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

Vilmos had performed the murder gruesomely, but without involvement. A rat had come from the corner to feast. His own body starved and tortured by the Master’s minions, Vilmos lay in the blood, the stranger’s and his own, his mind clear for the first time perhaps in twenty-five years, his eyes full of blue flashes, the visual product of another variation on his migraines. But the blue being very beautiful, very evocative, entertained him with its colour.

My own eyes had begun to ache.

I printed the amendments on paper, then switched off the machine. Going downstairs for a whisky nightcap, I poured it in one of the sturdier glasses from the kitchen. I felt done in, but would I sleep? Outside I heard the cats still fighting violently across the front paving. Their spitting struggle, or something like it, might fit well into the next paragraphs of Vilmos’s horror. Maybe other rats could come in and these would fight. I scribbled a note and took the whisky to bed.

To my surprise I drifted after only a minute or so, into a warm and trackless sleep. Just two more days, then I’d be gone.

Waking, the alarm-clock, blurred by my vision, said it was 4.12 a.m. There was as yet no light. Was I awake? I thought not completely, and turned eagerly to swim back down.

That damned party up the road was still going on. I could hear the music, not thumping now, in fact a piano playing. A piano playing tunefully. Softly, pleasingly. I thought, Oh, that’s only Sej. And again I slept.

I woke at half past ten. Nowadays that’s unheard of for me, even after a white night.

When I sat up, a light wave of vertigo slid across my brain. I’m not subject to such things. My mouth tasted unusually nasty, chalky…

A stab of absolute fright shot through me. I’d been drugged. I had been drugged. How? The tea – no, I’d worked a while after that. It must have been the whisky. Look, I hadn’t even finished it. I picked up the glass and sniffed it. There was no smell, only alcohol. But then, there hadn’t been any other smell than alcohol in the red wine I gave to him.

This was the moment I recalled hearing the piano being played downstairs.

I floundered out of bed, ran into the bathroom and grabbed the shaving-foam. It’s of the type that sprays.

Running, vertigo forgotten, I took the stairs in leaps and sprang into the front room.

No one was there. The lid of the piano was shut, as I’d eventually left it despite my cleaning girl’s admonition.

The library and kitchen were also empty. There was no sign of any tampering, had been none upstairs. The windows were shut and locked, the back door also. The front door too, when I went and looked at it, was the same as I had left it, the upper bolt shakily done up and the bottom one stuck in the undone position. Both door locks were secure.

Then I remembered the chair, which I’d left leaning on the door. It wasn’t there.

Back into the front room I went. The chair stood, where it usually did. Had I misremembered? Hadn’t I moved it out into the hall? Had I dreamed I’d done that, then dreamed I heard him playing – what had it been? Gershwin – Someone to Watch Over Me – and then something else…

I walked back into the hall and, not undoing the door, pulled at it very gently.

The upper bolt fell straight down on the floor. It had been secured, this time for appearances only, by blue tac. When I’d fetched the magnifying glass from the library, knelt down and peered through it, I saw too the mass of something transparent and shiny that had trapped the lower bolt in its slot, unable to move. Superglue, probably.

I stood there, thinking over the ultimate riddle. He must of course, during the short while he was here before, have managed to obtain copies of the two front door keys. But the bolts had been fine until the night before last. Thursday. Had Sej then already somehow broken in while I was here? I have reasonably good hearing for my age; surely I’d have heard him? The very camouflaging of the wrecked bolts indicated he’d wanted to enter quietly, to – shall I say – surprise me. And the drug, if there was one, in the whisky – I’d had a glass of whisky on Wednesday night, without any ill effect. I’d slept in the usual way, not well, only the peculiar dreams, but I’d had those off and on since first I met him.

No, something had been done here later than Wednesday. And somehow I knew it hadn’t been by Joseph. This was an animal deduction. My instinct, if you like. As if I might have detected him by odour, or a pricking in my thumbs.

Yet if not him, then who?

It was at this moment that I recalled the young woman with the stalled car. She was tall enough to reach up bolt-high easily, but had she the strength to pry the bolt loose, the skill not to loosen it entirely, only enough a slight nudge from outside would shift it? Of course she could have slopped the glue on to the other, lower bolt. I remembered how she’d bent down, risen with the dropped Kleenex in her hand, and wiped her nose – or seemed to wipe it – so sadly, as if holding back tears. Had there been space also for her to pop into the front room and fix my whisky?

Who was she? Why had she done it?

She must have done it because Sej told her to.

I remembered something else.

I remembered the woman with the run-over dead white dog at the Belmont Hotel.

SIXTEEN

It goes without saying that ringing both Duran’s home number and his mobile got no answer. He was at the hospital. However, now I couldn’t quite push off the grim