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

Price-Andrew-Andrezou. Nor, come to that, any other stray woman Laurence had put on a gold wedding ring for.

As for Nick and his break-in, Pond let it ride. He wondered if Nick somehow suspected something. It seemed far-fetched. Whatever, let Nick stew a little, thought Stewart Pond.

But, where feasible, unfinished business should be finished.

One evening then, Pond went back to the U-shaped cul-de-sac. He let himself quietly in at the main door to the flats by use of a specialist key, and walked up to Nick’s apartment.

When he first saw Nick again, and Nick began by asking his own questions, Pond made a snap decision. He would run some of the truth past Nick, and watch how he reacted. Pond tended to follow his instincts on these things. His instincts were normally sound, and also well-trained. Taking care to consume very little of the strong drink Nick had fixed him - Pond was driving - he began to spill portions of the story, bean by bean.

But Nick revealed nothing much. Or rather, he seemed to know nothing much. Nick appeared merely interested, if in a slightly impatient form. Pond had the distinct impression Nick was only listening to him in order to do a bit of research that might, perhaps, come in handy later for some sort of written fiction about adultery.

Then something - the instincts? - made Pond focus in on the woman Nick then knew as Kit. Pond presented her as a definite look-alike for Claudia Martin - just the way Angela had declared she was. And just as, too, Nick Lewis, who was undeniably male, really was, and so much more successfully.

When Nick informed Pond, who already knew, of his mother’s name, Pond saw he had scored a flawless try, but was unsure what it amounted to. Nick had gone white.

And then: “Laurence was her son, too.”

And Pond had seen Nick’s face go hard and fleshless, like that of an extremely old man, or a starved child.

Pond added, as if unaware of any changes, “That’s odd. When this woman of your brother’s was so like her.”

But Nick only repeated what he had already said. Then lowered his blond head right down, as if to be beheaded by an axe. Tears streamed from his eyes on to the wooden floor.

Pond let him cry. Then going to the kitchen he poured most of his own vodka down the sink and topped up the glass with tap water. He returned with that, a box of Kleenex, and an even stiffer real vodka for Nick.

“You take your time,” said Pond. And he rested his hand briefly on Nick’s shoulder. Pond could feel him shaking, though the weeping was virtually noiseless.

And Nick hated Laurence?

Pond went to look at some artwork on the wall. It was not bad, some of it excellent. He particularly liked a surreal, starkly beautiful cipher of night and trees and stardrift reflecting in water.

Standing there it came to Pond, unlooked for and, for a second, amazing him, a flush, a warmth of estranged compassion, pity - kindness. And he thought that his own son, terminally useless Timothy, would now be about the same age as Nicolas Lewis. Of course, Tim had never had Nick’s advantages. Neither financially nor artistically, certainly not genetically in looks, or talent, however slight. Come to think of it, not even in name. Pond was not much of a name to conjure with, as Pond’s own wife had remarked, once he wed her some years after Tim’s arrival.

So what was this? Envy of someone’s having a son like Nick? Some inappropriate male broodiness, wanting a sprog one could at least find presentable and pleasing? Or latent homosexuality? There was always that. Pond had half smiled. He doubted the last notion, but you never knew. He was getting on. Nearly fifty… Weird things could occur to either gender, when they reached a certain age. Pond himself had seen it happen.

But when he went back to sit down, after Nick’s ‘emotion’, as Nick put it, ended, Pond was quite glad the conversation quickly veered away into Nick’s territory of bizarre notebook burglars, the profligate Ms Price-Andrew-Andrezou, and the invented Ivorian curse.

Pond by then was watching himself like a hawk.

To feel human sympathy, for whatever temporary reason, must not be allowed to force him into a mistake. Pond was sure it did not.

Then came the two rogue bonuses. The distasteful little letter from the mad Ms KP, the news of her second flat in Marylebone.

Was that then where Laurence had taken himself that Friday night of the clothes change and the gold ring? Was it there he had lost almost two hours? And still with her? Then one must assume at least she had never tried her personalised insults on Laurence, for he, of all men, would never have gone back for more. Or would he? Would she, if even so, have allowed it?

What mattered however, at that moment, was to engender the idea, which might still be sensible, a last obfuscation of the facts of murder, that ‘Kit’ was Laurence’s indirect killer, her method her foul, female, black-widow-spider take on ego destruction. And never the fault of A Man, paid to see to things with his stone or his gun - or the sheer terror he could create.

To that end then, Pond had told Nick about the Last Weekend - which in fact never happened, since Laurence had died on Friday night.

As if in enlightenment, Pond described Laurence’s (invented) disturbance when he (inventedly) left the Wimbledon flat on Monday morning.

Pond had already established how, work on the case complete, he thought, he did not follow Laurence from the Wimbledon flat. Pond did not mention, for they were to be no free gift, about the altered clothes, the ring. Pond though could be truthful about the piece of ivory. It had not been with Laurence. Perhaps someone or thing had taken it from him, some scavenger, for some incomprehensible reason. The gold ring, Pond believed, might have