The Ultimate Truth (2 page)

The two weeks between the car crash and the funeral were the longest two weeks of my life. The days passed by in a haze of confusion and emptiness. I didn’t understand
anything. I didn’t know what to do, what to think, what to feel. At first I simply couldn’t believe that Mum and Dad were dead. I couldn’t comprehend it. How could they be dead?
They were my mum and dad . . . they
couldn’t
be dead. I kept thinking that it had to be some kind of huge mistake. It wasn’t my mum’s car that had crashed, it was someone
else’s car . . . the same make as Mum’s, the same model, the same colour. The people who’d died in the crash weren’t Mum and Dad, they were two other people, a man and a
woman who looked just like Mum and Dad . . .

But I knew I was just kidding myself.

It wasn’t a mistake.

Grandad had identified the bodies.

I was living at Nan and Grandad’s house now. I’d gone a bit crazy the day after the car crash, insisting that I wanted to go home, I wanted to go back to
my
house, I wanted to
be there in case Mum and Dad came back. It was hard for Nan and Grandad, of course. They couldn’t let me go home on my own. I was thirteen years old, my parents had just died. They had to
look after me. I knew that. I knew I was acting irrationally and making everything really awkward for them, but I couldn’t help it. My craziness didn’t last very long though, and once
I’d calmed down and apologised, we all just tried to get on with things as best as we could.

Grandad made a trip back to my house to pick up some of my stuff – clothes, my bike, my laptop, a few other bits and pieces – and although I really missed my own house, my own room,
I’d spent so much time at Nan and Grandad’s over the years that it kind of felt like my second home anyway. Their house wasn’t far from ours. We live – or we used to live
– in a place called Kell Cross, a village on the outskirts of Barton, and Nan and Grandad live about two kilometres away on Long Barton Road, the main road between Kell Cross and Barton.

Their house was a nice old place, and I’d always felt really comfortable there. There were three bedrooms upstairs. One was Nan and Grandad’s, one was the room I always stayed in,
and the third one was Granny Nora’s room. She’s my great-grandmother, Grandad’s mum. She’s eighty-six now, and she doesn’t get out much any more. She has chronic
arthritis, bad legs, bad hips. On good days she can just about walk with the aid of a stick, but when her arthritis is really bad she can only get about in a wheelchair. She’s deaf in one ear
too, and the other ear’s getting worse all the time. Her mind though – and her attitude – is as sharp as a pin.

I spent a lot of time thinking about things during those endless two weeks. There wasn’t much else to do. I didn’t want to go anywhere or talk to anyone – friends, kids from
school – I didn’t want to do anything. What was the point? So I just kind of hung around most of the time. In my room, in the sitting room downstairs, sometimes out in the garden.

I don’t think I meant to start asking myself questions about the car crash. It was just that I had nothing else to do, and the only other questions in my mind were too heartbreaking. Why
did my mum and dad have to die? Why them? They were the best people in the world. Why did
they
have to die?

There were no answers to those questions.

So I found myself asking others.

How did the crash happen? If there were no other vehicles involved, and driving conditions were fine, and there was nothing wrong with the car, why had it come off the road? Mum and Dad were
excellent drivers. Because of their investigation work, they’d taken an advanced driving course, and they were very proud of their driving skills. They drove carefully, not too fast, not too
slow. They didn’t use their phones when they were driving. They didn’t take risks. So what had happened? Why had Mum lost control of the car at 65 mph and careered off the road into a
tree?

It didn’t make sense.

I also couldn’t understand why they were only ten kilometres from Barton when they crashed. They’d left the house at around five o’clock, and according to the police, the crash
had occurred just over an hour later, at five past six. It doesn’t take an hour to drive ten kilometres. So where had they been? And why hadn’t they driven directly to London?

Again, I couldn’t think of an answer.

Another thing I couldn’t work out was that if they were driving to London, why would they take a slip road off the A12? The A12 is the direct route from Barton to London. Unless
you’re going somewhere else, you don’t need to turn off it.

Questions . . .

I couldn’t stop asking them.

Over and over and over again.

Even though I knew the answers didn’t matter.

Whatever the answers were, Mum and Dad were never coming home.

Everything felt really strange after the funeral. It was as if we’d been waiting for ever for the day to come, and now that it had, and the funeral was over, there was
nothing left to wait for. There was just nothing left. The whole world felt empty and dull.

I was still troubled by the unanswered questions about the car crash, and since the day of the funeral I hadn’t been able to get the man with the hidden camera out of my mind either. Who
was he? Why was he secretly filming my parents’ funeral? Normally I would have gone to Grandad and asked him about it, and normally he would have welcomed me and done his best to help. He
probably would have come up with some answers too.

My grandad is a very experienced and very smart man. Before running Delaney & Co on his own for nearly ten years, he’d spent five years in the Royal Military Police and twelve years as
an officer in the Army Intelligence Corps. So he knows pretty much everything there is to know about investigation work. Unfortunately though, he’s always been prone to very dark moods, and
ever since the car crash he’d been suffering really badly – moping around all day, not sleeping, getting irritable, not wanting to talk to anyone.

‘He’ll get over it,’ Nan assured me when I asked her about him. ‘He always does. He’ll never get over the loss of Jack and Izzy, of course, none of us will.
We’ve lost our son and daughter-in-law, you’ve lost your mum and dad . . .’ She put her arms around me. ‘The thing you have to remember, Trav,’ she said gently,
‘is that you don’t
have
to get over it. It wouldn’t be right if you did. All you have to do is let your grief become part of you. Do you understand?’

‘I think so,’ I said.

She smiled sadly at me. ‘Don’t worry too much about Grandad. He’s a tough old boot. He won’t stay down in the dumps for ever. This has just hit him really hard,
that’s all. It’s brought back too many bad memories.’

Grandad saw some terrible things in the army, and he went through a lot of terrible things himself. He almost lost his life in a car-bomb explosion when he was stationed in Northern Ireland. It
put him in hospital for six months, and even now he still has bits of shrapnel left in his body. But I think it’s the memories that haunt him the most. He has nightmares sometimes, he wakes
up screaming. I’ve heard him.

So that’s why I didn’t ask him about the car crash or the man with the hidden camera. He was suffering too much. The last thing he needed was me pestering him with questions.

But that didn’t mean I had to stop pestering myself.

It wasn’t as if I had anything else to do.

School was finished for the summer now, and in the past I’d always spent the holidays helping out Mum and Dad at Delaney & Co. They’d never let me get involved with any serious
investigation work, but they’d always been happy to let me hang around the office, doing whatever I could. Filing, writing letters, basic enquiries on the Internet. Sometimes they’d let
me tag along with them on a routine surveillance case, an insurance fraud stake-out or something . . .

But that wasn’t going to happen this summer.

Two days after the funeral, I downloaded the photograph of the man with the hidden camera to my laptop. The image on the laptop screen was a lot clearer than it was on my
mobile, and I must have spent a good two or three hours just sitting there staring at it. It was impossible to make out the button camera in the photograph, even after I’d zoomed in as much
as I could, but I hadn’t really expected to see it anyway. The button camera that Dad had shown me was so small, and so well disguised, that it was virtually invisible to the naked eye. And
when I remembered that, I started to wonder if maybe I’d been imagining things. If a button camera is virtually invisible, how could I be sure that the man at the funeral was wearing one? All
I’d seen was a brief glint of reflected light. It could have come from anything – a metal button, a pin, a tiny piece of foil . . .

I thought about that for a while, then I leaned forward and peered closely at the man’s face. His steely grey eyes were looking directly at me, but I guessed that wasn’t unusual. If
you see someone taking a picture of you, it’s quite normal to stare back at them. But he hadn’t just stared back at me, had he? He’d given me a very slight nod of his head, as if
he was acknowledging me. As I looked at him now, I could see that same acknowledgement in his eyes. It wasn’t a friendly look, but it wasn’t unfriendly either. It’s hard to
describe, but I got the impression that he was trying to share something with me.

I thought about that for a while too, then I zoomed out and studied the whole photograph again. It showed the man just as he was reaching up to close the boot of his BMW. I focused on the boot,
enlarging it as much as I could, trying to see inside it, but the picture quality was too grainy to see anything clearly. I scrolled down a bit and stopped when the car’s registration plate
came into view. It was clearly visible. Easily readable. I stared at it, wondering, thinking . . .

Although it’s illegal to trace the owner of a vehicle through its registration number, it’s not hard to do if you know the right people. And I knew for a fact that Grandad knew the
right people. He knows all kinds of people. I was pretty sure that if I gave him the registration number of the BMW and asked him to find out who owned it, it wouldn’t take him too long to
come up with a name. But no matter how much I wanted to, I knew I couldn’t ask Grandad to do that. Not while he was feeling so bad. It wouldn’t be fair.

As Mum once told me, if you do your best to be kind and fair, you’ll never go too far wrong.

I leaned back in my chair, stretched my neck and yawned, then rubbed the tiredness from my eyes and went back to studying the photograph.

After breakfast the next morning, I asked Nan if it was all right if I went out on my bike for a while.

‘Of course it’s all right,’ she said, a little hesitantly. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Nowhere really,’ I told her. ‘I just thought I’d ride around for a bit, you know . . . get some fresh air.’

She looked at me. ‘Well, be careful, OK? And make sure you take your phone with you.’

I nodded. ‘How’s Grandad today?’

‘Not too bad. He’s having a lie-in at the moment, which is a good sign. He hasn’t had much sleep recently.’ She smiled cautiously. ‘Hopefully he’ll feel a bit
better if he can get some rest.’

I just nodded again, not sure what to say.

‘Go on, then,’ she said, ruffling my hair. ‘Go and get yourself some fresh air.’

There wasn’t much fresh air along Long Barton Road, just the usual choke of exhaust fumes hazing in the heat of the traffic. Not that I minded. The smell of the streets
on the way into town always makes me feel like I’m going somewhere. And that’s what I needed just now – the feeling that I was going somewhere, the feeling that I was doing
something. I wasn’t sure why I needed it, and I wasn’t really sure what I was doing either, but somehow that didn’t seem to matter. All that mattered was having some kind of
purpose.

Nan and Grandad’s house isn’t far from town, about three kilometres at most, and it didn’t take long to get to the North Road roundabout, where the town centre really begins.
The roundabout was jam-packed with traffic, and it’s one of those massive mega-roundabouts that are really hard to cycle round at the best of times, so I got off my bike and wheeled it along
the pavement, then crossed over the road at the pelican crossing instead.

The crossing led me into North Walk, a pedestrianised street at the quiet end of town. If you keep going along North Walk, then turn left at the end, you’re right in the middle of town
where all the big shops are. But I wasn’t interested in big shops. All I was interested in was the familiar small office building at 22 North Walk, where Delaney & Co was located.

That morning though, as I wheeled my bike along the pavement, nothing looked very familiar. A lot of the shops were closed, their doors and windows boarded up. Others were still open, but their
windows were cracked and shattered. As I passed by a shoe shop and looked inside, I could see that it had been ransacked – shoes and boots strewn all over the place, the walls kicked in, the
sales counter smashed up. The street itself was a mess too – litter bins ripped out, signposts bent out of shape, the road covered with broken glass and bits of rubble.

As I stopped and looked around for a moment, I remembered seeing something on the local news about a small-scale riot in Barton. Under normal circumstances, I’m sure I would have paid more
attention to it, but these weren’t normal circumstances. Although Nan still turned on the TV most evenings, none of us really watched it. Even if we were sitting there looking at it, we
weren’t actually taking it in. We had other things on our minds, things that really meant something. So all I could remember about the news report was that there’d been some trouble in
Barton town centre recently and looters had damaged a number of shops and buildings.

I hurried on down the pavement, hoping the rioters had ignored Mum and Dad’s office. But even as I approached the office building I could see that the main door was patched up with a sheet
of plywood, and it was clear that it had been kicked in and smashed open. I couldn’t understand it at first. It was obvious from the names of the companies listed on a plaque by the door that
there was nothing of any great value in the building:
JAKES AND MORTIMER, SOLICITORS
on the second floor;
TANTASTIC TANNING
on the first;
DELANEY & CO, PRIVATE INVESTIGATION
SERVICES
on the ground floor. I mean, why would anyone bother looting places like that? What were they hoping to steal – a sunbed and a couple of filing cabinets? But then I realised that
rioters and looters probably don’t think very rationally, they just break into anywhere and grab whatever they can. Even if there isn’t anything worth stealing, there’s always
going to be something to smash up.