The Third Person

The news I did catch was reassuring, however. There was no mention of Walter Hughes, which I thought could only be good. He was, in his way, an important person and I was quite sure that his murder would have made it as far as a television near me. If he hadn’t been discovered yet then it meant that Dennison and his friends had been able to take what they wanted from the house – which also meant that, when the police finally did get around to calling, any traces I’d left were likely to have been buried beneath far more obvious traces of them. That was fine.

Predictably, the main news item was the internet crash. The situation had worsened slightly since the last broadcast, but now seemed to have stabilised. Millions of files remained inaccessible, but the rot was said to have stopped. Experts were puzzled, large areas of the internet remained shut down, businesses were up in arms and share prices were plummeting. But for now at least, things seemed to have settled.

I flicked off the television.

The first night in that hotel room, I paced. I scanned through the information I had a hundred times, reliving events in my head, trying to come up with some new angle or approach that might lead me to these men. But I couldn’t think of anything, and became so frustrated and uptight that I had to drink myself to sleep in order to get any.

I dreamt about her.

It was strange, actually – not the dream, which I don’t even remember, but the way my life was moving. In the room at Combo’s Deli, I’d not been able to think about Amy clearly enough to picture her, but now it felt as though I was drawing closer. Memories of her kept surfacing: the vibrant, saturated kind of memory, and not just some flat, black and white picture of the things we’d done. When I cried, which I did a lot, I could feel an imaginary arm around me. It began to seem as though if I spoke to her she’d be able to hear me, and I knew I was getting nearer to the stage when I’d be able to imagine her sitting next to me, maybe with her hand on my knee, and it was at that point I’d be able to end this. I didn’t believe in an afterlife but, to get myself through that moment, it might be nice to. It would only last a split-second, after all, and it wasn’t like I’d have to live with myself afterwards.

The second day, I started early. After breakfast, before checking out the next name on the list, I went to an internet cafe around the corner from the hotel. I got an extra coffee to help keep me upright through the day and then logged on to check my e-mail. I wanted to see if anything else had been sent to me from Amy’s account.

But it was down, of course, and so I couldn’t log in.

Number sixteen: I caught him just as he arrived home. I was walking down the pavement towards him, watching him tuck in his shirt and straighten his tie. He was a family man. I saw him turn into his driveway and noticed the little girl in the front room window; the curtain fell back into place and then she was at the door to meet him as he opened it. I walked away, wanting to close my eyes.

Number seventeen was a teenager: long and thin, like a clotheshanger.

I was getting tired, but number eighteen was on the way back to my hotel, so I decided to wander past and see what I could see.

His real name – number aside – was Paul Marley, and he lived in an enormous tenement building, which was verging on the derelict. I spent a minute or so trying to work out which room would be his, but I could only pin it down to the south-east side. The lights there seemed to form a computer pattern of yellow and black. He might be in or out, and I could wait outside all night and still not get anywhere. Unless Paul Marley was the man in the video, I wouldn’t recognise him even if I saw him.

I stood by the entrance, debating for a second.

Fuck it, I thought, and went inside.

The foyer was low and not very wide: just a cavity in the shape of a room, with two silver elevator shafts on the right, and a staircase straight ahead. I didn’t trust the elevators, so I took two flights up to Marley’s floor, with the echo of my footfalls preceding me up the stairwell. The bannister was cold and hard, and incomprehensible graffiti stained the walls in big blocks of colour. When I opened the door to Marley’s corridor, it stank of old air. The carpet was damp and curling up at the edges, and was illuminated from above by more bare lightbulbs. Closed off to either side were pale green doors, which had their numbers scribbled on in biro. My heart was beating quickly as I reached the end – number twenty-two.

The gun was in my jacket pocket, pointing down, and I wasn’t planning on taking it out. The idea was that – if it was him – I’d just grab hold of it in my pocket, twist my jacket up and shoot him through it. Get him in the gut, then push him back into the room and close the door behind us.

Keep it calm, keep it calm, I thought, reaching out with my free hand.

It probably won’t be him.