The Ultimate Truth (11 page)

That’s how I see it anyway.

I was just about to lose the game I was playing when Grandad knocked on my door. I had a queen and a rook left, but my opponent had a queen and two rooks, and it was only a matter of time before
the extra rook got the better of me. So when I heard Grandad knock on my door and call out softly – ‘Are you awake, Trav?’ – I was quite happy to close the game without
saving it, telling myself that I hadn’t really lost, I’d just been interrupted.

I’d already noticed at teatime that Grandad was looking a lot better, and as he came into my room that night I could tell from the way he was walking that he was almost back to himself
again. He wasn’t shuffling any more, his shoulders weren’t stooped. He had an air of confidence about him.

‘How’s it going?’ he said, crossing over to the window.

‘Well, you know . . .’

He looked at me, nodding slowly. ‘Yeah, I know.’

‘How are you?’ I asked him.

‘Not too bad, thanks.’ He sighed and looked out of the window. ‘Listen, Travis,’ he said solemnly, ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been here for you over these
last couple of weeks. It’s not because I didn’t want to—’

‘It’s all right, Grandad,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to explain.’

‘No, it’s not all right,’ he said sadly, shaking his head. ‘This is the worst time in the world for you. It’s the worst time for all of us, but I should have
been
with you. Every day, every hour, every minute. But I wasn’t. That’s unforgivable.’

‘Nothing’s unforgivable, Grandad,’ I said. ‘Dad told me once that if you really love someone, nothing’s unforgivable.’

Grandad smiled. It was the first time I’d seen him smile in weeks. ‘Your dad always did have a way with words, didn’t he? Even when he was a little kid he could talk his way
out of almost anything. It used to drive his mother mad sometimes.’ He grinned at the memory. ‘I remember once, when your dad came home from school one day with his clothes all ripped
up and covered in mud . . . this must have been when he was about six or seven, maybe a little older . . .’

We spent the next few hours just talking to each other. While I stayed slumped on the bed, Grandad made himself comfortable in an armchair in the corner and told me stories
about Dad when he was a kid – growing up in south London, getting into trouble sometimes, going to see Millwall play. As the sun went down and the night turned dark, the talk gradually turned
to more personal stuff. How was I
really
feeling? Grandad wanted to know. What did I have in my head? My heart? Was there anything I wanted to tell him? Anything I wanted to talk about? Did
I have any questions about anything, anything at all?

I didn’t know what to say at first. My head and my heart were full of stuff about Mum and Dad – feelings, questions, confusion – but I didn’t know how to put any of it
into words. It was just
there
. Inside me. Part of me. No matter how much I wanted to express it, it didn’t seem to want to come out. It was somehow as if it just wasn’t ready
yet. The other stuff though, the jigsaw-puzzle stuff, that
was
ready to come out. And although I knew it wasn’t the kind of stuff that Grandad had in mind, I also knew that I just
had
to tell him about it.

‘Do you remember the man in the car park at the funeral?’ I said to him. ‘The one I took a picture of on my mobile?’

Grandad frowned for a moment. ‘The man with the black BMW?’

I nodded, glad that he remembered.

Then I started telling him everything.

They say that the eyes are the window to the soul, and as I sat in my room with Grandad that night, telling him everything I’d found out about Bashir Kamal and the
mysterious men, it was pretty obvious from the look in Grandad’s eyes that his soul couldn’t make up its mind what to think. He was clearly intrigued by what I was telling him, and no
matter how much he tried to hide it, I could see an instinctive curiosity twinkling in his eyes. But the more I told him, the darker the twinkle became, and gradually his eyes took on a hard-edged
look of growing concern and suspicion. He was worried about me, frightened for me. And that almost made me wish I’d kept my mouth shut about everything.

But it was already too late by then.

Besides, however much I wished I hadn’t told him anything, I was still incredibly relieved that I had. I felt so much lighter now. It was as if I’d been walking around all day with a
boulder strapped to my shoulders, and now suddenly the boulder was gone.

‘You should have told someone about all this, Travis,’ Grandad said sternly. ‘You should have let someone know what you were doing.’

‘I did,’ I said. ‘I told Courtney. She came to see Mrs Kamal with me.’

‘You should have told Nan.’

‘I didn’t want to bother her.’

He sighed sadly. ‘I suppose that’s why you didn’t come to me, is it? You didn’t want to bother me.’

It was a hard question to answer, and I wasn’t sure how to do it. I didn’t want to lie to him, but I didn’t want to make him feel bad about himself either. He felt bad enough
as it was. So I didn’t say anything for a while, I just looked at him, trying to let him see that I didn’t blame him for anything, that I knew he couldn’t help sinking down into
his dark moods, and that everything was OK now anyway. He was better again, we were talking, and that was all that mattered.

After we’d both sat there for a minute or two, looking at each other in the moonlit darkness of my room, Grandad eventually just nodded his head. It wasn’t much – a brief
silent nod – but it was all either of us needed. I smiled quietly to myself, nodded back, and then we got on with it.

I thought he’d want to see the pictures first – the photo on my mobile and the printout I’d taken from the safe – but instead he started asking me
questions. Questions about the two Audis, questions about the man at the funeral and the man with the shaved head, questions about everything. What kind of men were they? Calm? Angry? Clever?
Agitated? How did they speak? Did they have accents? What exactly did they say? Are you sure the

Audi was following you? Did Evie Johnson give you a description of the men she saw in the Audi with Bashir?

It was surprisingly difficult to remember the details, and I was kind of annoyed with myself for having to say ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I can’t remember’ all the
time. Grandad assured me it was nothing to worry about. He said that almost everyone struggles to remember the little things, and that most people, when asked to describe someone they’ve only
seen once, can’t even recall the most basic details – hair colour, height, clothing.

‘I’ve interviewed a lot of eyewitnesses in my time, Trav,’ he said. ‘And, believe me, you’re better than most of them.’

‘They must have been pretty useless then.’

‘Don’t put yourself down. You know a lot more than you think.’

I wasn’t sure he was right about that, but I was happy enough to accept it.

‘Right,’ he said, ‘let’s see those pictures you told me about.’

I went over to the armchair and passed him the printout. He took a pair of reading glasses from his cardigan pocket, cleaned them on his shirt, then put them on and looked at the picture. While
he was doing that, I took out my phone and opened up the photo of the man at the funeral. Grandad was studying the printout very closely, taking his time, examining every little detail in
concentrated silence. I watched quietly as he took off his glasses and held them over the image of the three men, squinting through the lenses to get a better view. He didn’t seem too pleased
with the result though, and after a while he shook his head and put his glasses back on again.

‘Dad wrote a note on the back,’ I told him.

He turned over the printout and read the scribbled note.

‘What do you think?’ I asked him.

He carried on studying the note for a while, then he looked up slowly, took off his glasses, and stared straight ahead, his brow furrowed in concentration. After a good minute or so, he let out
a sigh of frustration and shook his head. ‘It’s obviously got
something
to do with the fourth and fifth of August, but I’m damned if I can figure out what.’ He looked
at me. ‘Have you got any ideas?’

We spent the next five minutes discussing what ‘dem’ and ‘last day’ might mean, but we didn’t come up with anything useful. In the end, Grandad suggested that we
leave it for now and put it to the back of our minds.

‘You never know,’ he said. ‘Sometimes the best way of solving a puzzle is by
not
thinking consciously about it.’ He turned over the printout, put his glasses back
on, and looked at the picture of the three men again. ‘Which one was it who came to the office?’ he asked.

‘Him,’ I said, pointing out the man with the shaved head.

‘And this one?’ he said, indicating the man with the goatee beard. ‘He’s the one your friend says paid for the riot?’

I nodded.

‘And this is the man from the funeral,’ he said, indicating the man with the steely grey eyes.

‘Yeah.’ I passed Grandad my phone. ‘This is the picture I took of him in the car park.’

Grandad took the phone and studied the photograph. He stared hard at the man in the picture, and after a while I saw his eyes narrow to a frown. He brought the phone closer to his eyes, trying
to focus on something, then he moved it away again and held it at arm’s length, angling his head and squinting over the top of his glasses at it. Still not satisfied, he took off his glasses
again, held the phone in his left hand, and with the thumb and index finger of his right hand he began adjusting the size and position of the photo on the screen. It took him a while to get it how
he wanted it, but eventually he stopped fiddling around, and then he just sat there for a while staring thoughtfully at the image he’d ended up with. He’d zoomed in quite a lot, so the
image was a bit blurred, but I could still just about make out that it was a close-up view of the man’s left arm, showing his hand on the boot of the BMW just as he was about to close it.

‘Can you see it?’ Grandad asked quietly, still staring at the image.

‘See what?’ I said.

He passed me the phone. ‘Look at his wrist.’

I gazed at the screen, focusing on the man’s left wrist. He was wearing a watch. It wasn’t very clear, but from what I could see of it, it seemed perfectly ordinary. Just a plain,
silver-coloured watch, with an expanding metal strap.

‘It’s just a watch,’ I said, shaking my head.

Grandad leaned over and carefully pointed to a darkish smudge on the back of the man’s wrist, just above the watch.

‘See that?’ he said.

I looked closer. It wasn’t just a smudge. It was a tattoo. I brought the phone closer to my eyes. It wasn’t a very big tattoo, about two centimetres across at most, and it was really
hard to make out what it was. It looked a bit like the letter O, with a bit missing at the bottom and two little feet.

Like this:
Ω

‘His watch strap is loose,’ Grandad muttered, almost as if he was talking to himself. ‘That’s why you can see it. If the strap wasn’t loose, the tattoo would be
covered up by the watch. But when he reached up to close the boot –’ Grandad raised his arm, mimicking the man’s pose ‘– the watch slipped down his wrist, revealing
the tattoo underneath.’

‘What is it?’ I asked Grandad, staring hard at the tattoo. ‘It looks vaguely familiar, but I don’t know why.’

‘It’s a Greek letter,’ he said, looking at me. ‘Omega. The last letter of the Greek alphabet.’

I frowned. ‘What does it mean?’

‘I’m not sure,’ he said, sighing. ‘It might not mean anything. It might be that this man, whoever he is, just happens to have an Omega symbol tattooed on his wrist. On
the other hand . . .’

‘What?’

‘Well, if it means what I think it might mean, I’m not sure I want to believe it.’

Although I knew a little bit about Grandad’s career in the Army Intelligence Corps, he’d never really told me exactly what he did as an intelligence officer, and
he’d always been particularly reluctant to talk about the work he’d done in Northern Ireland during the 1980s. I’d assumed this was because his memories of that time were
overshadowed by the trauma of the car bomb that almost killed him, but as we sat together in my room that night, and Grandad began telling me what he knew about an organisation known as Omega, I
realised that it wasn’t just the car bomb he was trying to forget.

‘Between 1982 and 1990,’ he told me, ‘I was an officer with a covert military intelligence squad based in Belfast called the FRU – the Force Research Unit. Our main job
was to recruit informants from the paramilitary forces and run them as undercover agents. Most of the assets we handled were either members or supporters of the IRA, but we also recruited agents
from some of the Loyalist groups.’ Grandad looked at me. ‘You know enough about the Troubles in Northern Ireland to know what I’m talking about, don’t you?’

I nodded. My history teacher had told us a bit about the conflict in Northern Ireland, and although I didn’t understand everything about it, I knew that it was basically a war between the
Nationalist and Unionist communities over the status of Northern Ireland. The Nationalists, or Republicans, were Catholic; the Unionists, or Loyalists, were Protestant. The Nationalists wanted a
united Ireland and an end to British rule, the Unionists wanted Northern Ireland to remain as part of the United Kingdom. Both sides used paramilitary forces to fight for their cause. The IRA was
the main Republican force, and for almost thirty years they’d fought a guerrilla campaign against both the Loyalist forces and the British people, who they saw as their enemy. The Troubles
claimed the lives of thousands of people on both sides – soldiers, paramilitaries, police, civilians – and many more thousands were seriously injured and maimed.

‘It was a long and dirty war, Travis,’ Grandad said quietly, ‘and a lot of really bad stuff happened. It always does in a war, of course. People get killed and terribly
wounded, lives are shattered, everything changes. Wars always bring out the worst in the human race.’ He sighed. ‘But as well as the hell that everyone knows about, there’s
another kind of hell that goes on during a war, a hidden hell. And that’s where I spent most of my time.’