4 You can never go back from here
Sometimes, when you pull at a loose thread, nothing much happens. But there’s always the danger that you have started something you might regret. The seam splits, the fabric separates. One thing leads to another. In less than twenty-four hours, Liam’s world has unravelled. The familiar has become the strange. The known now seems un-knowable. The safe has become dangerous, and one thing still leads on to many others.
~
“Go back to your sister, or your parents, or wherever,” DC Parker told Liam, as they stood outside the police station. “Go back and think about what you’ve told us. Think about what really happened. Then if there’s anything to report come back and ask for me. Okay, Liam? Do you understand?”
Liam felt that he was being told to just go back to his normal life, and stop telling tall stories. If only it could be that easy.
Head spinning, he walked a short way until he was on a small terrace, looking out over the striped canopies of the market. He sat on a wall, and took out his phone. No messages. He tried his mother, his father. Nothing. He called Kath.
She answered on the first ring. “Yes?”
“Kath. Me. Anything?”
“No. You okay, littl’un? You sound odd. What’s happened?”
He opened his mouth to speak, to tell her ... but he stopped. Not on the phone.
“Nothing,” he said. “Just cold. Speak to you later.”
He zipped up his fleece. It was a grey day today, cooler than yesterday. He hadn’t really noticed when he came out of the police station.
He tried to think. Either the “policeman” yesterday had been lying, or DC Parker had just now. But why? What were they covering up? It must be something his father was involved with, the work he would never tell anyone about. Government agencies, spies ... or maybe he was just some kind of crook and things had finally gone wrong for him.
Liam couldn’t believe any of that though. His father was an ordinary man, who just happened to travel a lot, and make jokes about his work to make it sound exciting. There was nothing in their life that had ever suggested things would end up like this.
He considered getting on a bus out to the university. From there it was a ten minute walk through the campus and over the river to the research park where lots of agricultural and medical research institutions had premises. But he’d never been to his mother’s workplace. They had driven past a few times, but all that told him was how big and complex a site it was. He didn’t even know which building she worked in, let alone where within that building. So going out to the research park was hardly going to gain him much.
He sat a little longer on the wall, looking out across the market. He had his phone cupped in his hands, just in case anyone rang.
Cold and numb, he moved on, walking aimlessly through the Saturday crowds to get his circulation going again. He couldn’t work it out. Maybe Kath was right: all they could do was sit tight until something happened. Only then would they be able to make sense of any of it.
But there was one more thing he had to do. He was on Prince of Wales Road now, heading towards the river and the railway station. Soon he would be on Riverside Road and heading for home.
He had been putting this off, this walk, the same one he had done yesterday when he had jumped off the train full of the sense of freedom of a weekend at home. He had put it off for fear of seeing it all again: the house, the mayhem. He had put it off for fear of what he might find, too. Any clues he might have missed, anything that might hint that the violence had been directed at people as well as property.
There had been all kinds of reasons for putting it off.
But he could never have expected this...
~
New Chapel Road was just as it had always been. The houses set back from the street behind tidy front gardens. The cars neatly slotted into their drives, each one shining as if it had had a Saturday morning wash and polish. The doves cooing from the trees and the rooftops.
Liam could almost find himself believing that nothing had happened.
The three eucalyptus trees flickered silvery-white in the breeze.
With a rising sense of dread, Liam crunched across the gravel drive. It was then that he realised why the front of the house seemed so bare. There were no curtains in the windows.
He stopped and peered into the front room.
It was empty. Stripped. There was no furniture. No carpets on the floor, no pictures on the wall. Not even a light-shade over the bare bulb.
He went to the door, but his key did not fit the shiny new Yale lock.
There were no windows at the side for him to look in, but he saw that the old trailer had gone. The back lawn was freshly cut. It had been shaggy and in need of a trim only the day before, a job his mother always put off and which Liam often ended up doing.
He peered into the kitchen, and it had been similarly stripped out. Even the units had gone, replaced by new ones with creamy white doors and metal handles. Liam stepped back, suddenly wondering whether he had come to the right house, the right street.
There was a tennis ball lodged in the gutter. Liam had knocked it there two weeks before, when he had been home for the bank holiday weekend. He had been playing tennis against the back wall and skied one.
He came back to the front and there was a man there, Mr Mendes from next door. Mr Mendes had always been a bit frightening, the kind of neighbour who had a shed full of children’s balls that had ended up in his garden. Right now, he seemed a welcome and familiar figure.
“Hey,” Mr Mendes called, as Liam emerged. “What are you doing here?”
Liam looked at him, open-mouthed. He realised that his neighbour was staring at him like a complete stranger.
“I ...”
“Go on, get out of there. I’ll get the police onto you. There’s Neighbourhood Watch, you know.”
Mr Mendes didn’t have a clue who Liam was.
Liam looked from his neighbour to the house, and then back again. “Who ... who lives here? I thought...”
“It’s empty, isn’t it?” said Mr Mendes. “As I expect you saw. Not for long, though. New tenants moving in tomorrow. I hope they’re better than the last lot.”
“The last?”
“Bloomin’ Pakis,” said Mr Mendes. “Don’t want their lot round here. Or yours. Go on, get out of there. I’ll call the police.”
Liam walked past him, still stunned by what was happening. He felt like just sitting down in the middle of the pavement and giving up. What more could the world throw at him? How much more could he cope with?
~
It was well into the afternoon now, and Liam hadn’t eaten since the breakfast Kath had cooked for him. He stopped at the market and bought a bag of chips. Around him, people talked and laughed and hurried about their business. He went and sat on some steps.
He was beginning to think that the police station had been the wrong kind of institution for him to visit this morning. He should have gone to the hospital and told them that the things he knew no longer matched the real world. He was sane enough to know that this was completely mad.
He was on his way back to Kath’s flat. He knew that was where he would end up. But he didn’t want to hurry. He wanted to put it off, delay everything as long as possible. He had the horrible feeling that when he got there and rang on the bell a complete stranger would come to the door and ask who he was. Piece by piece, his life was being erased.
He took his phone out, yet again. No messages. He tried his mother, his father, and all he got was their answering services.
He didn’t dare try Kath. He wanted her still to be there. He didn’t want to get the dead line that might hint that she too had been removed from his life.
~
A man was waiting in a white Volvo outside Kath’s flat. The street was always heavily parked-up, but all the other cars were empty. Why would this man be sitting in his car unless he was waiting, or watching? He wore a dark suit and tie, and had dark glasses obscuring his eyes.
He saw Liam and immediately picked up a mobile phone and thumbed a number.
Liam walked on and considered just keeping going. But what about Kath? He should warn her. But he could call her on his mobile rather than going right up to the flat.
He hesitated and then it was too late.
The door to Kath’s flat opened, and another dark-suited man stood smiling at Liam. He was tall and thin, and deathly pale. “Hello,” he said. “You must be Liam. Come in, come in. Your sister’s upstairs. She said you’d be along shortly. Come in, what are you waiting for?”
A car door thunked shut, and he heard footsteps approach and stop just behind him.
“Who are you?” said Liam. “What are you doing here?”
The man was still smiling. “I’m Mr Smith,” he said. “And my colleague behind you is another Mr Smith, although we’re not related. We’re investigating your parents’ disappearance, Liam. We’re here to help.”
“You’re with the police?”
The man nodded. “We’re part of the official investigation.”
But there was no official investigation, according to DC Parker earlier. The police knew nothing about it. Liam remembered his first encounter with the “policeman” at his home. “Do you have ID?” he asked.
The first Mr Smith nodded but made no move to show it.
Liam looked up to the living room window. Kath was there, watching them. He raised his eyebrows and she jerked her head, telling him to come up, stop messing around.
Liam slumped his shoulders, dropped his head, and trudged in past Mr Smith at the door. He didn’t know what was going on. He wished it would all just stop. As he started to climb the stairs the front door shut behind him, and then he heard Mr Smith following him up.
There was another man in the room, wearing a similar dark suit to the two Smiths. His grey hair was thin on top, and he wore thick, black-framed glasses. He was sitting on the sofa, keying something into a notebook computer. He barely glanced up as Liam and the first Mr Smith entered.
Liam looked at Kath and she smiled at him. “You okay?” she asked.
He shrugged.
“These men,” she continued. “They’re looking for Mum and Dad.”
“And you, Liam,” added Mr Smith. “We were concerned when your sister said that you had gone off on your own in the city. You should be cautious at such a difficult time. At least, until we know the fate of your parents.”
That phrase had an ominous ring: “the fate of your parents”.
“Where are they?” said Liam. “What’s going on?”
“Sit down, Liam,” said the man with the computer, waving a hand towards the other end of the sofa. The man had a soft voice and a Scottish accent. “We want to talk to you. We want to find out what’s happened.”
“Who are you?”
The man stared at Liam as he sat. “You don’t need to know who we are, lad. We’re members of Special Intelligence, an agency which reports to the Home Office. We look after people like you. Let’s leave it at that.”
Special agencies ... what did the Government have to do with all this?
Liam didn’t like the man’s stare, but he found that he couldn’t look away. He was like a rabbit, transfixed by a car’s headlights. He felt dizzy, felt as if the room was rushing around him. It took all his concentration to steady himself. How did the man do that?
“I went to the house,” Liam said. He felt the need to talk, to win these men’s trust. It would be good if they were on his and Kath’s side. “Home. This morning. Someone had cleared it. Since yesterday. Everything was gone. The curtains, the furniture, the carpets, the pictures and books and kitchen units. They’ve mowed the lawn, although they didn’t do the edges. They’ve wiped out any sign that we ever lived there. Apart from the tennis ball.” He chuckled at that. “The one I hit up into the gutter a couple of weeks ago.”
He stopped to gather himself. Mr Smith gave him a glass of water and he took it, sipped, put it down on the coffee table. “Our next door neighbour came round and found me. Mr Mendes. ‘Mental Mendes’ – remember, Kath? He didn’t know me. He didn’t recognise me. Everything’s been wiped away... Even in Mr Mendes’ head. What’s going on?”
The two men exchanged a glance, and then the Scot spoke. “It’s an erasure,” he said. “They’ve removed any evidence that your parents existed. It’s going to make them very hard to track down, lad.”
Liam looked at him. He could see himself reflected in the man’s thick glasses. “Who are ‘they’?” he asked, not sure if he wanted to know the answer. “Why would they want my parents erased? Why is a Government agency investigating this?”
“You don’t need to know, Liam.”
Liam nodded. It seemed fair enough that these men from Special Intelligence should only tell him what he needed to know. He felt that very strongly, all of a sudden.
“We want to know how you are, Liam. We were concerned. We thought you were in your sister’s protection, but she let you out into the city.” As he said this, he darted a look at Kath, then returned his gaze to Liam. “So how are you coping? You’re under a lot of stress, right now, aren’t you?”
Liam shrugged. “I’m okay,” he said.
“Come here,” the man said. “Lean closer.”
Liam did so. The man reached up and ran a hand over Liam’s scalp. He nodded. Then he put something to Liam’s left eye, a kind of frame that sat in the eye socket, holding a lens that made everything blur. A face loomed close, black-framed eyes suddenly snapping into focus, magnified so that every tiny movement looked seismic.
The man sat back, removing the device from Liam’s eye. He keyed something into his notebook. “Everything seems stable so far,” he said to the first Mr Smith, who was watching intently from the doorway.
“What’s all this got to do with ... with what’s happened?” asked Liam. He felt a little detached from what was going on, as if he was watching it happen rather than taking part.
“Everything,” said the man in the glasses. “It has everything to do with it, lad. Everything connects, even the unconnected. You’d be surprised.”
The man snapped his computer shut. “We want you to stay here, Liam. Do you understand? And if anything happens, we’ll talk again.”
“But... how do I let you know if anything happens?”
The man smiled, the first time he had done so. “Oh, Liam, don’t you worry about that. If we’re needed we’ll be on hand. We always are.”
His gaze locked into Liam’s for one last time. “I think you need to get some rest now, Liam. You’ve had a lot of excitement today. You need to re-gather yourself.”
Liam nodded. The man was right. His words, in their soft Scottish tone, made perfect sense. Liam’s eyelids were heavy, too heavy to hold open.
The man stood, and helped Liam swing his legs up onto the sofa. Moments later, Liam was in darkness again.