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

green dart of something high on the left side of his chest, some logo.

Nobody out there took any notice of him. No, actually one of the women did, a young one with long hair. She looked round and gazed at him a moment, evidently liking the look of him, but not intruding, passing on and away.

What should I do?

There were a lot of people here. Should I grip the waiter and mutter, Get the police! This seemed unreal and useless. Again, who would believe me?

Besides, I had drugged him. I might have killed him. Was this phantom definitely there, or only an illusion…? But the girl had seen him too. There he was.

Exactly then he glanced up and met my eyes in the bar mirror. (How long had he watched me before I glimpsed him?) He raised his right hand, as he had in the Crescent, a friendly, almost non-committal wave of hello. He didn’t get up.

I took the whisky, put it down again. I turned and came smartly out into the foyer.

Should I now walk past? Surely he would follow. The same if I got into a lift. Did he know my room number? Christ, he’d found me here, why wouldn’t he?

There was another chair facing his, I think he had drawn it over into that position. I went directly to the chair and sat down.

I heard my voice come out cool and flat.

“Well, Sej.”

“Well, Roy,” he said. And smiled.

“I’d better explain at once, hadn’t I? We both got tired of that last guessing game.”

“How you found me here.”

“Exactly. I looked in your books, the most recent publication. This very year. Then I contacted the publisher – Gates. I said I was trying to trace a Mr Roy Phipps. I didn’t use the landline for this, of course. It didn’t seem to work, perhaps because the wire had been ripped out and the receiver smashed. Whoever did that, Roy? You should have got it fixed.”

I said nothing.

He said: “I kept insisting that it was vital I speak to someone about you. I gave your nom de plume – R.P. Phillips. In the end, I reached some guy – Lewis something. Lewis Ryburn, that’s it.”

He had the wrong name. Would that count? I guessed it would not.

“Ryburn said graciously Who is this? I said, Actually I’m Roy’s son. I’ve been trying all night to locate him. I hadn’t been, obviously, I’d been asleep. I do apologise for that, Roy, by the way. Falling asleep so boorishly. I woke up on the floor. I’m afraid I also threw up in your sink. That wine – it must have been off.” Smiling ruefully now he looked at me. “Were you OK?”

I said nothing.

Joseph Traskul Sej went on. “Mr Ryburn was diffident at first. But I explained I’d been expecting you at Old Church Lane and was already there myself, but you hadn’t turned up. I gave the address of course so he would see I knew this important personal detail, was an intimate of yours. Then he became quite concerned. He said he had had a call from you and you’d seemed rather – what was the word he used? – flummoxed. That was it. I said I knew there’d been some family trouble. He said he’d never known you had a family, let alone a son. I said neither had I known I was yours until comparatively recently. But we’d been due to meet and I was worried sick. After a bit more of my ham acting he told me you were here. People do let one down, don’t they, Roy? My God. You ought to tell the bastards to be more careful of their authors, lucky he only told me. It could have been anyone.”

I could just picture Lewis Rybourne, intrigued by the story, (old Roy with a son!) and also delighted to shove me off his plate on to this handy other one.

And a son again. I could hear, mentally, how plausible and winning the demon had made himself sound. Even after his sedated coma and resultant nausea.

And he knew he had been drugged. By me. What else? Who else?

“How are you feeling?” I asked blankly.

Smilingly he said, “I’m fine. You seem surprised.”

“No, I’m not.” This was in fact true. Shocked but not surprised.

He said, “Oh, by the way, I brought your mail,” and lifting his tote-bag off the jazzy carpet he presented me with two business letters and an electricity bill.

I’d forgotten all about post and what it might reveal to him, but he hadn’t slit open any of the envelopes, not even cleverly undone them with steam from a kettle, thereafter resealing them, I knew the tell-tale signs, having experimented with the method for my work in the 1980’s.

Without saying anything I put the letters in my jacket pocket.

“Where shall we go for lunch?” he said.

More or less just like the first time.

“I can’t afford,” I said, “to treat you.”

“Don’t worry. My turn. What’s it like here?”

“Expensive.”

He laughed. “I get the feeling you think I’m penniless.”

Recently I hadn’t. I said, “Are you?”

“No, Roy.”

“Then why try to move into my house?”

“Did I? I thought it was just a visit.”

“You mean you’d have eaten the food, finished the wine, and left?”

“I might have. I do have a place of my own. Up here, London. Not bad though not very cheap. Worse thing is the fucking awful music the rest of them in the building play.” (I didn’t think I’d heard him use a four letter word before.) “I prefer a bit of tuneful jazz – the old kind, Dixie, New Orleans, or Bach or Handel. Do you like Handel, Roy?”

It occurred to me he had somehow heard Handel playing on my radio that night he unloaded the dustbin, noiselessly, in the back garden.

“Sometimes.”

“But in the flats they play rubbish. It gets on my nerves.”

Across the foyer, through the glass doors, the slender-pillared dining-room was revving up for custom. The Americans had already gone across.

“What do you think?” he