The Third Person (New Blood)

by Steve Mosby

  ‘He’s dead, Hughes,’ I said.

  ‘Call a fucking ambulance!’

  ‘Calm down.’ I took a step back and levelled the gun at him. ‘Just calm down.’

  Just keep calm, and everything will be okay.

  ‘Call an ambulance.’

  ‘He’s dead. Look: it was an accident. The gun just fucking went off.’

  And then I shook my head, realising how ridiculous this was. Hughes was staring at me – actually me, now – with unconcealed hatred, tears streaming down his face. Not five minutes ago he’d been threatening to kill me, and here I was: apologising and making excuses.

  ‘Just get over there.’ A tired gesture with the gun. I picked the towel off the chair and tossed it to him. ‘I guess you can sit on that if you’re worried about your furniture.’

  The old man did as he was told, leaving the body and returning to his armchair. Once there, he leant forward, elbows on knees and face in hands, and simply wept. I found the whole thing suddenly revolting on every conceivable level.

  A brandy sounded like a good idea, and so I retrieved a second glass and poured myself a good measure from the decanter. My hands were shaking slightly, but doing something as normal as this made me feel more in control. Not that I usually pour brandy out of anything fancier than a bottle, but the point stands: here was Hughes, in pieces, sobbing like a girl; and then here I was, acting as though nothing had happened, and pouring myself a goddamn drink. Like I killed people every day and sometimes – when the mood took me – more than one.

  The brandy tasted good.

  ‘Come on, Hughes. Get yourself together.’

  He looked up.

  ‘You’re a dead man for this, Klein. You realise that, don’t you?’

  ‘That’s more like it,’ I said. ‘Keep up the image.’

  I sat down in the chair opposite, keeping tight hold of the gun even though I could probably have beaten him to death with one hand behind my back.

  ‘You won’t get away with this.’ He shook his head and looked over at Paul’s corpse. At least he’d stopped crying: he was more in control of himself. ‘You won’t get away with what you’ve done here.’

  I glanced over at the body, figuring that Hughes was probably right.

  ‘How did you meet Claire Warner?’ I said.

  ‘I told you. She was a whore.’

  ‘What?’ I was surprised. ‘You mean literally?’

  Hughes nodded, looking at me with what – to a business rival – was probably an intimidating stare. It didn’t work so well because he’d been crying, but still made me feel like the passenger here, rather than the pilot.

  ‘Yes. Literally.’ He sounded disgusted. ‘She was recommended to me by an acquaintance. However . . . well, we didn’t get on.’

  I tried to picture Claire as a prostitute and didn’t know whether I could. She was a very sexual person, certainly, and I was sure she wouldn’t have had a moral objection to it. I’d just never anticipated it as a career path she would have chosen, or been forced into. But I supposed I didn’t know her that well, really. A lot could have changed since I met her in Schio.

  ‘What happened?’ I said. ‘What does that mean, you “didn’t get on”?’

  ‘As I said before, she was very wilful. And that element of her character was entirely at odds with some of the things I wished her to do.’ He looked slightly downcast. ‘To my discredit, I reacted badly. To her discredit, though, she retaliated by stealing a disk from me on her way out of my property. The disk which you now have in your possession.’

  Well, not quite – but there was no need for Walter Hughes to know that. My guess was that Claire had destroyed the disk when she found out what was on it and then dropped out of circulation for a while. But first, she’d saved a copy on the server in Asiago and given me the password to find it. Just in case.

  And what had been on the disk to scare her so badly?

  pale blue blouse

  ‘Where did you get the text from?’

  ‘I know people who know people.’

  ‘Let’s start with the people you know, then.’ I gestured with the gun. ‘And from them, I can work my way along.’

  Hughes nodded over at his bodyguard’s dead body.

  ‘Paul arranged the contacts. He also picked up the package. I have no idea of the names, addresses or availability of the men he obtained it from, and they had no knowledge of me.’

  ‘Bullshit!’ I said, standing up and moving over to Paul’s corpse.

  ‘No, it’s true.’ Hughes stood up and moved after me, stick in hand. I turned around and pointed the gun at him, suddenly panicked by his speed and closeness. The intent in his eyes.

  He was raising the cane as though to strike me. I saw the end third had slipped off to reveal a glinting blade. I had about a second.

  ‘Jesus!’

  I fumbled the gun out in front of me, and – bang – the air between us filled with smoke, just as he swung the sword-stick. He missed, and went down hard: it was as though a trapdoor had opened in the floor. I saw his clenched face whipping down, and then he was on the carpet, curled around his own stomach. The front of his shirt was blackened and steaming; the back of his suit was damp and tattered. Blood had blown out of him all over the armchair. His stick had been knocked all the way to the other side of the room.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said again, falling to my knees.

  He was twitching spasmodically, but it was obvious that he was dead. I could smell the wound burning.

  ‘Jesus.’

  That morning, I’d been anticipating killing a man – a paedophile and rapist – and reassuring myself that I could. Now I’d killed three.

  You won’t get away with this, Klein.

  And I thought: no – I won’t.

  Inside or out.

  But when you have a tiger by the tail, you don’t let go – just like I’d told Charlie before I abandoned her in the Bridge. You grit your teeth and hold on, all the way to the bitter fucking end. So I might not get away with it but that wasn’t important.

  I thought about Amy as I clambered to my feet and stumbled out of the study. The air in the hallway smelled so fresh in comparison to the gunsmoke inside.

  All that mattered was that I got away with it for long enough.

  The first thing I did was latch the front door and check that there was nobody else in the house, which I did quickly and carelessly, figuring that – if there was – they might have made themselves known by now. I checked the remaining downstairs rooms to begin with – a kitchen, lounge and dining-room, and then headed upstairs, finding a bathroom, two bedrooms, an office and a guest room. But no people. Just as I’d hoped, and fucking good job, too.

  Back downstairs, I checked Hughes and he was now very much dead. I dealt myself another brandy and went into the hallway to sit on the stairs, putting the gun on the floor between my feet. My hand started shaking, like the air in a room rings when loud people stop speaking.

  I didn’t know how to feel about what I’d just done. My natural inclination – bizarrely – was to feel apathetic about it, but I knew that was wrong. There were two dead people in the room to my left, and that was only the tail end of the shit I’d done today. Kareem was dead in a stream because of me, and if Hughes had been self-defence and his bodyguard an accident, then I still couldn’t avoid the fact that Kareem had been cold-blooded murder.

  It’s done now, and you can’t change it. So deal with the consequences.

  My motto. It had been tattooed into my brain over the past few months, a before and after mantra of justification intended for one purpose and one purpose only. Not to be a good guy or to be found innocent in a court of law. Just methodically to sweep away the moral, legal and personal debris that littered the path between me and Amy, wherever she might be. I was going to get to her as the crow flies, moving whatever I needed to out of the way: convention; morality; whatever.

  I closed my eyes, suddenly wanting nothing more than to hold h
er and have her back. I never realised how beautiful holding her felt: how much I’d taken little things like that for granted. I wanted her here with me; wanted our miserable, boring, little life back. Just wanted her so fucking badly that I couldn’t even feel the house around me anymore.

  Before I could cry, my mind stepped in: cold and rational.

  Put your thoughts in the box, it told me. Seal it up and get on with what you have to do.

  So I did.

  I wiped away non-existent tears with the back of my hand, picked up the gun and began to search the house. There must be something here: some clue or piece of evidence that would give me an idea of where to go when I left. Something that would take me to her, or – if not – then at least to the next step along the way.

  I worked quickly, but it was still nearly half-past eight by the time I was ready to leave. In the meantime, I plundered every drawer, cabinet and shoebox full of letters I could find, searching for anything that might salvage the day and lead me closer to the source of that scrambled text. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, but I figured maybe that was good. Gray had told me that his first rule of holistic internet searches was this: if you’re trying to find one particular piece of information then you’re likely to be disappointed, because there are a billion pieces of information to search through, and so – inevitably – the odds are against you. But if you search in general, with an open mind, then those odds flip over and work in your favour. Because you’re always likely to find something.

  General principle, then: when you don’t know the lay of the land, a path of some kind is always better than a field or the middle of a wood, even if it turns out to be going in the wrong direction. Sooner or later, you’ll find a signpost and learn whether you want to go forward, backward or side to fucking side.

  Searching the house, I found a hell of a lot of signposts that didn’t say Amy on them, and so at least I knew quite quickly that I was on the wrong track.

  The butler’s bedroom yielded secrets like barren waste-ground yields watermelons. There were a few letters and scribbled invoices that got my hopes up for about a second, but they didn’t lead anywhere, and I found no documentation relating to Marley, or any indication of the contacts the man must have used to buy the snuff text for Hughes. I hadn’t really expected him to keep explicit records, but it was still disappointing. Dead end.

  Hughes’ bedroom was the same. There were more framed texts on the wall. I read one of them and found myself sitting in the early morning sun outside a tent in Perugia, Italy. There was nobody else around and – although I was on a campsite – there wasn’t even another tent on my row. I knew it was a half-derelict site up in the mountains, and I was staring out at this peak in the distance, green trees and mist blending into a strangely spiritual whole that I was trying to make sense of.

  Another picture put me on my back beneath a tree. It was the same campsite, but later in the day, and I was looking up at the underside of a hundred branches and, beyond that, the deep, bright sea of the sky above. It was pure blue – a wonderful, cloudless shade of pale colour – and I was imagining that at any moment I might fall upwards towards it, snapping the branches between with the weight of my plummeting body, rushing up and splashing into the cold, faraway depths of this beautiful sky. At that moment, even the earth at my back felt tenuous.

  I stopped reading the texts and started looking for clues, smashing open the frames and examining the backs of the paper for any signs as to where they might have come from. But they were blank.

  I gave up and started searching the office instead. There were a million and one files, and most of them seemed to be insurance related, with the majority being on Peace of Mind headed paper. Certainly not what I was looking for. I made a mental note to tell Gray that his precious first rule of searching lacked something in practice: the filing cabinets and desks were so brimful with records, invoices and other accounting information that I could barely make head or tail of them, never mind find a nugget of gold. I was despairing, and about to give up the search altogether, when I saw the envelope on the desk.

  Occasionally in life, things just click. Sometimes you just get that feeling, and I got it in spades as I walked over to the desk and picked up that unopened envelope.

  It was addressed to Walter Hughes.

  I flipped it over and found the return address on the back.

  Jim Thornton, O’Reilly’s Bar.

  I’d heard of O’Reilly’s, but never been. From what I could remember, it was a downtown dive, an old Irish place, but there were so many of them that they all merged into one. I was quite sure that Walter Hughes would never have been in there, though – the world didn’t hold enough towels to separate that man’s ass from a barstool in a joint like that. The name Thornton rang a bell, but I wasn’t sure where I knew it from. I tore open the envelope.

  Bingo.

  Inside, there was one of the smaller scraps of paper that Hughes had decorated his entrance hall with: one short sentence. I read it quickly, taking in the aroma of hops and malt and sugar, and feeling a waft of hot steam in my face, only barely distinguishable from the warm breeze. Around me, there was a gabble of foreign language. The title at the top of the page said: Illegal brewery in Saudi.

  Bingo times a thousand.

  I folded the sheet of paper carefully and slipped it into my trouser pocket. It was half-past-eight: a good time to visit a bar on a Saturday night under other circumstances, but far from ideal on a night like tonight. There’d be a taxi rank somewhere near here, but I still wouldn’t make it to the bar for a good hour or so. Half-nine was a bad time to walk into a rough, city-centre bar with a gun and start asking questions.

  But really, I didn’t have anywhere else to be right now.

  I picked up the gun and made my way downstairs. I looked briefly into the room, almost expecting Hughes and his butler to have moved. But they hadn’t, of course. Not even a little.

  What’s done is done. Deal with the consequences.

  I closed the door over on them, inside and out, and made my way into the early evening gloom.

  CHAPTER NINE

  It was closing in on ten o’clock by the time I finally made my way downstairs into O’Reilly’s. A chalkboard on the street outside informed me that I’d missed the end of Happy Hour by a clear forty-five minutes, which seemed a pity, given the circumstances. The place turned out to be one of those bars that sits snugly in (or slightly beneath) the city centre, like some kind of benign cancer which – although you might not want to look at it too closely – you know isn’t doing any harm. The city centre’s like that, though. If you leave enough of a gap untenanted for long enough, a bar forms to fill the space. I figure that’s why cars are always getting beeped for not keeping up with the flow: the drivers behind are all afraid that a bar will form in the road between bumpers and they’ll be forced to find an alternative route.

  The taxi had to drop me off by a cashpoint. As I was withdrawing the money, some drunken, red-faced lad in a designer shirt came up and shouted something very loudly into my ear as he stumbled past, flexing his arms above his head. It sounded like a cheer, but I considered shooting him on general principle anyway. Nobody would have missed him: there were a thousand others just like him: all milling around, looking for trouble. And a thousand scantily-clad, barely vertical girls looking to watch the fighting, and then fuck the winner afterwards. The city centre’s like that. Come in on a weekend, they should tell people, and watch the yuppies regress.

  The taxi-driver told me that the bar was just around the corner, and he was right, but I still walked past it twice before I noticed it. O’Reilly’s, at face value, was a dingy staircase sandwiched between a bakery and a travel agents. Not promising. I stood and looked at it for a second, while a trio of wide, middle-aged ladies tottered past, and then pushed open the glass door and started down.

  The staircase was a descent into something like the green neon corner of Hell itself, with the s
ound of pool balls clacking and faux-Irish music reeling up with the cigarette smoke. The place was so down-at-heel that it didn’t even bother to have a bouncer. It had literally got to the point where smashing the furniture and faces around wasn’t good or bad, just different. Nobody cared anymore.

  As I pushed the door at the bottom open, I saw that there was hardly anybody here anyway. There was a group of builder-looking blokes playing pool on a stained table; a tanned, older woman, smoking like she meant it, eyeing me up on my way to the bar; a Frankenstein’s monster of a tramp, shirt hanging open to reveal white woolly hair over a reddened pigeon chest; and a few others, here and there, all watching me as I produced my wallet. The barman was short and older.

  ‘You missed Happy Hour,’ he told me as he pulled the beer I ordered.

  I looked around. Everybody had settled back into their depressed, isolated states, like dogs in the pound do when nobody’s looking to buy.

  ‘So I see.’

  Another burst of froth as he hung back on the tap.

  ‘Happy Hour’s six to nine.’

  ‘Well, I missed my taxi.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he grunted. ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I agreed, passing him a five pound note and not really understanding.

  ‘Two-fifty.’

  Bizarrely, he gave me three pound coins as change. Behind me, on the jukebox, the Irish music grew more raucous, and the tramp started slamming the pinball machine into musical life. The woman at the other end of the bar stubbed out her cigarette as though slowly squashing a wasp, and then exhaled with grey satisfaction. She seemed to be on the verge of approaching me, so I beckoned the bartender back over.

  ‘I’m looking for someone,’ I said. ‘A guy called Jim Thornton.’

  The woman was on her way over, as bone-thin and dry as a skeleton wrapped in prune-skin. Enormous, gaudy, plastic earrings brushed at her shoulders.

  ‘What do you want with Jim?’ she said.