down the hill toward Brookland School. The bike was a Condor Junior Roadracer, custom built for him on his twelfth birthday. It was a teenager’s bike, with a cut down Reynolds 531 frame, but the wheels were fullsize so he could ride at speed with hardly any rolling resistance. He spun past a delivery van and passed through the school gates. He would be sorry when he grew out of the bike. For two years now it had almost been part of him.
He double locked it in the shed and went into the yard. Brookland was a modern school, all redbrick and, to Alex’s eye, rather ugly. He could have gone to any of the exclusive private schools around Chelsea, but Ian Rider had decided to send him here. He had said it would be more of a challenge.
The first period of the day was algebra. When Alex came into the classroom, the teacher, Mr. Donovan, was already chalking up a complicated equation on the board. It was hot in the room, the sun streaming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, put in by architects who should have known better. As Alex took his place near the back, he wondered how he was going to get through the lesson. How could he possibly think about algebra when there were so many other questions churning through his mind?
The gun at the funeral. The way Blunt had looked at him. The van with STRYKER & SON written on the side. The empty office. And the biggest mystery of all, the one detail that refused to go away. The seat belt. Ian Rider hadn’t been wearing a seat belt.
But of course he had. Ian Rider had never been one to give lectures. He had always said Alex should make up his own mind about things. But he’d had this thing about seat belts. The more Alex thought about it, the less he believed it. A collision in the middle of the city. Suddenly he wished he could see the car. At least the wreckage would tell him that the accident had really happened, that Ian Rider had really died that way.
“Alex?”
Alex looked up and realized that everyone was staring at him. Mr. Donovan had just asked him something. He quickly scanned the blackboard, taking in the figures. “Yes, Sir,” he said. “X equals seven and Y is fifteen.”
The math teacher sighed. “Yes, Alex. You’re absolutely right. But actually I was just asking you to open the window…”
Somehow he managed to get through the rest of the day, but by the time the final bell rang, his mind was made up. While everyone else streamed out, he made his way to the secretary’s office and borrowed a copy of the Yellow Pages.
“What are you looking for?” the secretary asked. Miss Bedfordshire had always had a soft spot for Alex.
“Auto junkyards…” Alex flicked through the pages. “If a car got smashed up near Old Street, they’d take it somewhere near, wouldn’t they?”
“I suppose so.”
“Here…” Alex had found the yards listed under “Auto Wreckers.” But there were dozens of them fighting for attention over four pages.
“Is this for a school project?” the secretary asked. She knew Alex had lost a relative, but not how.
“Sort of…” Alex was reading the addresses, but they told him nothing.
“This one’s quite near Old Street.” Miss Bedfordshire pointed at the corner of the page.
“Wait!” Alex tugged the book toward him and looked at the entry underneath the one the secretary had chosen:
J. B. STRYKER. AUTO WRECKERS
Heaven for Cars
CALL US TODAY
“That’s in Vauxhall,” Miss Bedfordshire said. “Not too far from here.”
“I know.” But Alex had recognized the name. J. B. Stryker. He thought back to the van he had seen outside his house on the day of the funeral. Stryker & Son. Of course it might just be a coincidence, but it was still somewhere to start. He closed the book. “I’ll see you, Miss Bedfordshire.”
“Be careful.” The secretary watched Alex leave, wondering why she had said that. Maybe it was his eyes. Dark and serious, there was something dangerous there. Then the telephone rang and she forgot him as she went back to work.
J. B. Stryker’s was a square of wasteland behind the railway tracks running out of Waterloo Station. The area was enclosed by a high brick wall topped with broken glass and razor wire. Two wooden gates hung open, and from the other side of the road, Alex could see a shed with a security window and beyond it the tottering piles of dead and broken cars. Everything of any value had been stripped away and only the rusting carcasses remained, heaped one on top of the other, waiting to be fed into the crusher.
There was a guard sitting in the shed, reading a newspaper. In the distance a bulldozer coughed into life, then roared down on a battered Ford Taurus, its metal claw smashing through the window to scoop up the vehicle and carry it away. A telephone rang somewhere in the shed and the guard turned around to answer it. That was enough for Alex. Holding his bike and wheeling it along beside him, he sprinted through the gates.
He found himself surrounded by dirt and debris. The smell of diesel was thick in the air and the roar of the engines was deafening. Alex watched as a crane swooped down on one of the cars, seized it in a metallic grip, and dropped it into a crusher. For a moment the car rested on a pair of shelves. Then the shelves lifted up, toppling the car over and down into a trough. The operator—sitting in a glass cabin at one end of the crusher pressed a button and there was a great belch of black smoke. The shelves closed in on the car like a monster insect folding in its wings. There was a grinding sound as the car was crushed until it was no bigger than a rolled-up carpet. Then the operator threw a gear and the car was squeezed out, metallic toothpaste being chopped up by a hidden blade. The slices tumbled to the ground.
Leaving his bike propped against the wall, Alex ran farther into the yard, crouching down behind the wrecks. With the din from the machines, there was no chance that anyone would hear him, but he was still afraid of being seen. He stopped to catch his breath, drawing a grimy hand across his face. His eyes were watering from the diesel fumes. The air was as filthy as the ground beneath him.
He was beginning to regret coming—but then he saw it. His uncle’s BMW was parked a few yards away, separated from the other cars. At first glance it looked absolutely fine, the metallic silver bodywork not even scratched. Certainly there was no way that this car could have been involved in a fatal collision with a truck or with anything else. But it was definitely his uncle’s car. Alex recognized the license plate. He hurried closer and it was now that he saw that the car was damaged after all. The windshield had been smashed, along with all the windows on the driver’s side. Alex made his way around to the other side. And froze.
