To Indigo

by Tanith Lee

  A sort of flicker went over George’s face. He seemed caught between a wish to get all the gossip, and a wish to be rid of me.

  I granted the second one.

  “Anyway. I should be back in four or five days, a week at most. I can’t keep running up there to hold Matt’s hand, can I? Take care. Best to Vita.”

  I turned and he cleared his throat.

  The outrageousness of his next question, one which I not only had to answer, but to lie about, nearly stunned me. “How,” he demanded angrily, “did you like her cake?”

  Much later, I did consider that my semi-detached house, when it caught alight, possibly even with a small explosion, might endanger George and Vita. The brief mental sketch I’d made still inclined me to think the fire would be smelled if not heard, seen even – smoke billowing – early on. Even drugged by whisky and whatever else, Vita would wake up, her hearing wasn’t bad. Failing that neighbours or the fire brigade would alert them.

  But to be quite honest, I didn’t care.

  I didn’t give a damn.

  Long ago, before modern forensic techniques, and also given the inattention to detail only displaced now and then by a real life detective of the type of Sherlock Holmes, I could have got away with it much more easily.

  Finding Roy Phipps’ house burned down and a burned male corpse inside it, very likely said corpse would have been taken for Roy Phipps.

  Not now, of course. By no means.

  They would learn if not who, then who he was not, inside a few days at most. And despite the ruse I’d set up and the care I’d taken, any police force not completely composed of morons would instigate a search for me.

  I had decided to make for France, via the popularly-named Chunnel.

  To access the train times of Eurostar would have taken too long tonight. I’d opted to catch the last Ashford train from Charing Cross. There were a couple of hotels in Ashford. I’d pick up the Chunnel train tomorrow as early as was practicable.

  My French was adequate. Besides, two years before, when I went over there on some business junket with Gates, (signing books and so on for an affiliate French company known as Lisez-moi!), I’d found even the Parisians, notorious for their hauteur, had come to speak English, many of them. Maybe only in order to disgrace us by talking in our language more elegantly.

  The train going in to Charing Cross was almost empty. It was by then about eleven.

  I sat in the carriage with one of my bags squeezed into the uselessly narrow rack overhead, the other bulkier one on the next seat.

  The thick yellow light was both somnolent and unrestful.

  For the very first, finally, I began to feel a hollow terror at what I’d done. But it was far off. For now at least I could ignore it. I took out the miniature of whisky I’d bought en route, and downed a gulp.

  The train presently made its pneumatic hissing sound and we stopped. I don’t recall the station, although at the time I noted it. The couple of people already sitting back along the carriage got out, and someone else got in. I heard him give a sigh. And then he walked up towards the front of the carriage. I smelled an exclusive male fragrance I had met before, and quite recently. I couldn’t think where. Then his shadow crossed over me and I found I looked up quickly and in alarm.

  There was nothing in my head. I had no forecast image of a policeman, plain clothes or otherwise. Nor of Sej. Sej, I knew, was in no position now to have caught this train with me.

  “Mr Phillips,” said Cart, and sat down facing me in the dark yellow light.

  My first, and probably not utterly inane thought, was that the credit card company had refused to pay out on my ‘deliveries’ from him. I hadn’t checked my current credit, thought I’d paid a lot off the last card bill. (I’d not yet received the one which would show me what name Cart’s outfit traded under).

  I stared at Cart. He wore a dark raincoat.

  “Now,” he said, “Mr Phillips, you seem dismayed. Please. You have been an ideal customer. That’s the only reason I now seek you out.”

  “What for?” I said. I had felt very sick, but after a second this went off.

  “It is about the unusual apartment your dangerous young friend was in, at Saracen Road.”

  I didn’t know what I could say, or what I needed to say. I said, “How did you know which train…?”

  “Oh, you were followed, Mr Phillips, like before. I have received the text at the proper moment, and come at once to board the train too. Aren’t you curious,” he went on, smiling a little, “to know what is my interest in the apartment of Mr Sej?”

  In the false light his thick blue-black hair, eyebrows, lashes and moustache seemed made from some lush material that couldn’t, any of it, be hair. He looked manufactured.

  Unzipping the pocket in my bag, I took out the whisky and had another swig.

  “Ah, a whisky man,” said Cart, all approval. “So I am, Mr Phillips. The purest alcohol there is. Vodka is poison, and wine – the dregs of vinegars. But a fine malt may not be rivalled.”

  I felt bleak. I was afraid. “Tell me about the apartment.”

  “Very well, of course. Our good friend Mr C has discovered something of great importance about it. This we felt you should learn also, as it may be to mutual profit.”

  His English, which had been fairly sustained before, tonight seemed a bit less sound. How I noticed this I’m not sure. But it can happen. As when going blind, other senses compensate, the faculty of logic enters some other area when shut out of the main stream by fear. In the same way, apparently, condemned criminals can often describe in minute detail a pebble or a drop of dew, glimpsed on their way to the gallows.

  “All right,” I said. I put the whisky back in the zippered pocket, although I needed to take more. There wasn’t much left by now.

  “It seems there is another door into the flat. Mr C was concerned that some heavy furniture, a piano and so forth, were in the loft, and only an outdoor ladder to be going up.”

  I too had thought of that, had I not?

  “And so?” I said. My voice didn’t sound shaky. Even my hands had been steady on the whisky. The shakes were all inside.

  “Well, Mr C has cleverly located the other door to the apartment. In light of this, perhaps you would like to go back there? I mean, accompanied of course. And free of all charge. It seems he – your enemy-friend – is elsewhere.” (I almost blurted something when he said this. But I didn’t). “Perhaps we might go there tonight. As you are already on your way up to London.”

  “I have a business meeting.”

  “Do you? So late.” Silky, he looked at me. It was a flirtatious look, which said, Oh come now, I know you have nothing of the sort. “Just an hour from your urgent schedule. He pronounced this skedule, as Americans do.

  I thought, This is some form of so-far unfathomable blackmail. I’d better agree. I can delay the journey, start early tomorrow from Waterloo… pray no one is looking for me right there… If I offend him, refuse, God knows.

  We’d stopped at two or three stations meanwhile, and gone on. I hadn’t noted them. We might have been in a foreign country, not France: somewhere I couldn’t begin to decipher the signs. Hell, perhaps.

  “OK,” I said. “If you want.”

  “It will, I am sure, be mutually helpful.”

  In the window’s black night glass, our shades sat in the amber of the light. I didn’t look afraid, I saw. But then, I didn’t look quite like me either.

  He said, “That’s good, you see. Now we are coming into Waterloo.”

  What was striking was the silence of the flats. I’d been expecting blasts of bad music, even though now it was almost midnight.

  A few dim lights were on in various rooms. Everything however, the terrace, the street, the surrounding city, seemed still and relatively silent. Among the shrubs and trees of the park, old rain glittered, catching streetlamps which, here, had stayed shell white.

  Cart had brought us here by cab. He himself had paid for
this. Now he produced a key to the main door.

  I’d anticipated keys, for no doubt the talented Mr C would have managed that.

  The door undone, and discreetly shut behind us, we walked up the flights of stairs, I carrying my two bags.

  Reaching the landing where flat 5 showed its door in total noiselessness, Cart, surprising me if I were yet capable of surprise, knocked lightly on the wood.

  After a moment the door to flat 5 was opened.

  A big man, overweight and ruddy, with thick greying hair, looked out at us. He wore a dark blue T-shirt with two lines of script which read: Tell me how long you’ve been a swan.

  Cart laughed. “Hi, Leo.”

  “Hi, Cart.”

  “This is our Mr Phillips.”

  “Hi, Roy, good to meet you,” said Leo who wanted to know about swans. “Come in. Liberty hall here.” He had a London accent and clear diction. He knew my first name.

  I went first, because Leo stood aside and Cart waited for me. As soon as I was in the flat’s hall I got myself in over the threshold of the larger space of a big room. The layout was not dissimilar to No 6 above, the empty flat that lay below the roof apartment.

  But Leo had furnished this one, and the hall too, what I’d seen, in an uncluttered, comfortable style. He had the things one expects people to have who live in the Western world – carpet, couch and chairs, TV and obviously powerful music centre, even shelves with books, and a fruit bowl with oranges and plums and a bottle of diet Coke standing on a table. “Like a drop of the hard stuff, boys?” asked Leo.

  “Sure,” said Cart.

  “Roy?” politely asked Leo.

  I didn’t speak, and Cart said, as if proud of me, “He is a whisky man.”

  “Great. So’m I. Best drink you can get. I’ll break out the new Scottish malt.” To me he added, “Just dump your gear anywhere.” He meant my bags. Tired by now of holding them, perhaps wanting my hands free, I let the bags go. And he went into the kitchen, which here was through a door, and had white and pine units and clean-looking lino on the floor. He returned with an unopened bottle.

  “See this, Roy,” he said, showing me the label.

  It was highly prestigious. I’d heard of but never tasted it in my life. So far as I’d known, you couldn’t even buy it, over the border.

  “I am of the Clan McCallum,” said Leo. “Friends in the Highlands.” And suddenly in broadest Scottish, “Ye’ll no be averse t’a wee dram?”

  Cart laughed again. “To listen to him, we must think he is truthful. In fact he’s no more Scots blood than I.”

  “Huish,” said Leo sternly. He had got the bottle open and produced three clean glasses from a place on the bookcase among paperbacks and volumes with old black covers.

  When he handed each of us a filled glass, Cart said solemnly, “One moment, Mr Phillips – see, I drink. Now, you take this glass, I yours.” And handed me the glass he had sipped from twice.

  That was when I knew.

  I knew it as the tidal wave is known, rushing in. Without syntax, without hope.

  Leo called the toast. To me it sounded as if he cried “Hrarnaschy!”

  And we drank. Bottoms up.

  It was a good, a beautiful whisky. If I could have tasted it.

  It was about twenty minutes later that Leo let us all, (me holding the bags again, refusing his offer to carry one), through the door at the end of the corridor in flat 5, the area that, above, was occupied by the small spare room. The stair was quite wide, with sturdy shallow steps. It would have been a challenge to get a piano, or the heavy couches up, but it should have been possible, and demonstrably, had been.

  At the top Cart knocked once more on another white door.

  The woman who flung the door dramatically open was known to me, but I had been waiting – if not for her – for one of them.

  She wore a dark blue dress that looked like satin, pinned with a blinding brooch on one shoulder, feasibly diamonds. Her hair was done differently. Now, smiling and glamorous, not in tears or beside a bundle of bloodied shirt and dead dog, she seemed the perfect hostess.

  “Hello, darlings. Come in, come in.”

  Leo opened a bottle of Dom Perignon. Marga told us, reassuringly, there were ten more of these in the other larger fridge (This was the one on the landing outside the upper door into the attic). She added there was a roast of lamb in the oven.

  The smell was appetizing and corroborated the statement. In the kitchen area potatoes waited and a transparent bowl of green salad. But she also handed round plates of crisps and nuts and cocktail sausages.

  I was seated on one of the green and blue couches, the bags at my feet.

  Cart sat on another couch with Leo, and Marga in a deep dark green armchair.

  Bach was playing softly on the stereo.

  Cart had remarked, “Better than that shit you play, Leo.”

  And Leo said, “Either you like it or you don’t.”

  “Are you all right, Roy?” asked Marga in a little while. “Shall we start to explain now? Please, I know this isn’t simple. We’ve all been through it. Haven’t we, guys?”

  “You betcha,” said Leo.

  “Mmm,” said Cart, and drank a little champagne. He had removed his coat, which was also blue.

  Marga lifted her glass, a flute I hadn’t spotted here before. We all had one. “To Roy Phipps, aka R.P. Phillips.”

  They drank to my health. I didn’t.

  I put down my glass on the polished coffee table.

  “Tell me,” I said. “When does Sej arrive?”

  “Oh, Roy,” painfully said Marga. She put her hand to her mouth. But this time she didn’t cry.

  Leo said, “Look, Roy, he’s in the hospital.”

  “Really. But he always gets over that,” I said. I felt as if I had been frozen inside old ice. I was miles off. But also, here.

  Leo looked round at me. “Roy, feller, you did a very good job. The last text I got from Liss, Sej may be going into theatre for an op. You seem to have fractured his skull, Roy. Didn’t you know?”

  I sat there.

  I sat there.

  “But you could be lying,” I said. Or the thing which spoke for me said it.

  Leo said, “Only I’m not. Hey, Roy. It’s OK. He knows – we all know. It can happen. You play this game, you put your life, and anything else worth anything, on the line. If the bus goes o’er ye, ye’ve none ta blame than yoursel’.”

  “And he would never blame you,” said Marga. “None of us would.”

  Like a stone I said, “What happened to the house?”

  “C and Liss and Sid put the fire out. Hadn’t gone far. You’ll need some new carpet, though. Then they got him off to the hospital. Apparently,” said Leo, “some old guy next door called down out of the upper window, what was going on? C said they were friends of Sej’s. He needed looking after. The old guy said he wasn’t sure, he thought he ought to call the cops.”

  “And so Sid said,” helpfully interposed Marga, “that was maybe the best thing. If the old man would be kind enough to give the police all the details when they came, in about an hour or so. But meanwhile they needed to look after Sej. They’d be at so-and-so. Obviously that wasn’t where they went.”

  “No,” I said.

  Marga said, “Leo, Cart, should you tell Roy how C and Sid and Liss knew what was going on?”

  “They were watching the house,” said Leo. “I mean, he’d said, this was almost certainly the night,”

  “The night,” I said.

  “The night you got there.”

  “Where?”

  “Where we go.”

  I thought, Can I get out of this room? Is it still conceivable I can get away?

  She, Marga, said quietly, “Roy, this is the hardest bit. Trust me. Hang on. It gets so much better.”

  The door into the attic, seen from inside the attic, was painted dark blue. A faint tang of new paint clung to it, barely discernable in the aroma of cleanliness,
polish, and roasting lamb. A panel in the pale green plasterboard had been pulled back to reveal it and give access. Normally this panel would close flush to the wall. And a bookcase stood there, or had done previously, now moved on up the room by about five feet. I would never have noticed this panel, as it had been. But someone like C – Mr C – must have done so. He hadn’t needed to find it, however, had he? Evidently he’d already known of its existence, as he knew about everything else in the flats, both below and up here. He had probably stayed here, now and then. They might all have done, all this gang – this team of mad people who were the accomplices and friends, perhaps the lovers of Joseph Traskul. Should more than one person stay at a time, there would be little privacy for them here, of course. If you slept here you would then sleep, if not in the same bed at least in the same room. And there had been two wash basins in the bathroom, a shower and a bath. Imaginably other things could be seen to in pairs, or groups.

  They had no secrets from each other, that was no physical secrets.

  And the way they spoke about him, it was familiar in the truest sense. It was familial. They were his family. Siblings, incestuous or not, brothers and sisters.

  They told me things in segments, listening to any questions I asked with grave attentive faces, answering gravely, yet sometimes laughing too, appreciating, they said, my clever gambit with the sleeping tablets and Duran’s new locks, (which C and Sid hadn’t, even so, found particularly difficult to undermine. I’d kindly turned the alarm off for them, too. They were also amused by that. C could have neutralised it in moments anyway, they reassured me. He had been a policeman, did I know?) They congratulated me too on my last tactic, presumably the meal or they had heard the piano from outside, that which had so lulled Sej and resulted in his fractured skull. How did they square this with their demonstrated liking for, admiration of, love of him?

  “Roy,” said Marga, “we know what it cost you. We’ve all been there,” she said, “I told you that.”

  “You mean,” I said, “are you saying – he’s done to all of you the sort of things he did to me? He drove you so far towards insanity that you attacked him, meant to kill him? Is that what you’re saying?”