The Third Person (10 page)

‘I guess I don’t get one, then?’

‘Guess not.’ I tasted it. ‘It’s good, too.’

‘Of course, it’s good,’ he said, turning back to the screen. ‘What are you trying to imply about my coffee? And what can I actually do for you on this fine morning?’

‘Status report?’ I asked. ‘Just the usual.’

‘Pull up a pew.’

I edged my seat a little closer, so that I could see the screen more clearly. We did this most weekends, and every time I got a feeling of excitement as I moved in next to him. He was reassuring. With Graham on my side, it felt like I stood a chance.

‘What have you got for me?’

‘Maybe nothing,’ he said, shrugging.

He clicked the mouse, searching for something on-screen.

‘But maybe something.’

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.