Shooting in the Dark

noir slang, so he sounded like a gangster in a Bogart film. Sam liked having him around. ‘You don’t think they’re paranoid?’ Celia asked.
    Sam shook his head. ‘I don’t believe in paranoia.’
    ‘Another medical fact goes out of the window.’
    He smiled. ‘Oh, people get frightened, start twitching. Doctors call it paranoia, like it’s something inside you. But when you feel like that, you’re just sensing the uneasiness that everybody else takes for granted.’
    Celia walked back to her computer, moved the mouse to clear the screen-saver.
    Sam said, ‘D’you notice any kind of smell in here this morning?’
    Celia sniffed at the air. ‘Can’t say I do. No.’
    ‘I mean me,’ he said. ‘Can you smell anything different about me?’
    She took a step towards him, her nostrils flaring. ‘No, Sam. Are you feeling all right?’
    ‘Yeah. It was the blind woman. I got the feeling she might’ve got a whiff of something.’
    ‘Maybe she did. They say that if you’re down one sense, the others come in to compensate. If that’s true, she can probably smell things a mile away you wouldn’t even notice.’
    ‘Think I’ll just pop out for a new toothbrush,’ he said, shaking his head.
     

2
     
    JD watched himself in the mirror over the bathroom sink. He wore glasses with heavy frames, the arms of which disappeared into a thick growth of wiry beard and hair. He was forty years old and wore a threadbare suit which he’d recently had cleaned and re-textured. Under the suit he had a sky-blue shirt which he’d washed and ironed. He glanced down at his sixteen-hole DMs, black and buffed to a high shine.
    He shook his head and the image in the mirror joined in. He’d scrubbed himself clean this morning, as he did every morning. There was nothing wrong with his clothes, except the suit was hurtling back towards limp. You know you’re OK, you’re a guy who cares about his appearance, takes pains with it. And yet there’s this other thing in the mirror that always looks like a scruff. It was as if they were twins, identical twins, except one of them had a flaw.
    JD thought maybe he should get a mirror like they have in the chain-store changing rooms. Mirrors back-lit with a series of filters to make you look bright-eyed and bursting with health. You look at yourself trying on a new sweater, and you never looked better in your life. You could leave the sweater behind and go back to looking like shit, or you could give the sales assistant your last hundred quid. Even while you reach for your wallet you know you’ve been conned.
    He knotted a string tie around his neck and pulled his fingers through his hair.
    His mobile rang and he plucked it from the bathroom chair, hit the talk button.
    ‘JD Pears.’
    ‘JD? It’s Celia.’
    ‘Yeah. How you doing?’
    ‘I’m fine. Listen, Sam was wondering if you could spare us some time.’
    ‘I’m on the brink of a new novel. I suppose I could put it off a few more days. What’d I have to do?’
    ‘Mainly surveillance, but you’ll have to talk to Sam. We’ve got a blind woman and her sister who think they’re being watched.’
    ‘Watched? Followed? So I’ve got to watch them as well, see if I can find out who else is watching them?’
    Celia laughed. ‘Something like that. Can you come in to the office?’
    ‘Pronto, my dear. Soon as I get myself together.’
    He put the mobile down and looked at the messy guy in the mirror. He took his glasses off and the image took a step back into a mass of pixels. Looked better for it, too. Must tell Celia that we don’t use the word ‘blind’ any more. Some people are ‘partially sighted’ these days.
    JD closed his eyes, and the scruff disappeared altogether. Must be weird to be completely blind. He concentrated on keeping his eyes closed for a couple of minutes. Listened for sounds inside and outside the building, the sounds made by his own body. Felt the lip of the wash basin, the subtle texture of the porcelain, the low temperature it maintained. He ran the cold tap and scooped up water, drank from the palm of his hand. A few drops went into his beard, found their way to his cheeks and chin.
    When he was younger, still at home with his brothers, they had argued about which sense they would rather lose. ‘Would you rather be deaf or blind?’ Jack would say. ‘Come on, you have to choose.’ JD had always thought deafness would be worse than blindness, but he wasn’t sure any more. The novel he was