So it might cause some trouble. I didn’t fucking care.
I had a mail slip open and my hands poised over the keyboard before I noticed something that stopped me in my tracks.
There were two more files. Already. The slob from Texas was getting his wish: the pace was being picked up.
In j10 Jeanette was on her knees on a dirty mattress. Her hands appeared to be tied behind her, and her head was bowed. j11 showed her lying awkwardly on her side, as if she’d been pushed over. She was glaring at the camera, and when I magnified the left side of the image I could see a thin trickle of blood from her right nostril.
I leapt up from the keyboard, shouting. I don’t know what I was saying. It wasn’t coherent. Jeanette’s face stared up at me from the computer and I leant wildly across and hit the switch to turn the screen off. Just quitting out didn’t seem enough. Then I realised that the image was still there, even though I couldn’t see it. The computer was still sending the information to the screen, and the minute I turned it back on, it would be there. So I hard-stopped the computer by just turning it off at the mains. Suddenly what had always been my domain felt like the outpost of someone very twisted and evil, and I didn’t want anything to do with it.
Then, like a stone through glass, two ideas crashed into each other in my head.
Gospel Oak.
Police.
From nowhere came a faint half-memory, so tenuous that it might be illusory, of Jeanette mentioning Gospel Oak station. In other words, the rail station in Gospel Oak. I knew where that was.
An operator wouldn’t give me an address from a phone number. But the police would be able to get it. They had reverse directories.
I couldn’t think of anything else.
I rang the police. I told them I had reason to believe that someone was in danger, and that she lived at the house with this phone number. They wanted to know who I was and all manner of other shit, but I rang off quickly, grabbed my coat and hit the street.
Gospel Oak is a small area, filling up the gap between Highgate, Chalk Farm and Hampstead. I knew it well because Nick and I used to go play pool at a pub on Mansfield Road, which runs straight through it. I knew the entrance and exit points of the area, and I got the cab to drop me off as near to the centre as possible. Then I stood on the pavement, hopping from foot to foot and smoking, hoping against hope that this would work.
Ten minutes later a police car turned into Mansfield Road. I was very pleased to see them, and enormously relieved. I hadn’t been particularly sure about the Gospel Oak part. I shrank back against the nearest building until it had gone past, and then ran after it as inconspicuously as I could. It took a left into Estelle Road and I slowed at the corner to watch it pull up outside number 6. I slipped into the doorway of the corner shop and watched as two policemen took their own good time about untangling themselves from their car.
They walked up to the front of the house. One leant hard against the doorbell, while the other peered around the front of the house as if taking part in an officiousness competition. The door wasn’t answered, which didn’t surprise me. Ayer was hardly going to break off from torturing his girlfriend to take social calls. One of the policemen nodded to the other, who visibly sighed, and made his way round the back of the house.
‘Oh come on, come on,’ I hissed in the shadows. ‘Break the fucking door down.’
About five minutes passed, and then the policeman reappeared. He shrugged flamboyantly at his colleague, and pressed the doorbell again.
A light suddenly appeared above the door, coming from the hallway behind it. My breath caught in my throat and I edged a little closer. I’m not sure what I was preparing to do. Dash over there and force my way in, past the policemen, to grab Ayer and smash his head against the wall? I really don’t know.
The door opened, and I saw it wasn’t Ayer or Jeanette. It was an elderly man with a crutch and grey hair that looked like it had seen action in a hurricane. He conversed irritably with the policemen for a moment and then shut the door in their faces. The two cops stared at each other for a moment, clearly considering busting the old tosser, but then turned and made their way back to the car. Still looking up at the house, the first policeman made a report into his radio, and I heard enough to understand why they then got into the car and drove away.
The old guy had told them that the young couple had gone away for the weekend. He’d seen them go on Thursday evening. I was over 24 hours too late.
When the police car had turned the corner I found myself panting, not knowing what to do. The last two photographs, the one with the dirty mattress, hadn’t been taken here at all. Jeanette was somewhere in the country, but I didn’t know where, and there was no way of finding out. The pictures could have been posted from anywhere.
Making a decision, I walked quickly across the road towards the house. The policemen may not have felt they had just cause, but I did, and I carefully made my way around the back of the house. This involved climbing over a gate and wending through the old guy’s crowded little garden, and I came perilously close to knocking over a pile of flowerpots. As luck would have it there was a kind of low wall that led to a complex exterior plumbing fixture, and I quickly clambered on top of it. A slightly precarious upward step took me next to one of the second floor windows. It was dark, like all the others, but I kept my head bent just in case.
When I was closer to the window I saw that it wasn’t fastened at the bottom. They might have gone, and then come back. Ayer could have staged it so the old man saw them go, and then slipped back when he was out.
It was possible, but not likely. But on the other hand, the window was ajar. Maybe they were just careless about such things. I slipped my fingers under the pane and pulled it open. Then I leant with my ear close to the open space and listened. There was no sound, and so I boosted myself up and quickly in.
I found myself in a bedroom. I didn’t turn the light on, but there was enough coming from the moon and streetlights to pick out a couple of pieces of Jeanette’s clothing, garments that I recognised, strewn over the floor. She wouldn’t have left them like that, not if she’d had any choice in the matter. I walked carefully into the corridor, poking my head into the bathroom and kitchen, which were dead. Then I found myself in the living room.
The big chair stood in front of a wall I recognised, and at the far end a computer sat on a desk next to a picture scanner. Moving as quickly but quietly as possible, I frantically searched over the desk for anything that might tell me where Ayer had taken her. There was nothing there, and nothing in the rest of the room. I’d broken—well, opened—and entered for no purpose. There were no clues. No sign of where they’d gone. An empty box under the table confirmed what I’d already guessed: Ayer had a laptop computer as well. He could be posting the pictures onto the net from anywhere that had a phone socket. Jeanette would be with him, and I needed to find her. I needed to find her soon.
I paced around the room, trying to pick up speed, trying to work out what I could possibly do. No-one at VCA knew where they’d gone—they hadn’t even known Jeanette wasn’t going to be in. The old turd downstairs hadn’t known. There was nothing in the flat that resembled a phone book or personal organiser, something that would have a friend or family member’s number. I was prepared to do anything, call anyone, in the hope of finding where they’d gone. But there was nothing, unless…
I sat down at the desk, reached behind the computer and turned it on. Ayer had a fairly flash deck, together with a scanner and laser printer. He knew the Net. Chances were he was wirehead enough to keep his phone numbers somewhere on his computer.
As soon as the machine was booted up I went rifling through it, grimly enjoying the intrusion, the computer-rape. His files and programs were spread all over the disk, with no apparent system. Each time I finished looking through a folder, I erased it. It seemed the least I could do.
Then after about five minutes I found something, but not what I was looking for. I
found a folder named ‘j’.
There were files called j12 to j16 in the folder, in addition to all the others that I’d seen. Wherever Jeanette was, Ayer had come back here to scan the pictures. Presumably that meant they were still in London, for all the good that did me.
I’m not telling you what they were like, except that they showed Jeanette, and in some she was crying, and in j15 and j16 there was blood running from the corner of her mouth. A lot of blood. She was twisted and tied, face livid with bruises, and in j16 she was staring straight at the camera, face slack with terror.
Unthinkingly I slammed my fist down on the desk. There was a noise downstairs and I went absolutely motionless until I was sure the old man had lost interest. Then I turned the computer off, opened up the case and removed the hard disk. I climbed out the way I’d come and ran out down the street, flagged a taxi by jumping in front of it and headed for home.
I was going to the police, but I needed a computer, something to shove the hard disk into. I was going to show them what I’d found, and fuck the fact it was stolen. If they nicked me, so be it. But they had to do something about it. They had to try and find her. If he’d come back to do his scanning he had to be keeping her somewhere in London. They’d know where to look, or where to start. They’d know what to do.
They had to. They were the police. It was their job.
I ran up the stairs and into the flat, and then dug in my spares cupboard for enough pieces to hack together a compatible computer. When I’d got them I went over to my desk to call the local police station, and then stopped and turned my computer on. I logged onto the net and kicked up my mail package, and sent a short, useless message.
‘I’m coming after you,’ I said.
It wasn’t bravado. I didn’t feel brave at all. I just felt furious, and wanted to do anything that might unsettle him, or make him stop. Anything to make him stop.
I logged quickly onto the newsgroups, to see when [email protected] had most recently posted. A half hour ago, when I’d been in his apartment, j12–16 had been posted up. Two people had already responded: one hoping the blood was fake and asking if the group really wanted that kind of picture—the other asking for more. I viciously wished a violent death upon the second person, and was about to log off, having decided not to bother phoning but to just go straight to the cops, when I saw another text-only posting at the end of the list.
‘Re: j-series’ it said. It was from [email protected].
I opened it. ‘End of series,’ the message said. ‘Hope you all enjoyed it. Next time, something tasteless.’
‘And I hope,’ I shouted at the screen, ‘That you enjoy it when I ram your hard disk down your fucking throat.’
Then suddenly my blood ran cold.
‘Next time, something tasteless.’
I hurriedly closed the group, and opened up alt.binaries.pictures.tasteless. As I scrolled past the titles for roadkills and people crapping I felt the first heavy, cold tear roll out onto my cheek. My hand was shaking uncontrollably, my head full of some dark mist, and when I saw the last entry I knew suddenly and exactly what Jeanette had been looking at when j16 was taken.
‘j17.gif,’ it read. ‘{f} Pretty amputee’.
Being Right
Sometimes things happen in life that are weird, odd in a way that makes you question everything. Doesn’t mean it’s some big revelation, not necessarily. Just that something makes you realise that things are going on, that things have been forgotten and are better that way, that correct is not the same as right. Finding out about the listening angel was a little like that.
Dan’s mood had not been good anyway. It was Monday, the fourth day of their vacation, and the fourth solid day of rain. This didn’t bother him unduly—you didn’t come to London, London in February, moreover, if you were looking to work on your tan. The city was full of museums, galleries, stores. It had history up the wazzoo and nearly as many Starbucks as at home. If you could bear to get a little damp in between stops, there was a good time to be had whatever the weather. The forecast—which Dan knew all about, having been woken by it at five-thirty that morning—said it was going to get better as the week went on. Either way, the weather was something you couldn’t do anything about. It was simply there. You had to just accept it, change your plans accordingly, move on. There was no point complaining. No point going on and on and on.
What you could change, of course, was jet lag. You were flying to Europe, which they had done many times since the kids left home, there was a simple procedure to follow. You arrived there mid-morning, so it made sense to try to catch a little sleep on the plane. From the minute you arrived you locked yourself mentally to the new time, and you stayed awake until you would normally at home. That way your body got itself into some new kind of understanding, and you were so bushed by the time it came to turn in, you’d sleep regardless. Might be a couple of days where you felt draggy in the late afternoon, but otherwise you’d be okay. This is what Dan had done. This is what he always did.
Marcia, she did it different.
Despite the fact they’d discussed it, she stayed awake the whole flight. Said she’d found it impossible to sleep, though Dan had managed to catch an hour—not much, but enough to make a difference. Then when they’d gotten to the hotel just before lunch she’d started yawning, muttering about a nap. Dan told her to keep going, reminded her of how it was—but mid-afternoon still found her spark out on the bed. Dan left her there and went for a walk around the surrounding blocks. Sure, he felt a little spacey and weird, but he kind of enjoyed it. It served as a first recon of the neighbourhood, telling him where the cafés where, the nearest bookstore, all of that. It reminded you that you’d done a strange thing, travelled a long way, and that you weren’t at home any more.
When he got back, Marcia was in the shower. They went out, had another little walk, then dinner in the nearest restaurant. By ten o’clock Dan was utterly beat, and ready for bed. Marcia on the other hand was speeding, and wanted to talk up the issues over Proposition 7, the cause de jour back home in Oregon. Dan hadn’t much cared about P7 when on his own turf (it was going to be defeated, which was a shame, but that’s what people are like), and sure as shit didn’t care about it now. What was the point of coming to another country if you were going to mire yourself in the same old stuff? When he eventually said this, yawning massively, Marcia took the discussion into a playful analysis of why he was apparently unable to enter into any kind of intellectual dialogue that wasn’t about books, before swerving back to Proposition 7. This lasted a further twenty-five minutes. When Dan finally said he was just going to have to go to bed, she shook her head and stood up. First evening ruined, her body language said: thank you brutish husband.
Dan slept like a baby that night. Marcia, not so well.
They spent the next couple of days getting some tourism done, seeing the big sights, ticking them off. Dan was happy to do this, knowing they’d relax a little by the weekend, be able to kick back a little more and do their own thing. By Saturday he was locked on GMT, late-afternoon slump nothing a two-shot latté couldn’t shake off. Marcia seemed to be getting further and further out of sync. She was waking at six, five, four: waking and sitting up in bed pointedly reading (and reading a novel set in America, naturally, or one of the magazines she’d brought from home); alternatively, as on the Monday morning, turning on the television—quietly, of course, but you could still hear the tube crackle—and obsessing about the rain.
The real problem wasn’t the jetlag. Dan could sympathise with that. Not sleeping, it’s no fun. You lie there on your back staring up at an unfamiliar ceiling and your brain goes round and round and round. The problem was the mentioning of it, the endless fricking…It was the same when she had a cold. Dan got a cold, he took some tablets, waited for it to go away. He’d snuffle a bit, but that was physical. You couldn’t do anything about that. With Dan, a cold lasted four days, tops, soup to nuts. With Marcia it was a two-week miniseries, an
HBO Big Season Event. The first signs would be noted, discussed, held up for scrutiny. The danger of an approaching malaise would be flagged, and the particular inconvenience of its timing mourned. Nine times out of ten, this phase would last a single evening and then the symptoms would disappear for good, having never been anything more than two sneezes, or a mild headache. Sometimes the cold would arrive for real, and she would wander down the next morning wrapped in a blanket, face crumpled, nose red, hair mad as you like. Then, for at least a week, the mentioning of it. The constant filling him in—as if, twenty times a day, he’d said to her ‘Now darling, tell me exactly how every single little bit of you feels, and don’t stint on the detail.’ The sinus report. The lower back state-of-play. The glass throat film-at-eleven and here’s a message from our sponsor, Runny Noses R Us.
The cold would go away, eventually. Two days of noting its passing, and she’d be fine—would return, in fact, to the woman who said she never got colds, not ever. That’s when Dan knew he was in trouble. Ten days of reduced conversation would mean she was full to the brim with observations of pith and moment, stuff that simply had to get out of her head before it popped. Any chat, no matter how formerly relaxed, could get suddenly derailed into a long discussion of the major or minor issues of the day/year/century, with Marcia being firm but fair, subtle but strident, as if performing to a sizable radio audience. His participation was allowed every now and then, as a foil, a sentence thrown in as by an interviewer. Other than that, she’d just roll. Any suggestion from Dan that the length and depth of discussion was inappropriate to a dinner out at a local restaurant, to Sunday breakfast, or when he was trying to have a quiet bath, would be met with the masterfully oblique suggestion that he just hadn’t thought about the issues enough, and that he’d had his say and it was her turn now. Followed by more discussion.
More Tomorrow: And Other Stories Page 5