The Third Person Page 7

  There was a playground near where Graham and I grew up, formed in a concrete bubble on the edge of this park which wasn’t really a park at all – just grassland, really, with a couple of chalk-white pitch shapes stained thoughtlessly into it, and the ring of a path for older people to stroll around in summer. There was a maze of trees and bushes which people from the nearby pubs would lose themselves in on an evening, in order to fuck drunkenly. In fact, I lost my virginity there one night to some random girl, shivering and cold. The playground was at the top. Every morning, the park keeper would come, and you’d hear the steady swish-sweep as he pushed the previous night’s debris over towards the waiting sanitary truck. The needles, broken beer bottles, empty pill boxes and used condoms. A few children would play there during the day, depending on the weather, and then in the evening it would be ours again.

  I had my first beer there, too, and smoked my first joint. We shared the place out between about thirty of us, mixed in every way – from age and race to gender and sexual preference. It was a weird thing. That lasted for about two years, all told. Nobody had used it before and, as far as I know, nobody’s used it ever since. Our generation blew in like a tornado: like the life of the party, spinning through and dancing with people at random, whirling from one partner to the next before spilling out of the back door. And that was it. The park keeper swept up for the last time, and then the next day there was nothing for him to sweep.

  I’d been back there twice since then.

  The first was after a phone call from Helen. He’s gone out drunk, Jason, and I’m worried about him. Graham had stormed out after an argument, hours before, and it was dark now. Helen was going out of her mind.

  Leave it to me, I told A my as I pulled on my coat. You wait here. I know where he is.

  I remember the way he looked when I got there: this hunched black shadow perched at the top of the slide. I could hear him slugging spirits back from a litre bottle, but other than that it was almost eerily silent. It was as though the playground hadn’t been used for decades. I got him down from the slide, and we sat on the climbing-frame instead, sharing memories and sour shots of Kentucky bourbon. He never told me what was wrong, but he didn’t need to. When I suggested this terrible, taboo thing – that he left her – he didn’t even get angry: he just shook his head and said it wasn’t that easy and I didn’t understand.

  And then, I guess, he saw a few ghosts in the corner of the playground – his shared mortgage; his joint bank account; his coagulated pool of mixed friends – because he threw the bottle over in that direction, and it smashed against the wall.

  The second time was the opposite of the first, except that I wasn’t drinking that night, and I was already on the climbing-frame when he found me: perched there, hugging my knees, looking up at the sky. It was surprisingly bright that night – a shade of light blue with the contrast turned slightly down – and it felt open. I was figuring that everybody had the same sky, and so I was sending thoughts up into it, hoping that they’d somehow make their way to Amy.

  I miss you. I love you. Please come home.

  I’m sorry.

  Please come home.

  There was a desperation to it. It felt like if I stopped thinking these things then I’d start crying, but if I continued then they might come true. In the end, neither thing happened. Strong emotions that you think will destroy you never do. It always feels like you’re going to burst, but in the end they just fizzle out and you keep going. I wasn’t thinking about anything much by the time that Gray arrived: this dark figure wandering slowly over across the tarmac to sit down beside me.

  We didn’t say much. We didn’t have anything to drink, and by that point our relationship was becoming slightly strained. His days with Helen were getting longer at dawn and dusk, and his nights with me were dwindling away. We just sat there for a while, and then, after a bit of time had passed, he clapped me on the shoulder like the good friend he’d once been.

  Don’t worry, he told me.

  I’ll help you find her.

  With no alcohol to drink, and cold air falling from that open sky, we didn’t stay there long. Instead, we went back to my house, where there was beer and central heating. After we’d drunk a couple of bottles in relative silence, Graham asked me if I had any clue where she might have gone, any idea at all, and I told him the truth: none. I showed him the note that she’d left, which he read a couple of times through, and then I found it was all spilling out of me: everything about the arguments we’d had, the difficulties. The nights spent sleeping apart. I told him why she’d gone – I knew that much. I just didn’t know where.

  Graham listened to this without really looking at me, nodding occasionally, frowning the whole time, and then when I’d finished he gave me a look. I don’t know how to describe it, except that he looked very sad: it was worse than that, and I think I’ll remember it for a long time. Then, he shook his head and the look seemed to go away a little. He asked me about Amy’s behaviour: what she’d been doing on the occasions I’d gone to bed alone; whether she’d gone out and, if so, where she’d gone. Who she’d gone with. Perhaps he thought she had another boyfriend. She spent her nights on the computer, I told him. For hours on end. Sometimes, I said, there would be soft yellow light in the curtains by the time I felt her slip in behind me, careful not to touch me. But I didn’t tell him that, when that happened, I turned and put my arm around her and she didn’t even move.

  The computer, he said. Let me look at it.

  There was nothing obvious to see when we went upstairs and switched it on. I wasn’t stupid: I’d checked the browsers we had installed but Amy had totally blanked the histories and navigation bars. I told Graham this, and he just said: wait.

  Mechanics. It’s like this: when they’re out on a job, mechanics carry toolkits filled with everything they might need, but even on a casual day out chances are they have a pen-knife with a few attachments, or a screwdriver, or some shit like that lurking around. A kind of minimal toolkit, carried as naturally as someone else might carry their wallet or glasses-case. Graham had a nerdish equivalent: a slim case of about five compact disks, together containing the absolute minimum amount of software he could survive with. You never knew when you might need to unzip a compressed file in the chemist, I guess. Or defragment shattered information lying around on your best friend’s hard drive.

  This is a variation on some sneaky cookie software I developed, he told me. I adapted it to work on computers like this, as well.

  It took about two minutes, and as the list of sites appeared in Graham’s makeshift navigation window I found myself staring, surprised, growing colder inside as each one was listed. The addresses were never obvious dotcoms, but their content was obvious from occasional words appearing in the path. These were rape sites, death sites, murder sites. Of course, at that point I didn’t know what those things were like; I didn’t know quite how deep she’d gone, or how awful it was going to be to follow.

  Jesus, Graham said.

  That was where I started. I found that I could get to about a third of the addresses listed, and they turned out to be the shallows. You had to wade a lot deeper to find the real blackness, and there were strong undercurrents misleading you along the way: washing you quickly to more shallows, to the shore itself. The majority of the sites that Amy had visited were simply inaccessible. Graham explained that it was likely the addresses had been abandoned. This was common with illegal sites: the owners would shift servers often, sometimes moving every few minutes. They were like street vendors, alerted to approaching police, stuffing their briefcases closed and hurrying off to another corner to start again.

  There would be others though, Graham told me. There would be sites protected by specialised software – the type he occasionally dallied with – that would have left no traces of themselves on a visitor’s hard drive. There was no way around it: I would only find them by following Amy and discovering them for myself. And so that’s what I would do.
In the meantime, Graham would do what he did best: search the internet in his own inimitable way; do a little hacking here and there; try to put together, as best he could, information about where she’d gone on the day she left me.

  So: over the last four months I’d collected hardcore pornography, chatted with paedophiles and rapists and wormed my way into their community. Graham had been hard at work too, but his collection was more innocent. On his hard drive we had a few different videos that, when pieced together, showed Amy’s basic trajectory on that day. The first CCTV cameras were a few streets away from our home, and there was a lot of footage to sieve, so it took quite some time to locate her, but once we knew she was heading for the city we found things easier. We didn’t have tracking shots or anything, but we had rough continuity for much of it.

  Amy had taken the same route into the city as I had on my way to Graham’s, only she’d waited for a bus and taken that for three stops. I could watch her get on and get off. Nobody was following her. In fact, as far as I could tell, nobody followed her at all until we came along. After a brief, purposeful walk, she went into a café called Jo’s and sat in the window. She was there for half an hour in all, and drank two cups of something, taking her time over each. Between the drinks she sent a text message. We don’t know why she was there, or who she contacted. After she left the café, we lost track of her. The streets of Bracken can get pretty busy, and a lot of the film we had was low resolution, making it difficult to separate people and differentiate between them.

  But Graham kept looking.

  The video that he’d found from the station that day was stuttering and incomplete: as much evidence as you could possibly want that film footage is about as real as Jesus. He had four frames. All four were of the station floor, filled with a bustling crowd of blurry figures, but if you set them to play then they might as well have been distinct photographs, because they had different people in each. First one crowd, then another, then a third, and then one final group. She was in the third. Nowhere to be seen in the first or second, and nowhere to be seen in the last.

  Graham zoomed in on frame three. I moved closer to the screen, leaning over.

  Amy?

  I couldn’t be sure, but I touched the image anyway.

  It felt like her.

  ‘It’s a pretty good resemblance, isn’t it?’ Graham said.

  You could only tell what he meant if you blurred your eyes – otherwise, it was ridiculous. Her head was maybe twelve blocks of colour. Her body, which was visible to the waist, was another thirty or so, if that. In many ways, she was nothing but a pattern, but if you blurred your eyes then some kind of Amy appeared: an Amy obscured by tears. She was wearing that pale blue blouse with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows: the one that wasn’t in the closet anymore.

  ‘She tied her hair back after leaving the café,’ I said.

  Graham was more cautious.

  ‘It looks like her, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It’s her,’ I said.

  I touched the screen and murmured:

  ‘Amy.’

  Please come home.

  The timeframe in the corner of the video told me that I was looking four months into the past. Four months ago, she’d been at the train station.

  That was quite a head start.

  ‘Have you looked at the passenger listings?’ I asked.

  I saw him nodding out of the corner of my eye.

  ‘Most of them. There’s nothing in her name.’

  ‘Nothing on any of the other cameras?’

  ‘Not so far. The platforms are all covered, so she must be there somewhere. If I can find her, I will. But you’ve got to understand that I don’t have unrestricted access to these cameras. I’ve had to scrabble for these.’ He shook his head. ‘It might take time.’

  I nodded to myself, and then caught a thought: Walter Hughes had access to those cameras.

  Maybe we could trade in some way. I could tell him what Claire had told me.

  ‘I might know somebody who can get you access,’ I said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t really know. It’s too complicated to explain.’

  Of course, he wasn’t going to help me out just for one word.

  Graham said, ‘When can you find out?’

  ‘Monday. But it’s not as simple as that. He won’t just help me. I’m going to need some leverage.’

  The picture of Amy flicked into the next frame: a random jumble of black at this magnification. Graham clicked a button and she came back to me.

  If only.

  ‘What do you need?’ he asked.

  I was thinking:

  She was on the internet a lot… a whole load of guys.

  That was what Wilkinson had told me.

  ‘I need some bargaining power.’ I was still staring at the image of Amy on the computer screen. I couldn’t look away.

  The computer beeped. A window popped up informing Graham that the Will Robinson single had been successfully downloaded from Liberty.

  I blinked.

  ‘I need you to do a search on Liberty for me,’ I said. ‘I need you to look for just one word for me.’

  ‘Shoot.’

  If anything ever happens to me, I just want you to remember one word.

  That’s what she’d said to me.

  ‘Schio,’ I said. ‘Just one word. Run a search for Schio.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ Graham asked. ‘I’m worried about you.’

  ‘I’m fine. Well-’ A little incline of the head; a raise of the eyebrows. I sipped Helen’s perfect coffee. ‘You know.’

  He nodded.

  ‘But you don’t need to be worried about me,’ I said. I tried to make it sound as reassuring as possible – as though all this was some hobby I was vaguely committed to in my spare time, and not the only real purpose in life I had left. ‘Look. I’ve got to get going.’

  He took the mug from me. I glanced down at the screen. Reports were coming flooding into the program window as the search ran its way through a thousand computers on Liberty, and then ten thousand more:

  ‘I’ll leave it running,’ he told me. ‘Should have something in an hour or so.’

  I nodded.

  He clicked the [Reporting] button off, and the messages disappeared.

  ‘I’ll call back. Is it okay if I call?’

  ‘Of course, Jay,’ he said. ‘Always. It’s always okay.’

  But I didn’t believe him.

  I thought about Helen’s list of tea and coffee, and about Graham’s perfect bookcases and computerised intercom voice. Their uptown address. They had so much money that they almost didn’t know what to do with it – except buy what they’d been told to. Maybe they’d even be starting a family soon: a frightening thought.

  In a way, though, it was weird for me to think that their relationship was so fucked up. My love for Amy felt like something pure and wonderful in comparison, but the only evidence of our relationship at the moment was an image on the screen, and me – currently staining an unwanted shadow into their bright apartment. I could almost feel Helen washing up in the kitchen, wondering when – now that Amy was gone – their duty to me as friends would be finally discharged. When she could cross me off her coffee list. When they could trade me in for a better model and just have done.

  The only times I ever saw them these days were times like this.

  ‘I’ve gotta go,’ I said. ‘Say goodbye to Helen for me.’

  I wandered out and, like I was a blackmailer come to visit in the night, he watched me to the door without saying a word.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Lacey Beck.

  It was at one end of Swaine Woods – the Ludlow village end. Ludlow was pretty small: basically just a road of country houses backing onto the wood, all of them carefully reconstructed. They had bright white walls – many with black cartwheels nailed to the sides, for some reason – troughs filled with flowers, and they all sported tiny, random windows you couldn’t s
ee shit out of. You could see into some of the kitchens, though, and they all looked the same: herb racks and wooden-handle knives; pans hanging from hooks above the work surfaces; an olde cookery booke. Outside, you could breathe in the smell of grass and trees, and listen to birdsong, assuming you might want to.

  At one end of the road, a ginnel led to a footpath through the woods, which went all the way through to the ring road at the far side, skirting Morton. It was a lonely walk, but a nice one; Amy and I used to wander along it sometimes, and it would take about half an hour to get from one end to the other. The sun came streaking in through the tips of the trees, and the embankment sloped down to the left: a mess of dusty roots and dips. The beck was at the bottom, diverging away from the path. Half a mile into the wood you could barely even hear it anymore.

  I wouldn’t have wanted to live there. It was where a lynch mob hanged Edmund Lacey, an eighteenth-century highwayman, and although I don’t believe in ghosts I’ve always thought that there was an atmosphere to the place. Most of the time, it felt peaceful and pleasant, but occasionally it was almost threateningly still. All you could hear was the stream, which – in its way – was all that was left of Lacey: his name, rushing endlessly past.

  Sometimes, it made me think of screaming spirits blowing through abandoned buildings like the wind. Most of the time, it just made me think: oh – so there’s a stream here.

  I’d carefully followed Charlie from her house, waiting at the far end of the road until she emerged and then watching her all the way to the ginnel. When she’d turned the corner onto the footpath, I’d started to make my way down the road. By the time I’d started to hear the stream, and then reached the corner myself, I was figuring that she’d be out of sight. And she was.

  In spite of my days of careful planning, I wasn’t entirely sure how this was going to go, or even if it was going to go. It was more than possible that Kareem was many miles away right now – more than likely, in fact – and if that was the case then, although it meant another dead end, at least I didn’t have to worry about Charlie getting hurt. If he was here, though, I had at least two concerns.