Steve Mosby - The Third Person

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.