The Third Person (33 page)

The second day, I started early. After breakfast, before checking out the next name on the list, I went to an internet café around the corner from the hotel. I got an extra coffee to help keep me upright through the day and then logged on to check my e-mail. I wanted to see if anything else had been sent to me from Amy’s account.

But it was down, of course, and so I couldn’t log in.

Number sixteen: I caught him just as he arrived home. I was walking down the pavement towards him, watching him tuck in his shirt and straighten his tie. He was a family man. I saw him turn into his driveway and noticed the little girl in the front room window; the curtain fell back into place and then she was at the door to meet him as he opened it. I walked away, wanting to close my eyes.

Number seventeen was a teenager: long and thin, like a clotheshanger.

I was getting tired, but number eighteen was on the way back to my hotel, so I decided to wander past and see what I could see.

His real name – number aside – was Paul Marley, and he lived in an enormous tenement building, which was verging on the derelict. I spent a minute or so trying to work out which room would be his, but I could only pin it down to the south-east side. The lights there seemed to form a computer pattern of yellow and black. He might be in or out, and I could wait outside all night and still not get anywhere. Unless Paul Marley was the man in the video, I wouldn’t recognise him even if I saw him.

I stood by the entrance, debating for a second.

Fuck it
, I thought, and went inside.

The foyer was low and not very wide: just a cavity in the shape of a room, with two silver elevator shafts on the right, and a staircase straight ahead. I didn’t trust the elevators, so I took two flights up to Marley’s floor, with the echo of my footfalls preceding me up the stairwell. The bannister was cold and hard, and incomprehensible graffiti stained the walls in big blocks of colour. When I opened the door to Marley’s corridor, it stank of old air. The carpet was damp and curling up at the edges, and was illuminated from above by more bare lightbulbs. Closed off to either side were pale green doors, which had their numbers scribbled on in biro. My heart was beating quickly as I reached the end – number twenty-two.

The gun was in my jacket pocket, pointing down, and I wasn’t planning on taking it out. The idea was that – if it was him – I’d just grab hold of it in my pocket, twist my jacket up and shoot him through it. Get him in the gut, then push him back into the room and close the door behind us.

Keep it calm, keep it calm
, I thought, reaching out with my free hand.

It probably won’t be him
.

I rapped on the door three times, but on the second it wasn’t there: it was creaking open ever so slightly. Someone had left it ajar.

Fuck my plans – I took the gun out, took a good two-handed grip and moved to one side of the doorway. Waited. The world ticked over a couple of times around me. I fazed out everything except the door, and beyond it the room and everything my senses were telling me was happening inside it. Everything that wasn’t happening.

No footsteps.

No voices.

Five seconds. Six. I hesitated, but by then the corridor was beginning to feel just as threatening as whatever might be inside Marley’s flat. So I kept the two-handed grip and used it to push the door open a little further. And, when nothing happened, I moved inside.

The front room was a mess of old furniture and discarded clothing: a mad, patternless tapestry of newspaper, cloth and old take-out cartons. It was difficult to know whether the place had been turned over or if Marley just lived like this. To the left, I could see a kitchen: walls painted as yellow as melted butter. To the right, there were two doors: one shut, one open. An empty bedroom. From what I could see, it was as messy as the lounge. I guessed that the other must be the bathroom.

I stopped. Breathed in.

There was a smell about the place that wasn’t right – a burnt cooking smell – and it clicked into place with the door being left off the latch. Even before I saw the blood on the floor, I knew that I was going to find someone dead in this flat. I pushed the door closed behind me, and that was when I
noticed the stains on the papers beside it. Not a lot of blood, but not paper cut blood either. It was a proper amount, like you might see outside a pub the morning after a fight, with little splashes moving off down the street as someone held on to a broken nose and staggered away.

I looked over the floor and it was the same: more blood. There was a spatter of something across a few open books on the settee that might have been – I couldn’t tell – but there was no doubt about the rest. I followed the trail with my eyes, over papers and pizza boxes and fabric. The blood led sparely but clearly towards the closed bathroom door.

My heart hadn’t slowed down any since I’d entered the flat, and now it felt like it was beating heavily and quickly above a very deep and black pit. Instead of doing what I wanted to do – leave right now – I took the gun with me on a small tour of the apartment. I knew where it was going to end, and the flat was too quiet and still to be anything other than empty, but I had to be sure.

I checked the kitchen first. There were a few stacked pans on top of the cooker and an empty milk carton on the counter beside the kettle, but otherwise it was relatively tidy. I figured that Marley must have ordered in most of his food. There were some empty bottles on the floor by the bin – mostly wine, with a couple of sturdy vodkas hiding at the back – but apart from that there was nothing to see.

The bedroom next, obviously. A single bed, covered with nooses of cloth; more crumpled clothes on the floor; three glasses filled with misty water on the table by the bed. The air looked and smelled grey. That was all.

So: the bathroom.

I pushed the door open slowly, using the gun the way I’d used it on the front door, ready to shoot someone if I needed to even though it was obvious that I wouldn’t.

The smell was stronger here. The blood was concentrated
and specific. There were pools of it on the floor. A hotchpotch of blurred footprints smeared and scattered out of it, and it was streaked on the dirty tiles, and here and there on the paintwork. The room was only small, but it was just covered with blood. Opposite me, there was an old cast-iron bath, sheltered by a rubbery shower curtain hanging from metal links on a runner attached to the ceiling. The curtain was mottled and grubby, like a used condom, and there was blood on that, too. So much blood. It was obvious that the bath was the epicentre of all this, and although the curtain was pulled all the way across, I could see quite clearly that somebody was in there behind it. Not somebody anymore. Something dead.

To the left, I noticed that the rim of the sink was speckled with the foamy remains of a shave and I started to gather a scenario together in my head. Marley’s in here shaving when there’s a knock at the door. He answers it and gets attacked. He’s driven back into this room, which is where the intruder kills him and leaves him. Assuming that the corpse in the bathtub was him.

I used the barrel of the gun to draw the curtain back.

The video clip wasn’t clear, and the face below me had been cut to pieces, but it looked like him.

I stared down, feeling conflicting emotions beneath a blank surface. Now that he was in front of me, my first thought was that he didn’t look like much. He had jeans on, and that was all, and although it’s difficult to judge someone’s height when they’re dead in a bath in front of you, he just looked like a skinny little guy. Wiry, maybe – but that was charitable. He was cut in a fair few places, but they all looked like puncture wounds rather than slashes, and there was a kind of deep, unambiguous violence about them. He hadn’t been tortured. Someone had come into this flat with a knife, and they’d stuck it in him over and over until he was dead.

I took a cold, clinical look.

It’s him
.

I let the shower curtain fall back over, and then I went and sat down on the closed toilet, put my head in my hands and tried to think.

Someone had killed him, and I didn’t know what to feel about it. A small part of me felt cheated, but mostly I just felt relieved, and I was surprised at myself for that. Perhaps, despite everything, I wasn’t a cold, calculating killer after all. But I looked over at the bath. The person who had done that to Marley hadn’t been cold and calculating either: there was a passionate brutality to how he’d been killed, and it didn’t seem to me that it was the kind of professional hit that a man like Marley might have attracted. It was the kind of thing I might have done.

Well – whoever had done it, and for whatever reason, he was dead. So what was I supposed to do now? I could shoot him a couple of times for the sake of completion, but it felt pretty fucking redundant. What was I supposed to do? Shoot myself? I tried to conjure up that image of Amy – the acid test – and I could do it, but the image brought along an understanding that the last thing she would have wanted was me dead in this man’s bathroom.

The thought set me moving back through to the living room, not with any real intention, but just because there was nothing else to see in here and the smell was becoming more and more potent.

As I walked back through to the living room it occurred to me that I should probably be going quite soon. And I didn’t even feel the impact. It was like the right-hand side of me exploded, and then the left as my shoulder went into the wall and then hit the floor. Most of the air went out of me. The room spun around. I wasn’t holding the gun anymore.

Fuck
.

Half a second went by as I realised what was happening. And then I hit out blind, catching the man coming down with a weak right to the shoulder, too weak, but enough for the knife he was bringing down to miss, to scrape through the debris on the floor with the sound of a rap on the door and then paper tearing.
A fucking knife
. I was half pinned under his weight, my right arm trapped across me, and – panicking, terrified – I managed to get my left hand under his chin just as he brought the knife round and tried to cut my throat, resting on his elbow. I pushed his jaw up, his head back – and he was so heavy – and I scrunched my chin down as he put the knife against me. He sliced my jawbone, once, twice, again; flicking at it, not as hard as he’d have liked but I started screaming anyway: this noise that had no pain in it, just fear and anger and panic at being damaged.

He was punching me with his other hand: a fist going again and again into the side of my head. I pushed his jaw right up, flapping uselessly at the knife with my right hand as he sliced me again. He was trying to get the blade into the crook of my neck to cut me deeply. But then my other palm was over a snapping mouth, pushing his nose up, and my fingers found his eyes and I dug in, hard and fast and cruel. The punches stopped. He cried out and pushed himself up off me, reaching around to try to stop me from blinding him. My right hand, suddenly free, found his knife hand and held it as he pulled me up and backwards in a standing stumble. He was trying to wrench my hand away, biting at my palm, but then sheets of paper slipped out under him and we went down again, this time me landing on top, and my fingers went into his eyes, properly in, suddenly hot and wet and revolting. I didn’t care, I just thought
die, you fucker
and dug in as hard as I could, gritting my teeth and looking away from what I was doing, not listening to the noises he was making, holding his wrist down, getting one knee over it. Until his hand stopped
fighting me, until it just rested there, pressed against the floor. Until his mouth wasn’t biting at my other hand anymore.

I held him there for another minute, not looking. Not feeling anything. It was like my mind was made of glass and had been dropped, and now I was staring blankly at the pieces – heart pounding – not even caring where to begin.

After that minute, though, the effects of the adrenalin began to thaw. Pain brought enough of the pieces back together to get me moving, standing up again. I didn’t think about my fingers as they came out: I just looked for the gun. Then I went through to the bathroom and washed the man’s blood and brains off my hand. My mind was cool and calm by then – worryingly so, perhaps – and it was talking to itself:
do this, do that, no, do this first, that’s it
. I used toilet roll to wipe blood from my face and neck, and elsewhere, but I just kept wiping and then bundled a load up and held it in place over the cuts. My reflection was wired to high hell: wide-eyed and scared. The right-hand side of my face looked red and sore, but none of his punches had broken the skin. He hadn’t had enough leverage to do me much real damage with his fists. My shoulder hurt from the impact, but I’d live.

Who was he? A friend of Marley’s? One of his gang, maybe. Or perhaps he was the guy who’d killed him. After all, Marley had been stabbed too, so it was possible that I’d just avenged the guy I’d come to murder.

Whoever he was, the number of bodies in the flat was rapidly increasing. I needed to get out of here.

I dropped the balled-up, bloody tissues in the toilet and flushed, but I was still bleeding and it was going to get me noticed.

‘Jason,’ I said, looking at myself in the mirror. ‘I do believe that what you need right now is a scarf.’

I found one in the living room, tucked away on the bottom shelf of Marley’s wardrobe: black and old. Probably not the
most hygienic of dressings, but I figured what the fuck – needs must. As I wrapped it around my neck, I glanced down at the body on the floor. I didn’t feel at all bad about what I’d done. In fact, I didn’t feel much of anything, and what I did feel was something closer to exhilaration than regret or guilt. The man had attacked me and that was the way it was. It had been him or me. I could only wish that everything in life went my way quite so completely.