iBoy

10110

It was 03:15:52 when we left the flat and walked down the corridor to the lift. There was no one around. The tower felt cold and empty. An early-morning silence pervaded the air, adding to the sense of emptiness, and the sound of our footsteps echoed dully in the stillness. As we approached the lift — which had been jammed open with an iron bar — I wondered if this was going to be my final journey ...

My final time in this corridor.

My final time in the lift.

My final time in the concrete splendour of good old Compton House.

I smiled to myself, thinking — well, it could have been a lot worse, couldn't it? Of course, it could have been a whole lot better too ...

As we got into the lift and the doors closed, I glanced at Lucy. The picnic we'd had just a few hours earlier seemed to belong to a different world now, a world that existed a thousand years ago. And while, at the time, it had felt like the beginning of something between me and Lucy, it was now starting to feel like it was all there was ever going to be: the beginning, the middle, the end. But even so, if this was to be my final journey — our final journey — that brief time we'd shared on the roof together would still be the best time of my life.

Yeah, I thought, smiling at Lucy, it could have been a whole lot worse.

"What are you smiling about?" Hashim sneered at me.

I looked at him. "Not much. Just thinking how lucky I am, that's all."

"Lucky?" he said, shaking his head. "You fucking freak."

As the lift reached the ground floor, I said to Ellman, "What have you done with Lucy's mum and her brother?"

He didn't say anything, he didn't even bother looking at me. He just waited, his eyes taking in everything, as Tweet checked out the ground floor, making sure there was no one around. Then, after a signal from Tweet, Ellman gave Hashim the nod, and Hashim moved out of the lift with Lucy. O'Neil followed them. Ellman looked at me, jerking his head, and I followed O'Neil, with Ellman close behind me.

Outside the tower, two black Range Rovers with tinted windows were waiting by the doors.

Now that I was sure we were leaving the tower, I sent the text that I'd already written in my head to the local police and ambulance services. The text read:

URGENT!!! PLEASE HELP!!! MS CONNIE HARVEY, AGED 54, HAS BEEN ATTACKED AND HAS SUFFERED A SERIOUS HEAD INJURY. SHE NEEDS IMME­DIATE MEDICAL ATTENTION. SHE HAS BEEN TIED UP AND LEFT IN HER ROOM BY UN­KNOWN ASSAILANTS AT FLAT 4, 23RD FLOOR, COMPTON HOUSE, CROW LANE ESTATE, CROW LANE, LONDON SE15 6CG. MRS MICHELLE WALKER AND HER SON BEN MAY ALSO NEED ASSISTANCE AT FLAT 6 ON 3oTH FLOOR. THIS IS NOT A HOAX. PLEASE HURRY.

The two Range Rovers both had their engines running. While Tweet and Hashim and Lucy headed for the one in front, Ellman told me to follow O'Neil to the other one. I watched over my shoulder as Hashim and Lucy got awkwardly into the back of the first one, with Tweet getting into the front passenger's seat, then Ellman opened the back door of our Range Rover and told me to get in.

I got in.

He got in beside me.

O'Neil sat in the front passenger seat.

The guy in the driver's seat had his hood up, and all I could see of his face in the rear-view mirror was a pair of dark glasses and a raggedy twist of beard on his chin. From his phone records, I knew that he was Gunner.

"All right?" he grunted at Ellman.

Ellman ignored him, watching the car in front pull away. Then he just said, "Go."

We turned right out of Compton and headed south along Crow Lane, both cars cruising along at a steady 4omph — not fast enough to get stopped, not too slow to attract attention. Ellman lit a cigarette and leaned back in his seat, looking totally relaxed and at ease. I gazed out through the window for a while, watching the estate pass by — the kids' playground, the low-rises, the towers ... Fitzroy House, Gladstone, Heath. There were a few people around — some gang kids hanging around the towers, one or two passing cars — but they might as well have been on another planet for all the good they were to me. I didn't need telling again that Hashim would shoot Lucy if I tried anything. So I gave up thinking about it.

"Where are we going?" I asked Ellman as we passed Heath House and carried on heading south.

"You'll find out when we get there," Ellman said.

I looked at him. "How did you know it was me?"

"Eh?"

"iBoy ... how did you know it was me?"

He shrugged. "Does it matter?"

"Not really ..." I grinned at him. "But if this was a James Bond movie, this would be the perfect moment for the mad super-villain to show Bond how clever he is by unnecessarily explaining everything to him."

Ellman smiled. "Yeah, just before he tries to kill the fucker."

"And Bond escapes."

He looked at me. "Real life ain't the movies."

"True."

He smiled. "I mean, you think I'm going to hang you from a rope over a pool of fucking sharks or something?"

"Probably not."

He laughed. "And you're not exactly James fucking Bond, are you?"

"I suppose not... what about you?"

"What about me?"

I smiled at him. "Are you the mad super-villain?"

"Yeah, fucking right. I'm Hell-Man ... I'm the Devil —"

"And I'm iBoy."

He looked at me, genuinely amused.

I said, "So, how did you find out?"

He laughed. "It was the kid, the bitch's brother ... what's his name?"

"Ben?"

"Yeah. He told Troy and Jermaine that when you were trying to throw Yo out the window, and his sister was watching, he heard her whispering something to herself."

Ellman shook his head. "The little shit thought she said eBay, but then Yo here remembered one of his crew call­ing you iBoy a couple of weeks ago ... you know, like he was just fucking around with you at the time. So then we started thinking about it, looking into it, you know ... and here we are." He looked at me. "Satisfied?"

"Yeah."

"You ready to be strung up over the sharks now?"

"No problem."

He grinned at me for a moment, then he turned away and spent some time looking out of the car window, check­ing all around, making sure that everything was OK.

"You see anything?" he said to Gunner.

"No, it's cool," Gunner said.

"OK, take the right by the bridge and head back north. Yo, call Marek and let him know."

As O'Neil called the car in front and passed on the directions to the driver (who I guessed was Marek), Ellman leaned back in his seat again and carried on smoking his cigarette.

I gazed out of the window for a while, trying to work out where we were going, but all I could tell was that we seemed to be going round in circles. I tuned in to the GPS signal inside my head, logged on to Google Map, and let my iBrain do its stuff.

"So, anyway," Ellman said casually, turning back to me. "You're Georgie Harvey's boy, yeah?"

I didn't say anything, I just stared at him, wondering how the hell he knew my mum's name.

He smiled. "I don't suppose you remember her much, do you? You must have been about... what, six months old when she died?" He looked at me, smoking his cigar­ette, waiting for me to say something. When I didn't, he took another drag on his cigarette, flipped it out the window, and went on. "Georgie was really something, you know. Did anyone ever tell you that? She was one hot piece of ass. Feisty too." He grinned at me. "Shit, man, that bitch could fight."

I was so confused, so utterly stunned by what he was saying, I could barely breathe, let alone speak.

"What's the matter?" Ellman said, grinning at me. "Didn't you know about me and your mummy?"

I heard O'Neil sniggering, but I didn't take my eyes off Ellman. I couldn't take my eyes off him. "You knew my mum?" I whispered.

"Yeah," he said, leering, "I knew her ... in fact, I was the first guy that Georgie ever knew. Of course, there were plenty more after me —"

"You're lying," I said.

He looked at me. "You think so?"

I nodded. "You never knew my mum."

He laughed again. "I'm just telling you the truth, that's all."

"The truth?" I said, sneering at him. "What do you know about the truth?"

He stopped laughing suddenly and stared at me, his eyes dead cold. "I'll tell you what I know," he said icily. "Your mother was a fucked-up little whore who'd do anything for a line of coke, I know that. And I know how much effort it took me to break that bitch down and get her out on the streets where she belonged ... and then what does she do? After everything I've fucking done for her? She gets herself knocked up and says she wants out ... she wants out of the game ... she wants to get clean, for fuck's sake ..."

Ellman paused for a moment, his eyes drifting away from me, and all I could do was sit there, totally numbed, unable to digest what he was telling me ... or, at least, what I thought he was telling me. It was simply too pain­ful to believe.

"Yeah, well," Ellman said, his voice quite casual again. "She got what she deserved."

"What?"

"She knew what'd happen if she left me. I mean, no one leaves me. No one. And she knew that. She knew what I had to do."

"What...?" I said, my voice barely audible. "What did you have to do?"

Ellman looked surprised, as if the answer was obvious. "I had to kill her."

"Kill her?"

He shrugged. "What else could I do?"

I shook my head in disbelief. "My mum died in a road accident —"

"It wasn't an accident."

I stared at him. "Are you seriously trying to tell me that you were the driver of the car that ran over my mum?"

He looked at me for a moment, his face deadly serious ... and then, all of a sudden, his face broke into a smile and he started laughing. "I had you going for a while there, didn't I?" he said. "I really had you going ..."

"I don't understand —"

"I didn't kill her," he said, still laughing. "I was just fucking with you, that's all."

"You didn't kill my mum?"

He shook his head, grinning. "Like you said, what do I know about the truth?"

O'Neil and Gunner were both laughing too now, snorting away at enjoying Ellman's excellent joke, and as the car filled with the sound of their stupid braying voices, I just looked out of the window and tried to think about things. Was Ellman lying or not? Had he really known my mother? Had anything he'd told me about her been anywhere near the truth?

I couldn't think about it.

It was too hard.

I blanked out my emotions for a while and concen­trated instead on trying to coordinate the cyber-map inside my head with what I could see through the car window. It didn't take me long to work out that we were on the west side of the towers now, heading back north towards the industrial estate ...

I looked at Ellman. He'd stopped laughing now and was just sitting there, smoking another cigarette, gazing indifferently at me.

"Why do you do it?" I said to him.

"Do what?"

"All this ... fucking people up, hurting people, raping, killing ... I mean, why do you do it?"

He shrugged. "I told you before, it's just business."

I stared at him. "Business? How the hell is raping and killing people business?"

He sighed. "You don't understand —"

"No, I don't."

"It's all about power," he said. "Everything ... the whole fucking world, it's all about power. If you've got it, you survive. If you haven't, you don't. Simple as that. Power is the law. It rules the fucking world. You understand? And down here ..." He looked out of the window, indi­cating the passing streets, the towers in the distance, the world of Crow Town. "The only law down here, the only means of acquiring and establishing and maintaining your power, is violence." He stared hard at me. "Rape, murder, whatever ... it's not personal. I don't do it for fun. I mean, I'm not saying that I don't enjoy it, because I do, but that's not why I do it. I do it because it shows everyone else who I am, what I can do ... it shows the world what I am."

"And that's it?" I said. "You kill and rape and brutalize people just to show the world what you are? That's your reason?"

He shrugged. "It's as good a reason as any."

I stared at him. "But you must know it's wrong —

"Wrong?" he laughed. "What the fuck's wrong got to do with anything?" He looked at me. "D'you think it's wrong for a dog to kill a cat?"

"That's totally different."

"Why?"

"Dogs are animals — they don't know any better."

"What, and you think I do? You think any of us do? Fuck, man ... we're all fucking animals — none of us know any better."

As we sat there staring at each other — a wimp and a devil, iBoy and Hell-Man, together in the back seat of a black Range Rover — I wondered for a moment if perhaps, in a twisted kind of way, he was right. Maybe neither of us did know any better. Maybe we were just animals. And maybe ...

I stopped thinking about it then. The car was begin­ning to slow down. I looked out of the window and saw that the Range Rover in front of us had turned right and was heading slowly up an unlit lane. We followed it. The lane was uneven, pitted with cracks and pot-holes, and as the car lumped and rolled its way upwards, the twin beams of the headlights illuminated the ghosted remains of the old industrial estate: rusted skips, vacant factories, empty industrial units, abandoned warehouses ...

The car in front was turning right again, this time into a square of wasteground that had probably once been a car park ... a car park for the employees who'd prob­ably once worked in the dilapidated warehouse on the far side of the wasteground.

"Follow them round the back," Ellman told Gunner.

We followed the car in front as it rumbled across the wasteground, over to the warehouse, round the back ... and that's where we stopped.

I looked over at the other car, trying to catch a glimpse of Lucy, but it was too dark to see anything.

"Don't worry," Ellman said to me. "You'll see her in a minute."

I looked at him. "What are you going to do with her?"

"The same thing I did to your mother."

"What?"

He smiled coldly. "You should have seen the look on her face when I ran that bitch over."

"But you said —"

"Yeah, I know. I said I was only joking about Georgie ... but I wasn't." He grinned at me. "Or maybe I was ... but I guess you'll never know now, will you?"

He moved so incredibly quickly then, hammering his head into mine with such stunning speed and power, that I didn't have time to feel confused. I didn't have time to feel anything. The only thing I was vaguely aware of was a sudden shuddering impact, a momentary flash of blind­ing pain ...

And then nothing.