by Kevin Brooks
‘Nothing. It’s just . . .’ I turned shyly to Mrs Kamal.
‘Would you mind very much if I used your bathroom before we go?’
She hesitated, clearly desperate for us to leave, but at the same time not wanting to be ill-mannered. ‘Up the stairs,’ she said, smiling awkwardly. ‘At the end of the landing.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, getting to my feet.
As I left the room I heard Courtney say, ‘It sounds like you have a wonderful son, Mrs Kamal. He must be a very caring young man.’
‘Bashir has a good heart,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t ask for any more in a son.’
There were only three rooms upstairs. A main bedroom on the left, a smaller bedroom on the right, and the bathroom at the end of the landing. I hurried down to the bathroom, opened and closed the door without going in, then quietly went into the smaller bedroom. There was no doubt it was Bashir’s room. There was a weight machine on the floor, a punchbag in one corner, and a poster of Amir Khan on the wall. It was a very small room, and the weight machine took up about half of it, so there wasn’t much space for anything else. There was a single bed, a chest of drawers, a bedside cabinet, and that was it.
I went over to the chest of drawers and started searching through it. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, I was just looking, hoping to find something that might throw some light on whatever was going on. I went through the drawers as quickly and quietly as possible, but I didn’t come across anything useful. There was nothing in there except clothes.
As I went over to the bedside cabinet, I heard Courtney calling out from downstairs. ‘Travis! Hurry up, Trav! We need to get a move on!’
It was a warning. She’d guessed what I was doing, and she was trying to tell me that Mrs Kamal was getting suspicious and it was time for me to come back down. I hesitated for a moment, knowing that I should heed her warning, but I was at the bedside cabinet now, and it only had two drawers . . . it would only take a couple of seconds to go through them.
I leaned down and opened the bottom drawer. It was full of bits and pieces: an old iPod, headphones, bootlaces, a pack of playing cards, a can of shoe polish . . .
‘Travis!’
Courtney’s voice again. Louder now, more urgent.
I opened the top drawer. It was jam-packed with boxing magazines. Boxing Monthly, Boxing News, The Ring . . .
‘Damn,’ I muttered.
‘TRAVIS!’
As I went to close the drawer, something caught my eye. There was something poking out from between the pages of one of the magazines, a little booklet or something. I reached in and pulled it out.
It was a passport.
I heard footsteps then. The sound of someone coming up the stairs. It didn’t sound like Courtney. With my heart thumping hard, I opened the passport and scanned the details, then I dropped it back in the drawer and tiptoed quickly out of the room and along the landing to the bathroom. As I went in and closed the door, I heard Mrs Kamal’s voice from the top of the stairs, ‘Excuse me? Are you all right in there? What are you doing?’
I flushed the toilet, ran the taps, turned them off again, and opened the door. Mrs Kamal was standing on the landing.
‘Sorry,’ I said, holding my belly and looking embarrassed. ‘I think I must have eaten something bad . . . I’m really sorry.’
She frowned at me, not sure whether to believe me or not, and I saw her glance over at Bashir’s room.
‘Are you all right, Travis?’ Courtney called out from the bottom of the stairs.
‘Yeah,’ I told her. ‘I’m OK. I’m just coming.’
As I moved off along the landing, and Mrs Kamal stepped aside to let me pass, I could tell from the way she was looking at me that she guessed I’d been up to something. She didn’t say anything though. And I knew that she wouldn’t. Because I knew now, without a shadow of doubt, that she was lying about her son.
17
I told Courtney about Bashir’s passport as we drove back to her house.
‘Are you sure it was his?’ she asked.
‘It was in his name, and it had his photograph in it. It wasn’t an old one either. The expiry date was September 2021.’
‘He can’t have left the country then.’
‘No.’
‘So why are his parents lying?’
‘His mother’s definitely scared of something.’
‘And she definitely knew the man in the photograph.’
I looked at Courtney. ‘What do you think’s going on?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know, Travis. But whatever it is, I’m beginning to think that your mum and dad were on to it. Everything seems to revolve round them. They were investigating Bashir. Bashir’s mother knows the man you saw at their funeral. The man at the funeral knows the man who showed up at the office today pretending to be someone else.’ She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘There’s more to this than just a missing boxer, I’m pretty sure of that.’
When I didn’t answer, she looked across at me.
I was leaning to one side, angling my head to get a better view in the wing mirror.
‘What are you doing?’ Courtney said.
‘I think we’re being followed.’
She immediately looked up at the rear-view mirror.
‘Three cars back,’ I told her.
‘The silver Audi?’ she said, raising her eyebrows.
‘It’s been behind us since we left the Kamals’ house.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘It was parked at the end of Roman Way. It didn’t follow us immediately when we went past it, but it was behind us when we left the estate.’
‘Did you get the registration number?’
I shook my head. ‘It was blocked by another parked car in Roman Way. And now it’s too far back to see it.’
Courtney looked in the rear-view mirror again, narrowing her eyes to get a better look. ‘Is it an S6?’
‘Yep.’
‘Damn,’ she said quietly.
It went without saying that we were both thinking the same thing – that the car behind us was the same silver Audi S6 that Evie Johnson had told me about, the one with the restricted registration number . . . the one that in all likelihood was either a special operations police vehicle or a security services car.
Courtney didn’t say anything for a while, she just carried on driving, staring straight ahead, thinking things through. Then, after another quick look in the mirror, she flicked the indicator switch, slowed the car, and pulled up in a bus lay-by at the side of the road. She reached into her pocket and passed me a pen.
‘Get the registration number when it goes past,’ she told me. ‘I’ll see if I can get a look at the driver.’
Moments later the Audi sped past us. I read off the registration number and wrote it down on the back of my hand. By the time I looked up again, the Audi was disappearing into the distance.
‘Did you get it?’ Courtney asked. I showed her the number.
She frowned. ‘That’s not the same, is it?’
‘Not quite,’ I said, turning my hand over and showing her the number that Evie had written on my palm.
The first five characters matched, the last two were different.
‘What do you think it means?’ I asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ Courtney said. ‘It could just be a coincidence.’
I gave her a doubtful look.
‘Strange things happen, Trav.’
‘You’ve said that before.’
‘Well, it’s true.’
‘It’s more likely that the two cars are somehow connected though, isn’t it?’
‘There’s a pretty good chance,’ she agreed.
‘Did you get a look at the driver?’
‘Not really. He turned his head away as he went past. All I could really see was that he had black hair.’
‘Was he wearing a suit?’
‘I couldn’t tell.’ She reached into her pocket and took out her notepad. �
�Let me see the number again.’
I showed her the back of my hand. She took the pen from my other hand, copied down the number, then put the notepad back in her pocket.
‘Aren’t you going to check it out?’ I asked.
‘I’ll do it later.’
‘Why not now?’
‘We need to go home now.’
‘Go home?’
‘Look, we don’t know for sure that the guy in the Audi was tailing us, OK? But if he was, and if he knows what he’s doing – which he will if he’s police or security services – he’ll have realised that we’re on to him. He won’t carry on following us if he knows we’re looking out for him. Not for a while, anyway. So the best thing for us to do right now is go home, get some rest, and start again in the morning.’
‘Yeah, but—’
‘It’s been a long day, Travis. I need to get back and make sure my mum’s OK, and you need to get home before your nan and grandad start worrying. We both need time to think things through. All right?’
‘I suppose so.’
She looked at me. ‘We’re a good team, Travis. You and me, we can do this together.’
‘Yeah.’
She put her hand on my shoulder. ‘But not right now, OK? Right now we both need to go home.’
‘But we’ll start again tomorrow?’
‘First thing in the morning,’ she said, putting the car into gear.
‘First thing?’
‘I’ll meet you in the office at nine o’clock. Is that all right with you?’
‘Perfect.’
She looked over her shoulder, waited for a gap in the traffic, then pulled out of the lay-by and drove off.
The plan was to drive back to Courtney’s place to pick up my bike and then she’d give me a lift back home. When we arrived at Courtney’s house though, her mum was in a bit of a bad way. She’d fallen over in the kitchen, and although she wasn’t seriously hurt, she was pretty shaken up, and obviously Courtney didn’t want to leave her on her own. I asked if there was anything I could do to help, but Courtney said her mum just needed to get some rest. So I told Courtney not to worry about me, and I got on my bike and started riding back to Nan and Grandad’s.
I’d kept my eyes open for the silver Audi on the drive back to Courtney’s house. I hadn’t seen it anywhere, and I hadn’t seen any obvious signs that anyone else was following us either, but I carried on looking as I cycled out of town and along Long Barton Road – watching out for parked Audis, checking every vehicle that went past me, glancing over my shoulder every fifty metres or so.
I didn’t see anything to worry about though, and by the time I’d reached the top of the hill that leads down to Nan and Grandad’s house, I’d begun to relax a bit. I hadn’t stopped looking over my shoulder or anything, I just wasn’t doing it all the time any more. So when a car horn beeped right behind me, and I looked round and saw a white Nissan Skyline creeping along on my tail, I was kind of taken by surprise.
It was a boy-racer car – alloy wheels, rear spoiler, a big noisy exhaust system. The sun was in my eyes, and the car had a tinted windscreen, so it was hard to make out who was in it. There were definitely two people in the front, and I got the impression that there were more in the back, but I wasn’t hanging around to find out. I stood up in the saddle, hit the pedals, and hurtled off down the hill.
The car horn beeped again as I raced away, and I thought I heard someone call out my name, but I didn’t stop. Moments later I heard the Nissan coming after me – tyres screeching as it picked up speed, gears changing rapidly, the roar of a souped-up engine . . .
It was catching up fast.
I didn’t have time to think.
I veered out into the middle of the road, waited for an oncoming lorry to pass, then swung the bike sharply to the right and launched myself across the road . . .
Straight into the path of a Tesco van.
18
The Tesco van only just missed me, its front bumper millimetres away from clipping my back wheel, and as the van zoomed past me – with its horn blaring and the furious driver yelling out four-letter words – the sudden rush of air almost knocked me off my bike. I just managed to keep my balance though, and as the adrenalin rushed through me, tingling in my veins, I hopped the bike up onto the pavement and kept going as fast as I could – along the pavement, a skidding right turn into a steep downhill lane, then across the lane and through an open gate into the relative safety of a single-track footpath.
The path was far too narrow for a car, so I knew the Nissan couldn’t follow me any more, but I still wanted to get as far away from the road as I could. So I just kept my head down and kept pumping away on the pedals.
The footpath ran parallel to Long Barton Road, and Nan and Grandad’s house was less than a kilometre away. Their back garden backed onto the path, and I knew I could get into it without having to go out onto the road.
All I had to do was keep going.
I glanced over my shoulder, expecting to see the Nissan parked in the lane, and maybe the driver and his passengers standing at the gate, looking dejectedly in my direction, resigned to the fact that I’d given them the
slip. But the lane was empty. No parked Nissan, no one standing at the gate. Which I thought was a bit strange. They must have seen me cutting across the road and turning right into the lane. So why hadn’t they followed me? It didn’t make sense.
I thought about that for a moment or two, and then I realised there was something else that didn’t make sense. Why would someone be following me in such a noticeable car? And why would they beep their horn at me and call out my name? That didn’t make sense at all.
Forget it, I told myself. Now’s not the me for questions. The only thing that matters now getting back to Nan and Grandad’s.
There wasn’t far to go. I was coming up to a gap in the path where a road cuts across it at a right angle. All I had to do was cross over the road and carry on down the footpath on the other side, and I’d be at Nan and Grandad’s in minutes.
I slowed down as I approached the crossing, and I was just about to swing my leg over the saddle and get off when I heard the sound of a souped-up engine speeding down the road. I tried telling myself that it wasn’t necessarily the Nissan, that there were plenty of other boy racers around with big noisy exhausts, but I knew in my heart that I was kidding myself. I jammed on my brakes, skidded to a halt, and started to turn the bike around. But the path was so narrow there wasn’t enough room to manoeuvre. I yanked on the handlebars, trying to hop the front wheel over a tree stump at the side of the path, but the spokes of the wheel got caught in a broken branch. I was completely stuck now. I looked over at the crossing, listening to the rapidly approaching car, wondering if I should get off my bike and run, but even as I was thinking about it, I heard a squeal of tyres and I saw the Nissan pulling up at the side of the road. Before I had a chance to do anything, the car doors opened and two figures got out.
One of them was a tough-looking kid, about sixteen years old, wearing a black hoodie and black trackpants. The other one was an absolute giant – well over six feet tall, with the body of a heavyweight boxer, shoulders like an ox, and a massive head that looked as if it was carved out of stone.
‘Hey, Travis,’ the tough-looking kid called out. ‘What are you doing, man?’
‘Bloody hell, Mason,’ I said, letting out a sigh of relief. ‘You nearly scared me to death.’
19
Most people probably wouldn’t think much of Mason Yusuf. They’d take one look at him and think – street kid, gang kid, hoodie, criminal. They’d assume he was just another council-estate kid, another uneducated teenager from another broken family, just another lost kid with no future and no hope. And in some ways, they’d be right. Mason is an estate kid. He was born and raised on the Slade, he’s lived there all his life, he grew up with the gang kids who run the estate. He knows them, hangs around with them, he is one of them. And although I’ve never witnessed him
breaking the law, I’d be very surprised if he hasn’t broken a few in his time. The way Mason sees it though, as he explained to me once, is that if you live on the Slade, and you want to survive, the only law that matters is the law of the estate. ‘And our laws aren’t always compatible with yours,’ I remember him telling me, with a roguish grin.
But whatever the rights and wrongs of his way of life, there’s a lot more to Mason than meets the eye. A whole lot more.
I first got to know him about a year ago after an incident with his younger sister Jaydie. I didn’t actually know Jaydie at the time, I’d just met her one day when I was riding my bike across this little park near the Beacon Fields estate. She was riding her bike across the park too, but she’d run into a gang of kids who’d blocked her way and wouldn’t let her pass. I don’t think they meant any serious harm, they were just ‘having a bit of fun’ with her – calling her names, teasing her, just messing around really. But she was only eleven at the time, and she was on her own, and there were at least half a dozen of them, and they were all about fourteen or fifteen. It wasn’t right. I knew I had to do something to help her. So I just rode up to them and told them to leave her alone. And they did. Because now they had me to pick on. And because I was a bit older than Jaydie, and I wasn’t a girl, they didn’t have to hold back with me. And they didn’t.
I managed to fight them off long enough for Jaydie to get away, and as far as I can remember I put at least two of them down, but I was never going to beat them all. There were just too many of them. Within a few minutes they had me on the ground and were giving me a pretty good kicking. The last thing I remember is looking up at a circle of grinning faces, wondering how much this was going to hurt, and then – BOOM! – my head exploded and everything went black.
I wasn’t too badly hurt, no broken bones or anything, and after a couple of days I was up and about again. I don’t know how Mason found out who I was, but on the day I went back to school after the beating, he was waiting for me at the school gates at the end of the day.
‘Travis Delaney?’ he said.