The Third Person (20 page)

Searching the house, I found a hell of a lot of signposts that didn’t say Amy on them, and so at least I knew quite quickly that I was on the wrong track.

The butler’s bedroom yielded secrets like barren waste-ground yields watermelons. There were a few letters and scribbled invoices that got my hopes up for about a second, but they didn’t lead anywhere, and I found no documentation relating to Marley, or any indication of the contacts the man must have used to buy the snuff text for Hughes. I hadn’t really expected him to keep explicit records, but it was still disappointing. Dead end.

Hughes’ bedroom was the same. There were more framed texts on the wall. I read one of them and found myself sitting in the early morning sun outside a tent in Perugia, Italy. There was nobody else around and – although I was on a campsite – there wasn’t even another tent on my row. I knew it was a half-derelict site up in the mountains, and I was staring out at this peak in the distance, green trees and mist blending into a strangely spiritual whole that I was trying to make sense of.

Another picture put me on my back beneath a tree. It was the same campsite, but later in the day, and I was looking up at the underside of a hundred branches and, beyond that, the deep, bright sea of the sky above. It was pure blue – a
wonderful, cloudless shade of pale colour – and I was imagining that at any moment I might fall upwards towards it, snapping the branches between with the weight of my plummeting body, rushing up and splashing into the cold, faraway depths of this beautiful sky. At that moment, even the earth at my back felt tenuous.

I stopped reading the texts and started looking for clues, smashing open the frames and examining the backs of the paper for any signs as to where they might have come from. But they were blank.

I gave up and started searching the office instead. There were a million and one files, and most of them seemed to be insurance related, with the majority being on Peace of Mind headed paper. Certainly not what I was looking for. I made a mental note to tell Gray that his precious first rule of searching lacked something in practice: the filing cabinets and desks were so brimful with records, invoices and other accounting information that I could barely make head or tail of them, never mind find a nugget of gold. I was despairing, and about to give up the search altogether, when I saw the envelope on the desk.

Occasionally in life, things just click. Sometimes you just get that feeling, and I got it in spades as I walked over to the desk and picked up that unopened envelope.

It was addressed to Walter Hughes.

I flipped it over and found the return address on the back.

Jim Thornton, O’Reilly’s Bar.

I’d heard of O’Reilly’s, but never been. From what I could remember, it was a downtown dive, an old Irish place, but there were so many of them that they all merged into one. I was quite sure that Walter Hughes would never have been in there, though – the world didn’t hold enough towels to separate that man’s ass from a barstool in a joint like that. The
name Thornton rang a bell, but I wasn’t sure where I knew it from. I tore open the envelope.

Bingo.

Inside, there was one of the smaller scraps of paper that Hughes had decorated his entrance hall with: one short sentence. I read it quickly, taking in the aroma of hops and malt and sugar, and feeling a waft of hot steam in my face, only barely distinguishable from the warm breeze. Around me, there was a gabble of foreign language. The title at the top of the page said:
Illegal brewery in Saudi
.

Bingo times a thousand.

I folded the sheet of paper carefully and slipped it into my trouser pocket. It was half-past-eight: a good time to visit a bar on a Saturday night under other circumstances, but far from ideal on a night like tonight. There’d be a taxi rank somewhere near here, but I still wouldn’t make it to the bar for a good hour or so. Half-nine was a bad time to walk into a rough, city-centre bar with a gun and start asking questions.

But really, I didn’t have anywhere else to be right now.

I picked up the gun and made my way downstairs. I looked briefly into the room, almost expecting Hughes and his butler to have moved. But they hadn’t, of course. Not even a little.

What’s done is done. Deal with the consequences
.

I closed the door over on them, inside and out, and made my way into the early evening gloom.

It was closing in on ten o’clock by the time I finally made my way downstairs into O’Reilly’s. A chalkboard on the street outside informed me that I’d missed the end of Happy Hour by a clear forty-five minutes, which seemed a pity, given the circumstances. The place turned out to be one of those bars that sits snugly in (or slightly beneath) the city centre, like some kind of benign cancer which – although you might not want to look at it too closely – you know isn’t doing any harm. The city centre’s like that, though. If you leave enough of a gap untenanted for long enough, a bar forms to fill the space. I figure that’s why cars are always getting beeped for not keeping up with the flow: the drivers behind are all afraid that a bar will form in the road between bumpers and they’ll be forced to find an alternative route.

The taxi had to drop me off by a cashpoint. As I was withdrawing the money, some drunken, red-faced lad in a designer shirt came up and shouted something very loudly into my ear as he stumbled past, flexing his arms above his head. It sounded like a cheer, but I considered shooting him on general principle anyway. Nobody would have missed him: there were a thousand others just like him: all milling around, looking for trouble. And a thousand scantily-clad, barely vertical girls looking to watch the fighting, and then fuck the winner afterwards. The city centre’s like that. Come in on a weekend, they should tell people, and watch the yuppies regress.

The taxi-driver told me that the bar was just around the corner, and he was right, but I still walked past it twice before I noticed it. O’Reilly’s, at face value, was a dingy staircase sandwiched between a bakery and a travel agents. Not promising. I stood and looked at it for a second, while a trio of wide, middle-aged ladies tottered past, and then pushed open the glass door and started down.

The staircase was a descent into something like the green neon corner of Hell itself, with the sound of pool balls clacking and faux-Irish music reeling up with the cigarette smoke. The place was so down-at-heel that it didn’t even bother to have a bouncer. It had literally got to the point where smashing the furniture and faces around wasn’t good or bad, just different. Nobody cared anymore.

As I pushed the door at the bottom open, I saw that there was hardly anybody here anyway. There was a group of builder-looking blokes playing pool on a stained table; a tanned, older woman, smoking like she meant it, eyeing me up on my way to the bar; a Frankenstein’s monster of a tramp, shirt hanging open to reveal white woolly hair over a reddened pigeon chest; and a few others, here and there, all watching me as I produced my wallet. The barman was short and older.

‘You missed Happy Hour,’ he told me as he pulled the beer I ordered.

I looked around. Everybody had settled back into their depressed, isolated states, like dogs in the pound do when nobody’s looking to buy.

‘So I see.’

Another burst of froth as he hung back on the tap.

‘Happy Hour’s six to nine.’

‘Well, I missed my taxi.’

‘Yeah,’ he grunted. ‘Oh yeah.’

‘Yeah,’ I agreed, passing him a five pound note and not really understanding.

‘Two-fifty.’

Bizarrely, he gave me three pound coins as change. Behind me, on the jukebox, the Irish music grew more raucous, and the tramp started slamming the pinball machine into musical life. The woman at the other end of the bar stubbed out her cigarette as though slowly squashing a wasp, and then exhaled with grey satisfaction. She seemed to be on the verge of approaching me, so I beckoned the bartender back over.

‘I’m looking for someone,’ I said. ‘A guy called Jim Thornton.’

The woman was on her way over, as bone-thin and dry as a skeleton wrapped in prune-skin. Enormous, gaudy, plastic earrings brushed at her shoulders.

‘What do you want with Jim?’ she said.

‘He’s looking for Jim,’ the barman said helpfully.

She glared at him.

‘I heard
that
!’ she said. ‘I want to know what he wants with Jim.’

He walked off. ‘Shit, woman.’

‘I just want to talk to the guy,’ I said. ‘Is he here? Or do you know where I might find him?’

She appraised me. If she’d still had her cigarette, she would probably have blown some smoke at me.

Finally, she said, ‘Well what you want to talk to him about?’

I sipped my beer and tried a different tack.

‘Between me and him. Business.’

‘Business, huh?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What kind of business have you got with the man?’

I realised that the sound of pool-playing had stopped. The
builders were watching us, and the woman’s voice was carrying a bit too far. I turned back to her.

‘Look – you know him or not?’

‘Maybe.’ She was having none of it. ‘Maybe I’m just real protective of him. Fed up at reporters coming round bothering the man. Hasn’t he lost enough? You tell me. I’d say he has.’

Reporters?

I took another sip of my beer and tried to remain calm. Having a gun in your jacket pocket should do a lot to allay fear and, truth be told, it was helping a bit. I wasn’t actually scared of the men – who were now gathering like a storm cloud around the near end of the pool table – but I was scared of this whole thing going wrong, the way that everything else seemed to have done today.

‘I’m not a reporter,’ I told her. ‘I don’t know anything about the guy.’

‘You some kind of fan boy, or something?’

‘I told you. I don’t know the guy from Adam. I don’t know who he is, or what he’s been through. I just know I need to talk to him about something.’

She leaned her head to the opposite side.

‘If you tell me why, then maybe I can help. Or else maybe my friends over at the pool table can.’

Five of the men were approaching. One of them – the leader – was holding his cue. The other four, at least, seemed unarmed.

I sipped my beer again, thinking:
nonchalance
.

Think it to display it.

‘I really wouldn’t do that,’ I suggested quietly, my hand moving casually to where my gun was resting.

Two of the unarmed men reached beneath their shirts and pulled out pistols, and held them pointing casually at the floor. The remaining two each produced knives. The first man
tapped the ball end of his cue on the floor and sounded real pissed off when he spoke.

‘This fuck bothering you, Steph?’

I sipped my beer and pretended I didn’t exist.

Steph bent down slightly to get under my gaze and lift it back up to her. Then, she thumbed in the the direction of the man with the cue, glaring at me.

‘This here’s Joe Kennedy. And these are his boys.’

One of them grunted, right on time.

Steph said, ‘Maybe you can tell them why you want to see Jim.’

I was starting to be under the impression that Jim had better be worth it after all this trouble. Jim had better do fucking cartwheels. Play the piano and take requests.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m gonna reach into my pocket, okay?’

I held my hands – palms out – in a pacifying gesture.

‘There’s a piece of paper in my left-hand trouser pocket. I’m gonna reach in and get it out.’

Nobody told me not to, so I dug in, retrieving the paper I’d taken from Walter Hughes’ house.

‘It’s about this. Here – who wants it?’

Steph held out her hand and clicked her tanned, ringed fingers twice.

‘Give.’

I passed it over, and she pulled it taut between her witch’s hands, frowning as she read it.

‘I just want to speak to him about that,’ I said. ‘And where he got it from.’

Steph looked up at Joe Kennedy and his friends.

‘It’s all right, boys. You go back to your pool now.’

‘You sure?’

‘I’m sure,’ she said. ‘Go on.’

They wandered away, putting their weapons back into whichever tight and revolting spaces they’d pulled them from.
Steph looked me over again, evaluating me. I smiled and took a sip of beer.

‘All right,’ she said, turning around. ‘Put that candy-ass beer down and follow me. Bob!’

The landlord was polishing a pint glass with a rusty-looking bar towel.

‘Yeah?’

‘You order us down a big old bottle of liquor in back. And three glasses, and that’s all.’

‘Right up.’

He didn’t move, but I did – following Steph through a flimsy door by the side of the bar and wondering exactly how alive I was going to be ten minutes from now.

It was actually a revelation: exactly how much there was, hidden beneath the surface of the city. I supposed I shouldn’t have been surprised: in cities, like the people that live in them, the most interesting things happen beneath the surface. O’Reilly’s itself was subterranean, but the door by the bar led to steps that took Steph, and me behind her, down to another level entirely, and by the time we’d finished I figured we must have been a good two storeys beneath the streets of the city. We trailed along a dim corridor and then turned the corner into an enormous room.