The Third Person

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.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

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.