The Ultimate Truth Read online

  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.

  5

  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.

  I wheeled my bike through the open door and headed down the corridor towards Mum and Dad’s office.

  The office door was half open, the pebbled-glass panel smashed out. As I leaned my bike against the corridor wall, I heard a muffled clonk from inside the office. I stopped and listened. I couldn’t see anyone through the broken door panel, but there was definitely somebody in there. I could hear them – shuffling footsteps, a muted cough, a quiet sniff.

  My heart was beating hard now, and for a moment or two I was tempted to play it safe. Just turn round, walk out, and call the police. Let them deal with it. But my heart wasn’t just pounding with fear, it was seething with anger too. This was my mum and dad’s office. I’d spent half my life in here. It was full of good memories. It was a special place. It was our place. No one else had a right to be in our place.

  I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, then pushed open the door.

  6

  The first thing I saw when I went into the office was a young woman picking up piles of papers from the floor. She had bright-red hair, a tattoo on her right shoulder, and she was wearing a tiny black miniskirt, a vest top, and purple Doc Martens. As she heard me come in, she straightened up and smiled at me.

  ‘Hey, Travis,’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Hi, Courtney,’ I mumbled, feeling pretty stupid.

  The main reason I felt stupid was that Courtney Lane had been Mum and Dad’s assistant for almost two years, so it should have at least occurred to me that she might have been in the office. But I also felt stupid because Courtney always makes me feel stupid. She’s not only stunningly pretty, but she always wears incredibly revealing clothes. And whenever I see her, I never know where to look, which is pretty embarrassing. It’s even more embarrassing when she gives me a hug, which she did just then – grabbing hold of me and squeezing tight – because I never know where to put my hands. Despite feeling stupid and embarrassed though, I was still really pleased to see her.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you at the funeral,’ she said, letting go of me and stepping back. ‘I wanted to, but I wasn’t sure if you were up to talking or not. I wouldn’t have known what to say anyway. I still don’t.’

  ‘You don’t have to say anything.’

  She sighed, shaking her head. ‘I still can’t believe it.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘One minute everything’s all right, and then suddenly . . .’

  I just nodded, not really wanting to think about it, but not wanting to appear rude either.

  ‘Sorry,’ Courtney said. ‘I didn’t mean—’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I told her.

  She sighed again, then went over to her desk and put down the pile of papers she was holding.

  I looked around the office. The whole place had been trashed. Desk drawers had been emptied, cabinets ripped open, papers and files were scattered all over the floor. All the office equipment was either missing or smashed to pieces – computers, printers, scanners, phones.

  ‘When did it happen?’ I asked Courtney.

  ‘Last Saturday night,’ she said. ‘From what I’ve read in the local papers it all kicked off around seven o’clock when a gang of kids from the Slade Lane estate broke into the T-Mobile shop at the end of the street. There were about twenty or thirty of them at first, but once they went on the rampage and started looting all the other shops, loads of other people joined in. They all just went crazy, smashing up everything they came across.’

  ‘Did it spread any further?’ I asked. ‘Did they move on to the High Street or anything?’

  She shook her head. ‘The police reacted pretty quickly, apparently. They had the High Street blocked off within about half an hour, so most of the damage was limited to North Walk.’

  I looked over at Mum and Dad’s private office. The door was half hanging off, the wooden panels kicked in.

  ‘Is it just as bad in there?’ I asked.

  Courtney nodded. ‘I haven’t had a chance to check what’s missing yet. I thought I’d better try to clear up some of the mess first.’ She glanced across at me. ‘The police didn’t notify your grandad about the damage until Monday. He called me on the Wednesday after the funeral and asked if I could pop in sometime to check that the main door had been fixed.’ She gazed around at the mess. ‘I would have started on all this earlier, but my mum’s been in and out of hospital all week and I just haven’t had time.’

  ‘You didn’t have to come in and clean up,’ I told her. ‘I’m glad you did, of course. It’s really nice of you. But I don’t know if . . . well, you know . . .’

  I was suddenly feeling embarrassed again, but this time it was because I didn’t know how to say what I was trying to say. Thankfully, Courtney had already read my mind.

  ‘I’m not bothered about getting paid or anything, Trav,’ she said. ‘I mean, I know I don’t have to come in to work any more. I’m not doing this because I have to, I’m doing it because I want to. Your mum and dad were always really good to me.’ She wiped her eyes and smiled at me. ‘Besides, someone’s got to get this mess cleaned up. And I don’t suppose you came armed with a dustpan and brush, did you?’

  ‘No,’ I admitted.

  She turned back to the desk and started sorting through the piles of papers. ‘So what are you doing here, Travis?’

  ‘I’m not really sure, to be honest,’ I told her. ‘I suppose I’m just wondering what Mum and Dad were working on when they died. I know they were going to London to meet someone, and I know they’d been working on a new case, but I don’t know what it was about.’ I went over to a filing cabinet and started looking through the drawers. ‘I thought I might find their case notes or something . . .’

  ‘I’ve already checked that cabinet,’ Courtney said. ‘It’s empty. All the files are on the floor.’

  I looked at her. ‘Do you know what Mum and Dad were working on?’

  ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I was on holiday for the first two weeks of July, and I only came back on the Monday before the crash. Your mum and dad weren’t in the office that day, and I only saw your mum for a couple of minutes on the Tuesday, so I never got round to catching up with their current cases. The last case I know about was a missing persons enquiry that came through on the Friday before I went away. I passed on the details to your dad at the time, but I don’t know if he actually took the case or not.’

  ‘Do you remember who made the enquiry?’

  ‘It was a man called John Ruddy. He said he was an old friend of your dad’s.’

  ‘Have you still got his contact details?’

  ‘Well, I entered them into a new-client file on the office computer, as usual. But as you can see . . .’ She gestured at the empty space on the desk where the office PC used to be. ‘I also printed out two hard copies of his file. One copy went in the filing cabinet, the other went in the in tray in your mum and dad’s office.’ She looked down at the piles of pa
per on the floor. ‘They could be anywhere now.’

  ‘So you don’t have this John Ruddy’s phone number or anything?’ I said.

  ‘I can’t remember his phone number or his home address, but I remember that he mentioned a boxing club.’

  ‘A boxing club?’

  ‘It wasn’t the one you go to, it was the other one. The one near Slade Lane, down by the docks.’

  ‘Wonford Boxing Club?’

  ‘That’s it. I think Mr Ruddy said he was the club’s manager, or maybe the owner. He said your dad knew the club.’

  ‘Dad used to train there when he was boxing,’ I told her. ‘It’s a pretty rough place, but it’s got a good reputation for producing pro fighters. Did Mr Ruddy give you any more details about the case?’

  ‘He just said it was a missing persons enquiry and he’d like to talk to your dad about it.’ She looked at me. ‘What’s going on, Travis? Why do you want to know all this?’

  I paused for a second, thinking things through, then I sat down and started to talk.

  7

  When I’d finished telling Courtney everything – my doubts about the car crash, my suspicions about the man at the funeral – she didn’t say anything for a while, she just sat at her desk, thinking quietly.

  Eventually she said, ‘I’m not sure we’ll ever know the truth about the car crash, Travis. I’ve been asking myself exactly the same questions as you. How did it happen? Why did it happen? Why were your mum and dad turning off the A12? None of it made sense to me at first. There didn’t seem to be any logical answers. But then I reminded myself that life isn’t logical, it doesn’t always make sense. Sometimes stuff just happens. Maybe your mum was distracted by something when she was driving, a wasp or a bee, something like that. Or she could have sneezed at the wrong time . . . I don’t know. It could have been anything.’

  ‘Yeah, OK,’ I said, ‘but why were they on the slip road? And why were they only ten kilometres from Barton? Where had they been before then?’