by Kevin Brooks
I grinned.
‘I know you’re not stupid, Trav,’ she said seriously. ‘I know you’re perfectly capable of looking after yourself. But you need to let me look after you a bit too, OK?’ She smiled again. ‘Just humour me, all right? Pretend I’m a responsible adult and I know what I’m talking about.’
I could see the sincerity and determination behind her smile, and I knew she wasn’t just thinking of me, she was thinking of Mum and Dad too. And that really meant a lot to me.
But sometimes, no matter how much you want to do what you’re told, you just can’t help yourself.
‘OK,’ I said.
‘OK what?’
‘OK, ma’am?’
She laughed.
I said, ‘Can I have the printout back?’
‘Why?’
‘I want to show it to Grandad.’
‘I thought you said you didn’t want to bother him with any of this?’
‘He’ll want to know about it when he’s feeling better.’ She kept her eyes on me for a while, trying to see into my mind, and then – seemingly satisfied that I was telling the truth – she passed me the picture. ‘Promise me that you won’t do anything on your own, OK?’
‘I promise,’ I lied.
9
I don’t usually break my promises, and I felt really bad about lying to Courtney, but I would have felt a million times worse if I’d just gone home and done nothing. If there were only two days to go before the last day, whatever that meant, I didn’t have time to do nothing. I had to find out what was going on. It was as simple as that. I had to know.
I texted Nan as I wheeled my bike along North Walk – wth frnds in twn bak l8r travx – then I turned right into Magdalen Hill, got on my bike, and headed off towards Wonford Docks.
It was a hot and humid day, the air thick and heavy, and although it was only a couple of kilometres to the docks, I was covered in sweat by the time I got there. The area known as Wonford Docks is a mixture of old industrial buildings, car repair places, and dingy-looking nightclubs. The nightclubs probably look very different at night-time, but I’ve only ever seen them during the day, and they always look a bit sad to me, almost as if they’re ashamed of themselves.
I rode slowly past them, letting myself cool down a bit, then I turned left into a narrow little lane that sloped down towards the docks. The lane was lined with tall brick buildings that I guessed were old warehouses and mills. They had big wooden doors and soot-stained walls and weather-faded signs hanging on rusty chains. The buildings blocked out most of the sunlight, and as I freewheeled down to the end of the lane, it was so dark and gloomy that it was hard to believe it was the middle of the day.
The boxing club was in a converted warehouse about halfway down the lane. I stopped outside it and gazed up at the sign over the door. WONFORD BOXING CLUB, it said simply. Nothing else. No further information, no welcoming words. Just WONFORD BOXING CLUB. If they’d added TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT to the sign, it wouldn’t have looked out of place.
I got off my bike and double-locked it to the railings at the side of the road. I wiped a sheen of sweat from my brow, looked around the deserted street, then crossed over to the wooden door, pushed it open, and went inside.
The gym was bigger inside than I’d imagined, a sprawling brick-walled room with a high ceiling and a concrete floor. Although in some ways it was very different to my boxing club, the overall atmosphere felt pretty much the same. The set-up was fairly basic, to say the least: two boxing rings, both of which had seen better days; a selection of battered old punchbags; an area for weight training, another for general fitness; benches, mats, running machines. There was nothing wrong with it – everything you needed was there – it was just that my club, Barton Boxing Academy, had so much more. Two gymnasiums, state-of-the-art facilities, twice as much equipment, everything bang up to date. My club had loads of other amenities too – a cafe, a swimming pool, central heating, uniformed staff. But my club wasn’t five minutes’ walk from the Slade Lane estate, it was in a nice quiet area on the other side of town. It wasn’t cheap either. Most of its members had reasonably good jobs. The kids who went there had parents with reasonably good jobs. My boxing club was in a different world to this one.
But boxing is boxing, and apart from all the superficial stuff, everything else felt very familiar. The sounds and the smells were the same – the thud of boxing gloves on leather, the squeak of boots on canvas, the grunts and groans of exertion, the smell of sweat – and as I stood there gazing around, I realised that everything looked very familiar too. Men and boys in vests and shorts, some of them working the punchbags, some skipping, some sparring in the ring. Most of them were older than me – tough-looking older kids from the estate – but there were a few around my age.
As far as I could tell, there was only one girl among all the men. She looked about fourteen or fifteen. She was on her own, working on one of the heavy punchbags hanging from the ceiling – dancing around it, throwing good strong punches, her dark eyes burning with fierce concentration . . .
‘You want something?’ a voice said.
I looked round and saw a hard-looking black guy standing in front of me. He was older than most of the other kids in the gym, in his late twenties at least, and he looked like he’d had plenty of fights. Broken nose, busted-up eyes, scars on his face. He was bare-chested, his hands were wrapped with tape, and a sweaty towel was draped over his shoulder. I guessed he’d just finished a session in the ring.
‘I’m looking for John Ruddy,’ I told him.
‘Yeah?’ he said, wiping his nose. ‘And who are you?’
‘Travis Delaney.’
He paused for a moment, staring hard at me. ‘Any relation to Jack Delaney?’
‘He was my dad.’
The black guy nodded slowly. ‘I saw him fight a couple of times when I was a kid. He was pretty good.’ He wiped his nose again and lowered his eyes. ‘Sorry to hear about . . . well, you know.’
‘Yeah, thanks,’ I said.
He looked up. ‘You want to see Mr Ruddy, yeah?’
I nodded.
‘That’s him over there,’ he said, turning round and pointing towards the nearest boxing ring. ‘The guy with the white hair.’
I looked over and saw a wiry old man with short white hair. Two kids wearing head guards were sparring in the ring, and the old guy was shouting out instructions to them – ‘KEEP YOUR HANDS UP, DWAYNE! WORK THE JAB! USE YOUR FEET, JEZ! DON’T LET HIM BACK YOU UP! ’
‘Mr Ruddy!’ the black guy called out to him. ‘Someone to see you!’
Mr Ruddy looked over. At first he seemed annoyed by the interruption, but when he saw me, his expression changed. I saw a look of recognition in his eyes, then surprise, then something else, something I couldn’t read. He turned back to the kids in the ring for a moment, told them to take a break, then waved me over.
10
‘You look just like your father,’ Mr Ruddy told me. ‘That’s how I recognised you. You’re the spitting image of him.’
We were in his office, a cramped little room at the back of the gym. He was sitting in an old swivel chair behind his desk, and I was sitting in an equally old wooden chair across from him. He was dressed in a tracksuit and trainers. The walls of his office were covered with framed pictures of boxers. I recognised some of them – local fighters who’d gone on to box professionally – but a lot of the photographs were quite old, and I didn’t know the boxers in most of them.
‘That’s your father there,’ Mr Ruddy said, pointing proudly to one of the pictures. ‘Essex Junior Championship Final 1991.’ He smiled. ‘Your dad lost by a single point. We found out later that one of the judges was the uncle of the boy who beat him. I was absolutely furious about it. I was going to make an official complaint, but your dad didn’t want me to. He said that as long as we knew who the real champion was, that’s all that mattered.’
I looked up at the photograph. It showed Dad in the boxing ring, throw
ing a right hook at his opponent. I guessed he was about fifteen or sixteen at the time. Mr Ruddy was right, he did look a lot like me. Or rather, I looked a lot like him.
‘I’m so sorry about your mum and dad,’ Mr Ruddy said sadly, shaking his head. ‘Such a terrible thing . . .’
I just nodded. I was beginning to get used to the awkwardness of condolences – not really knowing what to say, or how to say it, or whether to say anything at all.
‘I still find it hard to believe,’ Mr Ruddy went on. ‘I mean, it was only a few weeks ago that your dad was sitting where you are, right there, having a cup of tea.’ He shook his head again. ‘Unbelievable.’
‘Was that when he came to see you about your missing persons enquiry?’ I asked.
‘Did he tell you about that?’
‘No, but I’m trying to find out what Mum and Dad were working on when they died. Their assistant remembers you ringing up to make an appointment at the end of June.’
‘That’s right. Jack came round to see me a few days after I called.’
‘Can you remember what date that was?’
He frowned, trying to remember. ‘It was a Monday, I know that. The first Monday in July, I think. Whatever date that was.’
‘What did you want Mum and Dad to do for you?’
He hesitated for a moment, looking carefully at me. ‘Why are you trying to find out what they were working on, Travis? Has it got anything to do with how they died?’
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘There’s a couple of things about the crash that I don’t understand, that’s all. They probably don’t mean anything, but I just need to make sure. Otherwise I’ll never stop thinking about it.’
Mr Ruddy nodded thoughtfully, looking into my eyes, then he reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a familiar-looking black plastic file. On the front of the file it said DELANEY & CO, and underneath that, PRELIMINARY REPORT.
He passed me the file and began telling me about a boxer called Bashir Kamal.
Bashir was the best young boxer he’d ever worked with, he told me. He was twenty years old, a light welterweight, and he’d been training with Mr Ruddy for two years. He’d won twenty-six of his twenty-seven amateur fights, twenty-two of them inside the distance, and since the beginning of May he’d been training hard in preparation for his first professional bout.
‘Bash was a fanatic about training,’ Mr Ruddy said. ‘Never missed a session, always on time, never moaned about anything. Just turned up every day and got on with it. Then one day, he didn’t show up. Didn’t call in sick or anything, didn’t leave a message, just didn’t turn up. And this was only six days before his first pro fight. I tried calling him, but he didn’t answer his phone. He didn’t reply to my voicemail messages either. So in the end I went round to his house to see what was going on.’
Bashir lived with his parents in a council house on the Beacon Fields estate, Mr Ruddy told me. He’d moved back in with them a few years ago, after living in London for a while, and he hadn’t got round to finding his own place yet.
‘When I got there,’ Mr Ruddy said, ‘his mother wouldn’t let me in. She told me that Bashir had gone to Pakistan to look after his grandmother who was seriously ill. I just didn’t believe her. Bash wouldn’t have gone to Pakistan without letting me know. He’s not like that. And there was something about the way his mother was acting anyway, something that didn’t feel right. When I asked her how I could contact Bashir, she told me I couldn’t. I asked her why not, she wouldn’t tell me. It was just really odd, you know?’
‘So what did you do?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘What could I do? I couldn’t force her to tell me anything, and I had no proof she was lying. There wasn’t anything I could do about it.’
‘What about reporting it to the police?’
‘I tried that, but there was nothing they could do either. Bashir’s not a kid, he’s twenty years old. He can go wherever he likes, whenever he likes. He doesn’t have to tell anyone where he is. If he wants to give up his boxing career to look after his sick grandmother in Pakistan, that’s entirely up to him.’
‘So you asked my dad to see what he could find out,’ I said.
Mr Ruddy nodded. ‘After a couple of days he got back to me with that,’ he said, indicating the file.
I opened the report and began flipping through the pages.
‘Your dad was fairly sure that Bash wasn’t at his parents’ house,’ Mr Ruddy said. ‘As far as he could tell, no one had seen or heard from him since he stopped coming to the gym.’
‘But Dad hadn’t found anything to suggest that Bashir had left the country,’ I said, skimming the report.
‘That’s right. Jack told me that he was happy to carry on looking for Bashir, but that it might take some time, and even though he was giving me a good discount, it could still be fairly expensive. I told him to go ahead.’
‘Did he find out anything else?’
‘Nothing specific, but he called me a couple of times and said they were making some progress.’
I carried on studying the report. There was a brief summary of the case on the first page, outlining what Mr Ruddy had told Dad, and the next page listed Bashir Kamal’s personal details – age, address, phone number, etc. There was also a photograph of him. He had a longish face, short black hair, and hauntingly dark eyes.
I quickly read through the summary.
‘What’s this about Bashir being preoccupied about something?’ I asked Mr Ruddy.
‘Your dad asked me all sorts of questions about Bashir, and I remembered that in the week or so before he went missing, Bash wasn’t quite as focused as he usually was. He just seemed . . . I don’t know, a bit distracted about something. As if he had something else on his mind, you know? Something other than the fight.’
‘Did you ask him about it?’
‘Yeah, but he just shrugged it off. Said it was nothing.’
I thought about that for a few seconds, then said, ‘When was the last time you heard from my dad?’
‘He called me a couple of days before the crash. He wanted to know if I knew anything about Bashir’s life before he came to Barton.’ Mr Ruddy shrugged. ‘There wasn’t much I could tell him really. Bash is a very private person, he doesn’t like talking about himself. All he’d ever told me was that he’d lived in the East End of London for a while and that he’d done most of his training at a boxing club somewhere in Stratford.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘And that was it? You didn’t hear from Dad again?’
‘No.’
I closed the file and just sat there for a while thinking about everything Mr Ruddy had told me, trying to work out if any of it meant anything. And, if so, what. But I didn’t get very far. The truth was, I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing.
‘Can I keep this?’ I asked Mr Ruddy, holding up the file.
‘I don’t see why not.’
I took out my mobile and showed him the photograph of the man at the funeral. ‘Have you ever seen him before?’
Mr Ruddy shook his head. ‘Who is he?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, taking the printout from my pocket. ‘What about these men?’ I said, showing him the picture. ‘Do you recognise any of them?’
‘That’s the one from the other photograph, isn’t it?’ he said, pointing out the man from the funeral.
‘Yeah, but what about the others? Have you seen any of them around?’
‘No, sorry.’
‘Is it all right if I show the pictures round the gym, see if anyone recognises them?’
‘Of course, no problem.’
‘Did Dad talk to anyone else here about Bashir?’
‘He talked to just about everybody. I don’t think they were very much help to him though. Like I said, Bashir’s a very private person. He keeps himself to himself. Everyone here knows him, of course, and they all respect him as a boxer, but Bash didn’t really make friends with anyone. Not that I know of, anyway.’
‘OK,’ I said, getting to my feet. ‘Well, thanks for all your help, Mr Ruddy. I’ll let you know if anything turns up.’
He smiled at me. ‘I hear you’re a pretty good boxer yourself.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ I said.
‘Your dad was very proud of you.’
‘Was he?’
Mr Ruddy nodded.
I didn’t know what else to say. I just stood there looking back at him for a moment or two, feeling the tingle of tears in my eyes, then I took a deep breath, swallowed hard, and went out into the gym.
11
Mr Ruddy was right about the other boxers. None of them knew very much about Bashir. They didn’t all want to talk to me – kids from the Slade are naturally suspicious of anyone asking questions – but even those who were happy to talk didn’t have much to say. Apart from the fact that he was a brilliant boxer, no one seemed to know anything about Bashir at all. No one recognised any of the men in the pictures either. By the time I’d talked to everyone in the gym except the dark-eyed girl, I’d pretty much given up hope of finding out anything useful.
I’m not sure why I left the girl until last. I suppose, if I’m honest, it was probably a mixture of fear and embarrassment. She was still working out on the heavy punchbag, and the look on her face as she pounded her fists into it was genuinely quite scary. I mean, she was pummelling away at the bag as if she was trying to kill it or something. I’d never seen anything like it. She looked so intense, so driven, that I seriously considered just leaving her to it. But she also looked really nice – those deep dark eyes, that beautiful light-brown skin, that strangely intriguing face – and I just couldn’t stop glancing over at her. I knew that I wanted to talk to her, but I also knew that I didn’t. It was a really weird feeling. Good and bad at the same time. Very confusing.
In the end, I told myself not to be so stupid, and I just went over and introduced myself.
‘Hi, I’m Travis Delaney,’ I said. ‘Do you mind if I ask you a few questions about Bashir Kamal?’