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

It is a coarse, cruel voice, the ungrammaticality and impoliteness all fused with a sort of malign belligerence. No timidity here. No real caution. Nick guesses that, if she had not opened the door previously, it had not been due to fear. More perhaps to some kind of mentally-limited little spiteful amusement at keeping him out. He can imagine she would say “‘S my door, ain’t it? Sod’ im. He ain’t got no right just to be let see me.”

What in fact Mrs Franks says as she snaps free the chain from across the door is, “You’re not coming in, you hear? Neither of you couple.”

The chain, strong or fragile as it might appear, has seemed less to ensure her safety than hold her back from them, like a leopard.

Now there she stands at large, her head lowered, eyes burning, staring and glaring. Overtly dangerous.

Jonquil Franks is a small woman, less than five feet tall Nick believes, and thin as wire. Like some thinner older women she is immensely wrinkled, yet her terrible and ravaged face has a great savage beauty. Her bones are classical, her nose aquiline, almost hooked; her jaw is clean of any sag, only the strings in her skinny neck to mar its angle. Her burning eyes look unnaturally huge, and have been carefully drawn around with black. Her creased lips are blazoned red. No concession, no quarter. Despite this her hair is allowed to grey in fierce silver stripes all through its fading black mane.

Behind her every other door that leads off the dully lighted inner hall is firmly shut. He and Pond are not to be allowed to look into any other room.

Nick has realised, aided in part by her physical appearance and method, that her cockney accent is augmented by another from somewhere doubtless much farther south and east.

“Mrs Franks,” says Pond, equably, “as my note to you explained…”

“Your note explain nothing. What you want to do? Borrow off of her?”

“The reverse, Mrs Franks. Quite the other way round.”

Nick feels, given his ‘role’, he should speak. He says, rather woodenly, no actor at all in the end, “It was Kit - Kitty - who lent me…”

But Mrs Franks the leopard does not wait.

She leaps in over his words, stands on their corpses.

“Get on! Y’couple. You one of her men, eh? Eh?” (This to Nick.) “Dumped you, has she? She always dumps ‘em. They’re alluz coming round ’ere. Angry some of ’em. You angry? Eh?”

“I’m not angry,” Nick says.

“Good, cuz if y’are, I got ways to do dealing with ’em. They don’t scare me. Like them young ones says, Bring it on.” And she grins. Her teeth are stained but all present, and strong, like those of a tough old horse which perhaps smokes.

“Madam,” says Pond, still cool, “Maybe you can tell us where your friend Kitty is, then we can leave you in peace.”

“Friend? She int no friend. Family, Kitty.”

“Your daughter, then,” Pond flatters her bleakly.

And Mrs Franks grins again. “No daughter. What age you think I am? I am Granny.” This title does not suit her. Yet “Granny,” she insists. “And what are you? You one of her blokes an’ all? Bit old int yer?”

Pond says, “She lent Mr Conway here three thousand pounds, very kindly. Now his finances are straight he would like to repay her.”

“Only three thousand?” ‘Granny’ stretches her eyes. “She don’t need your money. She got her plenty. Who’d you think owns this flat? Eh? She does. Bought it for me, for all them years I brings her up, little bitch. So when she says, You go on out tonight, I goes off to my gentleman, and we spends time. Meal, down the pub, back to his and what you think we does there?” She flaunts at them. “Think I’m too old to have a boyfriend, eh? I got one. Older’n me, poor old bugger. Can barely walk himself, but got plenty of petrol in him for the other. Go on, ya filthy bastards,” she adds furiously, as if they not she have mentioned her sexual life. “And her - you lay off of her! So she picks you up and dumps yer. Always she does that. And sometimes out I go and she brings ’em in here. When I get back the mess of ’em. But it’s her flat. She buys it. Stays here. What can a poor old woman do, you think, eh? Eh?”

“Mrs Franks…”

“Get off. Or I call policy men. She change you fellers like she change her hair colours. Now it’s red, now it’s yellah. Want to know what colour her hair is for real? Won’t tell you.” And with that she skips back, a malevolent goat rather than a leopard. “Piss off!” she abruptly shrieks, and slams the door, grinning, in their faces.

Pond and Nick walk back to the gate and the security light goes out behind them.

“A Mediterranean, I’d say,” says Pond. “Perhaps Greek. Probably altered her name for convenience.”

“Like Kitty.”

“It seems, however,” says Pond, as they get back into the grey VW, “to solve some of the mystery. If not of Ms Andrew herself.”

“Or it could all be lies. Stage-managed, a set-up…”

“It could. But life, as it’s been said, Mr Lewis, is stranger than fiction. Life is strange. And coincidences – full of those. Coincidence is a very strange thing I find, sir. Often very misleading. Like the idea of omens and portents in the ancient world. Coincidence can make you believe all sorts of things are happening for a purpose. Part of a pattern. But they’re not. It means nothing at all.”

They part near the National Theatre, where Pond drops Nick off.

It has been arranged tomorrow Pond is to continue seeing what else he can dig up on the drawer-man, or on Kit, if anything looks as if it might need to be. But both these insane composite events now seem to Nick to be played out.

And Nick feels therefore he is being delivered back into the