The Third Person

The in-car radio was tuned to i-Mart’s main station, and they seemed to have Will Robinson caught on a loop. I could have screamed: if there was one thing I didn’t need right now it was shitty pop music, but I didn’t have long to suffer. In ten minutes, we were there.

The Bracken police centre was floodlit in amber, with enormous, upturned lanterns bathing the building from all four sides and making its naturally orange brickwork all the more pronounced after nightfall. With its black canopies and foyered entrance it was often mistaken for a hotel – all twenty storeys of it – and I figured that more than a few late-night travellers had turned off the freeway over the years expecting a Holiday Inn. It had been built a decade earlier, when the police service was privatised. Bracken was one of three national hubs, connected to a spider’s-web of regional, and then local, offices. Following the i-Mart business model, the police force farmed out their officers to areas where ‘sales’ were lowest, setting up clusters of shops in key target areas and taking them over. In this case, the product on offer was a low crime statistic – coupled, of course, with some exemplary computer produce. i-Mart – to protect and to serve; Microsoft never even saw it coming. Where do you want to go today? Directly to fucking jail.

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-metal^TM 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 decor 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 Eye^TM 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.’