To Indigo, Tanith Lee [best ereader for comics .TXT] 📗

But my bar bills normally amount only to a glass or two of wine and perhaps a whisky; I’m so far able to pay them myself.

They remembered me at reception. I’d been lucky, for at this time of year usually they’re full up.

“Two nights, Mr Phipps?”

“It may be three. I’m not sure at present.”

The smiling girl said she’d make a note, but regretfully cautioned me she might have to move me to another room for the third night.

It was about nine forty-five by the foyer clock. My watch said ten to ten.

When I got upstairs to the small alien luxury of the en suite room, smelling of floral cleaning fluids and regularly hoovered dust, I sat down on the bed and let everything hit me like a collapsing wall.

To my appalled distaste I even cried for a moment. But that passed. Then I took out the whisky I had also put in my bag and had a couple of swigs. I’d done what I must. I’d escaped. Now there was time to think. And think I would bloody have to.

EIGHT

“Janette. I apologise for calling so early.”

“Eight o’clock? That’s nothing for me, Roy, I can assure you. I’m up with the lark. What is it you want?”

Though rather a good-looking woman, she has an ugly, unmusical voice, Janette, which its university-trained accent only emphasised.

“Would it be possible to put me in touch with Harris?”

“’Fraid not, Roy. Didn’t you know, his father died? He’s had to go over there, and I gather there are some complications.”

“Yes, he did tell me something about it.”

“Veronica,” said Janette. “The widow.”

“Yes, so I…”

“I really cannot comprehend,” expatiated Janette, “how a young woman with so much money of her own can behave in such a peculiar way.”

“It must be difficult. But I’m afraid – I have a bit of an emergency on my hands. Or I wouldn’t be troubling you.”

“Oh, yes.” The ugly over-polished voice was now non-committal. It said quite plainly without words, It’s no use at all your telling me or asking me anything. I am not going to respond.

I took a deep breath and said, “My life may be in danger.”

“Good Lord!” She actually laughed. But I had heard and seen her erupt into this type of laughter once before. On that occasion someone at a dinner party had just spoken of finding her dog dead behind a hedge. But while I had, that time, stared at Janette, the friend with the deceased dog had also loudly laughed. “Poor old hound,” had laughed Janette. Would she now say something similar to me? No, it transpired not. “Are you ill?” she snapped with what seemed a kind of anger.

“No. It’s nothing like that. I’m being – stalked.”

“Stalked!” She almost hooted now. “You? Roy? Seriously? Who by for heaven’s sake?”

Before I had called this time I had known any chance of help was slender. Even Harris would probably prove useless. But I had made a mental list of avenues to try and this was the first.

“Please listen, Janette.”

“You sound like a schoolteacher, Roy. Do rein it in.”

“I’m sorry. But when you speak to Harris – I assume you do speak to him now and then in Spain? – would you please ask him if he could call me, if at all possible. I’m staying at The Belmont in Prince Henry Court.”

“You want him to call you in London? From Spain? Oh really, Roy.”

“I stress I wouldn’t bother him unless…”

“All right. There. I’ve noted it down.” She read back to me the alleged note in a tone that managed to be both scornfully amused and irritatedly impatient: “Roy – serious emergency – call at Belmont Hotel. There you are.”

I thanked her wanting to throttle her, and put down the phone.

Tish Ackrington, my most recent editor with the White Knife Imprint, took my call immediately.

“Hello there, Roy. Your book’s doing awfully well! Really great reviews. Did we send you any? Oh dear, that’s too bad. I’ll get someone to. What are you up to now? Anything on your little screen we might be interested in?”

Tish was always like this. She seemed to want to cheer you up, promising things, exaggerating. I had been fooled at first, but after the initial contract nothing else ever materialised. I had once tested her with the name of an invented novel White Knife had supposedly already published, which of course they couldn’t have. And she had acquiesced gleefully, “Super book! Stayed up all night with that one, couldn’t put it down.” However. At one of those aforementioned parties, this one organised by WKI, I had heard something about her which might now prove useful.

“The thing is, Tish, I’m doing some research in a certain area and I can’t get hold of what I need.”

“Oh, that’s so tiresome for a writer, isn’t it?”

“It’s holding the book up rather. It’s for quite a big house…” I named the firm, who were only less likely ever to publish anything of mine than to jump collectively from the top windows of their tall chrome building overlooking Hyde Park.

“Wow,” said Tish, suitably impressed. “But can’t they help you with this research, Roy?”

“Wouldn’t you know it, my editor there is on holiday in Egypt for six weeks.”

“Oh God. Well, Roy, if there’s anything…”

“It’s just that I do once recall your mentioning you had a friend, who knew someone who was a little bit on the shady side of the law.”

A shocked silence. Naturally Tish had never confided this to me of all people. But she had confided it to someone, as it had been discussed as a fact by two or three fairly sober employees at the party. I could hear her now running a scanner over her memory, trying to find out how or why she had ever let slip such a matter to me.

Finally she said, in rather a different way, “Well actually, Roy, my friend – she doesn’t see him now. He was rather – well, rather kinky, if you know