The Intruders. Michael Marshall

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      But meanwhile other bits of my head were running scatter-shot in all directions. Deep inside each of us is a part that mistrusts order, and craves the relief of seeing the world shatter into the chaos it believes lies underneath all along. Or perhaps that’s just me.

      When Amy’s phone had enough charge I retrieved it from behind the bar. Sitting with it in my hands felt strange. This was the only device through which I could talk to my wife: but it was currently with me, and thus made her feel even farther away. We have evolved now, gained a sixth sense through the invention of email and cell phones – an awareness of the utterances and circumstances of people who are not present. When this sense is taken away, you feel panicked, struck blind. I had a sudden idea and called the phone back at the house, but it rang and rang before switching to the machine. I left a message saying where I was and why, just in case Amy got home ahead of me. It should have felt like a good, sensible thing to do. Instead it was as if another road had just been washed away in the rain.

      Amy’s phone was a different brand from mine and the keys were a lot smaller. As a result my first brush with the interface put me in the music player section by mistake. There were eight MP3 tracks listed, which surprised me. Like any other occupant of the twenty-first century who wasn’t Amish, Amy owned an iPod. She wasn’t going to be using her phone for music, but while I could imagine a device might come with a couple of songs preloaded, eight seemed a lot. Seven of the tracks were simply numbered Track 1 to Track 7, the other a long string of digits. I tried Track 1. Tinny music came out of the earpiece, old jazz, one of those crackly 1920s guys. Very much not Amy’s kind of thing – she’d gone on record more than once as hating jazz, or basically anything that pre-dated Blondie. I tried another track, then one more, with similar results. It was like holding the world’s smallest speakeasy.

      I took another scroll through the Contacts section, this time not looking for Kerry, Crane & Hardy but for anything else that stuck out. I didn’t see anything to make me linger. I didn’t recognize all the names, but I was never going to. Your partner’s workplace is like another country. You’ll always be a stranger there.

      So I headed to the SMS section. Amy had picked up the joy of SMS messaging from the younger blades in the agency, and she and I now exchanged texts regularly – when I knew she would be in a meeting, or she wanted to convey information that didn’t need my attention right away. Usually just to say hi. Sure enough, there were four from me there, going back a few months. A couple from her sister, Natalie, who lived back down in Santa Monica, in the house where she and Amy had been born and grown up.

      And eleven from somebody else.

      The messages from Natalie and me had our names attached. These others didn’t, just a phone number. It was the same number each time.

      I selected the earliest. It was blank. An SMS communication had been sent, and received, but there was no text in it at all. The next was the same, and the next. Why would you keep sending texts without anything in them? Because you were incompetent, maybe, but by the third or fourth you’d think anyone could have gotten the hang of it. I kept scrolling. I’d grown so used to the single line of nothing in each message that when the sixth contained something else it took me by surprise. It didn’t make much sense, either.

      yes

      No period, even. The next few messages were blank again. Then I got to the final one.

      A rose by ny othr name wll sml as sweet … :-D

      I put the phone on the table and poured another cup of coffee. Eleven messages was a lot, even if most of them had nothing to say. Besides, Amy wasn’t the type to let her phone be clogged with other people’s Luddite errors. She was not sentimental. I’d already noted she’d only kept the texts from me that contained information of long-term use. A few thinking-of-you ones I’d sent a couple of days before, and which she’d replied to, had already been erased. The couple from Natalie looked like they’d been saved because they were especially annoying, and could be used later as evidence against her.

      So why keep someone else’s blanks? And under what circumstances would you receive this many messages from someone and yet not have their name in your list of contacts? The others came up as ‘Home’ – my phone – and ‘Natalie’. These just listed the number. If you’re that regularly in contact, why not go to the minuscule trouble of entering the person’s name into your phone book? Unless it’s something you don’t want found?

      I flipped over to the made/received calls log. The number didn’t appear anywhere on it. Communication from this source evidently only came in the form of text, or at least no call had come from it in the last month.

      This gave me an idea, and I went back to the first SMS message and found it had been sent a little over three months previously. There had been a month gap between the first and the second. Then another two weeks. Then they had started coming more frequently. The one saying ‘yes’ had been sent six days before. And the one about roses had arrived just yesterday, late in the afternoon. Amy had seen this message – she must have, otherwise it would still have been filed under UNREAD. Then some time in the next few hours she had lost the phone, during the course of an evening which her schedule listed as blank.

      Then she had, so far as I could tell, lost herself.

      I navigated sideways from Received Messages into the section recording texts that Amy had sent. The list there was very short. A couple of replies her sister, and to me. And one other. It had been sent two minutes after the last message to her, and consisted of the following:

      Bell 9. Will b waitng, whenever yr redE, 2dy, nxt wk, nxt year xoxox

      The waitress swung by at that moment to see if I wanted fresh coffee. I said no. I asked for beer.

      One thing my father was always good at was answering questions. He didn’t have infinite patience in other directions, but if you asked him something – how the moon was created, why cats slept all the time, why that man over there had only one arm – he’d always give you a grown-up answer, except for this one occasion. I was about twelve. I’d heard an older kid at school being pretentious and been somewhat impressed and came home and asked my dad what was the meaning of life, thinking it made me sound at least sixteen. He seemed unaccountably annoyed, and said it was a dumb question. I didn’t understand. ‘Say you come back to your house one afternoon,’ he said, ‘and there’s someone at your table, eating your food. You don’t ask him “What the hell are you doing, sitting there, eating my dinner?” – because he could simply say he was hungry. Which is an answer to what you asked him, sure enough. But not to your real question, which is what the hell are you doing in my house?’

      I still didn’t get it, but I found I remembered this from time to time when I was older. It probably made me a slightly better cop, less prone to ask witnesses my questions instead of just letting them tell me what they knew. I remembered it again as I sat there in the bar in Seattle and started my first beer.

      My head felt heavy, and cold, and I was coming to suspect the day was not going to end well. I realized that maybe I had to stop asking where Amy was, and start thinking about why.

Chapter 10

      Meanwhile a girl was standing in an airport concourse. A big clock suspended from the ceiling said it was twenty-four minutes to four. As she watched, the last number changed, going from 16:36 to 16:37. She kept watching until it flipped to 16:39. She liked the ‘9’. She didn’t know why it should seem compelling, but it did. A recorded voice kept telling people СКАЧАТЬ