Read Online If You Were Me by Sam Hepburn - Free Book Online Page A

Behrouz’s bomb.’
    I couldn’t speak. The walls were closing in, trying to crush me.
    â€˜The colonel’s an extremely high-value target. We think Behrouz was trying to exploit their relationship so he could gain access to his home and plant a device.’
    â€˜That is not possible.’
    â€˜We checked with the colonel. He gave Behrouz the numbers of his parliamentary and constituency offices but not his home. So how did your brother get hold of it?’
    â€˜I . . . I don’t know.’
    â€˜I think you’re lying, Miss Sahar. I think you know a lot more about your brother’s activities than you’re letting on.’
    â€˜My brother goes to work and he looks after us. That’s all he does!’
    â€˜Did he leave you instructions? A list of things to do or people to contact if he was killed or injured?’
    â€˜No. Why would he?’
    He ran his thumb down his stubbly cheek. ‘We’re going to let you take a rest now, Miss Sahar. While we’re gone, I’d like you to think about everything I’ve told you. When I come back, we’ll talk again.’
    They left me then. With nothing to look at but my own reflection.

DAN
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    I was wrecked. Not surprising considering it was nearly two-thirty by the time I got home. I’d cycled like a maniac but I only just made it up to my room before I heard Dad tiptoe downstairs and slip out the front door. After that I’d stayed awake half the night, worrying about him getting sent back to prison, wondering what Cement Face had done with the man he’d kidnapped, and wishing I’d never set foot in Meadowview. You walk in there thinking you’re a normal person with a normal life and you come out smeared in filth, with the stink of fear and garbage in your nose and your head full stuff off the TV you never thought you’d see in real life. It was as if that whole building was rotten, not just the pipes, and if you lifted up any floorboard or opened any door, you’d findsome festering filth reaching out to suck you in. Every time I managed to drop off to sleep, I’d see that bloke’s bloody, petrified face, the gun under the bath, packets of drugs stuffed in boxes of washing powder, then I’d hear that weasel saying Dad’s name and I’d wake up yelling, imagining him going back to prison and me and Mum ending up in a place like Meadowview. She’d never cope.
    Around four in the morning I heard the front door click shut: Dad coming back. I pulled the pillow over my head, trying to block out the sound of his footsteps padding past my room, and when he’d gone, I hurled it across the room and lay there in the darkness, asking myself over and over if keeping quiet about someone else’s crimes makes you as guilty as they are. When he came in a couple of hours later to wake me up, I fixed my eyes on the wall and told him I felt sick and couldn’t face going to work with him.
    â€˜No problem,’ he said, ‘Jez is back.’ He put his hand on my forehead, like when I was kid. ‘You are a bit hot, son. I’ll get you an aspirin.’
    For a second the comforting weight of his big rough palm made me certain I’d got it all wrong, that there was a simple explanation for what I’d seen in the loading bay and that I’d dreamt I’d heard him coming and going in the small hours.
    I shifted round a bit. ‘Did you go out last night?’ He gave me a funny look. I stared at him and suddenly it felt like the familiar crinkles round his eyes, the scar on hischin, the crooked tooth that showed when he smiled and his short bristly hair had been stolen by a stranger. I really did feel sick as I waited for his lie. I felt even sicker when it came. He gave me that easy, hey-what-can-you-do? shrug of his. ‘Yeah. Old people’s home had an emergency, whole place got flooded.’
    â€˜Was Jez with