Steve Mosby - The Third Person

I sighed.

‘I know what happened to Claire,’ I said. ‘If you want to know, then I can tell you.’

From the way his gun hand faltered slightly, I figured that he did.

‘And if it makes it any easier, I can also tell you that the men responsible for it are dead. Because I killed them last night.’

Dennison looked as though he was almost going to cry. Instead, he just shook his head and lowered the gun. It rested on his thigh, and he looked so weary that I felt more of a connection with him than ever.

‘Tell me what’s going on?’

So I did.

Dennison made me go over the facts a couple of times, but by then he’d put the gun down on the settee beside him and I didn’t mind so much. I was thirsty, though.

‘Look, can you get me a drink?’

‘Yeah, sure.’

He started to get up, and then glanced at the gun.

‘I’m not going to shoot you,’ I said. I probably couldn’t even stand up. ‘For God’s sake.’

‘Okay. I hate the thing anyway.’

He was away for a couple of minutes, and I took the time to recover myself, but didn’t make a move for the weapon. Dennison wasn’t about to shoot me anymore and the people he was nervous about – the men who had killed his girlfriend – were currently smelling up a mansion a few hundred miles west of here. I was after a man named Marley and the gang he worked with, and I was probably being pursued by the police. But neither of those parties seemed likely to be turning up at Dennison’s house in the near future. I almost wished they would.

‘Here.’

‘Thanks.’

I took the water and gulped it down, pleased to see that my right arm was working a little better.

‘I’m glad you killed those men.’

He sat down.

‘I mean, I never thought I’d fucking say that about anybody. About anything. I used to think it was horrible when something died.’

‘It was horrible,’ I said.

‘They deserved it, though. I’m glad you did it. Jesus, listen to me.’

The idea made me feel uncomfortable, so I said, ‘How long had you known Claire?’

‘On and off, for years. We were friends some of the time, more than that at other times. We were always breaking up and getting back together, you know? She was too wild for anything else. It had been about a year, and then she came to see me a month or so back. She didn’t look well, and I wanted her to stay. She seemed so lost. She stayed for a bit, but then she was gone again. Claire never wanted to settle down.’

‘No.’

‘She wasn’t the type. I’m glad you killed those men.’

He might have been glad, but I still felt uncomfortable. Last night, I’d felt pretty guilty about the two murders, but I’d put them away with everything else and wasn’t about to start analysing them now. Fortunately, he changed the subject.

‘They killed her because of something she stole?’

I nodded.

‘Yeah. They were after a piece of art made out of text. She stole it from them, and stored it on your server for safe keeping.’

I didn’t want to tell him that she’d worked as a prostitute, but we were circling it. I needn’t have worried though: the words seemed to go through him – he was miles away. It seemed like he was running something over in his head. Something that was suddenly making sense of a shitload of chaos.

He said, ‘She stored it on the Society’s database.’

‘Right.’

‘And it was this… murder text.’

‘Well, it was a story,’ I said. ‘A description of a murder. And I think that one of the people in the story is my girlfriend.’

‘But there’s something different about it?’

‘It’s real.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘So well-written that it’s as good as real. Here.’

I reached into my pocket and produced the ticker-tape description of the Saudi distillery. There was no point fucking around: you needed to see this to believe it.

Dennison picked it carefully from my fingers and then read it.

‘Jesus.’

I finished off the water. ‘Jesus, indeed.’

‘Let me read this again. This is incredible.’

‘That’s only a short one,’ I said. ‘This guy writes books and books filled with that kind of shit. I read some of his other stuff.’

‘I don’t understand… this is just-’

‘Incredible. Yeah. I know.’

I’d had the same reaction, just less time to be verbal about it.

‘How does it work?’ ‘

I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘I’ve thought about it, and I just don’t know.’

Actually, it seemed like an impossible problem. If you tried hard enough, you could look at the words and take them in one by one, but it just wasn’t the same. When you took it apart, it just stopped working: it stopped laying its golden eggs. To get the full effect, you had to just sweep through it without pausing for thought – which was what your mind wanted to do anyway. It was only then that the vistas and imagery within it came alive around you.

Dennison read it again, shaking his head.

‘So who is this guy?’

‘The killer question. More importantly, I want to know who he works for. I find them, and I find Amy.’

‘Do you have a copy of the text that Claire stored on our database?’

I shook my head.

‘No. It’s corrupted anyway. You can only make out a few words.’

‘That’s the point. Everything’s corrupted.’

‘Profound.’

‘Can you walk?’

I almost laughed. It seemed a ridiculous question, not least because what I most felt like doing was dying in the dark somewhere.

‘Well, let’s see.’

I eased myself to my feet, expecting my legs to feel a little shaky. In fact, they seemed fine. I rolled my shoulders. That worked, too.

‘Seems like it.’

‘Come on, then,’ he said. ‘You can see for yourself.’

The rest of Dennison’s house was decorated and furnished in the same minimalist, paper-motif manner as his living room. More tethered bundles of paper lined the walls of the hallway, and seemingly random scraps and sheets had been tacked to the wall on the stairs, like butterflies. It was covered with torn out pages from notepads, shopping receipts and carefully flattened, multi-coloured sheets. There was writing on all of them. In fact, Dennison had even scribbled here and there himself, looping practically unreadable sentences like ribbons around the bannister. He’d reduced the first floor landing to a metre-wide strip of tattered tortoise-shell carpet, with occasional breaks in between the stacks to allow for doorways into similarly loaded rooms. The place smelled musty – like a poorly attended aisle in an underfunded library.

‘I like what you’ve done with the place,’ I said.

He stopped beneath a dangling mobile made from discarded bus tickets.

‘In here.’

The room turned out to be both a study and a storeroom. On the wall opposite the door there was a computer, sitting humming on a desk strewn with paper. A plastic dictation arm stuck out from the right-hand side of the monitor, and a sheet of a4 was hanging down from the clipper. Dennison was halfway through a Word document, no doubt transcribing what he saw as life from the paper to the hard drive.

All of that took up only one corner. The rest of the room, to the left, was piled high with paper – or rather, hung high. He’d suspended a number of vertical storers from the ceiling – the kind normal people use for T-shirts and trousers – and filled each box with documents of all shapes and sizes. At least ten of them were hanging down from the ceiling like paper punchbags, almost touching the floor, with just enough room to move between them, and sticking out from the base of each section was a coloured tag, presumably to label the contents. Beyond these strange pillars, there was a window. Its dark blue curtains were drawn, and the sun was trying to fight its way through. It was failing. The only light in the room was coming from the monitor, and it was making the various label tags glow fluorescent, like nesting fireflies.