Split Second (7 page)

‘You should be a designer,’ I said.

Jas shrugged, but she looked pleased.

I wandered over to the bed where pieces of fabric had been laid out in a series of broad, dramatic swathes. A length of soft, black-and-cream check wool caught my eye.

‘That’s lovely,’ I said.

‘I’m making a coat with it,’ Jas said, ‘but I’ve got stuck on the darts. I can’t make them even.’

‘Wow.’ I turned to her, impressed. I’d never met anyone who could make their own clothes before. ‘How did you learn to do that?’

‘Mum taught me, before . . .’ Jas tailed off and I knew she was referring to the bomb and to her older brother being in a coma.

I quickly steered the conversation back towards the fabrics on the bed. Nat must have come in quietly because I hadn’t heard the front door, but after we’d been upstairs for an hour
or so, he poked his head around the door. A strand of hair fell over his face.

‘Hey, Jas, I’m off, so—’ He stopped as he saw me, his blue eyes widening in horror.

I opened my mouth to say hello but before I could speak, Nat had mumbled something and ducked out of sight. A few moments later, the front door banged shut. He was gone.

There was an awkward silence. My face was burning. I didn’t want Jas to see, but there wasn’t much chance of that as she was sitting right opposite. In the end I looked up to see her
watching me, concern in her eyes.

‘Did I do something to upset him?’ I asked, the words slipping out before I could stop them.

Jas shook her head slowly. ‘I don’t know what it is . . . he’s not usually like that with my friends.’ She cleared her throat. ‘He said he remembered you from that
day . . . at the market . . .’

‘Oh.’ I looked away. I could see that might bring back horrible memories for Nat, but I still didn’t understand why he had looked so disgusted at finding me in his house.

Jas made some sandwiches for us to eat, though I noticed she only picked at hers. We chatted for a bit, then her dad rang to ask her to check some invoices he’d left at home. Apologising
again, Jas went downstairs. I popped to the bathroom, wondering how late her dad worked. It was already almost seven. Brian was usually home by six-thirty. As I came out, the open door across the
landing caught my eye. It was covered in ancient football stickers. Was this Nat’s room? I hesitated for a second. He was out and I could hear Jas downstairs. No-one else was around, why
shouldn’t I take a sneak peek?

I peered around the door. The room was slightly larger and much emptier than Jas’s with a bed on either side of the window. Did that mean Nat had once shared the room with Lucas?
Nat’s school uniform was hung neatly in front of the wardrobe though most of his other clothes were in piles on the floor. The paint on the furniture was peeling away while the walls were
covered with Blu-tack marks, where Nat had presumably taken down old posters. Only two remained – one of some footballer I’d never heard of, another of a girl in a bikini. She was
posing with her hands on her hips – some model or singer, I guessed. I didn’t recognise her.

I turned away, feeling a twinge of jealousy. Well, that was stupid. Nat was perfectly entitled to fancy anyone he liked. Just because he clearly couldn’t stand me . . .

Shaking off these thoughts I wandered over to Nat’s computer. It was an old model – second-hand by the look of it – and still open, though the screen was dark. I touched the
keys, thinking idly that if I stayed with Gail and Brian, I would be able to get something much sleeker and faster.

The screen lit up. I hesitated, intrigued, then I bent down to take a closer look. It was wrong to snoop, of course, but I could still hear Jas talking on the phone downstairs – and there
was no harm in just taking a peek.

Nat’s desktop was covered with folders and files. Some of them looked like they contained football stuff, others were clearly labelled with the names of school subjects. There was nothing
that looked particularly interesting.

As I turned away from the computer, it beeped.

I glanced back. The browser icon was flashing at the bottom of the screen. One of the programmes must still be open, presumably something from the internet that Nat had minimised before he left.
Downstairs, Jas was still chattering away. Without thinking about what I was doing, I clicked on the file.

It opened in front of me. A second later I gasped, unable to believe what I was looking at.

I stood outside Deakin’s Electrics and took a deep breath. Man, my hands were actually trembling. I shoved them into my jacket pockets. It was just the cold.

I glanced up at the shop entrance. If I’d worked out Saxon66’s coded message correctly, I was about to meet people from the League of Iron, probably including those responsible for
the Canal Street market bomb. They must know Lucas – and exactly how and why he had been involved in the bombing.

I blew out my breath. I needed to appear strong. And calm. An image of Charlie in Jas’s room flashed into my mind. I’d been shocked to see her there. In fact, if I was honest, I
hadn’t handled it well at all. It was just because of the connection with Lucas. Definitely nothing to do with the way she looked – or the way she’d stared at me in that haughty
way of hers, her dark eyes slightly slanted like a cat’s.

Enough stalling. I pressed on the doorbell. The shop behind was wreathed in shadows from the second-hand cookers and fridges that filled the small showroom. No-one came. I waited a moment, then
pressed the bell again, harder this time.

A slim man in a black shirt and glasses hurried towards me, past a line of freezers. He shot back a bolt and pulled open the door.

‘Yes?’

‘AngelOfFire.’ I gave my user name, as the coded message had instructed.

The man, who looked in his early twenties, let me in, rebolted the door, then checked the tablet in his hand. I waited, feeling anxious. After what felt like an age he nodded.

‘You’re on the list. Follow me.’ The man led me through to a storeroom at the back of the shop. About thirty people were gathered, mostly guys in their late teens or twenties,
though there were a few women too. I straightened up, grateful for my height. If anyone asked, I was planning on saying I was eighteen. But, as I gazed around the room I realised nobody was
actually paying me any attention. I slunk over to the far wall, trying to lose myself among the stacks of cardboard boxes. Most people were staring towards the front of the room. A second later a
man in a black shirt got up onto a packing crate.

Everyone looked at him expectantly.

I glanced around again. Most of the men wore black T-shirts and had shaved heads or crew cuts. I smoothed my own hair off my face and slid further into the shadows cast by the boxes.

The chatter in the room died down.

‘Welcome,’ the man on the crate said. He was thickset, with stubble on his chin and a deep groove etched into the centre of his forehead. ‘Some of you know me as Saxon66. I
called this meeting. We are the London branch of the League of Iron and we are ready to fight.’ His voice rose as he spoke. The room erupted in a cheer.

I gulped.

‘Tonight’s meeting is an opportunity to confirm our intentions,’ Saxon66 said, looking around the room. ‘To prepare for action.’

Really?
On his forum post Saxon66 had specifically said the meeting was for those ‘seeking answers’. I had assumed he’d meant answers to questions about the League of
Iron’s terrorist activities. Had I misunderstood? It looked like it, as most of the other people in the room were nodding approvingly at Saxon66’s words.

Saxon66 pointed to a young man in the front row with a shaved head and a clenched fist. ‘Why don’t you start, Inquisitor?’

The young man nodded. ‘We should get the Government, and everyone in a religion. We should have village squares and public executions like they used to. I’d do it myself. Cut their
freakin’ heads off.’

The two women opposite me nodded.

‘The real problem’s all the immigration,’ one of the woman called out, her sallow-skinned forehead screwed into an angry frown.

‘Yeah, we should gas them, all of them,’ added the other. She was wearing a black dress, with heavy Goth make-up and a white streak in her long dark hair.

I wriggled further back against the boxes that lined the wall.

‘One at a time,’ Saxon66 said. ‘Go on, Inquisitor.’

Inquisitor stared around the room. ‘They’re taking our jobs: blacks, Pakis, that lot from Poland, too.’

‘And the Government let it happen,’ shouted another voice. ‘We should bomb Parliament.’

‘
And
gas the foreigners,’ Inquisitor insisted.

‘
And
put all the freakin’ bankers in with them,’ snarled the Goth woman.

Everyone cheered.

I looked down at the floor, my head spinning. After spending so much time on the League of Iron forum I’d been expecting some extreme views, but not all this incoherent hatred. These
people weren’t interested in organised attacks, they just wanted a place to vent their anger and resentment. Clearly I’d been totally naive thinking it would be easy to bring up either
Lucas or the bombing.

‘Another view?’ Saxon66 roared. ‘What about you?’

A girl near me with mousy blonde hair shuffled nervously from foot to foot.

‘I’d like us to make the politicians do more,’ she said, her voice barely above a whisper. ‘They say a bunch of stuff, make everyone think they care, but nothing ever
happens.’

A murmur of agreement ran around the room.

‘Sometimes I think all Roman Riley does is talk,’ the girl went on.

‘Yeah.’ Saxon66 snorted with contempt. ‘Riley’s good at
talking
.’

Everyone apart from me grunted in agreement.

I frowned, trying to make sense of what I was hearing. These were Lucas’s contacts, responsible for organising the market bombing. Their blind rage fitted with the ugly violence of the
explosion, though I still didn’t understand why they thought bombing people queuing for food would get rid of the Government or black people or any of the other groups they hated.

‘What about you?’ Saxon66 was pointing into the audience again.

Oh,
no
. He was pointing at me. Everyone looked in my direction. What the hell did I say now?

If I’d stopped to think about it, I don’t know what I would have expected to find on Nat’s laptop: maybe a football website or one showing pictures of girls
or perhaps something relevant to his homework. Instead, I found myself on a forum thread with the title:
Who should we bomb?

Forgetting Jas downstairs, I scanned the posts. The top few consisted of an argument between two users debating whether black people generally or just Muslims should be blown up.

What was Nat doing looking at this horrible conversation? The language – and the hate behind it – made me feel sick.

Beneath this were similarly ugly comments about death camps and how immigrants were stealing English people’s jobs. And then I saw an entry from another forum member with the user name
AngelOfFire . . . it had been made just twenty minutes ago:

I froze. The lettering on the AngelOfFire user name was in bold which surely meant that it had been made on
this computer
. I clicked as if to start a new post.

I stared at the words. Twenty minutes ago Nat had been in here while Jas and I had been in her bedroom across the landing.

He was AngelOfFire.

I scrolled back, looking for other entries under the same name. There were several, all filled with ugly, mindless, hate-filled rants. A couple mentioned the Canal Street market bomb
specifically, while one from a week or so ago actually said the country needed ‘bombs not talk’.

Footsteps sounded on the landing. Jas must have come upstairs without me hearing. Palms sweating, I quickly closed the page and turned away. As I crossed the room, Jas called out my name.

‘I’m here,’ I said, stepping out of Nat’s room and onto the landing. No way could I tell poor Jas what I’d found. I needed time to think about it. ‘Just being
nosy.’

‘It’s fine.’ Jas smiled. ‘Nat won’t mind.’

Right.

‘I just wanted to see what his room looked like,’ I went on, following Jas back into her room.

I left soon after, saying that I had to get home or Gail and Brian would worry. Jas frowned when I said this. It flashed through my head that no-one was worrying about her, then I set off on the
ten-minute walk home. My head spun as I tried to make sense of what I’d seen on Nat’s computer.

There was no escape from what it meant: Nat was secretly a racist thug who believed in violence, in
hurting
people.

And then it hit me.

Nat had been there when the Canal Street market bomb went off. His brother had been caught in the blast but Nat hadn’t. He’d been safely out of the way in another part of the market,
arriving immediately
after
the explosion.

Surely that was all too big a coincidence?

I stopped in the middle of the pavement, the chill October wind whipping at my face.

Why had Nat been in the market at all?

Had he
planted
the bomb?

That would certainly explain why he acted so weirdly around me. But what about his brother? I thought it through. Maybe Nat hadn’t realised his brother was there until it was too late.

Maybe he didn’t care.

The world spun inside my head. What had he written on the forum? Something about bombing ordinary people to create panic ‘like in the Canal Street market bomb’.

I didn’t understand how but I was sure that aloof, good-looking Nat, my new best friend’s brother, had been involved with the bomb that killed my mother.