far as a television near me. If he hadn’t been discovered yet then it meant that Dennison and his friends had been able to take what they wanted from the house – which also meant that, when the police finally did get around to calling, any traces I’d left were likely to have been buried beneath far more obvious traces of them. That was fine.
Predictably, the main news item was the internet crash. The situation had worsened slightly since the last broadcast, but now seemed to have stabilised. Millions of files remained inaccessible, but the rot was said to have stopped. Experts were puzzled, large areas of the internet remained shut down, businesses were up in arms and share prices were plummeting. But for now at least, things seemed to have settled.
I flicked off the television.
The first night in that hotel room, I paced. I scanned through the information I had a hundred times, reliving events in my head, trying to come up with some new angle or approach that might lead me to these men. But I couldn’t think of anything, and became so frustrated and uptight that I had to drink myself to sleep in order to get any.
I dreamt about her.
It was strange, actually – not the dream, which I don’t even remember, but the way my life was moving. In the room at Combo’s Deli, I’d not been able to think about Amy clearly enough to picture her, but now it felt as though I was drawing closer. Memories of her kept surfacing: the vibrant, saturated kind of memory, and not just some flat, black and white picture of the things we’d done. When I cried, which I did a lot, I could feel an imaginary arm around me. It began to seem as though if I spoke to her she’d be able to hear me, and I knew I was getting nearer to the stage when I’d be able to imagine her sitting next to me, maybe with her hand on my knee, and it was at that point I’d be able to end this. I didn’t believe in an afterlife but, to get myself through that moment, it might be nice to. It would only last a split-second, after all, and it wasn’t like I’d have to live with myself afterwards.
The second day, I started early. After breakfast, before checking out the next name on the list, I went to an internet cafe around the corner from the hotel. I got an extra coffee to help keep me upright through the day and then logged on to check my e-mail. I wanted to see if anything else had been sent to me from Amy’s account.
But it was down, of course, and so I couldn’t log in.
Number sixteen: I caught him just as he arrived home. I was walking down the pavement towards him, watching him tuck in his shirt and straighten his tie. He was a family man. I saw him turn into his driveway and noticed the little girl in the front room window; the curtain fell back into place and then she was at the door to meet him as he opened it. I walked away, wanting to close my eyes.
Number seventeen was a teenager: long and thin, like a clotheshanger.
I was getting tired, but number eighteen was on the way back to my hotel, so I decided to wander past and see what I could see.
His real name – number aside – was Paul Marley, and he lived in an enormous tenement building, which was verging on the derelict. I spent a minute or so trying to work out which room would be his, but I could only pin it down to the south-east side. The lights there seemed to form a computer pattern of yellow and black. He might be in or out, and I could wait outside all night and still not get anywhere. Unless Paul Marley was the man in the video, I wouldn’t recognise him even if I saw him.
I stood by the entrance, debating for a second.
The foyer was low and not very wide: just a cavity in the shape of a room, with two silver elevator shafts on the right, and a staircase straight ahead. I didn’t trust the elevators, so I took two flights up to Marley’s floor, with the echo of my footfalls preceding me up the stairwell. The bannister was cold and hard, and incomprehensible graffiti stained the walls in big blocks of colour. When I opened the door to Marley’s corridor, it stank of old air. The carpet was damp and curling up at the edges, and was illuminated from above by more bare lightbulbs. Closed off to either side were pale green doors, which had their numbers scribbled on in biro. My heart was beating quickly as I reached the end – number twenty-two.
The gun was in my jacket pocket, pointing down, and I wasn’t planning on taking it out. The idea was that – if it was him – I’d just grab hold of it in my pocket, twist my jacket up and shoot him through it. Get him in the gut, then push him back into the room and close the door behind us.
I rapped on the door three times, but on the second it wasn’t there: it was creaking open ever so slightly. Someone had left it ajar.
Fuck my plans – I took the gun out, took a good two-handed grip and moved to one side of the doorway. Waited. The world ticked over a couple of times around me. I fazed out everything except the door, and beyond it the room and everything my senses were telling me was happening inside it. Everything that wasn’t happening.
No footsteps.
No voices.
Five seconds. Six. I hesitated, but by then the corridor was beginning to feel just as threatening as whatever might be inside Marley’s flat. So I kept the two-handed grip and used it to push the door open a little further. And, when nothing happened, I moved inside.
The front room was a mess of old furniture and discarded clothing: a mad, patternless tapestry of newspaper, cloth and old take-out cartons. It was difficult to know whether the place had been turned over or if Marley just lived like this. To the left, I could see a kitchen: walls painted as yellow as melted butter. To the right, there were two doors: one shut, one open. An empty bedroom. From what I could see, it was as messy as the lounge. I guessed that the other must be the bathroom.
I stopped. Breathed in.
There was a smell about the place that wasn’t right – a burnt cooking smell – and it clicked into place with the door being left off the latch. Even before I saw the blood on the floor, I knew that I was going to find someone dead in this flat. I pushed the door closed behind me, and that was when I noticed the stains on the papers beside it. Not a lot of blood, but not paper cut blood either. It was a proper amount, like you might see outside a pub the morning after a fight, with little splashes moving off down the street as someone held on to a broken nose and staggered away.
I looked over the floor and it was the same: more blood. There was a spatter of something across a few open books on the settee that might have been – I couldn’t tell – but there was no doubt about the rest. I followed the trail with my eyes, over papers and pizza boxes and fabric. The blood led sparely but clearly towards the closed bathroom door.
My heart hadn’t slowed down any since I’d entered the flat, and now it felt like it was beating heavily and quickly above a very deep and black pit. Instead of doing what I wanted to do – leave right now – I took the gun with me on a small tour of the apartment. I knew where it was going to end, and the flat was too quiet and still to be anything other than empty, but I had to be sure.
I checked the kitchen first. There were a few stacked pans on top of the cooker and an empty milk carton on the counter beside the kettle, but otherwise it was relatively tidy. I figured that Marley must have ordered in most of his food. There were some empty bottles on the floor by the bin – mostly wine, with a couple of sturdy vodkas hiding at the back – but apart from that there was nothing to see.
The bedroom next, obviously. A single bed, covered with nooses of cloth; more crumpled clothes on the floor; three glasses filled with misty water on the table by the bed. The air looked and smelled grey. That was all.
So: the bathroom.
I pushed the door open slowly, using the gun the way I’d used it on the front door, ready to shoot someone if I needed to even though it was obvious that I wouldn’t.
The smell was stronger here. The blood was concentrated and specific. There were pools of it on the floor. A hotchpotch of blurred footprints smeared and scattered out of it, and it was streaked on the dirty tiles, and here and there on the paintwork. The room was only small, but it was just covered with blood. Opposite me, there was an old cast-iron bath, sheltered by a rubbery shower curtain hanging from metal links on a runner attached to the ceiling. The curtain was mottled and grubby, like a used condom, and there was blood on that, too. So much blood. It was obvious that the bath was the epicentre of all this, and although the curtain was pulled all the way across, I could see quite clearly that somebody was in there behind it. Not somebody anymore. Something dead.
