The Third Person (17 page)

We’d need to question the first boy, she said. What was his name?

She said it like that –
the first boy
– as though the two encounters were similar.

Jack
, the girl said.
I don’t know his surname
.

Instead, she gave the address; the policewoman made a note of it.

We’d need to question Jack. We’d also need to take samples from him to match against the semen we’ve taken from you
.

Without much in the way of emotion, the policewoman
told the girl that there was very little chance of Jack’s girlfriend not finding out. She said they’d have to interview everybody who’d been at the party, including the girlfriend. In fact, if they took the boy to court, his lawyer would probably explain to everyone present how the girl had had sex with an attached stranger only two hours earlier. He’d go into detail.

If you press charges, she is going to find out
.

The policewoman had a wedding ring on, but she was sympathetic anyway.

It won’t help matters that you didn’t fight back
, she said a minute or two later.
I’m not judging you because of that, but other people will. They’ll take it as evidence that you didn’t want to fight back
.

The girl started crying again.

I
did
want to fight back
. She wanted to hit herself.
I was just
scared.

The policewoman remained implacable.

I’m not judging you
.

‘And it bothers me that the girl didn’t fight back,’ Amy told me once. She wasn’t looking at me: she was just staring into the distance between her toes, moving them slightly beneath the duvet. We always had these conversations in the middle of the night, with an emergency lamp flicked on to wipe away the nightmares.

She said, ‘I think she should have done, maybe.’

‘I don’t think she should.’

‘You don’t?’

‘No.’

What an impossible question. I just said what I thought might help.

‘I think maybe she should have, though.’ Amy frowned, intent on her main character and her motivations. ‘It could all
have turned out very differently. Because she didn’t fight at all. Maybe she could have got away if she did.’

‘You could have got hurt more than you did.’

Amy ignored the slip. To be honest, there were times when I didn’t really need to be there.

‘I mean, she
did
tell him no. She told him all the way through: No!’

‘Exactly.’

‘But she didn’t fight him.’

I said, ‘She did the right thing.’

Amy actually looked at me then. Generally, she’d have stopped crying by now, and this occasion was no different.

‘Do you think so?’

‘Absolutely.’ I put my arm around her shoulders. Her body felt soft and fragile. ‘He was a big guy, wasn’t he? He could have hurt her very badly.’

She leaned against me.

‘This girl,’ I repeated, ‘she did the right thing.’

Amy told me that the girl thought long and hard, but in the end she decided not to press charges.

The End.

Except not.

Like all good storytellers, she knew the boy’s name; I asked her, and she told me. And like a good background researcher, I went looking. Do you know how to go looking for somebody? Neither did I back than. It certainly didn’t work out the way it does in the movies, because what I hit – time and time again – was this one fact: the University Halls of Residence were bound by the Data Protection Act. They wouldn’t even confirm whether the boy had ever lived there, never mind where he might have gone when he left.

Amy never knew I went looking. I could never have let her know either, because it would have felt like a betrayal: like I
was hijacking her tragedy and trying to turn it into some drama of my own. People need to have ownership over the stories in their past, and it’s wrong to take them and try to make them yours. You don’t have that right. But I did it anyway. And then, with nothing to show for it but a growing sense of my own inadequacy, I stopped.

I threw that sense of inadequacy away, aware that it was an aimless, unfocused thing I shouldn’t keep. Amy did her best to forget, too. I sometimes wondered how she dealt with it; on one occasion I asked her, and this is what she told me:

I imagine I have a black box, she said. Except it’s big, so I guess it’s more like a chest or a trunk. I keep it in an attic. It’s a room I can see very, very clearly, although I don’t know where I get the image from. Maybe a film; I don’t know. It’s this wide attic room, with a slanted roof. There’s a skylight in the middle which lets in moonlight, and the only furniture is this black box. Whenever anything bad happens to me, I go up into the attic, open the lid and put whatever it is inside the box. Then I shut the box and forget about it
.

She said that she’d been doing this ever since she was a child, and that the story of what happened to the girl at the party was just one more thing to pile inside. After a while, she hoped, she wouldn’t know the story off by heart anymore. After a while longer, she wouldn’t know it at all.

And for some time it seemed to be working. When we first met, it was quite common for the narratives of her dreams and the story to dovetail together, and it wasn’t the kind of story that you slept soundly through. I imagined her mind drifting upstairs to this imaginary attic and opening this imaginary trunk: the story would leap out at her and she’d wake herself up screaming. In the middle of the night, there’s no such thing as just a story. There’s no past tense. No third-person.

But there was probably a period of about a year when she stopped having nightmares altogether. The sex became easier:
more relaxed. We hardly even thought about it. But it never went away entirely, and when it started to come back again I wasn’t as young as I used to be: not as able or willing to help. I don’t even want to think about some of the things I didn’t do, or some of the right words I didn’t say.

An example. You have a hundred dreams about people dying in your life, but you only remember the one where you woke up to the news that your mother died during the night. Some people base their whole world-view on it. Well, it’s the same with relationships. I don’t remember the thousand and one good nights I had with Amy, only the handful of bad that seem to define everything about us. That’s certainly how it was in the last few months, anyway, when we could barely speak to each other and all she did was surf black websites trying to understand what had happened. Trying to read between the lines.

The worst thing is that she seemed happier before she disappeared: it was a mystery to me back then, but I understand it now. She had her plan. Her investigation.

She seemed happier, and so I never saw it coming.

The cab took me to Uptown by the north loop. Once through the toll booth (I had to pay the five pounds access fee), it took about five minutes to reach the address on the business card, which turned out to be nominally above Peace of Mind Insurance: one of our direct competitors. Life is full of these little twists, isn’t it?

‘Do you want me to wait?’

I told the cabbie that I didn’t, and gave him slightly more money than the straight fare, which was slightly less than I had in my pocket. I peeled it off through the window, and he took it from me with a quick hand and drove away. He left me at the end of a long gravel drive leading up to a sprawling, two-storey mansion. Between me and the front door was a black metal gate with an intercom beside it. Above all of this was a video camera on a pole, like some kind of severed head on a pike.

I wandered over, my feet crunching across the wet gravel. It was very quiet here, and I guess I could understand the appeal – especially as the sky now seemed to have settled down to an over-reaching blue, smeared with still grey cloud. There was a slight breeze, but it was far from unpleasant. It was like being on a cliff-top.

I held down the red button for a full ten seconds, and then stepped back in time to see the video camera whirring around to focus on me. Nothing happened for a moment, and then
the gate jerked into life. A bland voice crackled out of the intercom.

‘Approach the house.’

I made my way up the drive. The gate jittered back across behind me like an old lady crossing the street, and buzzed in celebration when it finally re-established contact. The front door of the house had opened up, and a figure dressed in a black suit – incongruous in the mild sunshine – stepped out onto the spread of the porch and waited for me, his hands clasped almost protectively in front of his groin. I could see his half-bald head gleaming from here, and recognised him as the man with the gun from my house the night before.

‘Mr Klein,’ he said, shaking my hand when I reached him, and looking me over as though I was a series of targets for him to punch.

I returned both compliments. Mentally, I was striking him in the throat, kicking him on the inside of one knee, slamming a punch into his solar plexus.

‘Nice to see you again,’ I said.

‘Mr Hughes will see you immediately.’

He beckoned me inside, and then followed after me, closing the door behind us. I found myself standing at the end of a hallway, which seemed very dark and baroque in comparison to the easy freshness of the outside world. The air smelled of old wood and furniture polish. A grandfather clock was standing to attention halfway along, and there was no reason to believe it was anything other than properly real. Beyond that, there were a handful of ornate doors off to either side, and then red carpeted steps leading up to a windowed half-landing above, where a table was supporting some delicately arranged flowers in a crystal vase. I don’t think they were real. Between the front door and the stairs, there were various pictures hanging on the walls, and a small golden chandelier was suspended above.

The house wasn’t as big as it looked from the outside, which was probably a good thing. I had the other two men from last night pegged down as hired help – probably techies from Hughes’ company, brought in to search for the Schio file without even knowing, really, what they were looking for. I didn’t think they’d be here right now, and the relatively small size of the house made me think the only two people I needed to worry about were Hughes and his main bodyguard-cum-butler.

And, of course, his gun. Nowhere – as yet – in evidence.

‘This way.’

I followed him down the corridor to the last room on the right. On the way, I glanced at some of the pictures on the walls. They were strange to say the least: not so much pictures as some weird form of conceptual art. Each large frame surrounded an almost entirely empty canvas containing – pinned at the centre – a thin strip of paper. On each of these strips, someone had jotted a sentence down in a looping blue freehand. In fact, it was such an untidy scrawl that I couldn’t even make out the words as we went past: just the impression that a busy hand had been at work.

As far as I could tell, all the pictures on the wall were like that.

Sentences: framed and hung.

‘In here, please.’

Well, this was nice: the study, undeniably, was an elegant room, furnished entirely in browns, dark purples and greens, and was edged by several towering bookcases, which, with the shelves crammed from one side to the other, gave the room an impression of pleasing closeness. Of course, in this day and age, there was no guarantee that Hughes had collected the titles himself, but I was actually willing to bet that he had. The only other items in the room were two massive, swollen-hard leather couches, and a flat wooden table, which had a delicate-looking
antiquated map pressed like a butterfly beneath the glass surface. On top of this there was a silver platter, with tumblers huddling around a crystal decanter full of what appeared to be whisky or brandy. Beyond, a dozen small windows looked out over a side lawn, and in what little wall space remained there were more of the odd pictures from the hallway. Except these ones were larger – the smallest was a5 – and they seemed to contain a lot more than just one sentence.

‘Mr Hughes will be with you in a moment.’

The bodyguard left.

While I was waiting for Mr Hughes to arrive, I wandered over to have a closer look at one of the pictures.

I was standing outside the Colosseum in Rome, and it had taken me a while to find. It’s not a small thing, of course, and there were occasional streetmaps posted on signs that made it seem easy: a snail shell of rock, curled under the heart of the city like trapped wind. How could you miss it? But I’d wandered the tall streets for what felt like hours without success, and then finally succumbed to the heat, unfolding a curl of Euros to buy a ham cheese panini and a can of Coke. The can had looked out of place: as red as sunburn against the drained, dirty tones of the buildings. Those two things together cost the equivalent of eight pounds. I mean, fuck this city.

Dull traffic lights blinked yes and no as I walked, attempting to regulate the cars and mopeds whooshing past. My rucksack was stuck to my back with sweat, and I ate and drank as I wandered, my head held down over the backpacker’s shuffle. Finally, after an age of walking, the city had unfolded itself like a flower and I’d seen it.