The Third Person

by Steve Mosby

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries; Thrillers; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

'Steve Mosby has become one of a handful of writers who make me excited about crime fiction' Val McDermid 'Mosby has become renowned for thrillers that reach into dark places where most British crime writers are afraid to go' Sunday Express 'This isn't some kind of 'Dear John' letter. I'm coming back again'. But Amy Sinclair didn't come back. That note on the kitchen table was the last that her boyfriend, Jason, heard of her. At first, he let her have her space but as the weeks turned to months the worries had set in... and eventually he went after her. What he found appalled him. It seems that Amy had had a secret life on the internet and had met some people she shouldn't have. And one of them took her. Now Jason sits at home and cruises the same horrific websites that she once walked through to find her kidnapper. But when he lays a trap for a monster he meets in a chat-room he gets more than he bargained for. He finds that nothing in this story is as it seems, and that the clues lie in the mistakes of his own past...

Release date: August 26, 2010

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 308

Sample

Did you know that it’s possible to watch rape, twenty-four hours a day, in the comfort of your own home? I bet you didn’t know that, but it’s true. You can just sit in front of your computer screen – with a cold beer in one hand, clicking a mouse with the other – and watch rape after rape after rape. The scenes vary, but the reality remains the same. And that’s what I was doing, on the evening when the end of it all began: I was watching rape, drinking a Bud.

There are certain ways to do it. I’ve found that the best is to abstract yourself from what you’re actually watching and listening to: you quit hearing screams and, instead, you hear pitches and tones; and you don’t so much see skin anymore, as you see pixels: patterns of colour that remind you of things. Pink flesh; a black open mouth.

It’s the best way, but still not good.

I’ve grown up in a generation where reality is constantly mediated, though, and so it’s really not that different. When you see a war on television, for example, you’re not actually watching a war. Get close to the screen and you can see the little blocks of colour shifting, and that’s really all it is: a lot of second-hand light. It’s not really people dying at all. Reality, mediated. You’re not seeing what happened, you’re just seeing an effect it had on film in a camera. In every way that matters, it’s no different to someone describing it to you afterwards: someone whose eye is a lens; someone whose memory is camera film. Purely and simply, what you are seeing is hearsay.

The hearsay on the internet varies, depending upon where you go to listen. If you enter the word rape or snuff into a search engine, you’ll find the tip of the iceberg. Seriously – it’s that easy. The first few porn sites you’ll visit will be mostly – if not totally – legit. They offer violent, hard-core porn for download, generally for money but there are ways around that, and you’ll know, from watching them, that they’re fakes. There’ll be a plot structure that gives the whole thing away. Sometimes, there are even credits at the end. These are stories: fantasies designed to give you a thrill, acted out by paid, willing models.

I had a few hours’ worth of this type of movie on my hard drive: some good quality and some bad. I’d seen enough to know I wasn’t interested. I wouldn’t find Amy here. These staged travesties weren’t an abyss, merely a gutter, and I knew from the beginning that I was going to have to look deeper to find her.

Here’s something else I’ll bet you didn’t know:

The deeper you look, the darker your house gets.

It’s a strange thing. You start to feel very lonely, sitting in front of the screen. The heating starts clicking; pipes creak. The ticking clock in the other room starts to sound like cover for movement downstairs. You feel things standing behind you. The shadows become gloomier and the light less sufficient. The first time I felt this – and it felt like cold breath on my neck – was when I was looking at the carcass of one of Jeffrey Dahmer’s kills: a medium-sized jpeg image of a corpse, resplendent in streaks of red and white, propped up beside a stained bath. And suddenly, I felt watched. The silence in my house – our house, I mean – started to ring, and I slept with the light on later, lucky to sleep at all.

The death sites and the rape sites go hand in hand. Do you want to see dead people? You can. More specifically, you can view them by category. Do you want to see burn victims or hanging victims? Do you want to see gunshot wounds and people smashed beneath fallen rubble? You can see all these and more: rotting corpses; naked women, murdered and in various states of dismemberment; rape victims, discarded like torn bags of old clothes beside forest paths; deformities, both congenital and deliberate. The sites are often white text on black, adorned with skulls and candles, and the tone is generally humorous and genial. If you don’t like it, you can leave. These sites are not illegal.

Some skirt close, though. I found one site which showed photographs taken by two killers as they raped, tortured and murdered a young girl. They had also audiotaped it, and the track was available at the site. I listened, deliberately hearing it as pitches and tones: fluctuations in sound. The site claimed, incorrectly, that it was the closest thing to snuff available on the internet. I’ve seen closer. Other sites are devoted to animals, both sexually and otherwise. A woman being raped by a horse (real). Cats being flayed alive, their skins coming off like sellotape unsticking from a parcel (real). During the time of the Waco siege in Texas, FBI agents played tapes of rabbits being tortured to death into Koresh’s compound in order to wear down those inside. I have that sound file, and it wears me down, too.

But like I said: none of this is actually real. It’s all just hearsay after the event, like a newspaper report, or the Bible. And that’s the best way to think of it: maybe the only sensible way, if you’re going to think of it at all.

Just dots of colour or beats of sound.

Just words on a page.

‘You have one message . . . Message One.’

Beep.

I recognised her voice straight away, and pictured her face as she started talking to me from the pocked, steel-grey grid of my answerphone.

‘Jason? It’s me. Charlie. I was just calling to find out how you are. I mean, I know that you’re not great, but . . . you know. Williams is going spare about you not turning in this week.’

Charlie had just turned eighteen and was cute as hell. Short blonde hair, trim figure, pretty face. She had a pierced nose: a little gold stud, as though someone had banged a painless nail into the perfect skin on the side of her nostril. Whenever she spoke, she didn’t seem to have a bad word to say about anyone. For me, for some reason, they were all good.

‘He’s tried to ring you a couple of times, but there was no answer. He’s left messages, though. Have you not got them?’

I nodded to myself, picturing Williams behind his desk. White shirt, dark tie. Neat hair and glasses. He always had little red flushes in his cheeks, as though he was constantly embarrassed about something. I think he was slightly paranoid that the other guys all took the piss out of him when they were out of ear-shot, but in reality they couldn’t give a shit about him, and I felt the same way. He was my direct superior, and he’d left increasingly angry messages on my answerphone for the last few days. I’d deleted them as soon as I heard the first few nasal notes. A lot of times, you don’t need to hear people to know what they’re saying.

‘Well, whatever. I mean, I know that you’re having a bad time, and you don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want. Obviously, but – you know. I just wanted you to know that I’m here for you. If you want to talk, that is. We can have a chat. Hey – I could buy you a coffee some time.’

She always made sure I had a coffee each morning at nine. Bless her. Over the weeks, she’d even kept track of my increasing lateness, with the coffee starting to arrive on my desk at nine-fifteen, and then nine-thirty.

I smiled, and clicked stop, but I didn’t delete it. Instead, I shrugged off my coat onto the chair and headed through to the kitchen.

There was beer in the fridge, as there should be in every decent, civilised home. I collected a bottle, and then went upstairs, to the study, clicking the computer on at the plug and settling in for the night.

The Melanie Room.

Not a room in the normal sense that you might think of a room, but I’d say it still had a good claim. It had two walls, a floor and a ceiling – of a kind, anyway – and rooms branching out in all directions that you created as you went. It was a Chat room: white space filled with text, divided into two vertical sections. The section on the right listed usernames; the larger section on the left was the chat space, steadily scrolling away upwards as users typed in messages that appeared at the bottom. The Room was named after Melanie Shaw, a five-year-old girl who had disappeared in Central England a few years ago. She was still alive somewhere. The Room had been named in her honour after a user named JACKJILL posted a picture of what was claimed to be her: a bound, naked girl, with her head wrapped entirely in black electrical tape, breathing through straws in her nostrils. That was two years ago, and he’d posted a picture a month ever since.

There were thirty-seven users in the Room that night, which was about average. Sometimes there were more and sometimes less, but it hardly mattered. As always, the main room was almost entirely empty. Little in the way of real conversation ever went on there – the real action took place privately. By double-clicking on someone’s username you could enter into a private room with them – just the two of you, unless you invited others – and chat one-on-one. You could cyber or discuss cases in the news, or exchange favourite photographs and links, all out of the way of prying eyes.

I’d logged on as Amy17, and it took all of thirty seconds for the first private message to come through:

HARD4U:

[u like it in ass bitch]

Invitations to ‘private’ – however primitive – almost always came up in a separate window, and you could choose to chat or cancel. I took the first sip of my beer and pressed cancel. That thing about my boss? It goes for perverts on the internet, too.

A few more windows flashed up over the next twenty seconds, but none of them were that much better than just plain annoying.

SEXXXYFUCK:

[i’ll tie you with ur panties]

M-BRACE:

[hi – asl?]

likeyoungirls:

[r u wet Amy?]

I pressed cancel on each of them in turn, all the time scrolling down the list of users until I found the one I wanted. I’d been talking to this guy for the last couple of weeks, hiding behind the Amy17 name, and trying to get a little closer to him. Recently, it felt as though I’d been succeeding. Now, I peered at the screen, moving my head closer and closer. His name – <~KaREEM~> – did not dissolve into dots the way the gifs he often sent me did: the lines remained solid and connected. It was just text on a screen, this man’s name, but you still couldn’t see through it; it didn’t break down. It gave me the sense that this really was happening now, and that – somewhere nearby – he was looking at his own screen, perhaps running a finger over the text I was hiding behind, and thinking something similar.

I took a sip of my beer, and waited for him to come to me.

A few facts about Amy17. She was seventeen years old, five feet and three inches tall in her bare feet. She had short, blonde hair, cut off in a line just before it touched her shoulders, blue-green eyes and clear skin – a pretty girl. Generally, she wore plain white tops, sometimes a skinny-rib, and a skirt to mid-thigh. Both items showed her off well, because she had tanned, toned legs from her thrice-weekly gym visits, and firm 34C breasts. Amy17 was sexually experienced, and had discovered the boys very young. Her favourite position was missionary, held down firmly by that lovely hair of hers, but she was always open to suggestions. Kareem generally had a few.

I sat and waited for him, wondering how long he could hold out. A few more revolting hopefuls approached me, and I cancelled them all. Mr Hard4U tried me again, and I responded by telling him to fuck himself in the ass, and try his mother out first for practice. I was beginning to despair until, after five minutes, I felt his breath on my neck and the room went that little bit darker. The window appeared.

<~KaREEM~>:

[(whispers) Where are you?]

Got you, I thought, taking another sip of my beer. As always, my heart was pounding and my palms felt sweaty: slightly shaky. That feeling of connecting with someone over the net has always made me feel strange. It’s a feeling that’s never gone away.

I clicked chat, which opened up a private window. When I typed in my reply, it appeared underneath his:

<~KaREEM~>:

(whispers) Where are you?

Amy17:

I’m walking through a wood.

There was a brief pause. The white background of the window seemed to buzz with possibility. Somewhere, Kareem was busy typing his own reply: the next line in our own little play, a long way past first night nerves. I took another sip of beer.

<~KaREEM~>:

I’m walking behind u can’t hear me

I typed quickly, hitting [RETURN] to post the messages and then immediately writing the next one.

Amy17:

I’m a little frightened

Amy17:

It’s dark

Amy17:

I hitch my bag up slightly

Amy17:

adjust my skirt

There are probably a few facts you should know about me, too. I didn’t know what Kareem was imagining, sitting at his computer, talking to me. I didn’t know if he figured that Amy had told him the truth on the first night we met, but she really hadn’t.

<~KaREEM~>:

i can see u. i’m walking closer. catching u

<~KaREEM~>:

a stick cracks

I wasn’t five foot three; I was six foot two. My hair was blond – true – but it was cut short, shaved at the sides and back. I never used to wear it that way. In the old days, before Amy disappeared, I’d had it longer, and in a far more friendly style. These days, I looked like a thug, but that was no bad thing and, more to the point, it was an efficient cut. Reality over appearance. I shaved it once every fortnight, and didn’t have to think about it again, which suited me just fine. One less thing to worry about.

Amy17:

I turn around and see you. I’m very scared

Amy17:

I cry out HELP!

Amy17:

start to run as fast as I can

I weighed fourteen stone. At the other end of the study, which had housed our main computer suite ever since we moved in, two years before, I kept a bench and some weights and a punchbag. Generally, I did a few hours a day on both, listening to music so loud it almost made my head bleed. Unlike Amy17, if Kareem had ever started to chase me through a dark forest, I wouldn’t have been running away from him.

<~KaREEM~>:

i’m gaining on u. my cock is so hard

<~KaREEM~>:

i’m gonna stick it in u until u scream

Amy17:

I can tell. I’m running so fast, but know it’s not enough. no-one around!

<~KaREEM~>:

i’ve almost caught u

Amy17:

I’m falling over. I scream for help

<~KaREEM~>:

i’ve got u fuckin bitch

Amy17:

HELP! HELP!

<~KaREEM~>:

(slaps AMY17 hard)

I could never know for sure what Kareem imagined Amy’s motivation was for coming here and subjecting herself to this. I’d never known any woman who really wanted to be raped, although I knew there was a male myth that they existed. I guess Kareem knew that, too – or wanted to believe it, anyway. I mean, maybe he figured I was just another bloke, like him, doing the decent thing and enjoying the fantasy in my own way, even as I helped to create it – but I doubted that. I’d sent him a picture of Amy; we’d chatted at length. I’d invested time and effort in making her seem real, giving her a credible background, getting her name posted at websites, generally making her presence felt in places I knew he could check. After all this time, she seemed real to me, and I was hoping that she would to him, too.

My guess? Kareem thought he’d struck lucky. He’d found a beautiful, young girl who got off on the idea of being raped. Risk-free, trouble-free: his dream come true.

That was what I was counting on, anyway.

I sipped my beer and continued to type. On screen, Kareem was describing how he was raping Amy. Like a good little girl, I made sure I (SCREAM)ed in all the right places.

Cybersex takes place in every Chat room on the internet. Due to the ephemeral nature of the web, most of these Chat rooms are open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. They never close. Members vary, of course, but a good Chat room could expect to have an average of at least one hundred people logged in and talking at any hour of the day, and some of those people will be having sex in private rooms. There are thousands of Chat rooms on the internet. What this means is that there might well be as many people fucking on-line at any given moment as there are people dying, or being born.

You meet someone in a Chat room – usually by a random message inviting you to go private, and you chat for a while, sizing each other up. It works best if you’re both fast typists, and there’s no point at all unless there’s a chemistry there. In that sense, it’s the same as a physical meeting. Think it’s boring and clinical? You’re wrong: it’s not. It’s amazing how much personality shines through in the way you type. People fall in love on-line. It’s exactly as real as any other conversation, and often more telling: you can always scan back through what you’ve said to clarify meaning. It’s not like spoken words, which just drift away. Nothing on-line can ever be properly forgotten.

The act itself, then.

Some people cyber with strangers: others prefer to be in a relationship. And there are as many ways to do it as there are with physical sex. Some people talk through an actual, imagined sexual encounter, complete with (bracketed physical instructions) and hyperlinks to on-line pictures, while others just talk about what they’re physically doing at the time: undressing; masturbating; being masturbated. Maybe it’s real and maybe it isn’t. The cybersex ends when it ends – usually with both partners having reached orgasm, however many miles apart from each other. Sometimes, the whole procedure will progress to phone sex; more often, though, the two people involved will never encounter each other again. Such is life. At least on the internet it’s nice and clean, you can break it off at any time, and there’s no risk of disease. No shrieking, unwanted kids for the state to support afterwards.

That’s how it usually is, anyway.

But sometimes, on-line lovers will actually meet.

Kareem had taken a break, presumably to clean up. He’d fucked Amy hard, before turning her over and – eventually – coming in her backside, with her neck locked in the crook of his elbow, half-choking her. His mother would no doubt have been proud.

I took down the dregs of my beer and immediately wanted another one, but knew it would ruin me. I wanted ten three-minute rounds on the punchbag before turning in that night, and so a second beer would just have to wait. I played absently with the neck of the bottle, waiting for Kareem to return to the keyboard.

After a couple of minutes:

<~KaREEM~>:

back

Conversation was usually thin on the ground before we cybered, but he tended to be far more prolific afterwards. It was as though he’d released the tension and could relate to me as a human being again. I suppose that made sense. Talking to me beforehand would have killed his fantasy dead, whereas now he could light up a cigarette and kick back a little.

<~KaREEM~>:

u like that?

Amy17:

not so much tonight

A little disappointment for him, there. I could almost smell the palpably wounded male pride in the next message, which arrived on-screen quickly.

<~KaREEM~>:

why?

I guess no man likes to leave his woman unsatisfied. Kareem was probably worried that his dream girl was about to bale on him, and I figured he’d do just about anything to stop that from happening.

A few quick messages, punctuated by the [RETURN] key.

Amy17:

not enough anymore

Amy17:

need more than that

Amy17:

need more than just words on a screen

Amy17:

:-( x 1000

I was surprised by how excited I felt. There was a fluttering in my guts: the thrill of the hunt. Anything could happen in the next few minutes, and it would all be played out in a handful of sentences dropped onto a screen: black on white in neat, meaningful little scars.

Amy17:

:-( x 10000000000000000

<~KaREEM~>:

sorry.

<~KaREEM~>:

sorry not enough 4 u.

Amy17:

not ur fault

<~KaREEM~>:

(pauses) so what do u want?

Amy17:

(pauses) brb

Be right back.

Amy17 was going away to think about something. I leaned forwards in my chair again, bringing my face closer to the screen. Watched the blank space for a second or two, and then turned my attention towards the last frowning emoticon that Kareem had left me.

<~KaREEM~>:

Amy17?

I zoomed in on that simple, unhappy face until it seemed to fill my head from one side to the other. So simple and straightforward: just a couple of lines, really. But the human expression is universal. We see the frowning, unhappy face, and we feel sad for it. Or at least, we’re meant to.

Something that Kareem had said to me on the first night we met.

Lots of Amys hang out in here

That had been the wrong thing to say. I would learn, from subtle enquiry, that Kareem and I lived quite near to each other, and that was one coincidence too many. From that point, it would always have come to this. It had just taken a little bit of time to soften him up along the way.

<~KaREEM~>:

Amy17???

I started typing, before I lost my nerve. I didn’t look up the whole time.

Amy17:

back now. listen.

Amy17:

tomorrow is Saturday

Amy17:

there r woods nr my house

Amy17:

Swaine Woods. between morton and ludlow

Amy17:

lonely woods nobody ever around

Amy17:

i walk from lacey’s beck entrance to ring road

Amy17:

i start at 4pm. i’ll be there by 4.30pm

And then I paused, just for a second, and glanced up at what I’d written. That pause seemed like it had the potential to last a while. But there was no time for doubting. I’d made up my mind about what I was going to do days ago. Without this, it had all been worthless.

So I finished up quickly.

Amy17:

im easy tofind there

Amy17:

so find me

As soon as I’d pressed [RETURN] on the last message, I closed the private window and disconnected from the internet. My desktop appeared; the conversation vanished. Of course, the words would still appear on Kareem’s monitor, wherever he was, but now there would be a footnote running underneath them in red:

(Amy17 has logged off system)

‘Jason, it’s me. Charlie. I was just calling to find out how you are. I mean, I know that you’re not great, but . . . you know. Williams is going spare about you not turning in this week.’

I picked up the phone and checked that Charlie had been the last caller; she had. I hit redial and waited, turning gently on the spot to wring some of the stiffness from my lower back. As it rang at her end, I wandered through to the kitchen, selected a pint glass from the cabinet and took it over to the sink.

Click

‘Hello?’

‘Charlie,’ I said, ‘it’s me. Jason.’

‘Oh hiya.’ She sounded pleased that I’d called. Maybe a little surprised, too. ‘I’m glad you rang back. We’ve been worried about you.’

I held the receiver between my head and shoulder and poured water into the pint glass.

‘I’m okay. Just finding things . . . hard-going. You know?’

‘Yeah. Well, you know – not really. But I guess I can imagine what you must be going through. I wish I could help, or do something.’ She paused. ‘I mean, you’re in trouble here.’

‘I figured.’

‘Not that it matters.’

‘Not much,’ I said. ‘No.’

‘I guess you’ve got other things on your mind at the moment.’

Hearing her voice, it was like Charlie was in the room with me; I recognised her slight accent. I mean, it was her. But at the same time, it wasn’t – couldn’t be – because it wasn’t as though she was shouting down a tube and I was hearing her. The sound wasn’t her at all. It was Charlie mediated. A load of electrical signals transformed into pitch and tone and volume.

It was an artificial voice. Made-up. Created.

But then we never really do hear people do we? We experience the vibration of air molecules in a certain way, and come to associate that with the individual people around us. It struck me that – in a weird way – I’d never actually heard Charlie at all, just the effect that she’d had on the world.

Other things on your mind.

‘Yeah,’ I said, closing my eyes. ‘A thousand things.’

‘Is there anything I can do? Anything at all? I’d like to help.’

I sighed. Opened my eyes.

Don’t do this.

But I’d thought it through before this, and I was pretty sure that it would be okay. No – strike that. I was just plain sure.

‘You want to go for a drink tomorrow?’ I asked. It came out a bit too quickly, as well, but I figured she’d take that as my reluctance to ask her for help. Male pride. Whatever. ‘I mean, I’d like that. It’d be nice. We could talk.’

‘Sure.’ She sounded pleased. ‘Where would you like to go?’

‘Um.’ I pretended to think about. . .