The Third Person (4 page)

I warmed up hard that night – so hard, in fact, that I was dripping with sweat and almost unable to throw a punch by the time I’d finished. I didn’t know whether it was the correct way to train or not, only that it was the way I’d found worked best for me. Start at the bottom, feeling as drained as possible, and then try to make it through the workout. If I was in a real fight, fresh and full of energy, then all well and good, but if I was caught on my last legs, I wanted a precedent to work from of how it might feel.

This time, I was cut off before I could even begin.

Maybe the banging at the door had been going on for some time. I don’t know: I only recognised it when I went over to the computer to change the track. I wanted something heavier: more industrial. Instead, in the silence, I got a hammering fist
on the front door downstairs. I threw a towel over my shoulder and went to answer it.

It was raining outside, and there were two guys in black raincoats waiting on my doorstep, hunched against the cold. The first one showed me his badge and said:

‘Inspector Wilkinson.’

But I didn’t need that to know he was a cop. The i-Mart logo was all over the left breast of the raincoat. I watched a few droplets of water fall off the edge of his hat, heading down past a slightly pained face.

‘We’re looking for Jason Klein,’ he said.

‘That’s me.’

‘We’d like you to come down to the station,’ he told me. And then eyed my upper body. ‘Preferably with some clothes on.’

‘What’s it about?’

He looked at me. Rain was slashing down on the road behind them, but closer to it sounded more intimate. It was tapping on their hats.

‘We’ve found a girl’s body,’ Wilkinson told me. ‘We need to speak to you.’

It was a McDonald’s moon that night: two great big, golden arches staring down at me from the black sky, with stars twinkling beside and around. I’ve always hated that one the most: a big M – M for Moon – as though we’re all so stupid that we need everything labelling for us. The Nike tick annoys me, too.
Everything’s okay
, it seems to tell you, when you know that – really – it isn’t at all. I guess that my favourite, aesthetically speaking, would have to be Pepsi, but Benetton could sometimes be quite inventive.

No, fuck it – my favourite was old-fashioned plain. The night I’d met Amy it had been that way: three-quarters waxing, which was still slim enough to be free from advertising. Not exactly the stuff that poetry’s made of, I grant you – a kind of half-fat and unremarkable moon – but you need to take what free space you can get these days, and so that’s what I’ll take.

Amy
.

Wilkinson wouldn’t tell me any more information than he’d told me at the house. They’d found a girl’s body, and they wanted to speak to me. But what else could it be? I couldn’t think of anything. My body rocked with the motion of the car. I was aching slightly from the force of the exercise, but my mind felt very calm and passive.

Amy
.

The police car headed quickly through drenched streets. There were a few people around, black as the shadows
between the buildings, and the pavements looked so dark it was as though it was raining oil and not water. I supposed that it could have been. Clouds, sponsored by Esso. Bright lights turned to blurs through the front window, before the screeching wipers smeared away the rain; water pattered on the roof, like pins dropping. We tail-ended a pair of bright red lights for half a block, and then headed onto the freeway. The city dropped away to the side, and the driver sped up a little.

The in-car radio was tuned to i-Mart’s main station, and they seemed to have Will Robinson caught on a loop. I could have screamed: if there was one thing I didn’t need right now it was shitty pop music, but I didn’t have long to suffer. In ten minutes, we were there.

The Bracken police centre was floodlit in amber, with enormous, upturned lanterns bathing the building from all four sides and making its naturally orange brickwork all the more pronounced after nightfall. With its black canopies and foyered entrance it was often mistaken for a hotel – all twenty storeys of it – and I figured that more than a few late-night travellers had turned off the freeway over the years expecting a Holiday Inn. It had been built a decade earlier, when the police service was privatised. Bracken was one of three national hubs, connected to a spider’s-web of regional, and then local, offices. Following the i-Mart business model, the police force farmed out their officers to areas where ‘sales’ were lowest, setting up clusters of shops in key target areas and taking them over. In this case, the product on offer was a low crime statistic – coupled, of course, with some exemplary computer produce. i-Mart – to protect and to serve; Microsoft never even saw it coming. Where do you want to go today? Directly to fucking jail.

Wilkinson opened the door to let me out, and then we walked over to the main building while the driver parked the car up, tyres slashing away across wet tarmac.

‘Miserable night,’ Wilkinson said.

I nodded, never really that good at small talk except when it was faked on a computer screen.

He pulled up the collar of his coat and did a silly little half dance as he got beneath the canopy over the main entrance, as though he couldn’t stand another second of rain. I was barely noticing it. My hair was short and the rain couldn’t do any more damage than my face already did. And clothes dry, after a while. I had other things on my mind.

Amy
.

I supposed I’d been expecting this eventually, and now it was happening I felt an empty kind of calm. I wasn’t really upset or angry. It was more like nothing was going on in me at all.

‘Come on through.’

The foyer was silver: kitted out from the feet up in the best shiny-metal
^TM
that i-Mart could provide. Everything looked as though if you touched it, it would leave a smeary fingerprint, so nobody had yet. A bank of blue-backed Powermacs faced out at the incoming public, with a row of pretty receptionists taking 999 calls through headsets, fingers chattering commands to local offices. A pair of cops stood near the mirrored elevator doors to the right, while blue carpeted stairs led up to the left. Wilkinson headed for these, and I followed.

‘Good for the circulation,’ he insisted, as I looked around. The walls of the stairwell were decorated with old i-Mart advertisements: freeze-frames from computer commercials and adBoard stills. ‘I never take the elevators, anyway. Can’t stand the music.’

I nodded.

‘All they play is Will Robinson,’ he told me as we reached the first floor and he pushed through some double doors. ‘Like in the car. You know that kid? They pipe that shit out day and night. I didn’t know he had so many songs.’

‘He’s got a bunch.’

If I remembered rightly, the last few had adorned i-Mart’s recent ad campaign, which I figured might have had something to do with something.

I said, ‘But they’re mostly the same song in a different order.’

‘Is that right?’ Wilkinson raised an eyebrow at me. ‘I didn’t know you were a musician. You a musician?’

‘You don’t need to be.’

He looked away.

‘Yeah, well. They all suck like a vacuum cleaner, if you ask me. His current single makes me want to fucking kill myself. My daughter loves it, though. She loves all that kind of shit. Here we are.’

He opened the door to an interview room.

‘Take a seat,’ Wilkinson said, closing the door behind him. ‘If you’re nice, the décor won’t bite.’

I had my doubts, but sat down anyway. The silver desk extended out from one wall, blocking two-thirds of the room, with a raised computer panel on Wilkinson’s side. The i-Mart Eye
^TM
logo looked at me from the back. He took a seat in front of it, opposite me, and started running a nicotine-stained index finger over the screen. It beeped in protest, but a keyboard flicked up out of the desk. He sniffed.

‘State of the art,’ he told me, without looking up. ‘Means it takes half an hour more than pen and paper used to. Bear with me.’

‘Okay.’

I looked around some more as he started tapping keys, starting to have a weird feeling that this wasn’t about Amy at all. Surely, it would have been different if they’d found her – not like this, anyway. A camera was watching me from the far corner of the room, above the door, and there was a plexiglass division running down the centre of the steel desk. I figured that Wilkinson had a button his side, and if he pressed it the plexiglass would raise, and maybe the table would extend out
of the wall, caging me in. I thought I’d seen some kind of documentary where they’d shown it happening. I looked up.

There was a gas grill on the roof, slightly behind me.

I looked back at Wilkinson.

‘Can I ask what this is about, please?’

He tapped the keyboard once more and looked up.

‘Yeah, I’m ready now.’

And then, suddenly more serious, the question, coming out of nowhere:

‘Can I ask you, Jason, do you know a girl called Claire Warner?’

Now here was something. She sent me a jpeg of herself, once, and she was as beautiful as she’d always made out she was.
I can get any man I want
, she’d bragged to me at one point, except that it hadn’t been a boast as much as a plain statement of fact. Not something she was proud of, exactly, more something that bothered her. Because getting exactly what you want is only good when you know what that is.

I took the jpeg into Fireworks and magnified it up to 800%, until her crimson lips filled the screen and were reduced to red squares, darker red squares and dots of black –until it wasn’t recognisable as a face anymore: just a hotchpotch of blocky colour. And I looked at the edges where they touched, imagining that she might emerge from the non-space there, in hiding behind her own bitmap. The same way that I ran my fingers over [claire21] when we chatted at Liberty-Talk, and wondered at the million other words that were hiding between the letters of her name, the ones she didn’t give me in the hours we spent typing messages to each other.

Looking for traces of her on the internet: typing her name into ten search engines at once. They ticked through a hundred thousand sites between them and threw hopeless pages back at me. Not one was of her, or even close. There
were a whole bunch of
her-names
in the phonebook, and any one of them could have really been her, but I couldn’t find out which without ringing them each in turn. And even then her voice would have been a stranger’s, and yet not.

Here was something, indeed.

I don’t know why I bothered stalking her so unsuccessfully, when she would have told me anything and everything I wanted to know – even from that first accidental meeting on Liberty-Talk. She would have met up with me in half a second, fucked me blind with a smile on her face and then whirled away out of my life without a second thought or a backwards glance.

She was single, after all. It was me that was in the relationship.

‘Is Claire dead?’ I asked.

Wilkinson was implacable. ‘So you did know her?’

I nodded.

‘Yeah. Kind of.’

‘We knew that you knew her. How did you meet?’

He typed something in.

Suspect admits knowledge of victim
, I thought.

Best just to tell the truth.

‘I met her in LibertyTalk. We got chatting.’

‘How many times did you get chatting?’

I shrugged.

‘A bunch of times. You probably know that already, too. Is she dead?’

Of course she’s dead
.

Wilkinson was still typing.

‘We need to talk through some stuff,’ he told me. ‘But, yes, Claire’s dead. She was found earlier this morning. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s okay.’ I didn’t know whether I felt anything at all. I thought of the pixels in her lips. ‘We hadn’t been in touch for a while.’

‘How long’s a while?’

I thought about it.

‘A fair few months.’

‘Since before your girlfriend vanished?’

A beat. He didn’t look up at me.

‘I guess so. Yeah.’

‘But you can’t remember. You might have seen her since.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not since then.’

‘You sure, now?’

‘Yeah.’

He looked up at me.

I looked away from him, thinking about the train station in Schio. It was the last time I’d met Claire – the only real time I’d met her at all, in fact, outside the internet. How did I know it was before Amy disappeared? Because I’d come home afterwards and crawled into bed beside her, that’s how, and then spent the next day chasing her round to reassure her that I loved her – doing a hundred little things to make her smile even though none of them felt like enough. But I decided that I didn’t want Inspector Wilkinson to know about the train station at Schio.

‘I’m just sure,’ I said.

‘Well.’ He looked back down at the screen. ‘We can come back to that in a bit. Let’s talk about how you first met her.’

It’s easy to meet people. Bracken City Market holds at least three thousand shoppers at any one time. I could walk through it, from one end to the other, and brush against a hundred strangers. It’s limited and irrelevant, perhaps, but so what? The amount you know somebody is always subjective and limited, and so every contact you make is valid, no matter how small it seems and no matter how little you think it reveals. It’s easy to meet people. Easy to meet anyone.