The Third Person

by Steve Mosby

  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.

  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 h
is 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 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 décor 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 o
ut 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.

  What the fuck was this?

  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.