‘So you want to tell me who you are?’ he said. ‘Scratch that, because you probably don’t. So instead – just tell me who you are.’
A complicated question for my bruised head.
‘Jason Klein.’
‘Okay.’ He nodded. ‘That’s good. And who the fuck might you be, Jason Klein?’
I started to shrug, but my numb arm would have made it lop-sided. Instead, I attempted a rather intricate question of my own in reply.
‘Do you electrocute everyone who knocks on your door?’
It must have come out okay, because it got an answer.
‘If I don’t know them,’ he nodded, ‘these days, yeah. It’s a good job, too, when they turn out to have a fucking gun in their pocket, isn’t it?’
He tossed the apple core into the far corner of the room and then pointed that gun at me, suddenly more serious.
‘What do you know about my girlfriend, Jason Klein? Is that why you’re here?’
I looked away.
What I was dealing with was a mirror image of me: an ordinary guy, dealing with other ordinary guys doing very fucked up things. Except that he seemed to be more in control of the situation than I was – nodding aside – and he was dealing with those guys much better. I would probably have shot me and run away by now. I’d be well into the existential crisis part.
I said, ‘I don’t even know who your girlfriend is.’
Although I did, of course.
‘She was called Claire Warner.’
‘Fuck.’
It was obvious: Claire gets the file; Claire stores it on her boyfriend’s computer system. They were together, or had been. Could I see her with Dennison? I think I probably could, although perhaps not as seriously as I imagined he’d done.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘
‘I didn’t kill Claire.’
‘You didn’t?’
‘No.’
So, I figured, what happens is this. Claire rings me up and tells me the filename just in case something happens to her. That meant that her boyfriend probably didn’t know about it. Because if he did, why would she bother telling me at all? He’d be the back up for if anything went wrong.
‘How did you know her?’ he said.
‘We met in a Chat room. Ages ago.’
‘On the computer?’
The idea pissed him off a little.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘We met on Liberty. She was a friend of mine.’
‘A friend?’
A friend, he was asking, with a silent
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A friend.’
‘Well, she never mentioned you to me.’
‘She never mentioned you to me, either. How about that?’
Although he looked doubtful now, my attitude wasn’t making Dennison point the gun at me any less.
‘Look – I haven’t seen her in a while,’ I said. I sounded as tired of this as I felt. ‘We met for a drink once – six months or so back – but I haven’t heard from her since then. Not properly, anyway. So I can’t think of any reason why she would have mentioned me, or even thought about me.’
‘How did you find me?’
I tried a weary look.
‘Oh, it was incredibly fucking difficult.’
‘Very not funny.’
‘I found you through Liberty.’ I said. ‘A while back, Claire told me the name of a file she’d stored on your system. She obviously used your log in, because there it was – sitting right beside it. It’s not difficult to trace a person from server details.’
If I was feeling tetchy, I think I had good reason. The one lead I could realistically follow up was very clearly a dead end: Dennison didn’t know anything. Claire had just used him as a means to store the file so that it couldn’t be found on or traced back to her own computer. The guy wasn’t going to be able to tell me anything about where it had come from or what it was really about; he didn’t have the first clue. He wasn’t anything to do with this at all.
And on top of all that, the fucker had electrocuted me.
He was still pointing the gun at me – but of course he was.
His girlfriend had been found murdered, and he was affiliated to a vaguely militant underground organisation. The man was probably scared shitless. In fact, the more I looked at him the more obvious it was. He was completely fucking lost.
I sighed.
‘I know what happened to Claire,’ I said. ‘If you want to know, then I can tell you.’
From the way his gun hand faltered slightly, I figured that he did.
‘And if it makes it any easier, I can also tell you that the men responsible for it are dead. Because I killed them last night.’
Dennison looked as though he was almost going to cry. Instead, he just shook his head and lowered the gun. It rested on his thigh, and he looked so weary that I felt more of a connection with him than ever.
‘Tell me what’s going on?’
So I did.
Dennison made me go over the facts a couple of times, but by then he’d put the gun down on the settee beside him and I didn’t mind so much. I was thirsty, though.
‘Look, can you get me a drink?’
‘Yeah, sure.’
He started to get up, and then glanced at the gun.
‘I’m not going to shoot you,’ I said. I probably couldn’t even stand up. ‘For God’s sake.’
‘Okay. I hate the thing anyway.’
He was away for a couple of minutes, and I took the time to recover myself, but didn’t make a move for the weapon. Dennison wasn’t about to shoot me anymore and the people he was nervous about – the men who had killed his girlfriend – were currently smelling up a mansion a few hundred miles west of here. I was after a man named Marley and the gang he worked with, and I was probably being pursued by the police. But neither of those parties seemed likely to be turning up at Dennison’s house in the near future. I almost wished they would.
‘Here.’
‘Thanks.’
I took the water and gulped it down, pleased to see that my right arm was working a little better.
‘I’m glad you killed those men.’
He sat down.
‘I mean, I never thought I’d fucking say that about anybody. About anything. I used to think it was horrible when something died.’
‘It was horrible,’ I said.
‘They deserved it, though. I’m glad you did it. Jesus, listen to me.’
The idea made me feel uncomfortable, so I said, ‘How long had you known Claire?’
‘On and off, for years. We were friends some of the time, more than that at other times. We were always breaking up and getting back together, you know? She was too wild for anything else. It had been about a year, and then she came to see me a month or so back. She didn’t look well, and I wanted her to stay. She seemed so lost. She stayed for a bit, but then she was gone again. Claire never wanted to settle down.’
