The Third Person (37 page)

There it is: my Amy.

So, even after everything that happened, she was still mine at that point. I’d been human enough to be not good enough for her, and she was still prepared to be mine. Maybe I should take comfort from that: she didn’t want Graham, and she felt bad about what had happened between them; and she loved me and wanted it to work between us. But I don’t take any comfort. It’s not about Graham. I don’t care about that; everybody makes mistakes. But there’s this: she told me in the letter that she needed to sort herself out for me, and she shouldn’t have thought that; there shouldn’t have been the need for her to think like that. And once upon a time there wouldn’t have been. So it was my fault, not hers.

I keep thinking about what she wrote.

I should have dealt with them already, but I really need to now
.

And I think that she really needed to deal with them now because she’d found out she was pregnant and had suddenly been faced with all the responsibilities and uncertainties that go along with that. Amy had wanted to keep me – or she had wanted me back – and so she’d gone to sort herself out in the way she thought she owed me. Never mind for a moment that she didn’t owe me anything. More importantly, there’s the pregnancy to think about.

The baby.

Was it mine or was it the result of that afternoon with Graham? I’ve done the maths and it could have been either. I guess Graham thought it had been his, but maybe he was wrong. It really doesn’t matter. I’ll never know, and so to all intents and purposes it might as well have been.

You look at the line of your life and stick little coloured flags in at key moments: the ones where the line bends sharply off to one side, continuing at some weird new angle. You mark those points down and remember them, and when you
question your current trajectory, it’s those points that you use to explain them. Tapping the board and saying:
I’m going this way because of this
.

And that’s what it comes down to in the end. The rape was one little tag – one that sent her life spinning off in a different direction, crashing into mine – but there was another change in trajectory after that, and that’s really what’s important here. Stupid, but true.

Amy was dead because I went to see Claire Warner that day.

If it hadn’t been for that, there would have been none of this.

But as usual, it wasn’t quite as simple as that.

On the day she disappeared, Amy took the bus into the city. After a brief, purposeful walk, she went into a café called Jo’s and sat in the window. She was there for half an hour in all, and drank two cups of coffee, taking her time over each. Between the two cups, she sent a text message. Mildly annoyed but mostly anxious, she didn’t write much. She simply put:

[r u on ur way???]

A few blocks away, Graham read the message, and then immediately deleted it. He didn’t trust Helen not to look through the phone if he left it lying around. Perhaps it was guilt. When you’ve done something wrong, you often expect other people to share your standards.

‘Who was that?’

‘It was Jason,’ he said. ‘It was nothing.’

So: the footage of the café was actually the first bit of film that Graham ever located. Since he’d been supposed to be meeting
Amy there, he knew where to look. He sat on it for a while, of course, until he could realistically produce it – until he’d found enough of a trail for it to lead him there without it seeming suspicious. He wasn’t stupid. Neither was she, though, and I should have thought of it earlier. Would she really have disappeared off to meet a man like Kareem without telling someone where she was going? Of course not. She wouldn’t have told me, obviously, because then I wouldn’t have let her go, or I would have insisted on going with her. But she might have told Graham, especially after everything they’d been through together. So she arranged to meet him in that café, and I can only guess what was on her mind. Was she wanting him to go with her? Was she just going to tell him where and who she was going to see? I’ll never know.

And neither will Graham. He never made that appointment. He knew that Amy was making it work with me, or trying to, and he wasn’t going to get in the way of that, even if he wanted to. And I guess he was annoyed with her, in his own way. There had been times since they’d slept together when he’d been there, again and again, to listen to her and try to help her through whatever stupid shit I’d done that week, but there was no way that could continue forever, not considering how he felt. Even good friends lose their patience with you occasionally. That day, he thought
fuck it
. Perhaps, having found out how needy she could be, he might have started to empathise with me in some small way. He spent the day with Helen instead, and thought about Amy only once or twice.

So: Amy went to meet Kareem because of me, but she went on her own because Graham didn’t go to meet her, even though he’d told her that he would. That’s what it comes down to; we both had our parts to play in letting her down.

I imagine her sitting in that café, enjoying her first cup of
coffee as she waits for Graham, and then she becomes increasingly nervous and undecided as he fails to arrive. She sends that text message and starts thinking: should she go alone, or shouldn’t she? Deep down, she knows he’s not coming. That’s the second cup of coffee. It would be so much easier just to go home, but the thought of that is crushing. This is something that has been keeping her going, giving her hope for our relationship, and going home is defeat. It’s an emotional back-flip over the edge of a cliff.

Amy made her decision. She went on her own that day, and that was the last she ever saw of us.

‘Close your eyes,’ Graham said.

‘What?’

‘Close your eyes,’ he said. ‘And keep writing.’

The man did as he was told, but he was badly frightened now: shaking; his face looking like he was dreaming, all full of nervous twitches and concentration. And even in this extreme state, the pen kept skittering across the page in front of it, steady and even, recording each and every one of these terrible sensations like some kind of fucking polygraph. Graham stared at him for a couple of seconds, watching the words come, spilling across the empty lines, slowly filling the page. The man was like a machine. Like some kind of camera. The sense-data was coming in, being processed, and then out came the text before him. A permanent record.

How quick was he, Graham wondered as he raised the gun and aimed it at the side of the man’s head. Was the translation instantaneous? He took a good, solid two-handed grip, fingers uncurling and then curling back, and he thought: is this man quicker than a bullet? Will the split-second feeling of his skull opening, his brain rupturing – will the beginnings of that make their way onto the page? And, if so, what will become of the person who reads that?

Graham closed one eye and thought:
goodbye, Jason
.

‘Wait,’ the writer said.

Graham kept his eye closed.

‘Wait,’ the writer said again. He licked his lips. ‘I know what you want to do, but you have to give me a second. There’s something you need to see.’

‘What?’

‘An e-mail,’ the writer said. ‘Someone just sent it to me. There’s something there that you really need to see. That you should see, really, before you decide what you’re going to do.’

Graham stared at him. The man still had his eyes shut, and his head was nodding slightly, as though he was counting something in his head.

He stared at him for another couple of seconds.

‘Show me.’

The writer opened his eyes. He looked like someone coming out into the light from a long, dark tunnel. With his free hand trembling a little, he reached out for the mouse on the computer table in front of him, and Graham – still aiming the gun – said:

‘Slowly.’

The writer moved the cursor and the black screensaver vanished. Hidden underneath it was an empty e-mail.

‘It’s not the message you need to see,’ he said. ‘It’s the attachment.’

He clicked on a couple of options. The screen changed view to reveal a page of text and the writer scrolled for a second and then pointed at a section of it. ‘Here. This bit.’

Graham leaned across and looked at what was there.

He was watching the big man: Jack. Jack couldn’t work the skirt down over her kicking legs, and her voice was getting louder and more desperate –
No-o-o
! – and so he punched her so hard between her legs that the whole bed shook.

Jack watched her to see whether there was going to be any more fighting. When it was obvious that there wasn’t, he started moving again. He finished undressing her, throwing the skirt to one side, and then he climbed on top of her, his elbows pressing down hard on the inside of her upper arms, knocking her palms away from her red, tear-stained face. His hands pulled her head right back by the hair. In this surrender position, with her pinned there and sobbing, he started to rape her.

I was watching the man with the gun. It was still pointing at me, but there was no conscious thought attached. He was wrapped up in the text on the screen, lost in it, and – although he probably wouldn’t have known it – he had started to cry.

I had seconds. If I was going to get out of here alive, then this was going to be my only chance to do it. He was going to kill me, and I wasn’t a killer – not really – but there was no way I was going to let him hurt me: if it was me or him, then it was him.

The gun was wavering in the air. Before I could think about the danger, or what would happen if I couldn’t overpower him, I grabbed it and started to fight.

That was it: the end.

I looked away from the papers on the desk. My heart was beating too quickly and my mind felt bruised from both the impact of the message and the medium through which it had been communicated. Other than that, all I felt was a kind of dreadful, empty calm.

I was already putting it together. The writer must have attacked Graham while he was distracted with the text on the screen, and tried to wrestle the gun from him – and maybe he’d succeeded or maybe it had been an accident, but whichever, Graham had got himself shot in the head. The writer knew Marley had been killed and he would have suspected from what Graham had told him that I would be making my way here eventually, so he called Jack, the pins and knives man. They checked out Marley, found him dead and then staked the place out, or maybe Jack did that on his own. I arrived. Jack died. And then I follow Graham’s trail here and get to read what happened. I get to discover the reason behind all of this, and it fucking sucks.

There was an awful inevitability to it all: a sense of closure that left only me hanging, and that was something I thought I could take care of now. There wasn’t much else left for me.

The writer?

The fact that I hadn’t been attacked while I read the papers was telling. The man wasn’t a killer; he was a coward. He wasn’t even a hardcore criminal. So maybe Jack had told him
to lie low for a while: that he’d take care of me, clean things up and let the guy know when it was safe to come out. Or maybe he’d been staking out Marley’s place, too. He knew I’d killed Jack and wanted nothing to do with me. Perhaps he was on a plane to somewhere tropical even now. Wherever he was, he wasn’t here. Looking around, I had no great desire to be here either. I picked up the papers in front of me, folded them neatly and slipped them into my pocket.

And then I left.

But before I did, I took a quick look around. There were hundreds of notepads here: thousands of pages of observation and experience. Most of it was trivial and inconsequential, but who was I to judge? Most things are, including me. What occurred to me was what a shame it was that all this was going to waste. For a moment the books looked like nothing so much as lives held in stasis: rich, vital moments trapped between covers, just waiting to be tripped into and felt. It seemed a shame, and I didn’t know whether to take a match to the place or call Dennison. In the end, I did the latter, from a payphone in the street outside. There was no answer, so I left a message giving him the address and a couple of words of caution – dead body in the bathtub; possibly dangerous tenant – but there was a life’s work of lives to be saved in the flat and I didn’t think a few little details like that would deter him.

Then, for what it was worth, I went and checked out of the hotel.

And I went home.

The first thing I did when I got in was check the messages on my answerphone. It was the same two messages as before, but I listened to them again anyway.

Okay, I’m not the only loose end.

My job. As I listened to Nigel prattle on, with his odd inflections and even odder assumption that I might give a shit,
my job had never felt more meaningless to me. They had paid me for a month of work I hadn’t done, and that was all I needed to know. It was possible that they’d pay me for another month – I was, after all, a troubled young man – but frankly I couldn’t have cared less. I listened to Nigel’s voice and I knew it was intended to sound like some kind of authority – something that would make me feel guilty, or bring me to heel, or make me worried – but it didn’t. I received those emotions, but they were filtered through dream logic; they were feelings I might have experienced in another life and, now that I’d woken up, they meant next to nothing to me.