The Third Person

Hughes’ bedroom was the same. There were more framed texts on the wall. I read one of them and found myself sitting in the early morning sun outside a tent in Perugia, Italy. There was nobody else around and – although I was on a campsite – there wasn’t even another tent on my row. I knew it was a half-derelict site up in the mountains, and I was staring out at this peak in the distance, green trees and mist blending into a strangely spiritual whole that I was trying to make sense of.

Another picture put me on my back beneath a tree. It was the same campsite, but later in the day, and I was looking up at the underside of a hundred branches and, beyond that, the deep, bright sea of the sky above. It was pure blue – a wonderful, cloudless shade of pale colour – and I was imagining that at any moment I might fall upwards towards it, snapping the branches between with the weight of my plummeting body, rushing up and splashing into the cold, faraway depths of this beautiful sky. At that moment, even the earth at my back felt tenuous.

I stopped reading the texts and started looking for clues, smashing open the frames and examining the backs of the paper for any signs as to where they might have come from. But they were blank.

I gave up and started searching the office instead. There were a million and one files, and most of them seemed to be insurance related, with the majority being on Peace of Mind headed paper. Certainly not what I was looking for. I made a mental note to tell Gray that his precious first rule of searching lacked something in practice: the filing cabinets and desks were so brimful with records, invoices and other accounting information that I could barely make head or tail of them, never mind find a nugget of gold. I was despairing, and about to give up the search altogether, when I saw the envelope on the desk.

Occasionally in life, things just click. Sometimes you just get that feeling, and I got it in spades as I walked over to the desk and picked up that unopened envelope.

It was addressed to Walter Hughes.

I flipped it over and found the return address on the back.

Jim Thornton, O’Reilly’s Bar.

I’d heard of O’Reilly’s, but never been. From what I could remember, it was a downtown dive, an old Irish place, but there were so many of them that they all merged into one. I was quite sure that Walter Hughes would never have been in there, though – the world didn’t hold enough towels to separate that man’s ass from a barstool in a joint like that. The name Thornton rang a bell, but I wasn’t sure where I knew it from. I tore open the envelope.

Bingo.

Inside, there was one of the smaller scraps of paper that Hughes had decorated his entrance hall with: one short sentence. I read it quickly, taking in the aroma of hops and malt and sugar, and feeling a waft of hot steam in my face, only barely distinguishable from the warm breeze. Around me, there was a gabble of foreign language. The title at the top of the page said: Illegal brewery in Saudi.

Bingo times a thousand.

I folded the sheet of paper carefully and slipped it into my trouser pocket. It was half-past-eight: a good time to visit a bar on a Saturday night under other circumstances, but far from ideal on a night like tonight. There’d be a taxi rank somewhere near here, but I still wouldn’t make it to the bar for a good hour or so. Half-nine was a bad time to walk into a rough, city-centre bar with a gun and start asking questions.

But really, I didn’t have anywhere else to be right now.

I picked up the gun and made my way downstairs. I looked briefly into the room, almost expecting Hughes and his butler to have moved. But they hadn’t, of course. Not even a little.

What’s done is done. Deal with the consequences.

I closed the door over on them, inside and out, and made my way into the early evening gloom.

CHAPTER NINE

It was closing in on ten o’clock by the time I finally made my way downstairs into O’Reilly’s. A chalkboard on the street outside informed me that I’d missed the end of Happy Hour by a clear forty-five minutes, which seemed a pity, given the circumstances. The place turned out to be one of those bars that sits snugly in (or slightly beneath) the city centre, like some kind of benign cancer which – although you might not want to look at it too closely – you know isn’t doing any harm. The city centre’s like that, though. If you leave enough of a gap untenanted for long enough, a bar forms to fill the space. I figure that’s why cars are always getting beeped for not keeping up with the flow: the drivers behind are all afraid that a bar will form in the road between bumpers and they’ll be forced to find an alternative route.