The Danger Game

  ‘When can we see her?’ I asked.

  ‘Not for a while. Maybe a couple of hours or so.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Nan should be here soon. She went over to Courtney’s to pick up some nightclothes and stuff.’

  ‘What about Courtney’s mum?’ I asked. ‘Is she on her own?’

  Grandad shook his head. ‘Her carer’s staying with her tonight. We’ll have to arrange for someone else to take over in the morning. I’ll make some calls first thing.’

  ‘Why don’t you go home and get some rest?’ I suggested. ‘I can stay here with Nan. We can call you if anything happens.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he said firmly. ‘If I hadn’t let Courtney go to Raisa’s on her own, she wouldn’t be here. I’m not going to leave her now until I know for sure that she’s going to be OK.’

  ‘It’s not your fault, Grandad,’ I told him again. ‘The only people to blame for beating her up are the ones who actually did it and Dee Dee for telling them to do it.’

  ‘I know,’ Grandad said. ‘But that doesn’t mean I’m not partly responsible.’ He looked at me. ‘I’m not wallowing in guilt or anything, Travis, I’m just stating a fact. I made a mistake. I messed up. All I’m doing now is trying to make amends for it.’ He smiled wearily at me. ‘That’s what you do when you get things wrong. You accept it, try to fix it, and make sure you learn from it. So don’t worry, I’m not moping around drowning myself in guilt and self-pity, I’m just trying to put things straight. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  Nan turned up about twenty minutes later. She’d not only brought nightclothes and stuff for Courtney, she’d also brought fresh clothing for Grandad and me, which turned out to be a really good idea as the three of us ended up staying the rest of the night at the hospital. When the results of Courtney’s CT scan finally came through, there was no sign of a blood clot, and no indication of any other long-term damage. Dr Adams talked a lot about the complexities and uncertainties of head trauma injuries, but it was pretty obvious that he had no real idea what had caused her severe headache. I don’t know why he didn’t just admit that he simply didn’t know. I mean, it wasn’t as if anyone was going to blame him for not knowing everything. I felt like telling him what Granny Nora had told me. There are so many things that none of us will ever understand, things that simply don’t have answers, but the trick is to realise that we don’t have to know all the answers. We live in a mysterious universe that has no purpose or reason. We don’t have to feel frightened of not knowing things.

  I didn’t tell Dr Adams that, of course. I didn’t think he’d appreciate it.

  We were allowed in to see Courtney for a short while, and although she still looked terrible – her face a swollen mess of yellow and purple bruises – she didn’t seem too bad in herself, smiling and joking, trying to make light of everything. Underneath it all though, I think the shock of what had happened to her – and what could have happened to her if Mason and his friends hadn’t intervened – was beginning to really sink in. I could see it in her eyes, a haunted and fearful look. I’d never seen anything like that in Courtney before, and it really got to me. It gripped me deep down inside, filling me with a hatred so powerful that it was actually quite frightening.

  I didn’t tell Nan or Grandad what I’d found out about Gloria’s betrayal or Dee Dee’s connection with Ronnie Bull. Grandad was so exhausted that he could barely keep his eyes open – every time he sat down he kept dozing off – and I thought it was best to let him get as much rest as possible. And although it was very tempting to tell Nan about Gloria – and I almost gave in to the temptation once or twice – I decided in the end that it just wasn’t the right time or place. Our one and only concern at that moment was Courtney. And I wasn’t going to do anything to change that.

  35

  At eight o’clock the next morning we all set off from the hospital in Grandad’s car. Grandad had tried to arrange a replacement carer for Courtney’s mum, but he hadn’t had any luck, so Nan said she’d look after Mrs Lane for the day. The plan was that Grandad would drop Nan off at Courtney’s house, take me to school, then drive back to the hospital to stay with Courtney. She hadn’t suffered any further headaches, and when she’d woken up at seven o’clock she was feeling, and looking, a lot better. She’d eaten some breakfast, had a shower, and she was already starting to moan about having to stay in hospital.

  ‘I’ve got a lot of things to do,’ she told Dr Adams. ‘I haven’t got time to lie around in bed all day. Just give me some painkillers and I’ll be fine.’

  ‘I’ll decide if you’re fine or not, Ms Lane,’ he told her. ‘You’ve taken a serious beating. Your body needs time to recover.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘No buts,’ he said firmly. ‘I’m keeping you under observation for at least another twenty-four hours. If you’re still doing well then, we’ll consider discharging you. In the meantime, you need to get as much rest as you can.’

  Apart from a resigned shake of her head and a glare of disapproval, she hadn’t put up much of an argument, and I think, deep down, she knew he was right. The haunted look in her eyes that had pained me so much the night before wasn’t nearly so obvious now, but she was still a long way from being back to her usual feisty and fearless self. I’m pretty sure that’s why Grandad wanted to carry on staying with her. Physically, she was on the mend. But mentally and emotionally she was still in a bad way, and Grandad was determined to give her as much help as he could, even if that just meant being there for her.

  After we’d dropped Nan off at Courtney’s house and were heading out of town towards school, I wondered if now was the time to bring Grandad up to date on things – Gloria’s betrayal, her meeting with Winston, Jaydie’s revelation about Dee Dee and the plan we’d worked out to prove that he was hooked up with DI Bull – but as I was considering it, Grandad asked me how the changing-room investigation was going, and by the time I’d finished telling him as much as I could remember about the day before – which, now that I was looking back at it, felt like three days rolled into one – we were already approaching the school gates.

  ‘So when’s the Cup Final?’ Grandad asked, pulling up at the side of the road.

  ‘Tomorrow afternoon,’ I told him. ‘One thirty kick-off.

  ‘Well, hopefully you’ll have better luck catching your thief then.’

  He was doing his best to sound interested, but I could tell his heart wasn’t really in it. His mind was still focused on Courtney.

  ‘She’ll be OK, Grandad,’ I said. ‘She’s tough. She’ll get through it.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘You’d better get going,’ I said, unbuckling my seat belt. ‘You’ll call me if there’s any problems or anything, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’ll come round to the hospital straight after school.’

  ‘OK.’ He forced a smile. ‘Enjoy your lessons.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  Lessons didn’t start until nine o’clock, and it wasn’t even eight thirty yet, so there weren’t many kids or teachers around as I made my way over to the bike shed. As I unlocked my bike, I wondered again why I hadn’t told Grandad what I was planning to do this morning. I tried telling myself that it was simply because I was skipping school, and no one in their right mind tells their parents – or in my case grandparents – that they’re skipping school, but in all honesty I knew there was more to it than that. The real reason I hadn’t told him what I was doing was that I knew if I had, he would have done everything in his power to stop me. He would have told me it was far too dangerous, too risky, too stupid, and he probably would have been right.

  But as he’d told me himself, the sensible option isn’t always the right option. Sometimes you have to follow your heart. And my heart, filled as it was with a burning desire for revenge, was telling me to do everything in my power to make Dee Dee pay for what he’d done to Courtney.

  It usually takes me between twenty and
twenty-five minutes to cycle from Kell Cross to Delaney & Co’s office, but speed was of the essence that morning – I wanted to be in and out before Gloria arrived – and by going full-pelt all the way, I managed to get there in just over fifteen minutes. It was 8.43 when I entered the office, which meant that if Gloria was as punctual as she usually was – nine o’clock on the dot, every morning – I had exactly seventeen minutes to get what I needed and get out.

  It wasn’t absolutely crucial that I avoided Gloria, it just made everything a lot easier if she didn’t see me, so although I was hurrying as much as possible, I wasn’t in a state of panic or anything.

  I went into Grandad’s office and headed straight for the cupboard by the window. I opened it up, pulled out the gadget case, and began searching through it for what I needed. It took me a couple of minutes to find the two bits of kit I wanted – a small voice-activated recorder and the second of the two new trackers – and then I had to spend another two or three minutes opening up Grandad’s laptop and connecting the new tracker to my mobile. By the time I’d done all that and put the case back in the cupboard it was 8.56.

  Four minutes to go before Gloria was due to arrive.

  ‘Plenty of time,’ I muttered to myself, hurrying out of the office and locking the door behind me. ‘No need to rush . . . just stay cool . . .’

  I didn’t dare look over my shoulder as I rode off towards town along North Walk, I just kept going until I’d turned the corner at the end of the street. I felt childishly exhilarated, like a little kid who’s just got away with nicking a Twix from a sweetshop.

  While I stopped to get my breath back, I turned on my phone and quickly texted Jaydie. We’d already arranged the night before to meet at McDonald’s at ten this morning, so all I texted was – all ok, il b there n 5. c u wen u gt there. trav x

  While I was waiting for Jaydie upstairs in McDonald’s, I called the receptionist at school and told her that I wouldn’t be in today because a close friend of mine had been taken to hospital after a serious assault. I pretended to be all shaken up and emotional about it, and the receptionist was really kind and understanding, which made me feel a bit ashamed of myself, but it did the trick. She said she’d let my teachers know, and asked me to pass on her best wishes to my friend.

  Jaydie arrived at about 9.45. I bought us each a Big Breakfast, and while we ate, I went through the plan with her again.

  ‘This is the voice-activated recorder,’ I said, passing her the bug, ‘and this is the receiver.’ She took both devices and had a good look at them. The recorder was similar in size and shape to the tracker, and like the tracker it was magnetic. ‘It should be easy enough to find somewhere in the phone box to fix it to,’ I told Jaydie. ‘Just make sure it’s not visible.’

  ‘Duh,’ she said, grinning at me.

  ‘The receiver’s got a range of a thousand metres, so you shouldn’t have any problem getting a signal in your flat. How far do you reckon the phone box is from your place?’

  ‘A lot less than a thousand metres,’ she said, examining the receiver. ‘How do I turn it on?’

  ‘See that switch that says on and off?’

  She smiled sheepishly at me.

  ‘Duh,’ I said.

  She laughed.

  ‘Just keep it turned on all the time,’ I explained. ‘Once the recorder picks up the sound of a voice, it’ll start recording and you’ll hear a series of beeps from the receiver. The receiver will automatically record everything, but if you want to listen to it in real time, you press this button here.’ I pointed out a little switch labelled LIVE AUDIO. ‘All right?’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘Call me as soon as you hear anything, OK?’

  She nodded.

  ‘This is the tracker,’ I said, passing her the device. ‘Somehow you’ve got to get it planted on Dee Dee. Does he usually carry any kind of bag with him?’

  ‘Yeah, he’s got this really nice little Louis Vuitton handbag.’ She smiled at me. ‘He never goes anywhere without it.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ I said, momentarily grinning back at her. ‘Does he carry a rucksack or a sports bag or anything?’

  She shook her head, suddenly serious again. ‘I’ve never seen him with one.’

  ‘All right, so we’ll probably have to put the tracker in his clothing. That suit he wears . . . does he wear it all the time?’

  ‘Not always, but a lot of the time, yeah. He thinks it makes him look like a businessman.’

  ‘Try to get the tracker in the top pocket of his jacket. We’ll just have to hope he’s wearing it when he calls Bull.’ I looked at her. Are you sure this plan of yours is going to work?’

  When we’d talked about it the night before, Jaydie had come up with a way of getting the tracker into the phone box without being seen, and she’d worked out a possible way of getting close enough to Dee Dee to plant the tracker on him. Both plans were full of risks, and I still wasn’t sure about them at all.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Trav,’ Jaydie said. ‘I talked it through with my girls last night and we’ve got it all worked out. Just leave it to us, OK?’

  ‘Well, all right,’ I said hesitantly. ‘But if there’s any hint of trouble, even the slightest possibility that something might be going wrong, just call it all off immediately. Have you got that?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she said, giving me a mock salute. ‘Message received and understood.’

  ‘I’m serious, Jaydie. I don’t want you or anyone else getting hurt.’

  ‘We know what we’re doing, Trav. Trust me.’ She stared into my eyes. ‘We don’t need anyone to hold our hands. We know exactly what we’re doing.’

  I’d always known how tough and smart Jaydie was – she had to be to survive on the Slade – but what I hadn’t realised until now, as I sat there looking back into her eyes, was just how determined and capable she was. It was such a powerful sense that I could feel it drilling into me, filling me with a feeling I didn’t quite understand. Whether she’d always been so strong, and I just hadn’t realised it before, or whether this was another part of that indefinable change in her that I’d noticed the other day in her flat, I didn’t really know. All I knew for sure was that, at that precise moment, it was impossible not to believe in her.

  ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ she asked, frowning at me.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like you’ve just had an epiphany or something.’

  ‘Epiphany?’

  ‘It means a sudden revelation.’

  I grinned, shaking my head. ‘I was just thinking about something, that’s all.’

  ‘That’s the problem with you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You think too much.’

  ‘You think so?’

  She smiled. ‘I know so.’

  36

  I didn’t intend to sleep for the rest of the day, all I really meant to do was go home for a few hours and get some rest – take a shower, spend some time on my own, just hang around doing nothing for a while. But I suppose I must have been a lot more tired than I thought, because as soon as I went up to my room and lay down on my bed, I was out like a light.

  While I was sleeping like a baby, Jaydie – as she told me later – was busy doing her stuff.

  Like most of the so-called gangs and crews on the various estates in and around Barton, Jaydie’s ‘posse’ wasn’t really an organised gang at all, just a group of friends who hung around together and looked out for each other. There were a few ‘proper’ criminal gangs – like Dee Dee’s crew and Joss Malik’s boys – and these gangs were organised, at least to a certain extent, but a lot of what passed for ‘gang activity’ on the estates wasn’t structured or coordinated at all. It was just groups of kids who stuck together and sometimes had fights with other groups of kids. They might give themselves names that gave the impression they were genuine organised gangs – Young Beacon Boys or Barton Bloodset or whatever – but according to Mason, it was the
crews without names that you really had to worry about, the ones that didn’t have to try to impress anyone.

  Jaydie’s ‘posse’ was exactly what she’d told me it was – just a little group of trusted friends. There were only about fifteen of them. Some of them were the same age as her, but most of them were older. They didn’t call themselves anything, they didn’t go looking for trouble, and although the older girls were generally more respected – and listened to – than the younger ones, there weren’t any leaders as such. They were simply a group of friends who’d grown up together and were always there for each other.

  When Jaydie had first explained her plan to me, she’d told me that although she was only going to need help from two or three of the girls, she’d still have to tell the rest of them what she was up to. The problem with that – from my point of view – was that there was no way of explaining things without revealing Dee Dee’s relationship with Bull. To me, that sounded far too risky.

  ‘What if one of the girls tells someone else?’ I’d said to Jaydie. ‘If it got out now that Dee Dee’s in with Bull, and he found out about it, it could ruin everything.’

  ‘It won’t get out,’ Jaydie assured me. ‘I can absolutely guarantee it. Whenever we talk together, if one of us reveals something that we don’t want anyone outside the group to know – whatever it is, and for whatever reason we want it kept secret – it never goes any further. And when I say never, I mean never.’

  I still didn’t like the idea of putting my trust in people I’d never even met, but Jaydie was adamant that that was how it had to be, so I’d told her to go ahead, and that’s what she’d done. She’d told the whole group about Dee Dee, and they’d all agreed to keep it secret, and then she’d taken aside the two girls she’d chosen to carry out her plan, and they’d sat down together and worked out precisely how they were going to go about it.