Steve Mosby - The Third Person

‘I killed him for her, not for you,’ he was saying. ‘I opened up the account I set up for you, and I saw the videos that were there. I didn’t know where they came from but I knew what they meant. She was dead. I guess I’d always known that she would be. I mean, even before I read that file I downloaded for you from Liberty. What else could she be?’

The file.

I glanced at the blank computer screen on the desk in front of us.

‘And you know,’ he said, ‘I hadn’t really read that file too well before that. I’d scanned it, but it was mostly gibberish: just the occasional word, maybe half a sentence or so. It was corrupted, so I hadn’t read that much of it. But I read it through. I don’t know why. Morbid curiosity, I guess.’

The text.

I closed my eyes.

‘Look at me,’ he said.

I shook my head.

Oh God .

‘Open your eyes.’

‘No.’

‘You remember what it said there, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘You remember what she said.’

‘Yes,’ I told him. I opened my eyes, understanding perfectly. My mind had caught that feather. The final nail had gone in.

I was going to die, and it was probably the rightest thing in the world that I did.

‘I remember what she said.’

‘ Sit down on the edge of the fucking bed.’

Marley dragged her back and shoved her down, and she started to cry. Sat there and held her face in her hands, sobbing. Marley didn’t care; he wasn’t even looking at her anymore. Long Tall Jack just laughed.

‘Please don’t do this,’ she said.

Jack was walking over to her, swinging his cock, as she stood up. There was an awful look on her face: a kind of desperately contrived hope. Something had very clearly occurred to her. She was stuck in this nightmare, yes, panicking, yes, but now she’d suddenly realised that it was actually all going to be okay. She’d remembered a key piece of information that she’d left out. How could she have been so stupid? All that she needed to do was explain, and then everything would be all right.

‘Please don’t do this,’ she said. ‘I’m pregnant.’

Jack kept coming, and the look on her face disappeared.

It began with a punch.

You know what I remember most? It’s the note she left for me on the kitchen table.

Jason , she’d written.

I love you very much and I don’t want you to blame yourself for this. This isn’t some kind of ‘dear John’ letter. I’m coming back again. There are some things I need to sort out. You know how it’s been between the two of us recently and it’s not fair on you. I need to deal with the issues I have, just like you said .

I should have dealt with them by now, but I really need to now .

Please wait for me. I promise I’ll come home as soon as I can .

I love you so much (to the sky and back!) ,

Your Amy .

There it is: my Amy.

So, even after everything that happened, she was still mine at that point. I’d been human enough to be not good enough for her, and she was still prepared to be mine. Maybe I should take comfort from that: she didn’t want Graham, and she felt bad about what had happened between them; and she loved me and wanted it to work between us. But I don’t take any comfort. It’s not about Graham. I don’t care about that; everybody makes mistakes. But there’s this: she told me in the letter that she needed to sort herself out for me, and she shouldn’t have thought that; there shouldn’t have been the need for her to think like that. And once upon a time there wouldn’t have been. So it was my fault, not hers.

I keep thinking about what she wrote.

I should have dealt with them already, but I really need to now .

And I think that she really needed to deal with them now because she’d found out she was pregnant and had suddenly been faced with all the responsibilities and uncertainties that go along with that. Amy had wanted to keep me – or she had wanted me back – and so she’d gone to sort herself out in the way she thought she owed me. Never mind for a moment that she didn’t owe me anything. More importantly, there’s the pregnancy to think about.

The baby.

Was it mine or was it the result of that afternoon with Graham? I’ve done the maths and it could have been either. I guess Graham thought it had been his, but maybe he was wrong. It really doesn’t matter. I’ll never know, and so to all intents and purposes it might as well have been.

You look at the line of your life and stick little coloured flags in at key moments: the ones where the line bends sharply off to one side, continuing at some weird new angle. You mark those points down and remember them, and when you question your current trajectory, it’s those points that you use to explain them. Tapping the board and saying: I’m going this way because of this .

And that’s what it comes down to in the end. The rape was one little tag – one that sent her life spinning off in a different direction, crashing into mine – but there was another change in trajectory after that, and that’s really what’s important here. Stupid, but true.

Amy was dead because I went to see Claire Warner that day.

If it hadn’t been for that, there would have been none of this.

But as usual, it wasn’t quite as simple as that.

On the day she disappeared, Amy took the bus into the city. 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 coffee, taking her time over each. Between the two cups, she sent a text message. Mildly annoyed but mostly anxious, she didn’t write much. She simply put:

[r u on ur way???]

A few blocks away, Graham read the message, and then immediately deleted it. He didn’t trust Helen not to look through the phone if he left it lying around. Perhaps it was guilt. When you’ve done something wrong, you often expect other people to share your standards.

‘Who was that?’

‘It was Jason,’ he said. ‘It was nothing.’

So: the footage of the café was actually the first bit of film that Graham ever located. Since he’d been supposed to be meeting Amy there, he knew where to look. He sat on it for a while, of course, until he could realistically produce it – until he’d found enough of a trail for it to lead him there without it seeming suspicious. He wasn’t stupid. Neither was she, though, and I should have thought of it earlier. Would she really have disappeared off to meet a man like Kareem without telling someone where she was going? Of course not. She wouldn’t have told me, obviously, because then I wouldn’t have let her go, or I would have insisted on going with her. But she might have told Graham, especially after everything they’d been through together. So she arranged to meet him in that café, and I can only guess what was on her mind. Was she wanting him to go with her? Was she just going to tell him where and who she was going to see? I’ll never know.

And neither will Graham. He never made that appointment. He knew that Amy was making it work with me, or trying to, and he wasn’t going to get in the way of that, even if he wanted to. And I guess he was annoyed with her, in his own way. There had been times since they’d slept together when he’d been there, again and again, to listen to her and try to help her through whatever stupid shit I’d done that week, but there was no way that could continue forever, not considering how he felt. Even good friends lose their patience with you occasionally. That day, he thought fuck it . Perhaps, having found out how needy she could be, he might have started to empathise with me in some small way. He spent the day with Helen instead, and thought about Amy only once or twice.