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:
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.
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 sound 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.
