The Third Person

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 her 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.