Steve Mosby - The Third Person

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.

So where was I going to go?

The obvious answers – the hotel, my home – felt pointless. They were end-points. I could head to those places, but they both felt like moving into emotional checkmate. What was I going to do when I got there? Exactly. I wasn’t going to do anything. But if not home, then where?

I needed somewhere more productive to go. But, as I absently looked across the spread of papers, my gaze finally coming to rest on a small, open book over by the settee, I wondered whether what I actually needed was still the exact opposite.

I took a bus across town. It was late by then, and raining, so there we all were, bathed in a sickly amber light and breathing in the smell of damp clothes. The side of my face was hurting a lot more now, and I was still bleeding. Hopefully people hadn’t noticed, but it didn’t really matter. I watched the dark city go past outside, crossing gazes with a pale reflection of myself, and I really didn’t look well. In fact, I looked like the last person you’d choose to sit next to and, on this bus, that was saying something.

The address I was heading to was on the outskirts of Thiene, where the buildings got taller and more ramshackle, like somebody had built a load of separate floors and then seen how many they could pile up without the building coming crashing down. Everything was black brick and timber, and all you saw, or remembered, were boarded up hotels that looked about two hundred years old. The rain was grey and dirty and felt right; I couldn’t imagine this place in the daytime, or in summer. It was a fitting locale, I supposed, but part of me wished that all these people I was looking for might live somewhere a little nicer.

I had a vague idea of the area and knew where to get off the bus, but I had to ask the driver for directions to the street. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy who gave directions very often, but he took one look at me and decided it would be easier, and probably smarter, not to be difficult. He told me exactly what I needed to know.

It was only a five minute walk from the stop, but when I arrived I was soaked through and cold. And past caring. It was an apartment block with about six storeys, but it looked more or less derelict, and it was difficult to imagine anybody actually living here. There were a couple of lights on close to the top, though, so I figured somebody must be home. A helpful friend of society had already kicked the front door open for me, so I made my way inside and found the stairs.

There was a pretty good chance that whoever had killed Marley had also come here, as this place had been on the page at which his address book had been left open, and so I took out the gun as I made my way up to the top floor. There was nobody around, but every second staircase found me approaching a black-blue window, criss-crossed by a thin metal grid on the inside, pattered upon and streaked by the rain outside: an incessant tapping that made the building seem even older and weaker that it was. By the time I reached the sixth floor, I was so unnerved by it that I almost wanted someone to pop out of a door and say hi, just to prove that there were people here at all. But there was nothing apart from the rain.

And on the top floor it was literally raining: the ceiling was open to the sky in a couple of places, letting in a steady spatter of water that was probably not doing the wiring much good. The lights hung down from a brown ceiling, and I walked carefully. Getting electrocuted would, in theory, solve all my problems, but it didn’t seem like a particularly appealing prospect.

There had been no name in the address book: just the street, and then the building and room numbers. I didn’t know who I was going to find here, as I made my way down the old, battered corridor, searching for six-one-two. The décor left a lot to be desired. If the paper hadn’t been peeling in places, I might have believed there were no walls beneath them at all: just the paper, stretched and fragile and breakable. I could have torn it down and moved from one dank room to another, from empty flats into inhabited and stained ones. I could have held the surprised occupants at gunpoint as I stalked through and then ripped my way into the next one, and then the next, looking for whoever lived at this blank address. Room six-one-two. Here it was.

I listened at the door for a moment and, in a way that was becoming all too familiar, there was nothing to hear. Somehow, I hadn’t expected there to be. And when I tried the handle, it didn’t surprise me that the door opened. Unlocked, just like Marley’s had been. Was I going to find a body in the bath here, as well?

The room was dark, illuminated only by the pale blue glow from a monitor over by the window, with a wedge of carpet revealed by light from the open door behind me. I couldn’t see much, but I could just about make out the shelves of books lining the walls – hundreds of books and notepads and files and roughly bundled sheafs of paper – and I knew that I was in the right place. The computer was giving out a quiet electric hum, overlaid every few seconds by a small splashing noise of water falling into water. That was coming from deeper inside the flat. I guessed the bathroom.

And on top of those noises, the buzz of flies.

I found a light switch on the wall to my right, and it brought the room to life. All the shadows were sucked back under and between things, and I could suddenly see it all, or what there was to see anyway. Mostly just books. There were some weights in one corner, as well – tiny little things – and a desk by the window, where the computer was. Other than that the room was bare. Except for the man lying down on the floor by the desk.