I knew her. I knew her intimately—but in such a completely different context that it took me a few nanoseconds to retrieve her name.
“Anne?”
Her mouth moved silently. But I could see the shape it made: Oh, Rob.
What was Anne Grainger doing on this side of the Atlantic? Speculations log-jammed in my mind. She’d come to plead secretly with Evan Bone to call off the trolls. Or to write another article about him, that she didn’t want to mention to me. Or—in some way I couldn’t imagine—to take her revenge on him. Whatever it was, to judge by her expression, she wasn’t happy with how it was going.
I took a step towards her. “What on earth are you doing here?”
She gazed at me a moment longer, then spun round and began to move away.
“Anne! Anne!”
I hurried after her. She started to run, looking back every twenty paces or so to see if I was following her. In the dim patchwork of greys and blacks I kept losing her, then seeing her again. At one point, she vanished for more than ten seconds, and I began to think she must have gone inside the building. But then she reappeared, much further away now, heading towards the main gate. I sprinted in pursuit, but she had too big a lead. By the time I reached the entrance myself, there was no sign of her.
The little group of people was still clustered outside the fence. They watched curiously as I leaned panting against the wire mesh. It was a few seconds before I’d recovered my breath enough to look up and ask,
“Did you see where she went?”
A woman edged closer to me. She was broad-shouldered, black-haired, high cheek-boned. In her hand, slanted like a pilgrim’s staff, was a sign that said, Remember Carter Ramirez.
“Who?” she said, in a surly voice. “Who you talking about?”
“A woman. My sort of ageish. Just a minute ago.”
“Where?”
I pointed at the gate. She shook her head, then turned and asked her companions, “Anyone seen somebody go by?”
More head-shaking. A murmur of uh-uhs.
“But she was just here,” I said.
The woman shrugged. I squinted through the fence, searching for movement.
“Where you from?” she said.
“England.”
She grimaced, Thought so, then nodded at the Global Village Building. “You work in there?”
“I’m a journalist. I’m meant to be writing a piece about them.”
She hesitated, then glanced behind her and said, “Hey, guys. Someone give me a leaflet.”
A hand appeared, clutching a sheet of paper. She took it and held it towards me. In the acid glare of the prison-style floodlight by the gate I saw:
Remember Carter Ramirez. Underneath was a photo of a smiling, dark-skinned man with a crooked jaw. And below that: Justice for the Ohlone.
“You heard about Carter Ramirez?” said the woman.
I shook my head.
“Well, take this.”
She rolled it into a cheroot and poked it through the mesh. I pulled it out and rammed it into my pocket.
“You want to know more,” she said, “my cell’s on there.”
“And you are?”
“Corinne Ramirez,” she said, as if the question surprised her. “I’m his daughter.”
I made a final scan of the hinterland beyond the fence. There was still no sign of Anne. No sign of anything, except a few pricks of light in the grey muzz from the houses around the bay.
“OK,” I said.
I raised a hand and headed quickly back towards the car park, before she had a chance to press me further. I was tired and starting to be seriously worried about my own mental state. I didn’t have the time or the energy to be drawn into the case of Carter Ramirez, whoever he might be.
After half a minute or so, I suddenly remembered that my rental car was a black Dodge Charger. It didn’t take me long to find it. I let myself in and sat there, trying to separate out the individual thoughts from the cacophony in my head. Eventually I managed to get them into some kind of coherent order:
I had seen a woman in the car park. She was probably just a petty thief, looking for easy pickings in some Global Village employee’s Mercedes or BMW, but in my semi-deranged condition I had imagined she was Anne Grainger. There was some physical resemblance—and, given that I’d been thinking, only moments before, about the impact of the internet on journalists, it perhaps wasn’t surprising that, in the poor light, my eye had turned her into the journalist I knew who’d been worst affected by it. Then she’d managed to escape, without anyone seeing where she’d gone. That made sense, when you thought about it: if she was a criminal, she must have had plenty of practice making herself scarce.
It added up. Enough, anyway, for me to feel that normal service had been restored, and I was able to distinguish between what was really there and what wasn’t.
Very slowly, I drove back to my motel. I ordered a club sandwich from room service, then took a couple of Valiums and went to bed.
It was just before seven when the phone jerked me out of a deep sleep.
“Yes?”
“Rob?”
I knew that voice. Another intruder from a different world.
“Graham, do you realize what time it is here?”
“Yes, I know, I’m sorry. I left it as long as I dared. I didn’t want you to see the news online. I thought I should tell you in person.”
“What? Have they cancelled my contract or something? Because if they have—”
I could hear him swallowing. “Worse.”
What could my agent have to tell me that was worse than that?
“It’s Anne,” he said. “She’s dead. I’m afraid it looks like suicide.”
2
DEATH COINCIDENCE. That, I discovered, after a quick trawl through the web, is what it’s called. I hadn’t heard of it before—but in the far-off days when these things were thought worthy of serious investigation, the Society for Psychical Research apparently considered it the category of apparition for which there was the strongest evidence. Your brother—as far as you know—is away in India, serving the Raj. One day, out of the blue, you see him in Piccadilly. Next morning there’s a telegram, telling you that—at that precise moment—he was on his deathbed in Rawalpindi.
I’d never had the slightest interest in the paranormal. To me, it had always had an air of depressing seediness. All those specters and visions and disembodied voices spouting platitudes seemed so tawdry and third-rate, so completely lacking in artistic vision—as if the mountebanks peddling them couldn’t even muster the energy to come up with something a bit more original and vivid. Why should they bother? The sad failures they preyed on probably wouldn’t know the difference.
And it wasn’t just vulgar and ugly, but philosophically repellent, too. A paranormal experience was, by definition, unverifiable. X could claim to have seen a ghost on the staircase, and you could stand in exactly the same spot and see nothing, and X could still say, Well, I saw it. It made nonsense of a world in which some things were true and some weren’t, and you could demonstrate the difference. If that wasn’t the