The day was beginning to die. There were still a few hours of daylight left, but even so: the sun had broken the backbone of the sky, and now it was falling. The air was that little bit colder and you could tell that the clouds gathering at the base of the horizon were going to stick there and darken, swelling up until they filled the world with dusk and then finally solidified into a night sky. Dennison told me it was raining back in Bracken; he’d heard the forecast while I was in the bathroom being sick.
‘I’ll drive you,’ he said.
‘You don’t have to.’
He shrugged.
‘At the moment, I’ve nothing to hang around for. And apart from anything else, I want to see the texts at that house.’
I’d given him the address of Hughes’ mansion. He’d told me that the texts there represented a new form of life, and that there was no way he was risking them falling into someone else’s hands. And perhaps there was some clue in them as to what was happening.
Ten minutes later, anyway, we were on the motorway – doing pretty much the reverse of the journey I’d made that morning, but at roughly twice the speed. Dennison had a fast car, and he was flooring it. I wouldn’t have cared if we crashed. The cars we were passing were like dreams.
I kept glancing down at the printout on my lap.
A blank e-mail, sent both to Dennison and my own account, but the header information told me everything that I needed to know. Everything, but it also led to confusion and mystery. The attachment, however, was clearer.
I said, ‘It has to be her.’
Well, it had certainly been sent from Amy’s e-mail address: the one that I’d set up for her in the second week we were going out. That address was the only one she ever used. When we first met, she didn’t know much about computers and so I’d said that I’d sort one out for her to save her the bother. Maybe I’d made it out to be slightly more complicated than it was: some stupid attempt to impress her a little. I can’t remember. It wouldn’t surprise me.
‘It took me quarter of an hour to explain what pop mail was,’ I said. ‘Even then, I don’t think she really got it.’
Dennison didn’t say anything. He just concentrated on the road.
‘I don’t think I explained it too well.’
Sidling up to me, sly grin in place.
I swallowed the memory. ‘She never changed her password. We used to check each other’s mail all the time. But nobody else knew the password, apart from me.’
‘No?’
‘I don’t think she ever told anyone else.’ I shook my head. ‘I mean, why would she have done that?’
Dennison changed lanes, shifting down a gear. We edged a little faster past a dark grey pickup piled high with the skinned, burned remains of cars. The driver’s arm was resting on the open window-ledge, juddering with the road. I turned to watch him as we passed him. I don’t know why. He looked at me, and then looked away again.
‘I don’t know why she would have told anyone else,’ Isaid.
Dennison didn’t reply.
I turned back, more decisive now. The road was flying by underneath us.
‘I think it really does have to be from her.’
Dennison moved back into the middle lane and we started to leave the pickup behind us. The first few drops of rain started pattering against the windscreen.
Five megabytes of compressed video footage. Three different scenes in all, but spliced together into one long clip, which told a story if you knew some background. There were bits missing, but not important bits: if you were trying to get a particular message across, then the message was there: plain to see. There was even a progression to the separate scenes: the first was in the daytime; the second in the evening; the last at night – sort of, anyway. The grainy texture remained the same throughout, even as the scenes cut, and the closer you got to the screen, the more blurred and impossible it became: just smeary movements, like rain pouring over a painted window.
Scene One.
A man and a woman on a busy street. The sun is shining, but the traffic roaring past gives an artificial, whooshing undertone to the footage that sounds a lot like a strong breeze, or a downpour. The man and woman are walking along the pavement, away from a large, wide doorway, covered over by a green awning. I didn’t need to be able to see the white lettering on it to figure out that it was the train station in Thiene.
The man and the woman are walking away from the camera. The woman is wearing a pale blue blouse and a short white skirt, and she’s carrying an over-the-shoulder handbag, which nestles behind her hips slightly. Curly brown hair, tinged with blonde. Slim. She doesn’t seem to be being coerced in any way, and none of the people walking around the pair turn back for a second glance, or seem bothered about them. The man is overweight, with slightly sloping shoulders. I don’t need to see his face to know that it’s Kareem.
Cut to-
Early evening, the gloom supplemented by the storm.
Dennison pulled off the motorway, winding his way into the heart of the city. He neglected to slow down, and the air was suddenly filled with a cacophony of car horns as we shot past a line of semi-stationary traffic and cut in at the head of the queue. It was pouring down with rain, and the windscreen-wipers were squeaking back and forth. Dennison was hunched over the wheel, peering out. The red traffic lights were like two gigantic, bloody stars sparkling through the sheen.
‘You’re going to have to tell me where I’m going,’ he said. ‘This town is fucking crazy.’
The stars exploded in a burst of green and we set off with a screech.
‘Head in that direction. That’s the best I can do.’
The great grey lump of Uptown hung in the distance: a drab big top to our carnival city. Dennison weaved through side streets, slicing puddles apart in a watery spray. He slowed down a little, though, which I thought was good. The motorway was one thing, but three metre wide back alleys were entirely another.
We turned onto a minor loop road around the shredded face of the outside struts. The buildings that formed the edge of Uptown tended to be derelict and inhospitable: old tenement houses with windows made from nailed-in steel. You imagined them full of mattresses and needles, and stinking of rot. Dennison would drop me off soon. In the meantime, he sped up a little. Maybe he was afraid that – going under fifty – someone might steal his tyres, and if he was then he had a point.
I looked at the buildings we were passing. No McDonald’s here; no department stores. These were small shops: neighbour-hood grocery stores; shuttered pawnbrokers; greasy bars. There was hardly anyone about. Without much thought, I checked out the pavement by the edge of Downtown, and saw Kareem, walking in the opposite direction. He was wearing a raincoat and a hat, and smoking a sheltered cigarette. I caught a glimpse of him, and flipped around in my seat as we went past.
‘What?’ Dennison sounded anxious, but I ignored him.
Kareem’s wide back, hunched up. Plodding along. Splash splash.
From behind, he could have been anybody. He didn’t look back, or give any indication that he’d seen me: he was just another dark figure on another dark street, meandering slowly wherever he was going, huddled up against the weather. I kept watching him through the streaky back window, and he seemed to move into a doorway, disappearing into Downtown. But I couldn’t be sure, what with the rain.
Dennison said again: ‘What?’
I turned back.
‘Nothing.’
