The Ultimate Truth by Kevin Brooks Read Free Book Online

looking into my eyes, then he reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a familiar-looking black plastic file. On the front of the file it said
DELANEY &
CO
, and underneath that,
PRELIMINARY REPORT
.
    He passed me the file and began telling me about a boxer called Bashir Kamal.
    Bashir was the best young boxer he’d ever worked with, he told me. He was twenty years old, a light welterweight, and he’d been training with Mr Ruddy for two
years. He’d won twenty-six of his twenty-seven amateur fights, twenty-two of them inside the distance, and since the beginning of May he’d been training hard in preparation for his
first professional bout.
    ‘Bash was a fanatic about training,’ Mr Ruddy said. ‘Never missed a session, always on time, never moaned about anything. Just turned up every day and got on with it. Then one
day, he didn’t show up. Didn’t call in sick or anything, didn’t leave a message, just didn’t turn up. And this was only six days before his first pro fight. I tried calling
him, but he didn’t answer his phone. He didn’t reply to my voicemail messages either. So in the end I went round to his house to see what was going on.’
    Bashir lived with his parents in a council house on the Beacon Fields estate, Mr Ruddy told me. He’d moved back in with them a few years ago, after living in London for a while, and he
hadn’t got round to finding his own place yet.
    ‘When I got there,’ Mr Ruddy said, ‘his mother wouldn’t let me in. She told me that Bashir had gone to Pakistan to look after his grandmother who was seriously ill. I
just didn’t believe her. Bash wouldn’t have gone to Pakistan without letting me know. He’s not like that. And there was something about the way his mother was acting anyway,
something that didn’t feel right. When I asked her how I could contact Bashir, she told me I couldn’t. I asked her why not, she wouldn’t tell me. It was just really odd, you
know?’
    ‘So what did you do?’ I asked.
    He shrugged. ‘What could I do? I couldn’t force her to tell me anything, and I had no proof she was lying. There wasn’t anything I could do about it.’
    ‘What about reporting it to the police?’
    ‘I tried that, but there was nothing they could do either. Bashir’s not a kid, he’s twenty years old. He can go wherever he likes, whenever he likes. He doesn’t have to
tell anyone where he is. If he wants to give up his boxing career to look after his sick grandmother in Pakistan, that’s entirely up to him.’
    ‘So you asked my dad to see what he could find out,’ I said.
    Mr Ruddy nodded. ‘After a couple of days he got back to me with that,’ he said, indicating the file.
    I opened the report and began flipping through the pages.
    ‘Your dad was fairly sure that Bash wasn’t at his parents’ house,’ Mr Ruddy said. ‘As far as he could tell, no one had seen or heard from him since he stopped
coming to the gym.’
    ‘But Dad hadn’t found anything to suggest that Bashir had left the country,’ I said, skimming the report.
    ‘That’s right. Jack told me that he was happy to carry on looking for Bashir, but that it might take some time, and even though he was giving me a good discount, it could still be
fairly expensive. I told him to go ahead.’
    ‘Did he find out anything else?’
    ‘Nothing specific, but he called me a couple of times and said they were making some progress.’
    I carried on studying the report. There was a brief summary of the case on the first page, outlining what Mr Ruddy had told Dad, and the next page listed Bashir Kamal’s personal details
– age, address, phone number, etc. There was also a photograph of him. He had a longish face, short black hair, and hauntingly dark eyes.
    I quickly read through the summary.
    ‘What’s this about Bashir being preoccupied about something?’ I asked Mr Ruddy.
    ‘Your dad asked me all sorts of questions about Bashir, and I remembered that in the week or so