The Ultimate Truth (19 page)

‘All right?’ Winston asked me.

‘Yeah . . .’ I muttered. ‘Yeah, thanks . . . but how—’

‘We’re very resourceful,’ Winston said.

The gaunt-faced man had reached the BMW now and was just standing there on the pavement with my bike, waiting patiently.

‘Off you go then,’ Winston said.

I looked at him.

He smiled. ‘It’s been nice talking to you, Travis.’

I opened the car door and started to get out.

‘Don’t forget what I said,’ I heard Winston say.

I paused, glancing back at him.

‘Twenty-four hours,’ he said, looking into my eyes. ‘OK?’

I held his gaze for a second or two, and then I looked down and nodded in the direction of his left wrist. ‘You need to tighten your watch strap,’ I told him. ‘It looks a bit
loose to me.’

I watched as he looked down at his wrist, and I saw the flicker of surprise in his eyes as he noticed that his Omega tattoo was showing. As he turned back to me with a questioning look, I got
out of the car and closed the door.

I wasn’t entirely sure where I was going when I got on my bike and set off along the pavement. All I knew for certain was that I wanted to be somewhere where the Omega
men couldn’t see what I was doing. So rather than carrying on in the direction we’d been travelling, which would have made it quite simple for them to keep track of me, I headed off in
the opposite direction, back the way we’d come.

That’s why I passed the black Mercedes van.

And that’s when I noticed the dent in its bodywork.

I wasn’t even aware that I’d noticed it at first. I was concentrating on where I was going, scanning the layout of the roads and the roundabout up ahead, looking for any kind of
route that was too narrow for cars and vans. It was only when I’d passed the van, and spotted a little footpath that led down into a pedestrian subway, that I suddenly realised what I’d
just seen.

A dent over the front-left wheel arch of the Mercedes van.

It wasn’t a massive dent or anything, and there was nothing particularly remarkable about it, and for a moment or two I had no idea why I was even thinking about it. It was the kind of
minor crash damage you see on cars and vans every day. A dent in the bodywork, crumpled metal, scratched paint . . .

And then it suddenly dawned on me.

Crash damage . . .

Scratched paint . . .

I slammed on my brakes, skidded to a stop, and looked back at the bus stop. The van wasn’t there any more. Neither was the BMW. The bus stop was empty. I looked along the road, and I
thought I caught a glimpse of the black van in the distance, but it was so far away now that it didn’t matter whether I’d seen it or not.

Hoping the memory was still fresh in my mind, I quickly closed my eyes and tried to visualise the moment I’d passed the van and seen the dent over the wheel arch. It was really hard to
concentrate with the noise of the traffic filling the air all around me, but I did my best to block it from my mind and focus on what was inside my head. Eventually the image I was looking for came
back to me. The jagged-edged dent in the shiny black metal, about the size and depth of an upturned fruit bowl . . . scrapes in the paintwork, flashes of silver showing through . . . and there,
embedded in the crudely gashed metal . . .

Was I imagining it?

I held my breath and mentally zoomed in on what I thought I’d seen.

There wasn’t much of it, and it was hard to make out with any real clarity.

But I wasn’t imagining it.

There were definitely flecks of yellow paint embedded in the gouged-out metal.

Yellow.

The colour of Mum’s car.

After fifty yards, turn right . . .

It felt kind of weird listening to Dad’s sat nav while I was riding my bike. I couldn’t actually see the sat nav – I’d put it in the top pocket of my T-shirt – so I
didn’t have a map to guide me, just the disembodied voice of a slightly odd-sounding woman (who for some reason pronounced the word ‘roundabout’ as
‘roun-t’pout’).

After one hundred yards, enter the roun-t’pout then take the second exit . . .

It also felt weird because I kept having this stupid idea that when the navigation satellites that the sat nav used realised I was riding a bike and not driving a car, they were going to
instruct the sat nav lady to tell me off for misusing their services –
at the next lay-by, dismount from your bicycle and turn off the satellite navigation device, and DO NOT use it again
unless you’re driving a car.

I
knew
it was a stupid idea. It was
beyond
stupid.

But I just couldn’t get it out of my head.

Turn around if possible . . .

I wondered if my brain was making me think of stupid things in order to distract me from the things it didn’t want me to think about. The complicated things, the painful things, the things
that were too hard to think about . . .

Like Mum’s car.

And the yellow paint on the Mercedes van.

And the possibility that maybe, just maybe, the two were connected.

I knew it was highly unlikely. The colour of Mum’s Volvo may well have been quite distinctive, but that didn’t mean she was the only person in the country, or even the county, to own
a bright yellow car. There were probably thousands of bright yellow cars driving around, and any one of them could have been involved in a minor collision with the black Mercedes. The collision
could have happened months ago. For all I knew, the Mercedes might not have hit another car at all. The dent could have come from anything – a wall, a bollard, a fence . . .

Recalculate . . .

The truth was, there was virtually nothing at all to suggest that the black Mercedes had anything to do with the car crash that killed Mum and Dad.

Just a few tiny flecks of bright-yellow paint . . .

Plus the inescapable feeling that was still nagging away in the back of my mind, the feeling that I’d missed something Winston had said, something really important . . .

Your destination is nearby . . .

I stopped pedalling, pulled up at the side of the road, and glanced across at the street sign on the corner. SOWTON LANE, it said. The sat nav had done its job. I took it out of my pocket and
double-checked the address.

Sowton Lane, Barton BR10 6GG

The second-last address that Dad had keyed into his sat nav. I stared at the screen for a moment, imagining Dad entering the numbers and letters . . . then I turned off the sat
nav, put it back in my pocket, and gazed around. I’d been reasonably sure that one of the addresses in the sat nav was going to lead me to the warehouse that Dad had photographed, but
I’d had no way of knowing which one. The only reason I’d picked Sowton Lane first was that it was the next address on the list after Bashir’s. But as I looked around now at the
bleak industrial landscape, I felt fairly certain that I was in the right place. The street was situated on the outskirts of a busy industrial estate about three kilometres north of town. It
wasn’t completely deserted – I could see a few buildings with cars and vans parked outside – but most of the warehouses and small factories in the street were clearly no longer in
use. There was a feeling of disuse and emptiness in the air – litter rustling quietly in the street, weeds taking over the pavement, wild grasses growing tall in stretches of wasteground.

It was the perfect place to hide someone away.

Or lock someone away.

As I carried on looking around, I spotted an official-looking poster fixed to some railings at the side of the road. I went over for a closer look. It was a typed message on a sheet of A4 paper
in a clear plastic folder. The message read:

The list continued all the way up to 38 Sowton Lane, which I guessed covered every building in the street. I looked at the date again – 5 August – and now I
knew
that I was in the right place. The warehouse
was
here. It was due to be demolished, along with all the other properties in the street, on 5 August. That’s what the note on
the back of Dad’s surveillance photo referred to.

Demolition, 5 August.

And now, at long last, I knew what the other part of Dad’s note meant as well.

If the warehouse was being demolished on 5 August, the last day it could be used for anything was the 4th.

It felt so good to finally get a definite answer to something that for a few seconds I forgot about everything else. It didn’t take long for my sense of reality to return though, and I
soon realised that solving the riddle of Dad’s note didn’t actually help me all that much. I still didn’t really know anything.

I didn’t know if Omega had Bashir. And if they did have him, I didn’t know why. Maybe Winston had been telling me the truth, and Omega
were
just protecting him, defending his
safety and well-being. But maybe they weren’t. Maybe Winston was lying. And if he was lying about Bashir, maybe he was lying about everything else too.

Maybe this, maybe that . . .

I was letting myself get carried away.

I hadn’t even located the warehouse yet. Until I’d done that, and found out if Bashir was actually there or not, there was simply no point in thinking about anything else.

Shielding my eyes from the sun, I began scanning the road up ahead, studying the layout, trying to work out the probable location of the warehouse and the best way to approach it without being
seen.

I’d looked at Dad’s surveillance photograph so many times that I practically knew it off by heart, so it wasn’t too difficult to work out that the warehouse
had to be on the right-hand side of the street. The tall chimneys I could see in the distance over to my left would definitely have been visible in the photograph if the warehouse was on the
left-hand side of the street, and they weren’t.

The warehouse had to be on the right.

Which meant that Dad must have taken the pictures from somewhere on the left-hand side of the street. I thought about that for a while, wondering if he’d just parked opposite the warehouse
and taken the picture from his car, but that didn’t seem likely. The street was too deserted for that. A parked car around here would stick out like a sore thumb. So he must have left his car
somewhere else, somewhere nearby, and then . . .

And then what?
I asked myself.

How had he got near enough to the warehouse to take photographs without being seen? And where had he taken them from? I gazed over at the buildings on the left-hand side of the street again,
wondering if he’d used them as cover . . . and that’s when I saw the pathway. A narrow dirt track, with buckled mesh fencing on either side, it ran all the way along the backs of the
buildings. From what I could see, it offered a fairly good view of the buildings across the street.

It wasn’t hard to find the entrance to the pathway, and once I’d started wheeling my bike along it, I was pretty sure that this was the way Dad must have come. Although the view
across the street was partially blocked by the buildings to my right, there were plenty of gaps to see through, so I was pretty sure I’d be able see the warehouse when I came to it. At the
same time I was reasonably certain there was enough cover to see across the street without being seen.

I walked slowly, my head turned to the right, my eyes fixed on the buildings across the road.

It was a strange feeling, knowing that I was quite literally following in Dad’s footsteps. My feet were stepping on the very same ground he’d stepped on – the same packed dirt,
the same sun-baked grass, the same powdery dust. I was seeing the same things he’d seen, smelling the same smells, taking up the same space. It was a good feeling, in a way. It made me feel
very close to him. But it also brought home to me the emptiness of the spaces he’d left behind . . . the spaces where he’d once been.

Him and Mum . . .

Empty spaces.

God, it hurt.

I stopped walking then. Stopped, blinked, and slowly backed up. I’d seen something. At least, my eyes had seen something. My mind had been somewhere else for a while. But now it was back.
And now I knew what I was looking at. Directly in front of me, immediately to the right of the path, was an abandoned car-repair place. There were piles of tyres all over the place, a couple of
ramshackle workshops, a rusty old car chassis propped up on bricks. The two workshop buildings were quite close together. A rubbish-strewn alleyway ran between them, with a low wooden fence at the
far end, providing a tunnel-like view of the other side of the street. It was through this tunnel that I’d seen a flash of grey brick wall and a blur of wire-mesh fencing.

As I peered through the tunnel, there was no doubt in my mind that I was looking at the warehouse from the photograph. I could still only see a narrow strip of it, but that was more than enough.
I’d know that grey brick wall anywhere. I closed my eyes for a second, picturing the photograph again, just to make sure. When I opened my eyes and looked over at the car-repair place, I not
only knew that I was in the right place, I knew exactly where Dad had taken the photograph from.