The Ultimate Truth

by Kevin Brooks

  You can’t stop yourself thinking about something that means everything to you, can you? And if you can’t stop thinking about it, you can’t just close your eyes and go to sleep, no matter how exhausted you are. You have to keep going. Whether you like it or not, you just have to do whatever’s necessary . . .

  Was that what Nan had meant?

  Probably not.

  To be honest, I wasn’t sure what anything meant any more.

  It was two o’clock in the afternoon. I’d had about an hour’s sleep the night before, and I’d been whizzing around doing all kinds of crazy stuff since six o’clock this morning. My legs were tired, my arms were sunburnt, my head was throbbing like a pneumatic drill.

  How was I supposed to know what to do about anything?

  How was I supposed to know?

  Why couldn’t I just accept that Grandad was right? Why couldn’t I just forget about Bashir Kamal? Of course I’d like to help him, but if helping him meant putting Nan and Grandad in serious danger, why should I take that risk? I didn’t know Bashir, did I? I’d never even met him. So why did it seem to matter so much what happened to him? Why did it seem to mean everything to me?

  It was only after I’d thought about that for a while that the ultimate truth finally dawned on me: Bashir Kamal didn’t mean everything to me. Of course he didn’t. He only seemed to. It was Mum and Dad who meant everything to me. They were everything. Everything I’d been doing, everything I’d been trying to do, was all for them. For their lives and for their deaths. That was it.

  There wasn’t anything else.

  My mum and dad were everything.

  I sat up, rubbed the back of my head, and looked around for my laptop. It was on the bedside table. I reached over and picked it up, turned it on, and logged on to the Internet. I knew what it was that I’d missed now. That nagging feeling I’d had that I’d missed something Winston had said, something really important . . .

  I knew what it was.

  At least, I thought I did.

  It was something that wasn’t there.

  I opened Google and went looking for it.

  The trouble with looking for something that isn’t there is knowing how to tell if you’ve found it or not. You can keep looking for it in different places, keep finding it’s not there, but how do you know it’s not somewhere else? How many different places do you have to check before you can be 100 per cent sure it’s not anywhere?

  The answer, I suppose, is that you can never be 100 per cent sure.

  You can’t keep looking for ever.

  But you can keep looking until you’re 99 per cent sure.

  It took me just over an hour.

  And then, at last, I knew what I had to do. I had to go back to the warehouse. I wished there was another way, but there wasn’t. I had to go back to the warehouse, and I had to do it tonight.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon working out a plan of action. There was a lot to think about and a lot to be done, and I didn’t have very much time. It was almost three thirty now. The sun would start going down in around five hours’ time, and by nine thirty it would be dark. I had six hours to get everything ready.

  First of all, I checked out the warehouse again on my laptop. Using a combination of Google Earth and Street View, I studied the whole area as thoroughly as possible – the surrounding fields, the pathway, the car park, the geography of the streets around Sowton Lane. The views weren’t completely up to date, of course, but they showed me what I needed to know.

  The next thing I had to work out was how to contact Mason Yusuf without anyone finding out. I didn’t know for sure if our landline was being tapped (by the CIA, MI5, and/or Omega), but I got the feeling from Grandad that it probably was. Why else would he have used the telephone box when he’d called his contact the other day? As he’d also been reluctant to use my mobile, I had to assume that he didn’t think that was safe either.

  I went over to the window and looked down the street. The white van was still there, still in the same place. I wondered briefly if the CIA agents inside were the same ones I’d encountered at my house. Special Agents Zanetti and Gough, the giant-sized man I’d kicked where it hurts . . .

  Probably not, I thought, turning away from the window and going back over to my bed. Not that it mattered. Whoever was in there, they’d see me if I tried to use the telephone box. They might even be monitoring it anyway.

  Which left me a choice of either texting Mason or emailing him.

  I knew that emails and texts can be traced quite easily once they’ve been sent, but I was less sure about whether they can be monitored while they’re being sent. I guessed it wasn’t impossible though. There are all kinds of ways of hacking into email accounts and mobile phones – viruses, malware, Trojan horses – and I knew it wasn’t beyond the CIA or MI5 to have somehow gained access to my phone. If they could do it, so could Omega.

  But what other choice did I have? I definitely couldn’t phone Mason, and I didn’t haven’t time to go round and see him. So if I wanted to get in touch with him, I had to either text him or email him.

  I thought about it for a while, trying to weigh up the pros and cons of both options, but there were so many unknown factors to consider that it was really hard to make a rational decision. So in the end I just went with my gut-feeling instead.

  Text.

  I took out my phone, found Mason’s number, and got started.

  It was a long and laborious process. First of all I had to explain the whole situation to Mason, tell him what I was planning to do, and ask him if he was willing to help me. Then after he’d texted back – no prob. wot u wnt me 2 do? – I had to spell out exactly what I wanted him to do. Then I had to wait while he made some phone calls, and after that we had to figure out how to do what we were planning to do . . .

  I’d never texted so much in my life.

  Finally, at 5.49 p.m., Mason’s last message came through:

  got 25ish def and 10or12 more poss ok?

  I replied:

  brilliant! cu at 10.

  Then all I had to do was wait.

  44

  I’m not bad at waiting. I once sat in a parked car with Dad for three hours, just waiting for a man (who was falsely claiming compensation for a serious leg injury) to come out of his house and go jogging. On another occasion I spent nearly four hours on a park bench with Mum, just waiting to get a photograph of a recently sacked gardener who (the town council suspected) had been stealing koi carp from their ornamental pond.

  So it’s not as if I don’t have any experience of ‘just waiting’.

  But that night it was almost too much to bear. As the early evening crawled into the summer dusk, and I waited for the sun to go down, the time seemed to pass so incredibly slowly that every minute felt like an hour. I looked at my watch so often that the exact timing of everything that happened is still seared into my memory.

  6.32 p.m. I suddenly remembered that I’d arranged to meet Courtney in the office that morning, and that unless she’d called here and spoken to Nan or Grandad, she wouldn’t know why I hadn’t shown up.

  I wondered if I should text her to apologise and explain.

  And then I started wondering if I should let her know what I was planning to do with Mason, maybe even ask her to come along with us. I was pretty sure she’d like to be involved – or, at least, part of her would – and there was no question she’d be an enormous help. I just wasn’t sure whether I could trust her or not. It wasn’t that I doubted her loyalty. I knew she’d do almost anything for me. But I also knew that she felt responsible for me. So although the crazy-and-adventurous Courtney would love the idea of what I was about to do, the grown-up-and-responsible Courtney would quickly realise there was no way she could let me do it. If I told her what I was planning, she’d try to persuade me to change my mind, and then – having failed – she’d reluctantly call Grandad and tell him everything.

  And that would be the end of it.

 
I couldn’t let that happen.

  6.56 p.m. Nan came upstairs to see how I was doing. I told her I was fine.

  ‘Do you want anything to eat?’ she asked me. ‘We’re just going to have sandwiches, but I don’t mind cooking something if you’re hungry.’

  ‘I’m a bit tired, Nan,’ I said. ‘I think I’ll just get some sleep, if that’s OK.’

  ‘Of course it is. Do you want me to make you some cocoa?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘All right,’ she said, smiling. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it then.’

  7.02 p.m. I opened my laptop and started a game of chess.

  But my heart wasn’t really in it.

  And neither was my brain.

  Five minutes later, the game was over.

  Checkmate in ten moves.

  7.44 p.m. I went to the bathroom. As quietly as possible, I opened the window, leaned out, and double-checked the drainpipe. Could I reach it from here? Check. Did it go all the way down to the ground? Check. Was it sturdy enough to take my weight? Just about, I guessed . . . although it didn’t look quite as secure as I’d thought.

  Don’t worry about it, I told myself, closing the window. You’ll be all right.

  I flushed the toilet, ran the hot tap for a while, then left.

  As I was heading back along the landing, I heard Granny Nora calling out to me from her room.

  ‘Travis? Is that you?’

  For a second I was tempted to ignore her. Just pretend I hadn’t heard her, go back to my room, and shut the door. But I knew I wasn’t going to do that. I couldn’t. It was Granny Nora . . . I couldn’t ignore Granny Nora.

  ‘Travis?’ she called out again.

  I paused for a moment, let out a sigh, then opened her door and went inside.

  45

  When Granny Nora’s arthritis had started getting really bad, Grandad had fixed up the house to make things as easy as possible for her. He’d put in an en-suite bathroom so she didn’t have to keep shuffling along the landing to the toilet, and although he’d rigged up a stairlift for her too, so she could still get downstairs even when her arthritis was really playing up, he’d also built a little kitchen area into her room, with a microwave and a mini-fridge and stuff, so she didn’t have to come downstairs to eat if she didn’t want to. Basically, her room was fitted out like a self-contained flat.

  She was in her usual position when I went in that evening – sitting in her ancient armchair by the window. Her laptop and her mobile phone were in easy reach on the table beside her, together with a pile of crime novels, a packet of biscuits, and her iPod. A paperback book was resting in her lap, and her binoculars were on the windowsill. Granny Nora likes to know what’s going on, and when she’s not reading or listening to music or surfing the web, she’s quite happy just sitting by the window watching the world through her binoculars.

  ‘Hey, Granny,’ I said, going over to her.

  ‘What?’ she replied, cupping her hand to her ear.

  ‘Turn your hearing aid on,’ I told her, tapping my ear.

  ‘Oh, right,’ she said, grinning as she fiddled with her hearing-aid controls. ‘Silly me. I forgot again.’

  ‘It’s funny how you keep “forgetting” to turn on your hearing aid, but you never seem to forget anything else.’

  ‘What?’ she said, cupping her ear again.

  ‘I said it’s funny—’

  She grinned again, and I realised she’d got me.

  ‘Yeah, good one, Gran,’ I said, smiling at her.

  ‘I might be old and decrepit,’ she said, ‘but I’m still too quick for you.’

  I’ve always loved the sound of Granny Nora’s voice. She was born and raised in Dublin, and there’s something kind of comforting about her strong Irish accent, something that never fails to lift my spirits. Even when she’s moaning about things, which she does a lot – cursing about this, griping about that, effing and blinding about her ‘stupid bloody arthritis’ – I still love listening to her. She knows more rude words than anyone I’ve ever met. And unlike most adults, she doesn’t stop using them when I’m around. ‘They’re only words, for goodness sake,’ she’d told Mum once (although she’d used a slightly stronger word than ‘goodness’). ‘The boy’s not a baby, is he?’ she’d added. ‘He’s going to hear a lot worse in his time. He might as well get used to it.’

  The memory of Mum trying to stifle a laugh at this brought a smile to my face. Mum and Granny Nora had always been really close, and although Gran was my dad’s grandmother – and they didn’t actually look anything like each other – there’d always been something about Gran that reminded me of Mum.

  I looked at Granny now, trying to see my mum in her, but all I could see was something my mum would never be: an old woman. My mum would never be an old woman. She’d never be a nan or a granny. She’d always be thirty-seven years old.

  If that wasn’t unfair, I didn’t know what was.

  ‘Sit down, Travis,’ Granny said gently. ‘Talk to me for a while.’

  I hesitated, not sure what to say. I loved being with Granny, but I didn’t really feel like talking right now.

  ‘Just sit with me for five minutes then,’ she said, as if she could read my mind. ‘I’m not that boring, am I?’

  ‘You’re never boring, Gran,’ I told her, settling down in a cushioned wicker chair on the other side of the window. ‘You might be really annoying sometimes, but you’re definitely not boring.’

  ‘Well, that’s good to know,’ she said.

  ‘How are you feeling today?’

  ‘You don’t want to know how I’m feeling.’

  ‘I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.’

  ‘Yes, you would. You’re just being polite.’

  I sighed, shaking my head. ‘You wanted me to talk to you, Gran. That’s all I’m trying to do.’

  ‘I know,’ she said softly. ‘I’m sorry . . . I didn’t mean anything.’ She grinned. ‘My default setting seems to be “grumpy old woman” these days. I don’t even know I’m doing it most of the time. Just ignore me when I’m like that, OK?’

  I didn’t say anything. I just stared out of the window, pretending to concentrate on something outside.

  ‘Travis?’ she said. ‘Did you hear me?’

  ‘Sorry, Gran,’ I said, turning round. ‘I was ignoring you. What did you say?’

  She nodded, smiling, and pointed a bony finger at me. ‘That’s one-all, I believe.’

  It was nice having a joke with Gran, and just for a moment everything felt OK again, but we both knew it wasn’t. As the moment faded, our smiles faded with it.

  ‘Listen, Travis,’ Granny said quietly, her eyes suddenly gentle and caring. ‘There’s nothing I can say to ease your pain, and I know you probably don’t want to talk about it anyway. But if you do ever want to talk about it, or if you just want to talk about anything . . . well, you know I’m always here for you, don’t you?’

  I nodded.

  ‘If you don’t feel like talking,’ she continued, ‘you can always just come in here and sit with me if you want. And if you don’t want to, if you want to be on your own, that’s fine as well.’ She leaned forward in her chair and looked into my eyes. ‘At times like this, Travis, you just have to do whatever feels right for you.’

  I looked at her. ‘But what if it only feels right to me? I mean, what if I feel that I have to do something that everyone else thinks is wrong?’

  ‘Do you care what everyone else thinks?’

  ‘I care what Nan and Grandad think. And you, of course.’

  ‘Ah, I see,’ she said, nodding thoughtfully. ‘Well, that’s different, isn’t it? That puts you in a bit of a tricky position . . .’ She leaned back in her chair, her brow furrowed in thought, and I wondered then how much she knew about everything. Had Nan or Grandad told her what was going on? Had she worked it all out herself? Did she know a lot more than she was letting on?

  ‘I can’t tell you what to do, Travis,’ she said. ‘You kn
ow that, don’t you?’

  I nodded.

  She smiled. ‘I remember saying the very same thing to your grandad when he was a boy.’ She gazed out of the window, her eyes lost in the memory. ‘Joseph had just turned sixteen when he told me he was leaving home to join the army. He knew I didn’t want him to, and I knew it pained him to go against my will. But for some reason – which I still don’t understand – he was absolutely convinced it was the right thing to do. As far as he was concerned, he just had to join the army.’ She sighed. ‘He’d prefer to leave with my blessing, he told me, but in the end he was going whether I liked it or not.’

  ‘What did you do?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said emptily. ‘What could I do? I wasn’t going to lie to him and tell him he had my blessing, because he didn’t. I despised the idea of him being a soldier. But I couldn’t stop him. I couldn’t lock him up, could I? All I could do was . . .’ She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t do anything. I just had to let him go.’

  ‘Do you still wish he hadn’t joined the army?’

  She looked at me for a moment or two, then said, ‘There’s never any point in wishing things were different. Things are what they are. Good or bad, right or wrong. You can’t change the past, Travis. You just have to live with it.’

  46

  At 9.15, as the sun finally dipped below the horizon, I made one last adjustment to the pillows I’d stuffed under my duvet, then I went over to the bedroom door and studied my handiwork from there. I’d never actually seen myself asleep in bed, so it was hard to know whether the body-shaped lump I’d constructed under the duvet would fool Nan and Grandad or not. It obviously wouldn’t stand up to close inspection, but if you were standing in the doorway, and you didn’t turn on the light . . . well, it might just do the trick.

  I nodded to myself.

  It would have to do.

  I picked up my trainers, opened the door, and paused, listening. The TV was on in the sitting room, and I could just make out the muffled sound of Nan’s voice as she asked Grandad something . . . and a moment later he grunted something in reply . . . and then they were both quiet again.