Shooting in the Dark

yourself to not knowing the answer.’
    ‘I can live with that if I have to,’ she said. ‘The search for certainty is a kind of mental cowardice, an avoidance of reality.’
    Sam whistled through his teeth. ‘I like you a little more each day,’ he said. ‘But reality is when two or more people are pretending the same thing.’
    ‘Like us,’ she said, reaching for his face.
    ‘Could be.’ He slipped down on to the rug beside her and they fumbled with each other’s clothing.
    ‘Shhhhh,’ she said. ‘We’ve got lots of time.’
    Sam closed his eyes and kept them shut, even up the score a little. They made love quietly in the empty house, as though someone was listening.
     

49
     
    Felt like it was the end of another case to JD. It’d been good to be close to Marie again, for as long as it lasted. One of the things that had finished it for them, put the final nail in the coffin, so to speak, was when she found and read his journal. Specifically when she read what he’d written about her.
    Everyone was in JD’s journal. Sam Turner, Geordie and Janet, Marie and Celia. All of JD’s friends and neighbours and acquaintances. No one escaped. He watched them because character was his stock-in-trade. He stole bits of them, a mannerism from Sam, a phrase from Celia, the peculiar stoop of the man who cut his hair, and he combined them within the confines of a novel. JD laughed when people sneered at fiction, said they preferred biography or documentary, wanted to deal with the real world rather than something from a writer’s imagination. Picasso had said it more than once: ‘Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.’
    Guilt? Should he feel guilt for getting his friends and neighbours down on paper? For watching them, for spying, for being an observer of human nature? JD didn’t think so. The supreme watcher was not the writer but the reader. It was the reader who greedily gobbled up the end product. The reader who looked into the souls of all the characters in the book, and who, ultimately, tried to discern the movement of the mind of the writer.
    He didn’t store people away in a computer. His object was to discover, to retain and enhance the humanity of his stolen characters. He didn’t reduce them to data. His stock-in-trade was art, language. He didn’t digitize people, wasn’t concerned with the jargon of cyberspace.
    He’d tried all of those arguments on Marie, but she didn’t like any of them.
     

50
     
    What would’ve happened if he hadn’t told Ralph to get out of the house? If he hadn’t delivered his brother’s things to the hospital? Geordie had asked himself these questions over and over again, and he knew the answers. Ralph would still be alive, that’s what would have happened.
    Ralph would still be alive because Geordie or Janet or someone would have arrived at the hospital to bring him home. He wouldn’t’ve been left there to hobble across town on his own. Injured, after being beaten up, unable to defend himself.
    It was as if everything had conspired to set Ralph up for the chop. The psychiatrist, whatever he was, the fucking murderer must’ve thought it was his birthday when he saw Ralph on his own.
    OK, so Ralph was no angel. Geordie knew that, just like everybody else. He was a chancer, but that didn’t mean he was gonna be a chancer all his life. Their mother had been a chancer and so had Geordie for most of his life. Their mother had taken her chance and run off with the landlord, somebody with money. She’d had the chance to change her life and she’d grabbed at it with both hands, took it by the throat.
    Geordie had seen his own chance the day Sam Turner came up to him in that shop doorway and offered him a job, and Geordie had done the same as their mother. He’d taken the chance and everything that’d happened since that day had led to his present position as a husband and a father. It’d meant he had a group of friends he could rely on.
    And the same thing could’ve happened to Ralph. If Ralph could’ve seen that Geordie and Janet and Sam were willing to be there for him. If he could have understood that they weren’t just there to be taken, then he’d’ve had a chance too.
    But instead of those things happening he’d gone and got himself killed. Inside his head Geordie called his brother a stupid bastard. He wanted to go down the morgue and get hold of the body and shake it. Everything could’ve come up roses if Ralph’d only opened his