The Ultimate Truth Read Free

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.

4
    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,