Num8ers - By Rachel Ward Page 0,79

lady. If you have done nothing wrong, if you have nothing to hide, then you should talk to the police. Nothing bad will happen to you if you tell the truth.”

I snorted. “Yeah, right.”

His nostrils flared. “I don’t like your attitude. Appalling things have happened. Innocent people have died. We need to get to the truth. We need to find those responsible. It’s not a laughing matter.”

“I’m not laughing,” I said, “but I’m not talking to them. I don’t trust them. Why should I? They’ve taken my friend away.”

“He was a suspect,” he said, his mouth slowly shaping all the words like he was talking to a very young kid or a foreigner. “Of course they’ve taken him away. And if he has done nothing wrong and he tells the truth, they will let him go again. Perhaps” — his voice softened—“perhaps we sometimes don’t know people as well as we think we do. It’s possible that your…your friend didn’t tell you everything. That you got caught up in something you knew nothing about….”

“No!” I shouted, my voice echoing through the place. “It’s not like that. You’re like the rest of them. You’re twisting things around, trying to make him into something he’s not. It wasn’t him at the London Eye. It was me.”

They were both looking at me intently now. “Go on,” Simon said.

“I didn’t do nothing. I just knew that something was going to happen that day. I could see that lots of people there were going to die.”

“How did you know?” The rector was waiting for me to tell him I did it, I planted the bomb.

“I can see the day, the date, when people are going to die.” They looked at each other quickly. “I could tell you both yours, your last days, but I never will. I never tell people, it’s not right. But when I saw that all those people had the same day, that day in London, I was scared. I didn’t want to be there, so we ran away.”

“What do you mean, you can see the date…?”

“If I look at someone, I see a number. It’s kind of inside my head and outside at the same time. The number is a date.”

“How do you know what the number means?”

“I’ve seen enough death. I know. Anyway, I was right, wasn’t I, about the London Eye? I was right to run away.”

They looked at each other again.

“Why didn’t you go to the police, tell them what you knew?”

“Why do you think? It’s all so simple, isn’t it? Tell the truth and it will all be alright. Maybe it’s like that here, but it’s not where I come from. They see a black kid with some money, they see a dealer. They see a couple of kids, just chilling somewhere, hanging out, they see a couple of muggers. They need to collar someone for a crime, they collar someone — one of the usual suspects, anyone who fits the picture, doesn’t matter. Truth and lies, it all gets mixed up. No one would believe me.”

“It’s certainly…unexpected” — the rector was picking his words carefully—“what you’re saying. But if that’s what you believe, then you should tell them. They will be able to do tests that can exonerate you, test your clothes for traces of explosives.”

“Set me up, you mean.”

His turn to get angry. “No!” he shouted, slamming his fist against the door. “That’s not how it works in this country. There are processes, checks and balances. You must trust the system. It’s what keeps this country civilized.”

I closed my eyes. What can you say to people like that, part of the system themselves, or so naïve they believe all that establishment bullshit? I couldn’t argue against them, anyway. I didn’t have the words that would make them listen, respect me; didn’t know their language.

They let the police in to see me, of course, and as usual they brought a social worker with them. The feeling that Simon and the rector might protect me from all that had faded during the lecture about our “civilized society,” but it still felt like a betrayal. I didn’t answer their questions. The only thing I said, over and over, until I thought it would drive us all mad, was, “I’ll talk when you bring my friend here. I’ll talk when I’ve seen Spider.”

They tried all the usual stuff: good cop, bad cop; kind cop, irritated cop; sympathetic cop, threatening cop. None of it touched me — I let their