Steve Mosby - The Third Person

There is no limit to what you can achieve given time. Even the most complicated and seemingly impossible task is only a matter of doing one thing after another. This wasn’t even that complicated; just time consuming.

I checked the list. I figured maybe three more and then call it a day.

There was no rush.

The hotel room in Thiene was a million miles from the standard of the one in Downtown, which made it middle of the road in general terms. I had an en-suite bathroom, roughly the size of two standing people, a wardrobe, a double bed, and a desk and chair. Most of my notes and papers were spread out on the desk. In the corner of the room, there was a television unit – also housing a handy little mini-bar underneath. Not the grandest of rooms, admittedly, but the four walls surrounding it would define the last few days of my life, with only a slight slope and one dark Monet print to differentiate them, so I figured I’d have to learn to live with it.

The first day was filled with a kind of blank, soulless searching. I’d sit down every so often – on a bus or on a bench – and draw a shaky line through a name. When I wasn’t doing that, I was scanning maps, dialling numbers and hanging up, watching people without watching them, or pacing in my Thiene hotel room wondering how I could fill time. Ideas weren’t exactly forthcoming, either – it felt like I’d struck a deal and received a free trial edition of the rest of my life. I wouldn’t kill myself yet but, in exchange for these few extra days, I was living a life where most of the main features had been disabled. I only turned on the television to check the news broadcasts, and I hardly slept. In fact, the only real impact I made on the room was to the minibar.

The news I did catch was reassuring, however. There was no mention of Walter Hughes, which I thought could only be good. He was, in his way, an important person and I was quite sure that his murder would have made it as far as a television near me. If he hadn’t been discovered yet then it meant that Dennison and his friends had been able to take what they wanted from the house – which also meant that, when the police finally did get around to calling, any traces I’d left were likely to have been buried beneath far more obvious traces of them. That was fine.

Predictably, the main news item was the internet crash. The situation had worsened slightly since the last broadcast, but now seemed to have stabilised. Millions of files remained inaccessible, but the rot was said to have stopped. Experts were puzzled, large areas of the internet remained shut down, businesses were up in arms and share prices were plummeting. But for now at least, things seemed to have settled.

I flicked off the television.

The first night in that hotel room, I paced. I scanned through the information I had a hundred times, reliving events in my head, trying to come up with some new angle or approach that might lead me to these men. But I couldn’t think of anything, and became so frustrated and uptight that I had to drink myself to sleep in order to get any.

I dreamt about her.

It was strange, actually – not the dream, which I don’t even remember, but the way my life was moving. In the room at Combo’s Deli, I’d not been able to think about Amy clearly enough to picture her, but now it felt as though I was drawing closer. Memories of her kept surfacing: the vibrant, saturated kind of memory, and not just some flat, black and white picture of the things we’d done. When I cried, which I did a lot, I could feel an imaginary arm around me. It began to seem as though if I spoke to her she’d be able to hear me, and I knew I was getting nearer to the stage when I’d be able to imagine her sitting next to me, maybe with her hand on my knee, and it was at that point I’d be able to end this. I didn’t believe in an afterlife but, to get myself through that moment, it might be nice to. It would only last a split-second, after all, and it wasn’t like I’d have to live with myself afterwards.

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.