Ivoria, Tanith Lee [popular ebook readers .TXT] 📗

and their mothers, like sons, often, and their fathers. They might discount them, hate them. But death - death could change everything.

They had all come out of Claudia’s womb, like little attractive maggots from the perfect apple of her inside.

Claudia was clean as light. She had never been ill. Never had anything wrong. Clear as crystal. She was fifty-three.

“What are you talking about?” he thought he said. Maybe he had not said that.

But Serena told him.

She had stopped screaming and could barely speak for tears.

“It was so sudden, Nicky. No one expected it. They said they think it’s a kind of stroke - some sort of blood-clot hitting the brain…”

“What?” he whispered.

What hitting what? Whose brain? Who was Serena talking about?

“She wouldn’t have felt it. She just - fell. There was a party. Samson was there, and - Oh God, I can’t think - Dad’s in Limoges. I was - I was just bringing some limes and lemons for the drinks - bloody Roo forgot…” (oh yes, Mrs Rush had still been with them) “and Laurence - I forget where Laurence - Laurence isn’t - only Claudia was standing there with someone - I can’t remember who - and she just turned, and frowned as if the sun was in her eyes, only it wasn’t, we were indoors - and then she just fell down. Just - she just - and then Samson and everyone, we all just stood there, and then - somebody - who was it - went over and lifted her head and then…”

Nick put his phone very carefully on the floor. He thought, distinctly It’s another of their jokes. It’s a trick. I’m not going to fall for it this time. And then, like Serena’s, his memory became and remains a blank. He can never now recall anything else until he was on the train returning to London, and the countryside gushing by under the gin-coloured sky and the slice of lemon sun.

7

As a rule Nick cleans the flat on alternate weekends. He is thorough but uninvolved; it neither interests nor bores him. He just prefers the place to be clean. But also it takes him less than two hours. There is slight clutter, and only the bathroom and bedroom carpets to hoover, and the special purring thing to run over the wooden floor about once a month. Even the kitchen asks little. He seldom cooks.

When he has finished the bathroom Nick opens the bathroom store cabinet to gauge supplies. A stack of four individual soap boxes remain, with a single soap out of its box on top. He puts the soap by the bath, then thinks to check the top box, which may be empty. It is not, none of them are. In fact the box the loose soap had occupied has been compressed almost but not quite flat, then wedged behind the others. He removes it and opens it out, and sees that something small, and closed in a Kleenex, lies inside.

Nick knows he has not emptied this box, put anything in it, hidden it.

He shakes the wrapped object free.

It lies there on the undone tissue, in his palm. It is a little tapering stick with one pointed end. On the other end, at the top of the stick, is a miniature face with a sort of bunching halo rising above it. In colour the object is a murky greenish brown.

Nick carries it into the main room, and picks up a magnifying glass he has, probably, hardly used before, and looks at the stick through it.

He has already had a strong theory about what it is.

The magnification confirms this. A pin, maybe bronze, decorated with a woman’s head with a severe face, and a classical, complex, ridiculous hairstyle. It is almost certainly Roman, and so nearly two thousand years old.

After a minute Nick sits down.

Could this be a fake? There is no way at all Nick, not an expert, can know. The nearest he has ever got to any of the things unearthed during Laurence’s digs, has been to see them in photographs forced on him by others.

Now, however, Laurence has definitely left the Roman bronze pin, (if so it is) here in Nick’s flat. Why? Another trick? Again, why?

Nick puts the pin down, still in the protective tissue, on the table.

He thinks of something. He is after all a writer.

Laurence’s reason for calling here last Friday had been curiously shallow, frankly unconvincing. When had the wonderful and dynamic and self-admiring Laurence ever needed to seek Nick’s advice, or required Nick’s listening ear? No, the desirable female TV producer and all her works were either invented, or merely used as an excuse to visit the flat. Admittedly Laurence had, now and then, foisted himself on Nick here, but there had always been some more solid reason - for example, Laurence had once, after a delayed payment from a publisher, requested a ‘small loan’. Which Nick had given him. (It was, naturally, not so small and never repaid, nor had Nick thought it would be.)

This time then Laurence had wanted to enter the flat, and had subsequently gone into the bathroom, in order to conceal the Roman cloak-pin, or whatever it was. Predictably he would have intended to retrieve it - preferably before Nick discovered it was there. That must mean Laurence had some other bolt-hole - or person - where or with whom he could ultimately leave or hide the pin more thoroughly. Which might indicate Laurence anticipated someone else might, in the interim, come looking for the pin, and even in the house he shared with Angela in South Kensington.

Period of danger over, Laurence would have returned to Nick’s flat on some other pretext, and retrieved his trophy.

And the pretext had been furnished, had it not? Laurence had taken the ivory counter, in order to ‘turn anything up on it’, and reassure poor jittery superstitious Nick. Laurence must have been planning then to call round again, with some (invented -