If You Were Me (11 page)

‘You don't have to go on helping me,' I said.

He swung round. ‘We're going to sort this, Aliya. You and me. All right? Whatever it takes.' He said it fiercely but as he turned away I saw his lip tremble.

‘Thank you,' I whispered. He walked on, head down, his hands stuffed in his pockets. We were supposed to be
looking for the wall in the photo but I was too deep in my thoughts to see anything, too busy trying to find one single thread of sense in the tangled knot of horrors in my head.

‘Aliya!' The boy was calling me. I jerked my head up. He was walking faster, breaking into a run, dodging and swerving through the beeping cars, shouting at me to hurry up. He leapt on to the opposite pavement and kept running as if he was chasing someone, not looking back or slowing down. I speeded up but my legs felt wobbly and I couldn't catch him until he stopped at a crossroads and bent double with his hands on his knees.

‘Why did you run?' I gasped.

He was red-faced and panting, trying to catch his breath. He pointed down a street of red-brick terraced houses that looked identical to all the others we'd passed. ‘Let's try down there.'

‘Why?'

‘Some girl at the station thought the wall in the photo might be –' his eyes flicked to the big white building behind me – ‘down the road near that church, St . . . Olaf's, but she couldn't remember the name of the street.'

The flutter was back beneath my ribs. It could have been unease, it could have been my heart beating too fast from so much running, or it could have been the continuing shock at the death of Captain Merrick. ‘All right.'

I followed him to the end of the street and as we turned down another side road the houses gave way to empty
ground littered with rubbish. Beyond that rose big metal buildings surrounded by high wire-mesh fences.

‘What is this place?' I said.

‘Looks like some kind of industrial estate.'

It was as big as a small town, full of criss-crossing roads and factories pumping tendrils of white smoke into the air, vast yards tangled with broken car parts, dusty machines, bags of cement and wooden pallets. The boy seemed unsure where to go. He glanced up and down, his eyes fixed on the passing trucks. Without warning, he started to move again. I followed him, trying not to breathe in the rancid smell that came and went with the breeze.

I heard him gasp. I looked up. A man in green overalls was crossing the road up ahead. For a second I couldn't work out why the boy had tensed. Then I saw the man's white rubber boots, just like the ones Cement Face had been wearing in Behrouz's photos. The man disappeared into the traffic. The boy started to run again. I tried to think as I pounded the pavement behind him, tried to work out what we should do if we actually saw Cement Face. We turned the corner into a section where the buildings were older, tucked behind high brick walls topped with black metal spikes. The boy had guessed right. He was good at guessing. This wall was just like the one in the photograph and so were the signs dotted along the top. There'd only been a corner of one in the photo, red and shiny, but now we could see they had ‘Hardel Intercontinental Meats Ltd' printed across them in bright-yellow
letters: a factory where they butchered and packed meat. That explained the stench, thick and fatty like something you could cut. There was a wide entrance gate about halfway down, choked with vans coming in and out. As we followed the wall around, the rancid smell grew stronger and the fear pressing down on my heart got heavier.

DAN

 

 

 

I
'd nearly ripped my lungs out running after that red van. Maybe it was the shock of discovering Behrouz's mate Merrick was dead. Maybe it was realizing the power and reach of these thugs that Dad had got himself mixed up with. Either way, I'd been in a sick, angry daze and hadn't noticed the name Hardel Intercontinental Meats Ltd down the side of the van till the lights had gone green and it was pulling away. Then it had clicked: ‘—tal Meats Ltd' – that's what you'd see if half the letters were cut off by a pile of stolen washing machines. So I'd run like hell to find out where it was going and managed to follow a couple more Hardel's vans right up to the gates. I felt like death, but it had been worth it. I'd found the place where Cement Face worked and now I had a
chance to find out his name. I pulled Aliya back around the corner.

‘I'll go on my own, check the place out. Give me an Afghan man's name, quick, anything.'

‘Dost . . . I don't know . . . Sajadi.'

‘Give me one of those pictures of Cement Face.'

She got one out of her backpack. I scribbled the address of Hardel Meats along the bottom and walked back along the wall, repeating the name Dost Sajadi in my head. A couple of security guards stood at the gate, checking passes, sharing jokes with the van drivers, waving them through with their clipboards. I held back, trying to see inside, while I waited for a lull in the traffic. Workers in hats, blood-smeared overalls and rubber boots criss-crossed the yard, trundling trolleys past a couple of men who were directing the trucks down to a huge metal hangar right at the back. There were big signs everywhere – ‘Zone A', ‘Zone B', ‘No Turning', ‘Smoking Strictly Forbidden'. I studied the guards' faces. There wasn't much in it, but I went for the friendlier-looking of the two, held out the photo and took a long breath.

‘Um . . . 'scuse me. I . . . I'm looking for this man. I think he works here.'

He glared at me. ‘What makes you think that?'

I pointed to the Hardel's address at the bottom.

‘Why d'you want him?'

My voice sounded thin and squeaky as I gave him the story I'd hurriedly cobbled together. ‘I found a wallet with
this photo and a load of cash in it. If it's his, I figured he'd want it back.'

The guard looked sceptical. ‘Let's see the wallet.'

‘My mum's handing it in to the cops, but I was hoping if I tracked him down, he might give me a reward.'

He seemed to buy that. Big black lies, little white ones, grubby grey ones – I was getting good at all of them. Just like my dad.

‘Leave us your name and number and I'll get him to call you,' he said.

My stomach tightened. He'd as good as told me Cement Face worked there. He handed me his clipboard. I wrote down a made-up name and number.

‘Do you know what time he'll be leaving?'

‘He does earlies, so he'll finish at four.' He broke off to wave a van through.

‘There was ID in the wallet,' I said, doing my best to sound casual. ‘Name of Dost Sajadi. That him?'

‘Dost? Nah, he's Tewfiq something or other.'

He called to the other guard. ‘Hey, Terry, what's Tewfiq's surname?'

The other guard thought about it for a couple of seconds and called out, ‘Hamidi.'

‘Oh, right,' I said. ‘Maybe the wallet's not his, then.'

He wasn't even listening. I headed back to Aliya, feeling pretty pleased with myself. ‘He definitely works there. His name's Tewfiq Hamidi. That name mean anything to you?'

‘No.'

‘Let's wait for him to come out, then we'll follow him. He'll be knocking off around four.'

‘Knocking off? That means to kill someone.'

‘That's when you knock someone off. Knocking off means leaving for the day. Going home.'

Shivering, she looked at her watch and wrapped her arms around her chest. ‘We must wait for forty minutes.'

‘Let's get a sandwich and come back.'

She chewed her cuff and stared at the ground. ‘I am not hungry.'

She was lying. I could tell.

‘It's on me,' I said. ‘I got thirty quid for helping Dad at Meadowview.' Thirty quid I wish I'd never earned.

She said solemnly, ‘I promise that whatever happens, I will one day pay you back this money.'

I forced a smile. ‘OK. I'll hold you to that. Meanwhile, what do you want in your sandwich?'

We got cheese rolls, crisps and cups of tea from the stand in the car park opposite. It wasn't much more than a wooden shed with a drop-down hatch on the side but it was doing a good trade, catering to anyone who fancied a snack and wasn't put off by the stink from the meatpacking plant. The man who served us said that after a while you got used to it. I couldn't see how.

My phone rang while we were eating. I nearly choked on my roll when I saw Dad's name on the screen and I couldn't believe it when he told me that that nosy cow
Eileen Deakin across the road had called him at work to tell him she'd seen me bringing my girlfriend back to the house.

‘I don't want you having girls round when there's no one there. It's not right, Dan. Do you hear me? Anything could be going on, and Eileen says she was foreign.'

It was like a sick joke. Jez's mum and my dad telling me what was right and what was wrong. I was so angry I cut the connection and pretended I'd lost the signal.

I chucked the rest of my roll away and we wandered off among the cars, trying to work out exactly where Behrouz had been parked when he took his photos. Not in the car park, that was for sure. We followed the road round to a disused warehouse and spotted the side door of Hardel's bang opposite. There were even a couple of men in wellies standing beside it, lighting up. It was obviously where all the smokers went for a fag. Aliya had gone quiet again, her face screwed up, concentrating, thinking something through. ‘To knock off is to stop work,' she said, suddenly.

‘Yeah.'

‘So what does “those DVDs are knock-off” mean?'

‘What?'

‘I heard someone say it once in the market.'

‘Oh. Right. It means they're stolen.'

‘But “he knocked his cup off the table” means he hit it and it fell?'

‘Yeah.'

‘It would be better to use different words.'

‘S'pose.'

It was getting on for four o'clock by then so we walked back towards the main gate and slipped behind a row of cars in the car park, watching the early shift come straggling out, looking none too happy about life. I scanned their faces, worried we'd miss Cement Face in the crowd.

‘Over there.' Aliya nudged me and looked away. I held up my phone, zoomed in on the tall stooping figure and caught his face full frame: the lumpy pockmarked skin, the hooded eyes, the mean mouth that had twisted into a smile when he'd said he was going to make Behrouz famous. It felt like the pavement was giving way. For a second I prayed it would swallow me up. It was definitely him. On his own, walking fast, towering over the rest of the workers. His head jerked around. Trying to keep my hand steady, I panned the phone to see what he was looking at. The security guard was calling him over. Cement Face didn't like it, but he went anyway, looking surly. The guard was rifling through the sheets on his clipboard. He tore something off. Jesus. It had to be the fake name and number I'd left. The guard leant forward, telling him something. When he held his flattened hand up level with his chin, I knew he was giving him a description of me.

As I ducked behind a green Mondeo, Cement Face glanced round, scouring the street for a thin boy, medium height, brown hair, wearing jeans and a grey hoodie,
before he walked off, stuffing the strip of paper into his pocket. I tore off the hoodie and kicked it under the Mondeo.

Aliya stepped back. ‘What are you doing?'

‘That guard just told him what I look like. Give us your cap.'

She bent her head and took off the baseball cap. We'd found Cement Face, adrenaline had kicked in, and I should have been concentrating on our next move. Instead I was looking at the curve of her neck and the way her silky hair tumbled free as she lifted her head. I rammed the cap on my head and slipped my arm around her shoulder. She spun round in horror and shook it off. ‘What are you doing?' she hissed.

‘He thinks I'm on my own, so act like we're together. Cap, no hoodie, girlfriend – it's part of the disguise.'

‘Oh.' She set off, walking beside me, stiff and awkward as a zombie.

‘Relax,' I whispered. ‘Act normal.'

‘I can't. For me this is not normal.'

It wasn't normal for me either, but I wasn't going to tell her that. ‘You've got to pretend. If he turns round, put your face close to mine so he can't see what either of us looks like.'

We merged into the stream of workers crowding the pavement, hoping Cement Face wasn't about to jump in a car and drive off. He headed for the bus stop and made a call while he waited. I stood with my back to him,
keeping well out of his eye line. Aliya, who'd been peering over my shoulder, suddenly jerked her head back and looked up at me. ‘He just turned round,' she whispered.

Close up, there was a weird mix of dark and light in her eyes, as if someone had splashed green ink in a glass of water and swirled it around. And they were nervous, like a lost dog's, watching everything, taking it in, trying to survive. I wanted to tell her I was sure we'd find the truth, that Behrouz would be all right and her family wouldn't get sent back to Afghanistan. Only it would have been another lie. I wasn't sure of anything.

We stood like that till the bus came, cold, uncomfortable and embarrassed. When Hamidi went upstairs, we stayed on the lower deck, ready to get off when he did without it looking too obvious. We'd been travelling for nearly forty minutes through parts of London I'd never seen before when he finally thudded down the stairs and pushed past us. The bus stopped. The doors swung open and he jumped off. Aliya made a move towards the exit. I held her back, waiting till the very last moment before I pulled her on to the pavement. By then Tewfiq Hamidi was about fifty metres ahead of us and we stayed right back as he turned down a dingy lane, trailed past a terrace of scruffy little houses that backed on to a railway line, crossed the road and disappeared down the driveway of a corner plot that was almost hidden behind a thick jungle of shrubs and trees.

We broke into a run, squeezed through a gap in the
rotting fence and crept through the undergrowth just in time to catch him going into a scabby pebble-dash house, standing on its own in the middle of an overgrown garden. It had a peeling, dung-coloured door and filthy windows half covered with some kind of creeper that crawled across the front to a crumbling garage stuck on one side. The whole place looked totally abandoned until you noticed a tiny sliver of light seeping through a rip in the upstairs curtains.

‘What do we do now?' Aliya whispered.

‘We wait,' I said.