imagine this place in the daytime, or in summer. It was a fitting locale, I supposed, but part of me wished that all these people I was looking for might live somewhere a little nicer.
I had a vague idea of the area and knew where to get off the bus, but I had to ask the driver for directions to the street. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy who gave directions very often, but he took one look at me and decided it would be easier, and probably smarter, not to be difficult. He told me exactly what I needed to know.
It was only a five minute walk from the stop, but when I arrived I was soaked through and cold. And past caring. It was an apartment block with about six storeys, but it looked more or less derelict, and it was difficult to imagine anybody actually living here. There were a couple of lights on close to the top, though, so I figured somebody must be home. A helpful friend of society had already kicked the front door open for me, so I made my way inside and found the stairs.
There was a pretty good chance that whoever had killed Marley had also come here, as this place had been on the page at which his address book had been left open, and so I took out the gun as I made my way up to the top floor. There was nobody around, but every second staircase found me approaching a black-blue window, criss- crossed by a thin metal grid on the inside, pattered upon and streaked by the rain outside: an incessant tapping that made the building seem even older and weaker that it was. By the time I reached the sixth floor, I was so unnerved by it that I almost wanted someone to pop out of a door and say hi, just to prove that there were people here at all. But there was nothing apart from the rain.
And on the top floor it was literally raining: the ceiling was open to the sky in a couple of places, letting in a steady spatter of water that was probably not doing the wiring much good. The lights hung down from a brown ceiling, and I walked carefully. Getting electrocuted would, in theory, solve all my problems, but it didn’t seem like a particularly appealing prospect.
There had been no name in the address book: just the street, and then the building and room numbers. I didn’t know who I was going to find here, as I made my way down the old, battered corridor, searching for six-one-two. The decor left a lot to be desired. If the paper hadn’t been peeling in places, I might have believed there were no walls beneath them at all: just the paper, stretched and fragile and breakable. I could have torn it down and moved from one dank room to another, from empty flats into inhabited and stained ones. I could have held the surprised occupants at gunpoint as I stalked through and then ripped my way into the next one, and then the next, looking for whoever lived at this blank address. Room six-one-two. Here it was.
I listened at the door for a moment and, in a way that was becoming all too familiar, there was nothing to hear. Somehow, I hadn’t expected there to be. And when I tried the handle, it didn’t surprise me that the door opened. Unlocked, just like Marley’s had been. Was I going to find a body in the bath here, as well?
The room was dark, illuminated only by the pale blue glow from a monitor over by the window, with a wedge of carpet revealed by light from the open door behind me. I couldn’t see much, but I could just about make out the shelves of books lining the walls – hundreds of books and notepads and files and roughly bundled sheafs of paper – and I knew that I was in the right place. The computer was giving out a quiet electric hum, overlaid every few seconds by a small splashing noise of water falling into water. That was coming from deeper inside the flat. I guessed the bathroom.
And on top of those noises, the buzz of flies.
I found a light switch on the wall to my right, and it brought the room to life. All the shadows were sucked back under and between things, and I could suddenly see it all, or what there was to see anyway. Mostly just books. There were some weights in one corner, as well – tiny little things – and a desk by the window, where the computer was. Other than that the room was bare. Except for the man lying down on the floor by the desk.
I closed the front door quietly, as though he was sleeping and I didn’t want to disturb him. But he wasn’t sleeping. There was something about the curled angle of him, and the stillness, not to mention the flies. And the smell, more than anything. It was the same odour that there’d been in Marley’s flat. I recognised it for what it was, and I knew the man on the floor was dead even before I saw the blood pooled out from his hair, the spray of it on the books to the right, and the gun, discarded, not far from his mottled hand. On the desk in front of the computer were a few sheets of paper. A suicide note, I guessed.
Everybody was dead before I could get to them, and it didn’t seem fair.
I nudged the corpse with my foot, rolling it onto its back, and I watched as the head came unstuck from the floor, moving absently on its lifeless neck. And then I saw the face, and took a shocked step back. A half stumble. It was Graham.
It couldn’t be, I thought, but I hadn’t taken my eyes off him and there was really no doubt at all. Apart from a ruined section above his ear, the nearest side of his head was intact – pale but whole – and I’d known him for how long? I’d known him since we were little kids. I’d known him for years.
What had happened here? What was Graham doing here in this flat? It looked like he’d killed himself, but if so then what did that fucking mean – had he been involved in this all along? I couldn’t make it fit: none of it made any sense.
I looked around the room, over and over, not really taking any of it in. It was like my mind had put the shutters down and blocked out anything new until it got a handle on the shit it already had, but then I remembered the suicide note and the shutters went up again.
Before I knew what I was doing, I picked up the sheets of paper and started to read.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
‘Are you writing this down now?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Look at me while you’re doing it.’
So I looked over at him, sitting next to me. He was a large man: tall and solid, without being muscular or fat. Clean shaven. Brown hair. Blue eyes behind the glasses he was wearing. In fact, apart from the gun he was holding, pointing only vaguely at me but with his eyes doing most of the damage, he seemed normal. Just an average, everyday guy: the kind you passed in the street all the time without noticing, caring about or looking twice at.
Except for that gun.
‘What do you want?’ I said. I was surprised by how frightened I sounded. ‘I don’t have any money.’
He smiled, but even as I’d said it I’d known how stupid it was. He wasn’t here for money. My flat was on the top floor of a half-abandoned, three-quarters derelict shit-stack, and that was hardly the sort of place you came at random just to turn somebody over. On top of that, he clearly knew all about me. He hadn’t got me on the floor; he hadn’t tied me up or told me not to fucking move and asked where the money was.
What had happened was this.
It had been pouring down outside. There was a cacophony of clicks and splashes as the rain hit windowsills and cars and awnings below: a deep, dense, wet sound; a three-dimensional noise that you could walk through. The rain smelled warm, almost spicy. The street and pavements far below seemed suitably black and charred.
I’d been sitting, staring at the blank e-mail I’d received. There was no actual message, only the attachment, and I kept alternating between reading sections of the text it contained and staring at the empty e-mail and wondering what it meant.
Somehow, it had sidled through all the broken and breaking servers and found its way here, to my inbox.
The screensaver woke up – a featureless black background and I nudged the mouse to send it away. The blank message returned. Implacable. It was almost surprising how full of meaning no words could be.
I opened the attachment again and read it through.
It was very much incomplete: I guessed that there was less than a quarter of the original text there, and the rest was corrupted to the point where the meaning had gone, but I could make out some of the words and I recognised enough of the others to know what this was.
I closed the attachment and clicked back to the blank message. Nothing – no words anyway. The malformed text made me think of a dog. It was like an old dog you’d dragged out back and shot in the head, but then you hear
