The Third Person

I rapped on the door three times, but on the second it wasn’t there: it was creaking open ever so slightly. Someone had left it ajar.

Fuck my plans – I took the gun out, took a good two-handed grip and moved to one side of the doorway. Waited. The world ticked over a couple of times around me. I fazed out everything except the door, and beyond it the room and everything my senses were telling me was happening inside it. Everything that wasn’t happening.

No footsteps.

No voices.

Five seconds. Six. I hesitated, but by then the corridor was beginning to feel just as threatening as whatever might be inside Marley’s flat. So I kept the two-handed grip and used it to push the door open a little further. And, when nothing happened, I moved inside.

The front room was a mess of old furniture and discarded clothing: a mad, patternless tapestry of newspaper, cloth and old take-out cartons. It was difficult to know whether the place had been turned over or if Marley just lived like this. To the left, I could see a kitchen: walls painted as yellow as melted butter. To the right, there were two doors: one shut, one open. An empty bedroom. From what I could see, it was as messy as the lounge. I guessed that the other must be the bathroom.

I stopped. Breathed in.

There was a smell about the place that wasn’t right – a burnt cooking smell – and it clicked into place with the door being left off the latch. Even before I saw the blood on the floor, I knew that I was going to find someone dead in this flat. I pushed the door closed behind me, and that was when I noticed the stains on the papers beside it. Not a lot of blood, but not paper cut blood either. It was a proper amount, like you might see outside a pub the morning after a fight, with little splashes moving off down the street as someone held on to a broken nose and staggered away.

I looked over the floor and it was the same: more blood. There was a spatter of something across a few open books on the settee that might have been – I couldn’t tell – but there was no doubt about the rest. I followed the trail with my eyes, over papers and pizza boxes and fabric. The blood led sparely but clearly towards the closed bathroom door.

My heart hadn’t slowed down any since I’d entered the flat, and now it felt like it was beating heavily and quickly above a very deep and black pit. Instead of doing what I wanted to do – leave right now – I took the gun with me on a small tour of the apartment. I knew where it was going to end, and the flat was too quiet and still to be anything other than empty, but I had to be sure.

I checked the kitchen first. There were a few stacked pans on top of the cooker and an empty milk carton on the counter beside the kettle, but otherwise it was relatively tidy. I figured that Marley must have ordered in most of his food. There were some empty bottles on the floor by the bin – mostly wine, with a couple of sturdy vodkas hiding at the back – but apart from that there was nothing to see.

The bedroom next, obviously. A single bed, covered with nooses of cloth; more crumpled clothes on the floor; three glasses filled with misty water on the table by the bed. The air looked and smelled grey. That was all.

So: the bathroom.

I pushed the door open slowly, using the gun the way I’d used it on the front door, ready to shoot someone if I needed to even though it was obvious that I wouldn’t.

The smell was stronger here. The blood was concentrated and specific. There were pools of it on the floor. A hotchpotch of blurred footprints smeared and scattered out of it, and it was streaked on the dirty tiles, and here and there on the paintwork. The room was only small, but it was just covered with blood. Opposite me, there was an old cast-iron bath, sheltered by a rubbery shower curtain hanging from metal links on a runner attached to the ceiling. The curtain was mottled and grubby, like a used condom, and there was blood on that, too. So much blood. It was obvious that the bath was the epicentre of all this, and although the curtain was pulled all the way across, I could see quite clearly that somebody was in there behind it. Not somebody anymore. Something dead.

To the left, I noticed that the rim of the sink was speckled with the foamy remains of a shave and I started to gather a scenario together in my head. Marley’s in here shaving when there’s a knock at the door. He answers it and gets attacked. He’s driven back into this room, which is where the intruder kills him and leaves him. Assuming that the corpse in the bathtub was him.

I used the barrel of the gun to draw the curtain back.

The video clip wasn’t clear, and the face below me had been cut to pieces, but it looked like him.