The Third Person

by Steve Mosby

  Wilkinson opened the door to let me out, and then we walked over to the main building while the driver parked the car up, tyres slashing away across wet tarmac.

  ‘Miserable night,’ Wilkinson said.

  I nodded, never really that good at small talk except when it was faked on a computer screen.

  He pulled up the collar of his coat and did a silly little half dance as he got beneath the canopy over the main entrance, as though he couldn’t stand another second of rain. I was barely noticing it. My hair was short and the rain couldn’t do any more damage than my face already did. And clothes dry, after a while. I had other things on my mind.

  Amy.

  I supposed I’d been expecting this eventually, and now it was happening I felt an empty kind of calm. I wasn’t really upset or angry. It was more like nothing was going on in me at all.

  ‘Come on through.’

  The foyer was silver: kitted out from the feet up in the best shiny-metalTM that i-Mart could provide. Everything looked as though if you touched it, it would leave a smeary fingerprint, so nobody had yet. A bank of blue-backed Powermacs faced out at the incoming public, with a row of pretty receptionists taking 999 calls through headsets, fingers chattering commands to local offices. A pair of cops stood near the mirrored elevator doors to the right, while blue carpeted stairs led up to the left. Wilkinson headed for these, and I followed.

  ‘Good for the circulation,’ he insisted, as I looked around. The walls of the stairwell were decorated with old i-Mart advertisements: freeze-frames from computer commercials and adBoard stills. ‘I never take the elevators, anyway. Can’t stand the music.’

  I nodded.

  ‘All they play is Will Robinson,’ he told me as we reached the first floor and he pushed through some double doors. ‘Like in the car. You know that kid? They pipe that shit out day and night. I didn’t know he had so many songs.’

  ‘He’s got a bunch.’

  If I remembered rightly, the last few had adorned i-Mart’s recent ad campaign, which I figured might have had something to do with something.

  I said, ‘But they’re mostly the same song in a different order.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Wilkinson raised an eyebrow at me. ‘I didn’t know you were a musician. You a musician?’

  ‘You don’t need to be.’

  He looked away.

  ‘Yeah, well. They all suck like a vacuum cleaner, if you ask me. His current single makes me want to fucking kill myself. My daughter loves it, though. She loves all that kind of shit. Here we are.’

  He opened the door to an interview room.

  ‘Take a seat,’ Wilkinson said, closing the door behind him. ‘If you’re nice, the décor won’t bite.’

  I had my doubts, but sat down anyway. The silver desk extended out from one wall, blocking two-thirds of the room, with a raised computer panel on Wilkinson’s side. The i-Mart EyeTM logo looked at me from the back. He took a seat in front of it, opposite me, and started running a nicotine-stained index finger over the screen. It beeped in protest, but a keyboard flicked up out of the desk. He sniffed.

  ‘State of the art,’ he told me, without looking up. ‘Means it takes half an hour more than pen and paper used to. Bear with me.’

  ‘Okay.’

  I looked around some more as he started tapping keys, starting to have a weird feeling that this wasn’t about Amy at all. Surely, it would have been different if they’d found her – not like this, anyway. A camera was watching me from the far corner of the room, above the door, and there was a plexiglass division running down the centre of the steel desk. I figured that Wilkinson had a button his side, and if he pressed it the plexiglass would raise, and maybe the table would extend out of the wall, caging me in. I thought I’d seen some kind of documentary where they’d shown it happening. I looked up.

  There was a gas grill on the roof, slightly behind me.

  I looked back at Wilkinson.

  ‘Can I ask what this is about, please?’

  He tapped the keyboard once more and looked up.

  ‘Yeah, I’m ready now.’

  And then, suddenly more serious, the question, coming out of nowhere:

  ‘Can I ask you, Jason, do you know a girl called Claire Warner?’

  Now here was something. She sent me a jpeg of herself, once, and she was as beautiful as she’d always made out she was. I can get any man I want, she’d bragged to me at one point, except that it hadn’t been a boast as much as a plain statement of fact. Not something she was proud of, exactly, more something that bothered her. Because getting exactly what you want is only good when you know what that is.

  I took the jpeg into Fireworks and magnified it up to 800%, until her crimson lips filled the screen and were reduced to red squares, darker red squares and dots of black -until it wasn’t recognisable as a face anymore: just a hotchpotch of blocky colour. And I looked at the edges where they touched, imagining that she might emerge from the non-space there, in hiding behind her own bitmap. The same way that I ran my fingers over [claire21] when we chatted at Liberty-Talk, and wondered at the million other words that were hiding between the letters of her name, the ones she didn’t give me in the hours we spent typing messages to each other.

  Looking for traces of her on the internet: typing her name into ten search engines at once. They ticked through a hundred thousand sites between them and threw hopeless pages back at me. Not one was of her, or even close. There were a whole bunch of her-names in the phonebook, and any one of them could have really been her, but I couldn’t find out which without ringing them each in turn. And even then her voice would have been a stranger’s, and yet not.

  Here was something, indeed.

  I don’t know why I bothered stalking her so unsuccessfully, when she would have told me anything and everything I wanted to know – even from that first accidental meeting on Liberty-Talk. She would have met up with me in half a second, fucked me blind with a smile on her face and then whirled away out of my life without a second thought or a backwards glance.

  She was single, after all. It was me that was in the relationship.

  ‘Is Claire dead?’ I asked.

  Wilkinson was implacable. ‘So you did know her?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Yeah. Kind of.’

  ‘We knew that you knew her. How did you meet?’

  He typed something in.

  Suspect admits knowledge of victim, I thought.

  Best just to tell the truth.

  ‘I met her in LibertyTalk. We got chatting.’

  ‘How many times did you get chatting?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘A bunch of times. You probably know that already, too. Is she dead?’

  Of course she’s dead.

  Wilkinson was still typing.

  ‘We need to talk through some stuff,’ he told me. ‘But, yes, Claire’s dead. She was found earlier this morning. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay.’ I didn’t know whether I felt anything at all. I thought of the pixels in her lips. ‘We hadn’t been in touch for a while.’

  ‘How long’s a while?’

  I thought about it.

  ‘A fair few months.’

  ‘Since before your girlfriend vanished?’

  A beat. He didn’t look up at me.

  ‘I guess so. Yeah.’

  ‘But you can’t remember. You might have seen her since.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not since then.’

  ‘You sure, now?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He looked up at me.

  I looked away from him, thinking about the train station in Schio. It was the last time I’d met Claire – the only real time I’d met her at all, in fact, outside the internet. How did I know it was before Amy disappeared? Because I’d come home afterwards and crawled into bed beside her, that’s how, and then spent the next day chasing her round to reassure her that I loved her – doing a hundred little things to make her smile even though none of
them felt like enough. But I decided that I didn’t want Inspector Wilkinson to know about the train station at Schio.

  ‘I’m just sure,’ I said.

  ‘Well.’ He looked back down at the screen. ‘We can come back to that in a bit. Let’s talk about how you first met her.’

  It’s easy to meet people. Bracken City Market holds at least three thousand shoppers at any one time. I could walk through it, from one end to the other, and brush against a hundred strangers. It’s limited and irrelevant, perhaps, but so what? The amount you know somebody is always subjective and limited, and so every contact you make is valid, no matter how small it seems and no matter how little you think it reveals. It’s easy to meet people. Easy to meet anyone.

  Harder to connect, though.

  LibertyTalk was a little bit like the Melanie Room in its basic format: just a bog-standard, generic Chat room. Where you choose to chat on-line is usually pretty much accidental: you find somewhere, you start talking to a few people, you begin to feel at home. It’s like becoming a regular at a pub in a lot of ways. They serve the same beer as everyone else, and people are people – but you get to know these particular people, and the beer starts to be ready for you when you walk in the door. So you stick around. It’s no more – or less – complicated than that.

  I ended up there out of a random mix of internet kudos and hyperlinks, both of which I know mean very little in the everyday world. Liberty was the official site of Dave Pateley, who was rumoured to have pioneered the original free code that made places like the Melanie Room possible. The idea was that you downloaded specific software from another user, someone you knew, and it linked you up to a random selection of neighbouring computers – sometimes three or four, sometimes a hundred, and you never knew how many – all around the world. And you shared a folder on your computer with those other users, putting whatever files you wanted in it – music files, text files, government documents, pornography. You gave it a universal key name, which you could also post at the main Liberty site, and left it there. If you wanted to get hold of a particular file – say your favourite song – you just entered the key name in as search criteria, and the program searched through all the computers you were connected to. If it didn’t find it in those, it set them searching through all the ones they were connected to. And so on. When it did find it, it copied it back to you, leaving an additional copy in all the computers along the way.

  This achieved a number of things. Most importantly, it got you the file. But there was no way – from looking at your computer – that the authorities could tell whether it had got there by accident or design. You were clearly either a criminal or a victim of crime, but it was impossible for them to tell which. Secondly, there was no way that – from you – they could trace more than a handful of other users. They could bring down a cell, but never disable the entire network. Thirdly, it meant that you had to clear a few gigs of shit off your hard drive every evening, or else install some software that did it for you. A small price to pay for total freedom of information? People thought so. Even the politicians whose private documents were being circulated on a daily basis recognised that it was pretty cool, and attempted to ally themselves with it. Nothing ever changes.

  That’s why I ended up there, anyway, wandering through the hundred or so hosted Chat rooms as [JK22], looking at the throb of conversation scrolling up before me: SHOUTs and (whispers); multi-coloured text; emoticons; roses and kisses being passed around like spare cigarettes or bought like free drinks. It was an alien world to me, and every time I saw a new name entering the room, or slid sideways through into another one myself, I felt a thrill of excitement in my gut that I hadn’t felt for a long time.

  People as text.

  I’d sip coffee after coffee, or sometimes a beer, and have random conversations with complete strangers.

  I was never on for that long. By that point in time, Amy was spending a great deal of the evenings on the internet herself, looking at sites she didn’t want me to see, and so I was always grateful for any time with her that I could get. But sometimes – when the clouds came over – I was also glad for somewhere else to go: somewhere I could be whoever I wanted, talk to whomever I please and feel that there were no consequences.

  None at all.

  And one late evening, with a simple invitation to private, Claire Warner had found me. I knew, because she told me while we were talking, that she was sitting in her bedroom, naked, with the bedclothes wrapped around her a little. (It was cold that night.) Throughout it all – until towards the end, anyway – she was sitting cross-legged on the edge of her bed with the keyboard resting across her bare thighs, and there was a bottle of wine on the bedside table. She had a glass in her hand, and there was hard dance music playing in the background – only she’d turned it down so low that it had the volume and ease of a soft, comfortable ballad.

  She always typed to music, she said. It made her fingers feel as though they were dancing.

  ‘You had cybersex with her?’ Wilkinson asked me.

  I tapped my fingers on the table a couple of times, wondering where exactly this was going. All the time, I was remembering things that I’d done my best to bury and forget. Unhelpful things.

  [CLAIRE21]: why do you want to know that?

  [JK22]:?

  [CLAIRE21]: well why are you asking?

  [JK22]: (getting all embarrassed…)

  [CLAIRE21]: aw – blushing boy!

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘After a while.’

  ‘That night?’

  I stared at the top of his head.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Later on.’

  [JK22]: I don’t want to offend you.

  [JK22]:…

  [CLAIRE21]: you think you could offend me?

  [JK22]: maybe

  [CLAIRE21]: lol

  [CLAIRE21]: doubt it

  [CLAIRE21]: feel free to try!

  [JK22]: lol

  [JK22]: (still blushing tho)

  [CLAIRE21]: y r u so worried about offending me?

  Wilkinson was still typing, but now he was frowning slightly.

  ‘So you had cybersex with her that evening.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Just the once?’

  I almost laughed.

  ‘Of course.’

  He looked up at me, not really smiling.

  ‘Jason, I don’t know anything about this kind of thing.’

  And, although he said it in a neutral voice – deliberately neutral – I could tell that it was a loaded sentence. This kind of thing. This kind of disgusting thing, was what he meant. I checked out his hand. No wedding ring. I figured that Wilkinson was a real man: he picked up his ladies in bars or clubs. Never anywhere so sad as on-line, even though it was exactly the same.

  ‘You generally only tend to do it once,’ I explained.

  He started typing again, his voice more normal.

  ‘Did you meet her again?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘On-line?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The excitement, fluttering in my stomach as the train pulled into the station at Schio. The people milling around. My fingertips were pressed on the glass, with a phantom hand touching them from the outside and a slight reflection of my peering face almost cheek-to-cheek with me. Looking for that white dress in the crowd.

  ‘Yes,’ I said again. ‘It was always on-line.’

  He tapped a key.

  ‘How many times did you meet her?’

  I thought about it.

  ‘I couldn’t say for sure. Maybe eight or nine times, over a period of about… I don’t know. Two months?’ I shook my head. ‘But I’m not sure.’

  ‘You didn’t keep track?’

  ‘No.’

  A few more keystrokes.

  ‘And did you continue to have cybersex with her throughout that time?’

  A loaded question – again – fired like a blank.

  I said, ‘A couple of times, maybe.’

  �
�So, yes?’

  ‘I suppose so. Yes. But not always.’

  ‘Sometimes you just talked?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s right. Just like in any other relationship. Sometimes we just talked.’

  [CLAIRE21]: y r u so worried about offending me?

  [JK22] because you’re nice

  [JK22] you know?

  [CLAIRE21]: I think you’re nice, too.

  [CLAIRE21]: you’re not like the other bastards on here

  [CLAIRE21]: r u gonna blush now?

  [CLAIRE21]: whaddyou think?

  [CLAIRE21]: lol

  [JK22] no. I’m glad you think I’m nice

  [CLAIRE21] (shocked) what would your gf say?

  Wilkinson tapped in a few more lines of text, recording the strange fact that – from time to time – two people had actually managed to talk without having sex. I shifted in my seat a little. He looked up, then, catching my movement.

  ‘You okay? You comfortable?’

  ‘I’m fine, yeah.’

  ‘You want a coffee?’

  Of course I wanted a coffee. But not as much as I wanted to be out of here.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Okay. You know – this is just routine.’ Suddenly, he leaned back in his chair and seemed more relaxed.

  ‘Your name was on her computer: a bunch of old transcripts and stuff. She’d erased a load of it, but some were still left. Not just you, by the way.’ He leaned forwards again. ‘A whole load of guys. She was on the internet a lot, huh?’