Read Online Then You Were Gone by Claire Moss - Free Book Online Page B

birth certificate of another man, one Mack might have been pretending to be. This was a woman’s birth certificate. A woman called Jessica Maria Novak. But then, as Simone continued to look at the letters, the numbers, the dates, she realised this was not even the birth certificate of a woman. It was a girl, a seventeen-year-old girl.

Chapter Seven
    Keith had not been back to the office for three days. Of course not. Not when Jazzy wanted to speak to him. The man had a sixth sense about where he was least wanted, then made sure to be there whenever possible.
    In fact, it was not even that Jazzy wanted to speak to Keith. He never wanted to speak to Keith. He knew he ought to, knew that Keith, if anyone, would be able to shed light on Mack’s past. But he had tried and tried to imagine how the conversation might go, and he just couldn’t. If Keith genuinely did not know where Mack was, then he would be worried by now – worried enough to say something to Jazzy or come into the office again or send out a bunch of his loaf-headed henchmen as a search party. And the fact that he had done none of those things surely meant that he knew where Mack had gone, or at least had some idea as to why. And if he wanted Jazzy or Simone to know these things, Keith would have told them. But he hadn’t.
    When Simone had come to Jazzy and Petra’s house three nights ago with Mack’s exam certificates and that inexplicable birth certificate, it was the first time that Jazzy had felt genuinely afraid of what Mack might be running from. He had looked at the two certificates, one marking the pinnacle of a young man’s academic career, one marking the birth of a baby girl, daughter of Maria Novak, ‘father unknown’, at a hospital in Lewisham seventeen years ago and tried, without success, to connect the two, all the while Petra’s words echoing in his head.
How well do you really know this guy?
    Simone had asked him what he thought. ‘I don’t think anything,’ was the only truthful answer he had been able to give. He had, for the first time, truly understood what people meant when they said their mind had gone blank. It had been as though he was staring into a very bright light, blinding him to everything and wiping any coherent thought from his brain.
    The exam certificate thing was probably nothing. It could just be inverse snobbery, be Mack pretending to be more street than he really was. Jazzy possessed just about enough self-awareness to realise that Mack, with his flawless sense of social infrastructure, knew that if he was trying to impress someone like Jazzy, then better to be a comprehensive school boy made good than a scholarship boy desperately trying to ingratiate himself with the boarders. The birth certificate thing though was weird, and scary. Jazzy had seen enough films and read enough airport thrillers to know that you could fake someone’s identity by using a stolen birth certificate – usually a dead person’s. Ayanna had told him that Mack had asked for a fake birth certificate. He wanted one for himself, Jazzy supposed, but he had not said anything about one for someone else. Maybe he hadn’t needed to, because he had already managed to get that person one.
    Jazzy cleared his throat and gagged on the acid reflux that came up. He took a swig from the bottle of Gaviscon that was open on his desk. It was one thing for Mack to disappear; it was one thing for him to buy a fake identity before doing so. It was another thing altogether to be dealing in fake identities for seventeen-year-old girls with eastern European names.
    Jazzy had let the last few days go by in the hope that something would happen to make all this go away; that Mack would walk back through the door as though nothing had happened and nobody would ever mention it again. That would suit Jazzy just fine. But now it was after eleven-thirty in the morning, and Mack had been gone for over a week. Jazzy had spent most of the day so far ignoring the work