The Third Person

CHAPTER FIVE

Lacey Beck.

It was at one end of Swaine Woods – the Ludlow village end. Ludlow was pretty small: basically just a road of country houses backing onto the wood, all of them carefully reconstructed. They had bright white walls – many with black cartwheels nailed to the sides, for some reason – troughs filled with flowers, and they all sported tiny, random windows you couldn’t see shit out of. You could see into some of the kitchens, though, and they all looked the same: herb racks and wooden-handle knives; pans hanging from hooks above the work surfaces; an olde cookery booke. Outside, you could breathe in the smell of grass and trees, and listen to birdsong, assuming you might want to.

At one end of the road, a ginnel led to a footpath through the woods, which went all the way through to the ring road at the far side, skirting Morton. It was a lonely walk, but a nice one; Amy and I used to wander along it sometimes, and it would take about half an hour to get from one end to the other. The sun came streaking in through the tips of the trees, and the embankment sloped down to the left: a mess of dusty roots and dips. The beck was at the bottom, diverging away from the path. Half a mile into the wood you could barely even hear it anymore.

I wouldn’t have wanted to live there. It was where a lynch mob hanged Edmund Lacey, an eighteenth-century highwayman, and although I don’t believe in ghosts I’ve always thought that there was an atmosphere to the place. Most of the time, it felt peaceful and pleasant, but occasionally it was almost threateningly still. All you could hear was the stream, which – in its way – was all that was left of Lacey: his name, rushing endlessly past.

Sometimes, it made me think of screaming spirits blowing through abandoned buildings like the wind. Most of the time, it just made me think: oh – so there’s a stream here.

I’d carefully followed Charlie from her house, waiting at the far end of the road until she emerged and then watching her all the way to the ginnel. When she’d turned the corner onto the footpath, I’d started to make my way down the road. By the time I’d started to hear the stream, and then reached the corner myself, I was figuring that she’d be out of sight. And she was.

In spite of my days of careful planning, I wasn’t entirely sure how this was going to go, or even if it was going to go. It was more than possible that Kareem was many miles away right now – more than likely, in fact – and if that was the case then, although it meant another dead end, at least I didn’t have to worry about Charlie getting hurt. If he was here, though, I had at least two concerns.

Firstly, and most importantly, protecting Charlie.

Secondly, protecting myself.

Kareem really shouldn’t have written that, A lot of Amys hang around in here, because what it now came down to was this: I was here in these woods, expecting him. If he showed up, then the likelihood was that only one of us was leaving, which was a pretty big thing.

I set off along the path.

There would be a fair amount of luck to this, I realised. After all, I had no idea what Kareem looked like, in terms of his age, race, height, build, dress sense – anything, really – and although these woods were quiet, that didn’t mean I was about to leap on someone the moment I saw them. It could just be a guy out for a walk, and so I needed to be certain it was him before committing myself. That meant giving him enough rope to hang himself with, á la Edmund Lacey, which – in turn – meant exposing Charlie to more danger than felt entirely comfortable.

Ideal situation?

Aside from us all being at home, tucked up in bed, it was this:

Kareem was deep in the woods, watching for a woman of Amy17’s description to come walking along the footpath. I’d be far enough back for him not to see me. Then, he’d see her and move onto the path behind her, and that was when I’d move in, running up to catch him. In an ideal situation, Charlie wouldn’t know anything about it; I’d take him down before he reached her, and she’d carry on, none the wiser.

How likely was this ideal situation? Let’s say I didn’t exactly have my hopes up. But I didn’t think he would have waited on the road and followed her in, like I did, because he wouldn’t have known where she was coming from, and so waiting in the woods was probably a good bet. Another possibility was that he’d come the opposite way, and then turn around and go after her, but I didn’t think that was likely either. He had his fantasy to think about, after all: whenever we cybered, he didn’t like Amy17 to see him until he was chasing her. I was figuring that would hold here, too.

I moved as quietly and quickly as I dared, trying to recreate the pace I’d seen Charlie moving at. A quick walk, keeping my breathing in check so I could listen as carefully as possible. For a twig snapping, or a shoe scuffing the dirt up ahead. Worst case scenario: a scream. And all the time keeping an eye out on the woods to the left: looking for colour, for movement, for anything.

I’d been walking for about ten minutes when I heard the scream.

I started running immediately, twitched into motion by the sound. The woods around me seemed intensely real; I took in every shade of green, brown and yellow as I ran, hurdling over looping roots, tapping trees as I passed them, partly to propel and partly to steady myself. Too busy to notice the adrenalin. The path twisted around to the right. Too busy, until the last moment, to realise that the scream I’d just heard had come from a man. That fact occurred to me as I rounded the corner and saw them, a few metres ahead.

They were almost in a rugby scrum, forming a bridge, with Charlie holding on to the shoulders of a much bigger man and yelling in anger as she launched kicks into his flabby stomach. The man was panting uncontrollably: although he was much taller and heavier than she was, he seemed to have been bent double by the force of her attack and was now hanging on for dear life. As I started to move forwards, she stamped down hard on his shin, and he screamed and stepped back, letting go of her and covering his face just in time as she launched a series of punches at him. Quick, snappy left jab; hard right cross that smacked the back of his hand and must have broken something, and then a solid left hook that knocked him a step sideways. From nowhere, her foot was suddenly in his stomach again – she’d spun around on her heel and launched a blistering kick that seemed to go a full metre through him.

Kareem disappeared backwards into the wood. I watched him tumble down the embankment, with little punches of dust and cries of pain following him on his way.

‘Holy shit,’ I said.

‘Jason?’

Charlie was flushed.

I ran over. Kareem had come to a halt in an ungainly heap about thirty metres down from us. He seemed to be deciding whether to attempt to get to his feet or not.

‘What the hell just happened?’

Charlie said, ‘Son of a bitch jumped out at me.’

We both looked down at the son of a bitch in question: a mildly overweight man in blue jeans and a checked shirt. He was struggling upright, with the aid of the tree beside him, and seemed as stunned as I was. He looked up at us. He was shaking, and I saw an average face, filled with a kind of stupid, awful terror. Then, he turned around and began to flounder off in the direction of the Beck.

‘Wait here.’

I started down after him.

Leave this, my mind told me, even as I was running. Or stamping, anyway – the embankment was forty-five treacherous degrees of dry mud, spotted with a slalom of trees. You couldn’t run down something that steep; it was more like a semi-controlled, high-stepping fall that jarred your legs and hurt your stomach. As the ground evened out, the world juddered around impossibly quickly. I hit the woodland floor and was after him like a gunshot.

Leave this.

Kareem glanced back, saw that I was coming after him and found a higher gear. His shirt came untucked as he ran deeper into the woods. His arms were pistoning. In fact, he could move pretty quickly when he wasn’t having his ass kicked by a girl.

I was exhilarated, but also feeling like I was a worm that had been let off the hook and had then jumped right back on again.

Leave this. What the fuck are you going to do when you catch him?

Kill him? Now that Charlie’s seen him?

But I was still running in the wrong direction, regardless.

Straight after him, slapping past trees as I went. He veered right, heading deeper still. I could hear the stream and knew we must be getting close. He’d need to level out soon: just head straight right and hope he could outpace me to the ring road. But that was five minutes’ run, or more, and he must have known he wouldn’t make it.

I could hear his frantic breaths.

This feeling was the same feeling I’d had waiting at the station for the train to Schio on the day I’d gone to meet Claire. It was the shaking, stupid anxiety of a man who knew he was about to do the wrong thing; that he was going to disregard all the pleading, desperate advice that his mind was throwing at him, and go on and do the wrong thing regardless.

I put on a last jolt of speed as I reached him, punching into him from the side and driving him over towards the beck. Kareem went down; I heard a splash as my leg smashed into the water. Then grunting as I got my arm to the side of his head and pushed him.

He wasn’t a serious contender. I punched him again – hard – as we were getting to our feet. His nose shattered, and suddenly he was flat on his ass again, with blood spattered onto his shirt. He brought up his hands to hold his face together.

‘Shit,’ he said simply.

I wandered back up the bank and checked out the woods. There was no sign of Charlie, so I figured that she’d stayed up on the footpath out of the way. Either that or she was wandering, unsure where we’d ended up. I backed down to the edge of the stream. Over on the other side, there were just green fields: empty and desolate. The grass was long overgrown and untended.

It was still possible to walk away. I really did know this.

Instead, feeling sick, I pulled the stanley knife out of my jacket pocket, clicked the blade out three notches and turned back to where he was lying.

‘Hey Kareem,’ I said.

He stopped massaging his face and looked up at me. Confused.

And then with a little more understanding.

I’d well and truly boarded the train now.

I grabbed him by his hair and put the blade to his face. It was a weird thing. Like something out of a movie: not at all like I’d expected it to feel. It was too sunny, for a start.

‘We’ve got some talking to do,’ I said.

‘Please don’t hurt me.’

His voice was this stuttering, fragile thing. He couldn’t even think about fighting back; couldn’t think about anything right now apart from how he was suddenly all past, no future.

‘Amy Foster,’ I told him, tightening my grip on his hair. He winced a little. ‘You tell me about her, and you get away from here today alive.’

The words came out in a gush.

‘Who? I don’t know any Amy Foster. I swear I don’t-’

And so I cut his cheek. I’d never cut anyone before and I wasn’t really sure how to do it. It was meant to be a warning cut – a taster – but it didn’t turn out that way. The blade went through his cheek like paper, and with about the same sound. Blood spilled out of the side of his mouth.

He started crying.

My hand was shaking, but I told him:

‘You know who she is. You met her in the Melanie Room about four months ago. And then you met her in real life. She took a train to come see you.’

I didn’t know that any of this was true until he started crying harder, and then I knew that it was all true. Suddenly, it didn’t feel too sunny for this anymore; something went out inside me. Some light. I cut him again, digging the stanley knife over his cheekbone, pressing down so hard that the muscles in my forearm bunched and my teeth gritted.

‘You fucking killed her.’

‘I didn’t! I didn’t! I swear to God! Jesus, ahhhh!’

The train leaving the station now: rolling out backwards. It was out of my hands.

‘You met her and you killed her.’

Easier to just sit back now, as I carved his face apart.

‘I didn’t kill her,’ he sobbed. ‘Please stop hurting me!’

I let go of his hair, throwing his head back in disgust, and stepped away from him. Then, I went to the top of the bank and checked the woods again. In the distance, I heard Charlie calling my name. She was a long way away by the sound of it. If she’d been closer, I might have left it there.

Who am I kidding?

Back with Kareem, by the side of the stream. In the sun. With the breeze making the grass in the field shiver, and the trees above us nodding thoughtfully.

‘What happened?’ I said.

‘I don’t know what happened.’ He was knuckling blood and spit off his chin. His cheek was bright red and looked utterly destroyed.

‘Jesus. Oh, Jesus.’ He looked up at me desperately. ‘Marley took her. I owed Marley some money, and he fucking took her. That’s all I know.’

I made to grab him again, and he flinched away.

‘You sold her?’

He shook his head.

‘Not like that. I didn’t have any say in it. We were just talking about things.’

‘About what?’

‘About rape. About why I wanted to do the things I did. Why I like that stuff. We were just talking, I swear. We weren’t doing anything!’

I pictured this man in a room with Amy. Just talking. Either side of a table, elbows resting there. Cups of coffee between them. Just shooting the breeze.

‘What happened?’

‘I owed this guyMarley. He’s like this big underworld guy in Thiene, and I owed him money. I’d been gambling, and taking shit from him on loan, and I didn’t want my wife to know. He was gonna tell her. Gonna beat me and tell her everything. Maybe beat her too.’

‘So you gave him my girlfriend?’

White rage: I took hold of his hair again, ready to put the knife through his face a hundred thousand times.

‘NO! He just took her, man. I didn’t have any say in it, I swear. He had a couple of other guys with him – real big guys – and they just took her out by the hair. I tried to stop them, but-’

I attempted to picture him trying to stop them, but the image wouldn’t come. I couldn’t see it somehow. All I saw was Amy being taken away by her hair, and I knew exactly what had happened. Kareem had paid his debt by giving Amy to this man, Marley. Before I even knew what I was doing, I’d punched Kareem in the stomach so hard that the knife flew out of my hand and landed on the bank. All the air went out of him in a whoosh, and then I was dragging him up by the hair, pulling him towards the beck, then kicking his legs out from under him, and down he went, face first, into the water. He couldn’t help sucking it in. Blood spilled away downstream in little tendrils.

And I held him there. Looking out over the field, and then glancing back at the bank behind me. Charlie was calling me: still quite a way away. Maybe if she was closer I would have stopped: I could keep thinking like that. My mind was calm now. The panic would come afterwards, I was sure, but for now there was only silence, as I carried out this unreal thing that it had been telling me not to all along while at the same time knowing I was always going to.

He fought for a minute or so, but I was stronger than he was. And that’s what life’s about, isn’t it? You fuck up, you fight with all your might, and then you die anyway.

I met Charlie halfway back through the woods. We saw each other from quite a way off and she waited for me as I walked towards her, head bowed. I scratched my nose, looked up at her and shrugged as I reached the place she was standing.

‘He got away.’

‘Too bad.’ She noticed my clothes. ‘Jesus – you’re soaking.’

I looked down at my leg and my arms.

‘Yeah. I took a tumble into the beck. My hand’s pretty sore.’ I looked at it, pretending that it hurt or appeared injured in some way. ‘He took off over the field, and I figured I was done in.’

‘Thanks for trying.’

She smiled at me, but looked a little shaken.

‘You really beat the shit out of him,’ I said, trying to make light of the situation. But my face just wouldn’t smile. Every time I tried, it just slipped away.

She said, ‘I think he had it coming.’

And then she shivered. ‘The adrenalin’s kicking in, though. I’m a wreck. Think I hurt my hand on him, too.’

‘Let me have a look.’

Suddenly, I was this world expert on injured hands. I took up her small fist and examined it. Already, between her first two knuckles, the skin was darkening. It happened to me a lot when I went bare-fist on the Scream, and I figured she’d be okay.

‘You’ll live,’ I said, letting go of her hand.

She rubbed it.

‘Well – bit of excitement, anyway. Think we should report it?’

‘I doubt it.’ I looked behind me. ‘He’s long gone.’

‘Probably think twice before he does that again, anyway.’

‘I would think so.’ I smiled at her, but it faded again. ‘Where did you learn to do that stuff?’

She struck a stance.

‘Second-dan gojo-ryu,’ she said. ‘I’ve been training since I was eight.’

‘Jesus.’

She relaxed. ‘You still want to go for that drink?’

‘I think I really need it.’

‘Okay, then. Let’s go.’

So we walked back up to the path and together followed it all the way to the ring road. In better circumstances, it might have reminded me of walking with Amy. I don’t know how I would have felt then, but it hardly even registered now. I was like a zombie, grunting in the right places to everything Charlie said. I’d left the thinking part of me back down by Lacey Beck, and it was still kneeling there now, squatting beside Kareem’s corpse and keening like a frightened, abandoned child as the water washed over him.