The Third Person

To the left, I noticed that the rim of the sink was speckled with the foamy remains of a shave and I started to gather a scenario together in my head. Marley’s in here shaving when there’s a knock at the door. He answers it and gets attacked. He’s driven back into this room, which is where the intruder kills him and leaves him. Assuming that the corpse in the bathtub was him.

I used the barrel of the gun to draw the curtain back.

The video clip wasn’t clear, and the face below me had been cut to pieces, but it looked like him.

I stared down, feeling conflicting emotions beneath a blank surface. Now that he was in front of me, my first thought was that he didn’t look like much. He had jeans on, and that was all, and although it’s difficult to judge someone’s height when they’re dead in a bath in front of you, he just looked like a skinny little guy. Wiry, maybe – but that was charitable. He was cut in a fair few places, but they all looked like puncture wounds rather than slashes, and there was a kind of deep, unambiguous violence about them. He hadn’t been tortured. Someone had come into this flat with a knife, and they’d stuck it in him over and over until he was dead.

I took a cold, clinical look.

It’s him.

I let the shower curtain fall back over, and then I went and sat down on the closed toilet, put my head in my hands and tried to think.

Someone had killed him, and I didn’t know what to feel about it. A small part of me felt cheated, but mostly I just felt relieved, and I was surprised at myself for that. Perhaps, despite everything, I wasn’t a cold, calculating killer after all. But I looked over at the bath. The person who had done that to Marley hadn’t been cold and calculating either: there was a passionate brutality to how he’d been killed, and it didn’t seem to me that it was the kind of professional hit that a man like Marley might have attracted. It was the kind of thing I might have done.

Well – whoever had done it, and for whatever reason, he was dead. So what was I supposed to do now? I could shoot him a couple of times for the sake of completion, but it felt pretty fucking redundant. What was I supposed to do? Shoot myself? I tried to conjure up that image of Amy – the acid test – and I could do it, but the image brought along an understanding that the last thing she would have wanted was me dead in this man’s bathroom.

The thought set me moving back through to the living room, not with any real intention, but just because there was nothing else to see in here and the smell was becoming more and more potent.

As I walked back through to the living room it occurred to me that I should probably be going quite soon. And I didn’t even feel the impact. It was like the right-hand side of me exploded, and then the left as my shoulder went into the wall and then hit the floor. Most of the air went out of me. The room spun around. I wasn’t holding the gun anymore.

Fuck.

Half a second went by as I realised what was happening. And then I hit out blind, catching the man coming down with a weak right to the shoulder, too weak, but enough for the knife he was bringing down to miss, to scrape through the debris on the floor with the sound of a rap on the door and then paper tearing. A fucking knife. I was half pinned under his weight, my right arm trapped across me, and – panicking, terrified – I managed to get my left hand under his chin just as he brought the knife round and tried to cut my throat, resting on his elbow. I pushed his jaw up, his head back – and he was so heavy – and I scrunched my chin down as he put the knife against me. He sliced my jawbone, once, twice, again; flicking at it, not as hard as he’d have liked but I started screaming anyway: this noise that had no pain in it, just fear and anger and panic at being damaged.

He was punching me with his other hand: a fist going again and again into the side of my head. I pushed his jaw right up, flapping uselessly at the knife with my right hand as he sliced me again. He was trying to get the blade into the crook of my neck to cut me deeply. But then my other palm was over a snapping mouth, pushing his nose up, and my fingers found his eyes and I dug in, hard and fast and cruel. The punches stopped. He cried out and pushed himself up off me, reaching around to try to stop me from blinding him. My right hand, suddenly free, found his knife hand and held it as he pulled me up and backwards in a standing stumble. He was trying to wrench my hand away, biting at my palm, but then sheets of paper slipped out under him and we went down again, this time me landing on top, and my fingers went into his eyes, properly in, suddenly hot and wet and revolting. I didn’t care, I just thought die, you fucker and dug in as hard as I could, gritting my teeth and looking away from what I was doing, not listening to the noises he was making, holding his wrist down, getting one knee over it. Until his hand stopped fighting me, until it just rested there, pressed against the floor. Until his mouth wasn’t biting at my other hand anymore.

I held him there for another minute, not looking. Not feeling anything. It was like my mind was made of glass and had been dropped, and now I was staring blankly at the pieces – heart pounding – not even caring where to begin.

After that minute, though, the effects of the adrenalin began to thaw. Pain brought enough of the pieces back together to get me moving, standing up again. I didn’t think about my fingers as they came out: I just looked for the gun. Then I went through to the bathroom and washed the man’s blood and brains off my hand. My mind was cool and calm by then – worryingly so, perhaps – and it was talking to itself: do this, do that, no, do this first, that’s it. I used toilet roll to wipe blood from my face and neck, and elsewhere, but I just kept wiping and then bundled a load up and held it in place over the cuts. My reflection was wired to high hell: wide-eyed and scared. The right-hand side of my face looked red and sore, but none of his punches had broken the skin. He hadn’t had enough leverage to do me much real damage with his fists. My shoulder hurt from the impact, but I’d live.

Who was he? A friend of Marley’s? One of his gang, maybe. Or perhaps he was the guy who’d killed him. After all, Marley had been stabbed too, so it was possible that I’d just avenged the guy I’d come to murder.

Whoever he was, the number of bodies in the flat was rapidly increasing. I needed to get out of here.

I dropped the balled-up, bloody tissues in the toilet and flushed, but I was still bleeding and it was going to get me noticed.

‘Jason,’ I said, looking at myself in the mirror. ‘I do believe that what you need right now is a scarf.’

I found one in the living room, tucked away on the bottom shelf of Marley’s wardrobe: black and old. Probably not the most hygienic of dressings, but I figured what the fuck – needs must. As I wrapped it around my neck, I glanced down at the body on the floor. I didn’t feel at all bad about what I’d done. In fact, I didn’t feel much of anything, and what I did feel was something closer to exhilaration than regret or guilt. The man had attacked me and that was the way it was. It had been him or me. I could only wish that everything in life went my way quite so completely.

So where was I going to go?

The obvious answers – the hotel, my home – felt pointless. They were end-points. I could head to those places, but they both felt like moving into emotional checkmate. What was I going to do when I got there? Exactly. I wasn’t going to do anything. But if not home, then where?

I needed somewhere more productive to go. But, as I absently looked across the spread of papers, my gaze finally coming to rest on a small, open book over by the settee, I wondered whether what I actually needed was still the exact opposite.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I took a bus across town. It was late by then, and raining, so there we all were, bathed in a sickly amber light and breathing in the smell of damp clothes. The side of my face was hurting a lot more now, and I was still bleeding. Hopefully people hadn’t noticed, but it didn’t really matter. I watched the dark city go past outside, crossing gazes with a pale reflection of myself, and I really didn’t look well. In fact, I looked like the last person you’d choose to sit next to and, on this bus, that was saying something.

The address I was heading to was on the outskirts of Thiene, where the buildings got taller and more ramshackle, like somebody had built a load of separate floors and then seen how many they could pile up without the building coming crashing down. Everything was black brick and timber, and all you saw, or remembered, were boarded up hotels that looked about two hundred years old. The rain was grey and dirty and felt right; I couldn’t