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

done it. The response was the same. The price, on this occasion, only five hundred pounds, with a discount, too, since I’d paid ahead of the delivery.

Mr C had by now sloughed his very excellent street accent. He spoke like the well-bred Oxbridge type he apparently was. Or maybe this accent was a fake too.

The place was as I’d seen it before. Bare, empty, untouched. I’d half expected someone, some friend from another flat, to be squatting here by now. Yet no one even seemed to have come in, despite the door’s having been undone. Then again, long ago any of them could have broken in as I had.

Even my unreal packet lay where I’d dropped it. Mr C bent at once and picked it up. He didn’t tell me off, as Duran had done about my security, for discarding incriminatory evidence. When I’d suggested plastic gloves to Mr C he had shaken his head. “That won’t be needed, Mr Phillips, you take this flat too seriously. No cop worth his salt would give a fip.”

Despite its phonetic resemblance to my surname, “fip” was what Mr C sometimes said for fuck. So far I’d not actually heard him swear.

To begin with, once we were in he made sure the flat’s front door was closed off from inside. He did this by dragging the dirty unclothed mattress, unaided, in from the bedroom, and pushing it against the entry. Its passage made strange tracks through the perhaps stranger dusts of the flat.

His search was unlike mine.

He prised up floorboards, clipped pieces out of the plaster, skirmished behind the lavatory and took the panel off the side of the bath. He used various small tools, some unanticipated, in this work. (I’d never seen a corkscrew used as a drill before).

I followed him, and when requested to hold something or move something, I obeyed without question.

I’d gathered once he had been in the police, but which department, as with the cause of his leaving, was never made clear.

The red leaf in the bedroom had already turned wan and brown. He picked it up and sniffed it with a knowing look incomprehensible to me.

“African, you know,” he said elusively.

Presumably he meant something the leaf had been used to conceal, or used in the preparation of. Its floral origins, even to me, still appeared English.

Although his search was both particular and elaborate, neither did he unearth anything, to my eyes at least, unusual.

We’d been there over an hour. No one had disturbed us (5’s music crashed on and on, an especially repellent opus demonstrably on repeat).

“And that door to the balcony is locked?” said Mr C.

He went to it and took a screwdriver from his pocket.

Inserting it in the empty keyhole he tried various manoeuvres. Suddenly the door snapped, shifted, and I glimpsed the key-driven bolts lifted from their sockets. He gave the door a final twist and pull and it was open.

Out on the balcony he looked up, then down.

“Nothing.”

When he was back in again, I followed him along the internal corridor once more, into the other rooms, the bathroom and bedroom and spare room.

“Let’s try,” he said, “that fire-escape.”

He shoved the window of the now-mattressless bedroom up. There’d been only a sort of snib to lock it.

Putting out his head and shoulders, he craned his neck. “Ah ha.”

He helped me out of the window and we stood on the fire-escape. The metal steps uncoiled downwards to the unkempt garden. A ginger cat, chasing something small in the undergrowth, took no notice of us.

“Look there, Mr Phillips. And then up there.”

Up there was the sloping roof of the house, one of the endless array of terrace roofs, all rather badly in need of re-tiling, with an independent weed or two growing out of the them, or in the tops of adjacent drainpipes.

This roof had in it a large sloping skylight. It seemed to be made of dark polarised glass. A metal ladder was fixed directly below the skylight. The end of this ladder, not quite visible from the bedroom when the window was closed, came down to the top of the fire-escape, and was firmly bolted there.

Somehow Mr C’s bulk had hidden the ladder from me at first, as if he had wanted to astound me, uncovering it, pointing up.

The dark glass couldn’t even be looked at. The sun hit it blindingly, a splashed broken egg.

A noise in the garden made me look down.

“I hate cats,” said Mr C. “Vicious fips.”

A mouse in its jaws, uncaring of censure, the ginger tom didn’t give us a second glance.

SEVENTEEN

After we had the tea, or he did, Sej asked me if I’d left my bags upstairs. I said nothing, which was pointless, but he didn’t press me. Instead he outlined for me what I’d packed in them, both of them. He included in the assessment what I’d also stuffed in my jacket in case I could get away.

He was very accurate.

He might have had X-ray eyes.

“By the way,” he added, “you shouldn’t worry too much about documents like that. Most of them are replaceable, even a passport. Your birth certificate, or a deed poll change of name, are the worst. They moved everything out of Somerset House some while back, and now you can’t get hold of anything, I gather, unless you commute to some unheard of place well outside London, and search through the records yourself. It can take days.”

Still, I kept quiet.

I sat and watched him.

“On the other hand, you’d want to keep any discs with you. They have to do, I assume, with your books. A paper copy wasn’t necessary, surely? That has to be on one of the discs. What’s on the other?”

Again, my instinct kicked in, prompting me to answer. I’d given up trying to second guess myself as to whether this was cunning of me – or placation – or the other peculiar sense of game-playing and engagement, which he had somehow induced.

“A future book. Not much. A pot-boiler.”

“What’s