The Third Person

‘State of the art,’ he told me, without looking up. ‘Means it takes half an hour more than pen and paper used to. Bear with me.’

‘Okay.’

I looked around some more as he started tapping keys, starting to have a weird feeling that this wasn’t about Amy at all. Surely, it would have been different if they’d found her – not like this, anyway. A camera was watching me from the far corner of the room, above the door, and there was a plexiglass division running down the centre of the steel desk. I figured that Wilkinson had a button his side, and if he pressed it the plexiglass would raise, and maybe the table would extend out of the wall, caging me in. I thought I’d seen some kind of documentary where they’d shown it happening. I looked up.

There was a gas grill on the roof, slightly behind me.

I looked back at Wilkinson.

‘Can I ask what this is about, please?’

He tapped the keyboard once more and looked up.

‘Yeah, I’m ready now.’

And then, suddenly more serious, the question, coming out of nowhere:

‘Can I ask you, Jason, do you know a girl called Claire Warner?’

Now here was something. She sent me a jpeg of herself, once, and she was as beautiful as she’d always made out she was. I can get any man I want, she’d bragged to me at one point, except that it hadn’t been a boast as much as a plain statement of fact. Not something she was proud of, exactly, more something that bothered her. Because getting exactly what you want is only good when you know what that is.

I took the jpeg into Fireworks and magnified it up to 800%, until her crimson lips filled the screen and were reduced to red squares, darker red squares and dots of black -until it wasn’t recognisable as a face anymore: just a hotchpotch of blocky colour. And I looked at the edges where they touched, imagining that she might emerge from the non-space there, in hiding behind her own bitmap. The same way that I ran my fingers over [claire21] when we chatted at Liberty-Talk, and wondered at the million other words that were hiding between the letters of her name, the ones she didn’t give me in the hours we spent typing messages to each other.

Looking for traces of her on the internet: typing her name into ten search engines at once. They ticked through a hundred thousand sites between them and threw hopeless pages back at me. Not one was of her, or even close. There were a whole bunch of her-names in the phonebook, and any one of them could have really been her, but I couldn’t find out which without ringing them each in turn. And even then her voice would have been a stranger’s, and yet not.

Here was something, indeed.

I don’t know why I bothered stalking her so unsuccessfully, when she would have told me anything and everything I wanted to know – even from that first accidental meeting on Liberty-Talk. She would have met up with me in half a second, fucked me blind with a smile on her face and then whirled away out of my life without a second thought or a backwards glance.

She was single, after all. It was me that was in the relationship.

‘Is Claire dead?’ I asked.

Wilkinson was implacable. ‘So you did know her?’

I nodded.

‘Yeah. Kind of.’

‘We knew that you knew her. How did you meet?’

He typed something in.

Suspect admits knowledge of victim, I thought.

Best just to tell the truth.

‘I met her in LibertyTalk. We got chatting.’

‘How many times did you get chatting?’

I shrugged.

‘A bunch of times. You probably know that already, too. Is she dead?’

Of course she’s dead.

Wilkinson was still typing.

‘We need to talk through some stuff,’ he told me. ‘But, yes, Claire’s dead. She was found earlier this morning. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s okay.’ I didn’t know whether I felt anything at all. I thought of the pixels in her lips. ‘We hadn’t been in touch for a while.’

‘How long’s a while?’

I thought about it.

‘A fair few months.’

‘Since before your girlfriend vanished?’

A beat. He didn’t look up at me.

‘I guess so. Yeah.’

‘But you can’t remember. You might have seen her since.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not since then.’

‘You sure, now?’

‘Yeah.’

He looked up at me.

I looked away from him, thinking about the train station in Schio. It was the last time I’d met Claire – the only real time I’d met her at all, in fact, outside the internet. How did I know it was before Amy disappeared? Because I’d come home afterwards and crawled into bed beside her, that’s how, and then spent the next day chasing her round to reassure her that I loved her – doing a hundred little things to make her smile even though none of them felt like enough. But I decided that I didn’t want Inspector Wilkinson to know about the train station at Schio.

‘I’m just sure,’ I said.

‘Well.’ He looked back down at the screen. ‘We can come back to that in a bit. Let’s talk about how you first met her.’