An Individual Will Read online

  *

  Adrian’s Den, declared the plate on the door. Something of a misnomer that. Not so much a den as a well-appointed hotel room. Typical of a modern teenager’s bedroom, I supposed, in that there was little need to leave it, though this one was a little on the plush side. A double-bed, a flat screen television. No hi-fi, but a set of speakers attached to the laptop. Modern music collections tend to be computer-based, much to the chagrin of the phonographic industry. A pair of headphones adorned a Styrofoam model of the human head, which also sported a pair of mirror sunglasses. I lifted the lid on the laptop and pushed the on button. I wanted to check something of which I was already fairly certain: that is, that Adrian Mansfield had private access to the internet. When the Windows operating system had finished loading – and it lacked the situation’s sense of urgency – I opened the browser and accessed the BBC. The computer was, indeed, online.

  We would want the computer, just as we would his mobile phone, which hadn’t been found on his body. There was, I supposed, always the possibility, surely a very remote one, that he didn’t have a mobile phone – one can text from a computer – but it would make him a very unusual young man; young people tend to be tediously interested in social networking, and its technological appurtenances.

  Alan had made his phone-call; to someone called Martha. He wanted her to come round. “Something terrible’s happened.” Well, yes. I wondered how I might have put it in his place. What was it, though, about how he had put it that bothered me so much? The formality, I think. “Martha? Martha, something terrible’s happened. Can you you come round? My wife...” Martha probably said something like, “Of course, Alan. Don’t worry. I’m on my way.” Martha understood. Martha was something like a brick. Martha had always been there. History. Of course, there was always history, and yet... what? A whiff of misfortune revisited. Martha had always needed to be there – that was her principle role in the Mansfields’ drama. So – she was coming round. Of course she was. Straight away, no doubt.