Omega Place Read online

  • The American, Jerome Petersen, is refusing to cooperate any further. He has been informed that his government has started extradition proceedings.

  • The girl found with Baker, Isabel Morley, claims to have only been in the squat for a few days and to have no knowledge of what Baker, Petersen and the others were doing; as she appears in none of the photographic evidence we have, this is possibly true and it’s likely we shall have to let her go, as her only crime is that of squatting.

  • There are three remaining subjects at large – the female and two males who were photographed with Petersen in Bristol. We have no information as to who they might be. In his paperwork, Welles/Baker referred to people only by initials, so, by a process of elimination, we know that we are missing an RG, a TH and a TM. These three may well know about the RPA project, and as such I am advising that we should, in the short term, keep looking for them.

  That about wraps it up. Bottom line, Omega Place has been closed down and I don’t expect to hear any more about it, or its activities. And if anyone asks, no, we haven’t found out why it was called by that name.

  I gather the latest RPA night test flights, with the infrared cameras, have been very successful – I hope to see one in action myself in the next few weeks.

  Yours etc.,

  Alex

  Mercer closed the file, put it on her desk and picked up the other one. What was her bottom line going to be?

  INTERNAL MEMO – FOR YOUR EYES ONLY

  FROM:

  Alex Markham, Director of Internal Affairs, MI5

  TO:

  Jane Mercer

  Re:

  Omega Place

  Jane,

  Just a short note to thank you and your team for the sterling work put in on this operation, which is now effectively closed down. I know you may find yourself at odds with the facts – what with Dean Mayhew and three of the Omega Place people unaccounted for – but as you will have seen from the Home Office file, there is still work to be done in this regard and I am just waiting on confirmation that it can go ahead.

  I would therefore like to keep your team together for the foreseeable future. I have a twenty-minute window at 5.00 p.m. today and would like to brief you then.

  Alex

  41

  Monday 21st August, King’s Cross

  Paul had got back to the café with about a quarter of an hour to spare. About three hours, just like Terri had said. Fifteen minutes and one cup of tepid coffee later, it was just after six and there was still no sign of her. He went back to looking through a copy of the Daily Mail someone had left at the table, idly scanning the pages, not really taking in what he was reading. ‘BURGLARY GOES WRONG – ENDS IN MURDER’… the headline caught his eye and he started reading properly.

  Some bloke, a successful insurance broker living in a place called Hendon had apparently surprised a burglar in his house the night before and ended up getting shot for his trouble; he was an OK type, apparently, at least according to a neighbour the journalist had talked to. The story ended with a paragraph detailing how much gun crime had risen in the UK over the last twelve months. It pissed Paul off that some businessman deserved a half-page story in the papers when he got shot and killed, but Tommy and Orlando didn’t. Even when you were dead, money made a difference. Without it, you weren’t worth anything.

  ‘Hi.’

  Paul looked up. Some girl, dark hair, cut short, wearing smart, kind of office clothes, was pulling out a chair and sitting opposite him.

  ‘Yeah…?’

  ‘What d’you think?’

  It was the voice. ‘Terri? What…?’

  ‘They’re looking for a blonde, with long hair, jeans and stuff, so… ta-da!’ Terri spread out both her hands.

  She looked, not only completely different, but, if anything, even more unattainable; all Paul could do was nod and wonder how she’d managed to afford to do everything… the hair, the clothes…

  ‘Like the look?’

  ‘Very nice, Terri.’ Paul knew now, beyond any shadow of a doubt that, like Rob had said, he hadn’t a chance in hell. ‘So did you just come back to, like, say goodbye? You didn’t have to, you could’ve walked out, like Rob. I’d’ve understood.’

  ‘No, Pauly, I wanted to say goodbye. Leave you thinking good things about me.’ she smiled. ‘You never know, we might meet again somewhere.’

  ‘Yeah, right…’

  ‘Never say never. And I got you something…’ Terri put a large black leather bag, another new purchase, on the table and began taking stuff out as she looked for something. ‘Here it is.’

  Paul looked at the envelope she was holding out for him to take. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Take a look.’

  He tore the pristine white paper. Money, and what looked like a train ticket. He looked questioningly at Terri.

  ‘It’s an open ticket to Newcastle, plus a bit.’ She stood up and began putting everything back in her bag. ‘Better than hitching, right?’

  ‘How d’you know I want to go back?’

  ‘Because you hadn’t left home for good, because you should go back and see if you really want to leave.’ Terri hitched her bag on to her shoulder and came round the table. ‘Bye, Pauly. Have the best life you can.’

  Before Paul could say thanks, Terri was threading her way through the tables and was gone. Which meant he was alone again. Properly alone this time, as there was no one to come back now. He looked in the envelope again, counting a couple of hundred quid in twenties. Where the hell had all that come from? What had she done, gone and robbed a flaming bank or what? Which was when he noticed the piece of paper Terri had left behind on the table by mistake.

  He picked it up, a receipt from some shop. Made out to someone called Teresa Hyde-Barrett. Was that who Terri Hyde really was? Some double-barrelled girl who’d been slumming it for a bit of excitement? And now that it was getting too exciting she was going back. So maybe Sky had been wrong about that. Maybe, with enough money, you could go back. Lucky her, then, if she could simply turn herself into someone else so easily… unlike him. He didn’t exist any more. He was nobody now. How was he going to start a new life – that wasn’t going to happen with a train ticket and a couple of hundred quid. And was Terri right, that he’d not really left home for good? If he hadn’t, how could a dead boy ever go home?

  Paul took his mobile out of Tommy’s jacket pocket. Truth was, he’d never thought it through, leaving home; he’d slammed the door of the house shut, but hadn’t locked it or thrown away the key. He could call home, talk to his mum. She wouldn’t know anything about what had happened…

  He sat bolt upright in the chair, shocked rigid by what he’d just thought. No one knew about what had happened. If the cops really were covering it all up, no one out in the big, wide world knew anything about the shooting, that Paul Hendry was supposed to be dead. Not even his mum.

  He sat, completely stunned. Confused, tired and strung out by everything that he’d been through, he couldn’t seem to make his brain function properly. If it wasn’t in the papers, then, surely, it hadn’t been on TV or anything. And if that was true, no one knew about it – and if that was an actual fact, then it hadn’t happened. That was logical, wasn’t it? Like Orlando always said, history was always written by those with the power. Nothing was real, and there was no such thing as truth…

  Paul picked up his phone and dialled his mum’s mobile, only remembering, when the answering service picked up, that she never liked taking calls from numbers she didn’t know, and she wouldn’t know the number he was using now, the one Tommy, poor dead Tommy, had given him. One of her little things, that. He cut the call, not leaving a message.

  Staring at the screen of his phone, he wondered what his mum would say when she heard his voice. She’d be totally hacked off with him, probably, but glad, too. Happy he’d phoned. He punched in the digits for the house phone and pressed ‘call’. Maybe a dead boy could go back home, after all…

  A
cknowledgements

  Big thanks to Gregory Wells, for taking the time to plough through an early iteration (and liking it), Eileen Armstrong for her valuable comments, and my editors, Isabel Ford and Georgia Murray, for their clarity of vision. Sometimes – make that often – you can’t see the book for the words.

  Also by Graham Marks

  Radio Radio

  How It Works

  Zoo

  Tokyo

  Copyright © 2007 by Graham Marks

  All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce, or otherwise

  make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means

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  may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Published by Bloomsbury U.S.A. Children’s Books

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  First published in Great Britain in August 2007 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP

  Electronic edition published in January 2013

  www.bloomsbury.com

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to

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  A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-6196-3172-4 (e-book)

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