  I pulled out my phone, pressed ‘play’ and held the screen to the camera. A picture appeared on the little monitor at the cameraman’s feet, a blurry hand, a shirt, a chin, a cheek, an eye, but you could see they were the colonel’s, and though the voices were tinny and thin, the words were clear enough.

  ‘Are you going to kill me, Colonel Clarke?’

  ‘Not until you stop being useful.’

  A wall of microphones, cameras and journalists yelling my name closed in. I’d had a plan, not much of one, but somehow I think it had worked.

  DAN

  Two weeks later

  They played it over and over for days. Every time I turned on the TV, there it was. Sometimes they showed the whole scene from different angles, using footage from the CCTV and all the other news cameras in the car park: Aliya running through the cars, me and Connor rushing after her and freezing in shock when she veered away from the entrance, grabbed the reporter’s microphone and started yelling into it. I thought she’d gone mad till I realized what she was doing. Smart move, when you think about it. But then she’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.

  They also played the photos from Be
hrouz’s phone. When they showed the one at the Meadowview fundraiser, they highlighted the faces of the policeman at the cake stall and the man lobbing balls at coconuts. I don’t know why I never realized it before – they were Mark Trent and Jez Deakin.

  When I look back on it the rest of that night, it’s a blur. I remember Dad coming to the police station to get me. What an idiot. They arrested him there and then, but next morning they let him out on bail, unlike the rest of Clarke’s people, who look like they’ll be staying on remand for months while the cops dismantle his empire. Every day there’s another big-name arrest in the papers, some investigator from the Drug Enforcement Agency flying in from the States or Afghanistan, or an announcement from the Prime Minister about smashing high-level corruption.

  Mum’s chucked out all the nicked appliances Dad got her for her birthday and now there’s three big holes in her perfect kitchen. Things at home are pretty weird. One minute Mum’s crying and shouting at Dad, the next she’s crying and hugging him. Dad doesn’t say much. Now and then he puts his hand on my shoulder and says, ‘I’m proud of you, son,’ and I nod and duck out of his way, feeling terrible. Turns out that Jez had laundered thousands of pounds of drug money through Abbott & Co’s books. Dad’s admitting to fencing stolen appliances but he says he had no idea about the money-laundering, and though he kind of knew Jez was involved with drugs, he’d turned a blind eye to it. The recording of Trent telling Aliya he was just Jez’s runaround should go some way to helping Dad’s defence. Anyway, his lawyers are hoping if he testifies for the prosecution, they can swing some kind of deal, and we’ve just got to hope it’ll work out. Jez’s mum Eileen won’t talk to us. Sticks her nose in the air every time she walks past. Snotty cow. Her darling son deserves everything he gets. And he’s going to get plenty.