With no alcohol to drink, and cold air falling from that open sky, we didn’t stay there long. Instead, we went back to my house, where there was beer and central heating. After we’d drunk a couple of bottles in relative silence, Graham asked me if I had any clue where she might have gone, any idea at all, and I told him the truth: none. I showed him the note that she’d left, which he read a couple of times through, and then I found it was all spilling out of me: everything about the arguments we’d had, the difficulties. The nights spent sleeping apart. I told him why she’d gone – I knew that much. I just didn’t know where.

Graham listened to this without really looking at me, nodding occasionally, frowning the whole time, and then when I’d finished he gave me a look. I don’t know how to describe it, except that he looked very sad: it was worse than that, and I think I’ll remember it for a long time. Then, he shook his head and the look seemed to go away a little. He asked me about Amy’s behaviour: what she’d been doing on the occasions I’d gone to bed alone; whether she’d gone out and, if so, where she’d gone. Who she’d gone with. Perhaps he thought she had another boyfriend. She spent her nights on the computer, I told him. For hours on end. Sometimes, I said, there would be soft yellow light in the curtains by the time I felt her slip in behind me, careful not to touch me. But I didn’t tell him that, when that happened, I turned and put my arm around her and she didn’t even move.

The computer, he said. Let me look at it.

There was nothing obvious to see when we went upstairs and switched it on. I wasn’t stupid: I’d checked the browsers we had installed but Amy had totally blanked the histories and navigation bars. I told Graham this, and he just said: wait.

Mechanics. It’s like this: when they’re out on a job, mechanics carry toolkits filled with everything they might need, but even on a casual day out chances are they have a pen-knife with a few attachments, or a screwdriver, or some shit like that lurking around. A kind of minimal toolkit, carried as naturally as someone else might carry their wallet or glasses-case. Graham had a nerdish equivalent: a slim case of about five compact disks, together containing the absolute minimum amount of software he could survive with. You never knew when you might need to unzip a compressed file in the chemist, I guess. Or defragment shattered information lying around on your best friend’s hard drive.

This is a variation on some sneaky cookie software I developed, he told me. I adapted it to work on computers like this, as well.

It took about two minutes, and as the list of sites appeared in Graham’s makeshift navigation window I found myself staring, surprised, growing colder inside as each one was listed. The addresses were never obvious dotcoms, but their content was obvious from occasional words appearing in the path. These were rape sites, death sites, murder sites. Of course, at that point I didn’t know what those things were like; I didn’t know quite how deep she’d gone, or how awful it was going to be to follow.

Jesus, Graham said.

That was where I started. I found that I could get to about a third of the addresses listed, and they turned out to be the shallows. You had to wade a lot deeper to find the real blackness, and there were strong undercurrents misleading you along the way: washing you quickly to more shallows, to the shore itself. The majority of the sites that Amy had visited were simply inaccessible. Graham explained that it was likely the addresses had been abandoned. This was common with illegal sites: the owners would shift servers often, sometimes moving every few minutes. They were like street vendors, alerted to approaching police, stuffing their briefcases closed and hurrying off to another corner to start again.

There would be others though, Graham told me. There would be sites protected by specialised software – the type he occasionally dallied with – that would have left no traces of themselves on a visitor’s hard drive. There was no way around it: I would only find them by following Amy and discovering them for myself. And so that’s what I would do. In the meantime, Graham would do what he did best: search the internet in his own inimitable way; do a little hacking here and there; try to put together, as best he could, information about where she’d gone on the day she left me.

So: over the last four months I’d collected hardcore pornography, chatted with paedophiles and rapists and wormed my way into their community. Graham had been hard at work too, but his collection was more innocent. On his hard drive we had a few different videos that, when pieced together, showed Amy’s basic trajectory on that day. The first CCTV cameras were a few streets away from our home, and there was a lot of footage to sieve, so it took quite some time to locate her, but once we knew she was heading for the city we found things easier. We didn’t have tracking shots or anything, but we had rough continuity for much of it.

Amy had taken the same route into the city as I had on my way to Graham’s, only she’d waited for a bus and taken that for three stops. I could watch her get on and get off. Nobody was following her. In fact, as far as I could tell, nobody followed her at all until we came along. After a brief, purposeful walk, she went into a cafe called Jo’s and sat in the window. She was there for half an hour in all, and drank two cups of something, taking her time over each. Between the drinks she sent a text message. We don’t know why she was there, or who she contacted. After she left the cafe, we lost track of her. The streets of Bracken can get pretty busy, and a lot of the film we had was low resolution, making it difficult to separate people and differentiate between them.

But Graham kept looking.

The video that he’d found from the station that day was stuttering and incomplete: as much evidence as you could possibly want that film footage is about as real as Jesus. He had four frames. All four were of the station floor, filled with a bustling crowd of blurry figures, but if you set them to play then they might as well have been distinct photographs, because they had different people in each. First one crowd, then another, then a third, and then one final group. She was in the third. Nowhere to be seen in the first or second, and nowhere to be seen in the last.

Graham zoomed in on frame three. I moved closer to the screen, leaning over.

Amy?

I couldn’t be sure, but I touched the image anyway.

It felt like her.

‘It’s a pretty good resemblance, isn’t it?’ Graham said.

You could only tell what he meant if you blurred your eyes – otherwise, it was ridiculous. Her head was maybe twelve blocks of colour. Her body, which was visible to the waist, was another thirty or so, if that. In many ways, she was nothing but a pattern, but if you blurred your eyes then some kind of Amy appeared: an Amy obscured by tears. She was wearing that pale blue blouse with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows: the one that wasn’t in the closet anymore.

‘She tied her hair back after leaving the cafe,’ I said.

Graham was more cautious.

‘It looks like her, doesn’t it?’

‘It’s her,’ I said.

I touched the screen and murmured:

‘Amy.’

Please come home.

The timeframe in the corner of the video told me that I was looking four months into the past. Four months ago, she’d been at the train station.

That was quite a head start.

‘Have you looked at the passenger listings?’ I asked.

I saw him nodding out of the corner of my eye.

‘Most of them. There’s nothing in her name.’

‘Nothing on any of the other cameras?’

‘Not so far. The platforms are all covered, so she must be there somewhere. If I can find her, I will. But you’ve got to understand that I don’t have unrestricted access to these cameras. I’ve had to scrabble for these.’ He shook his head. ‘It might take time.’

I nodded to myself, and then caught a thought: Walter Hughes had access to those cameras.

Maybe we could trade in some way. I could tell him what Claire had told me.

‘I might know somebody who can get you access,’ I said.

‘Who?’

‘I don’t really know. It’s too complicated to explain.’

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