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

anyone try to gauge them. Then add a criminal crony or two…

Nick can envisage it. “Bugger took my stationery. I was only gone a couple of hours. I know it’s him.”

“Yeah, right out of order, mate. Leave it to me and Ginger.”

Will this retrieval be the end of it though? So far only the stolen goods have been made off with. (His own notebooks remain.) A just antagonist? Improbable. Number 14 must be off his head as well, or why bother? He lost a computer, he said, and Nick had not had that. Thank God.

Nick circles the phone, but who is he going to call - Ghost Busters?

Then he thinks of Pond. The police generally are out of the question, but Pond - is he with the police, Mr Pond? – whatever he is, seems to be a type of freelance. And after all, he has already associated himself with Nick, via Angela.

Nick sits by the table, pulls the phone forward and types out on it Angela’s number.

After a few shrills a young female voice answers.

“I’d like to speak to Angela, please.”

“I’m afraid that isn’t possible. Whom may I say has called?”

Nick tells the voice, which repeats his name, and then there is a horrible cacophony. It sounds as if something huge and heavy, perhaps on wheels and out of control, has collided with the girl who answered the phone. There comes a sort of thud, almost the sound of blows - except they cannot be blows, can they? - and a thin wild shriek, more like the cry of a mouse than anything human.

Next the older coarser voice of Angela, Laurence’s wife, tumbles into his ear.

She had sounded mad to Nick before. Now she sounds homicidal.

Angela is screaming at him at full volume, as if he is across a vast mountain gulf, and only by this means can he be made to hear.

“You cunt, Nick! Why are you calling me? You fucking heartless little cunt!”

He holds the phone away from him, feeling bemused and offended in the most silly of ways. But in fact terrified, not by her frenzy, but by the stone age quality of this ultimate disintegration. Her howls before belonged in an X-rated movie from the past. But this seems to find its métier in some arcane ritual of sacrificial rending, in a time when even Ancient Rome was only a gleam in the eye of the future.

“Angela, I…” he attempts.

But her voice roars in again, the primordial sea, female and raging, not to be denied.

“He’s dead - he’s dead…”(So like that other time, that time with Reenie, in Edinburgh, the cold stone floor under his feet, the winter clasping the small grey house, and Claudia lying miles off “dead, dead, died, dead.”) The rest of the torrent is now beating by him, the tidal wave rushing inland. “They found him. It is Laurence. I’ve seen. So - unspeakable… It’s Laurence, it’s Laurence, he’s dead…”

Somehow behind the tidal wave, Nick can just make out other voices calling, and then abruptly a deep male voice, no one Nick knows, or thinks he knows, “Angela, come on, now. Let me… That’s right…” And the phone falls with a crash. Nick looks at his phone, still there in his hand, with the crash of the other phone still echoing in it. He is about to cut the signal when the deep-voiced man speaks to him through it instead. “Is that Nicolas Lewis?”

Nick speaks too. “Yes.”

“Nicolas, you’re Laurence’s brother, am I correct?”

“Yes. Laurence’s brother.”

“I’m very sorry you had to hear, like that. I am Angela’s doctor - Dr Telby. I’m afraid it’s true. We went to the police station about an hour ago. It is Laurence, I’m afraid. There’s no doubt, despite the length of time, and the - activity, shall I say. There will have to be an inquest, naturally.”

Nick’s ears seem to be glazing over, the way that only eyes are supposed to do.

He is neither alarmed nor mortified to hear that Laurence is, in fact, dead. Nick feels nothing. He had believed Laurence would turn up, and part of Nick, it seems, still does believe that. Except that Laurence has turned up, demonstrably, and his condition is not that of the living.

Dr Telby stops talking. Nick says, “There was a man -a man called Pond.”

No doubt the doctor is accustomed to the random bad manners of shock.

He replies mildly, “Oh yes. Some sort of private investigator Angela hired. I don’t know much about him. I’m afraid she went to him because she felt the police were being rather complacent.”

Nick knows his request is inappropriate, and in stinking taste. He should, he supposes, be yowling like a male version of Angela. But he says, humbly, “Could you see if his number is there anywhere? I know this isn’t the time, but it’s - rather urgent.”

9

The TV carries it on the lunchtime news. By 5 p.m. the radio has it. Of course, Laurence had taken part in programmes sponsored by both. The circumstances of Laurence’s death remain vague. But it transpired his body had been found in Richmond Park; neither Angela nor Dr Telby had told Nick this.

However Telby’s curious choice of word - ‘activity’ - may now be explained. If Laurence had been found in a park, maybe the cold would have preserved him slightly, but also animals might have nibbled the body. How long had it all been? About twelve days… But then, why assume Laurence had died that same night he called on Nick? True, he had failed to go home to Angela, but it seemed he had not intended to, telling her earlier he was ‘making a night of it’ with his brother. She had even angrily anticipated Laurence would be gone longer, and so had not even called Nick to rant at him until the evening of that first Monday.

Nick has left a message on what Telby had assured him was Pond’s mobile number.

But Pond does not return the call,