He was wrapped up in the text on the screen, lost in it, and – although he probably wouldn’t have known it – he had started to cry.
I had seconds. If I was going to get out of here alive, then this was going to be my only chance to do it. He was going to kill me, and I wasn’t a killer – not really – but there was no way I was going to let him hurt me: if it was me or him, then it was him.
The gun was wavering in the air. Before I could think about the danger, or what would happen if I couldn’t overpower him, I grabbed it and started to fight.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
That was it: the end.
I looked away from the papers on the desk. My heart was beating too quickly and my mind felt bruised from both the impact of the message and the medium through which it had been communicated. Other than that, all I felt was a kind of dreadful, empty calm.
I was already putting it together. The writer must have attacked Graham while he was distracted with the text on the screen, and tried to wrestle the gun from him – and maybe he’d succeeded or maybe it had been an accident, but whichever, Graham had got himself shot in the head. The writer knew Marley had been killed and he would have suspected from what Graham had told him that I would be making my way here eventually, so he called Jack, the pins and knives man. They checked out Marley, found him dead and then staked the place out, or maybe Jack did that on his own. I arrived. Jack died. And then I follow Graham’s trail here and get to read what happened. I get to discover the reason behind all of this, and it fucking sucks.
There was an awful inevitability to it all: a sense of closure that left only me hanging, and that was something I thought I could take care of now. There wasn’t much else left for me.
The writer?
The fact that I hadn’t been attacked while I read the papers was telling. The man wasn’t a killer; he was a coward. He wasn’t even a hardcore criminal. So maybe Jack had told him to lie low for a while: that he’d take care of me, clean things up and let the guy know when it was safe to come out. Or maybe he’d been staking out Marley’s place, too. He knew I’d killed Jack and wanted nothing to do with me. Perhaps he was on a plane to somewhere tropical even now. Wherever he was, he wasn’t here. Looking around, I had no great desire to be here either. I picked up the papers in front of me, folded them neatly and slipped them into my pocket.
And then I left.
But before I did, I took a quick look around. There were hundreds of notepads here: thousands of pages of observation and experience. Most of it was trivial and inconsequential, but who was I to judge? Most things are, including me. What occurred to me was what a shame it was that all this was going to waste. For a moment the books looked like nothing so much as lives held in stasis: rich, vital moments trapped between covers, just waiting to be tripped into and felt. It seemed a shame, and I didn’t know whether to take a match to the place or call Dennison. In the end, I did the latter, from a payphone in the street outside. There was no answer, so I left a message giving him the address and a couple of words of caution – dead body in the bathtub; possibly dangerous tenant – but there was a life’s work of lives to be saved in the flat and I didn’t think a few little details like that would deter him.
Then, for what it was worth, I went and checked out of the hotel.
And I went home.
The first thing I did when I got in was check the messages on my answerphone. It was the same two messages as before, but I listened to them again anyway.
Okay, I’m not the only loose end.
My job. As I listened to Nigel prattle on, with his odd inflections and even odder assumption that I might give a shit, my job had never felt more meaningless to me. They had paid me for a month of work I hadn’t done, and that was all I needed to know. It was possible that they’d pay me for another month – I was, after all, a troubled young man – but frankly I couldn’t have cared less. I listened to Nigel’s voice and I knew it was intended to sound like some kind of authority – something that would make me feel guilty, or bring me to heel, or make me worried – but it didn’t. I received those emotions, but they were filtered through dream logic; they were feelings I might have experienced in another life and, now that I’d woken up, they meant next to nothing to me.
Fuck him, fuck them. I pressed [NEXT] before the end of the message.
‘Hi Jason, it’s Charlie.’
Oh, yes – there was Charlie to think about. Poor Charlie, who practically idolised me. And what did I do to her? I used her as bait to track down a paedophile, killed him, unburdened half my soul to her and then abandoned her. And after all that, without me even asking, she had covered up evidence of a serious crime on my behalf. What was her current reaction to me?
‘It’s Sunday night,’ she told me again. ‘I’m just calling because I hope you’re okay. I don’t know what happened yesterday – or what I did wrong – but I’m sorry, whatever it was. And I understand; it’s okay.’
She understood. It was okay. In fact, it was possible that she’d even done something wrong. As I pressed [STOP] I thought that if enough of the women in my life got together they might realise that I was the common fucking denominator.
‘I wanted to let you know-’
So: Charlie. Turning up to meet me with make-up on. She was more attractive than she realised – and nicer, too. For fuck’s sake, she’d been sitting there, listening to my worries. She’d encouraged me to talk about Amy and my other problems, and all the time she was doing that she’d had makeup on. Either that, or she’d had her hair cut. I couldn’t even remember which it had been. It was pretty obvious that she deserved better than someone like me.
But she’d be okay, I thought as I headed upstairs with the gun in my hand. My job, too. They’d both survive without me. In themselves, they weren’t loose ends so much as frayed edges. Once you got rid of me, they took care of themselves.
I walked into the study.
Everything was still just as fucked up as Walter Hughes’ friends had left it. The hard drive of my computer was in a couple of clunky pieces on the floor, and one of the guys had pulled the monitor off base and smashed it to shit, no doubt unaware that his boss was about to offer to pay for any damages. Compensation would have undermined the point of destroying my property a little bit. But then I’d gone and killed Hughes, so it was a moot point anyway.
I kicked a bit of circuitry and thought about the internet. The news on the coach was that the damage was starting to repair itself. Where that wasn’t the case, IT firemen were busy pouring gushing streams of water over the flames, trying to limit the spread. Nobody had a clue what had happened, but the consensus was that it seemed to have stopped. For the moment.
I kept a few pictures of Amy in the study. They were pretty much undisturbed: lodged on a shelf in the computer desk. Actually, they weren’t just pictures of Amy: I was on some of them, too; Graham and Helen; Jonny and the guys we’d grown up with. Amy probably wasn’t even on half of them, but I took the whole bundle through to the bedroom.
There, I spread the pictures out, filtering away the irrelevant ones and putting the ones I liked best out on the pillows, the top of the duvet. I covered the bed in them. Shots of us on holiday. Shots of us at New Year’s. Just tens of photographs. Graduation. Engagement. Pictures taken in bars, of long, cheering tables we were at; you had to pick us out, and even then it barely looked like us. I was crying the whole time, touching her face as I let them fall. One. Ten. Thirty. I remembered all of them. Ask me for fifty different occasions when Amy had smiled at me and I’d be stuck by double figures, but I remembered each of these clearly. They were obvious examples. Only God knows all of the times she smiled when I forgot to take a photograph.
When the bed was covered, I lay down on it. Everything shifted and slid, but that was okay. First one elbow, then onto my back. I still had the gun, and – when I was settled – I put the barrel into my mouth, tasting the salt
