The Third Person (11 page)

Graham said, ‘When can you find out?’

‘Monday. But it’s not as simple as that. He won’t just help me. I’m going to need some leverage.’

The picture of Amy flicked into the next frame: a random jumble of black at this magnification. Graham clicked a button and she came back to me.

If only.

‘What do you need?’ he asked.

I was thinking:

She was on the internet a lot . . . a whole load of guys
.

That was what Wilkinson had told me.

‘I need some bargaining power.’ I was still staring at the image of Amy on the computer screen. I couldn’t look away.

The computer beeped. A window popped up informing Graham that the Will Robinson single had been successfully downloaded from Liberty.

I blinked.

‘I need you to do a search on Liberty for me,’ I said. ‘I need you to look for just one word for me.’

‘Shoot.’

If anything ever happens to me, I just want you to remember one word
.

That’s what she’d said to me.

‘
Schio
,’ I said. ‘Just one word. Run a search for
Schio
.’

‘Are you all right?’ Graham asked. ‘I’m worried about you.’

‘I’m fine. Well—’ A little incline of the head; a raise of the eyebrows. I sipped Helen’s perfect coffee. ‘You know.’

He nodded.

‘But you don’t need to be worried about me,’ I said. I tried to make it sound as reassuring as possible – as though all this was some hobby I was vaguely committed to in my spare time, and not the only real purpose in life I had left. ‘Look. I’ve got to get going.’

He took the mug from me. I glanced down at the screen. Reports were coming flooding into the program window as the search ran its way through a thousand computers on Liberty, and then ten thousand more:

‘I’ll leave it running,’ he told me. ‘Should have something in an hour or so.’

I nodded.

He clicked the [Reporting] button off, and the messages disappeared.

‘I’ll call back. Is it okay if I call?’

‘Of course, Jay,’ he said. ‘Always. It’s always okay.’

But I didn’t believe him.

I thought about Helen’s list of tea and coffee, and about Graham’s perfect bookcases and computerised intercom voice. Their uptown address. They had so much money that they almost didn’t know what to do with it – except buy what they’d been told to. Maybe they’d even be starting a family soon: a frightening thought.

In a way, though, it was weird for me to think that their relationship was so fucked up. My love for Amy felt like something pure and wonderful in comparison, but the only evidence of our relationship at the moment was an image on the screen, and me – currently staining an unwanted shadow into their bright apartment. I could almost feel Helen washing up in the kitchen, wondering when – now that Amy was gone – their duty to me as friends would be finally discharged. When she could cross me off her coffee list. When they could trade me in for a better model and just have done.

The only times I ever saw them these days were times like this.

‘I’ve gotta go,’ I said. ‘Say goodbye to Helen for me.’

I wandered out and, like I was a blackmailer come to visit in the night, he watched me to the door without saying a word.

Lacey Beck
.

It was at one end of Swaine Woods – the Ludlow village end. Ludlow was pretty small: basically just a road of country houses backing onto the wood, all of them carefully reconstructed. They had bright white walls – many with black cartwheels nailed to the sides, for some reason – troughs filled with flowers, and they all sported tiny, random windows you couldn’t see shit out of. You could see into some of the kitchens, though, and they all looked the same: herb racks and wooden-handle knives; pans hanging from hooks above the work surfaces; an olde cookery booke. Outside, you could breathe in the smell of grass and trees, and listen to birdsong, assuming you might want to.

At one end of the road, a ginnel led to a footpath through the woods, which went all the way through to the ring road at the far side, skirting Morton. It was a lonely walk, but a nice one; Amy and I used to wander along it sometimes, and it would take about half an hour to get from one end to the other. The sun came streaking in through the tips of the trees, and the embankment sloped down to the left: a mess of dusty roots and dips. The beck was at the bottom, diverging away from the path. Half a mile into the wood you could barely even hear it anymore.

I wouldn’t have wanted to live there. It was where a lynch mob hanged Edmund Lacey, an eighteenth-century highwayman, and although I don’t believe in ghosts I’ve always
thought that there was an atmosphere to the place. Most of the time, it felt peaceful and pleasant, but occasionally it was almost threateningly still. All you could hear was the stream, which – in its way – was all that was left of Lacey: his name, rushing endlessly past.

Sometimes, it made me think of screaming spirits blowing through abandoned buildings like the wind. Most of the time, it just made me think:
oh – so there’s a stream here
.

I’d carefully followed Charlie from her house, waiting at the far end of the road until she emerged and then watching her all the way to the ginnel. When she’d turned the corner onto the footpath, I’d started to make my way down the road. By the time I’d started to hear the stream, and then reached the corner myself, I was figuring that she’d be out of sight. And she was.

In spite of my days of careful planning, I wasn’t entirely sure how this was going to go, or even if it was going to go. It was more than possible that Kareem was many miles away right now – more than likely, in fact – and if that was the case then, although it meant another dead end, at least I didn’t have to worry about Charlie getting hurt. If he was here, though, I had at least two concerns.

Firstly, and most importantly, protecting Charlie.

Secondly, protecting myself.

Kareem really shouldn’t have written that,
A lot of Amys hang around in here
, because what it now came down to was this: I was here in these woods, expecting him. If he showed up, then the likelihood was that only one of us was leaving, which was a pretty big thing.

I set off along the path.

There would be a fair amount of luck to this, I realised. After all, I had no idea what Kareem looked like, in terms of his age, race, height, build, dress sense – anything, really – and although these woods were quiet, that didn’t mean I was
about to leap on someone the moment I saw them. It could just be a guy out for a walk, and so I needed to be certain it was him before committing myself. That meant giving him enough rope to hang himself with, á la Edmund Lacey, which – in turn – meant exposing Charlie to more danger than felt entirely comfortable.

Ideal situation?

Aside from us all being at home, tucked up in bed, it was this:

Kareem was deep in the woods, watching for a woman of Amy17’s description to come walking along the footpath. I’d be far enough back for him not to see me. Then, he’d see her and move onto the path behind her, and that was when I’d move in, running up to catch him. In an ideal situation, Charlie wouldn’t know anything about it; I’d take him down before he reached her, and she’d carry on, none the wiser.

How likely was this ideal situation? Let’s say I didn’t exactly have my hopes up. But I didn’t think he would have waited on the road and followed her in, like I did, because he wouldn’t have known where she was coming from, and so waiting in the woods was probably a good bet. Another possibility was that he’d come the opposite way, and then turn around and go after her, but I didn’t think that was likely either. He had his fantasy to think about, after all: whenever we cybered, he didn’t like Amy17 to see him until he was chasing her. I was figuring that would hold here, too.

I moved as quietly and quickly as I dared, trying to recreate the pace I’d seen Charlie moving at. A quick walk, keeping my breathing in check so I could listen as carefully as possible. For a twig snapping, or a shoe scuffing the dirt up ahead. Worst case scenario: a scream. And all the time keeping an eye out on the woods to the left: looking for colour, for movement, for anything.

I’d been walking for about ten minutes when I heard the scream.

I started running immediately, twitched into motion by the sound. The woods around me seemed intensely real; I took in every shade of green, brown and yellow as I ran, hurdling over looping roots, tapping trees as I passed them, partly to propel and partly to steady myself. Too busy to notice the adrenalin. The path twisted around to the right. Too busy, until the last moment, to realise that the scream I’d just heard had come from a man. That fact occurred to me as I rounded the corner and saw them, a few metres ahead.

They were almost in a rugby scrum, forming a bridge, with Charlie holding on to the shoulders of a much bigger man and yelling in anger as she launched kicks into his flabby stomach. The man was panting uncontrollably: although he was much taller and heavier than she was, he seemed to have been bent double by the force of her attack and was now hanging on for dear life. As I started to move forwards, she stamped down hard on his shin, and he screamed and stepped back, letting go of her and covering his face just in time as she launched a series of punches at him. Quick, snappy left jab; hard right cross that smacked the back of his hand and must have broken something, and then a solid left hook that knocked him a step sideways. From nowhere, her foot was suddenly in his stomach again – she’d spun around on her heel and launched a blistering kick that seemed to go a full metre through him.

Kareem disappeared backwards into the wood. I watched him tumble down the embankment, with little punches of dust and cries of pain following him on his way.

‘Holy shit,’ I said.

‘Jason?’

Charlie was flushed.

I ran over. Kareem had come to a halt in an ungainly heap
about thirty metres down from us. He seemed to be deciding whether to attempt to get to his feet or not.

‘What the hell just happened?’

Charlie said, ‘Son of a bitch jumped out at me.’

We both looked down at the son of a bitch in question: a mildly overweight man in blue jeans and a checked shirt. He was struggling upright, with the aid of the tree beside him, and seemed as stunned as I was. He looked up at us. He was shaking, and I saw an average face, filled with a kind of stupid, awful terror. Then, he turned around and began to flounder off in the direction of the Beck.

‘Wait here.’

I started down after him.

Leave this
, my mind told me, even as I was running. Or stamping, anyway – the embankment was forty-five treacherous degrees of dry mud, spotted with a slalom of trees. You couldn’t run down something that steep; it was more like a semi-controlled, high-stepping fall that jarred your legs and hurt your stomach. As the ground evened out, the world juddered around impossibly quickly. I hit the woodland floor and was after him like a gunshot.

Leave this
.

Kareem glanced back, saw that I was coming after him and found a higher gear. His shirt came untucked as he ran deeper into the woods. His arms were pistoning. In fact, he could move pretty quickly when he wasn’t having his ass kicked by a girl.

I was exhilarated, but also feeling like I was a worm that had been let off the hook and had then jumped right back on again.

Leave this. What the fuck are you going to do when you catch him?

Kill him? Now that Charlie’s seen him?

But I was still running in the wrong direction, regardless.

Straight after him, slapping past trees as I went. He veered right, heading deeper still. I could hear the stream and knew we must be getting close. He’d need to level out soon: just head straight right and hope he could outpace me to the ring road. But that was five minutes’ run, or more, and he must have known he wouldn’t make it.

I could hear his frantic breaths.

This feeling was the same feeling I’d had waiting at the station for the train to Schio on the day I’d gone to meet Claire. It was the shaking, stupid anxiety of a man who knew he was about to do the wrong thing; that he was going to disregard all the pleading, desperate advice that his mind was throwing at him, and go on and do the wrong thing regardless.