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

impermanence. It was like a camp in a wood. A middle-class bivouac between battles. Stocked with straightforward nourishing proteins and edible delicacies, bandages, painkillers, areas for not-quite-ordinary R and R. A hidden sanctum. What else? We’d found no weapons.

Some of my neurasthenia at being outside the house had gone. I walked home from the station, up Bulivante Crescent, along my own familiar road.

When I was almost there I saw the eccentric car, a 1930’s Morris in shiny condition, parked by the curb.

This car I knew.

But I couldn’t recall from where, or why.

Then Harris Wybrother opened the driver’s door and got out, looking round uncertainly at me, this hitherto unseen shaven-headed, moustachioed Roy all in black.

“You look really well,” he told me, pummelling my hand and arm. “More than you’ll be able to vouch for me, I expect.”

Astounded, I could only say, “This is a surprise.”

“Yes, old boy. Janette got some bee in her hairdo, the day I got back – last Friday – she thinks she had a message that you were having some kind of dodgy squabble with a publisher.”

Shaven house-breaker, employer of hitmen, Roy shook his head with a thin smile. “She misunderstood. It was a personal matter. I’d have liked to ask your advice. But that’s in the past.”

“Oh, she tends to get things wrong. Wrapped up in her own multi-tasking. She’s in Strasbourg till tomorrow. I thought I’d run over and see you. I can do with a breather. So this is your domicile?”

We both stood and looked at my house, semi-detached, inadequately paved, unimpressive, slightly run down – aside, of course, from its brand-new security locks.

“Somehow I didn’t picture your pad like this.”

My pad.

“Come in,” I said.

“Glad to,” he said, “I’m done in, I can tell you.”

He looked all right to me, despite a yellowish half-formed tan which he tends to put on at the start of an English summer anyway. Perhaps Spain had been overcast?

“Oh the weather stank. Hot, and storms. They put it down to the usual global hoohah. And they’re still in a state from the terrorist stuff.”

We had gone in and I guided him through into the kitchen; the door of the front room was shut and the curtains I had drawn. He glanced at the shut door but made no comment. He was already telling me about his father’s funeral, which apparently had had to take place in Spain, according to Veronica the thirty plus child bride, and also to Wybrother Senior’s will. “The official crap – you’ve no idea, Roy. It wasn’t red tape – more like red bandage.” He had declined coffee or tea so I fetched the whisky, shutting the door of the front room again when I came out. The old bottle had already been emptied, this was a fresh one. “Christ, Roy. You have no idea.”

“You had a bad time.” I felt remote as I said this. I felt, actually, contemptuous.

“Bad’s not the word. And that bitch Vero – that’s what Dad called her, apparently, Vero. So now she’s Vero. Sounds like some US brand of energy drink, doesn’t it. Vero took me aside the first evening, after I’d bought her quite a lavish dinner at my hotel. She put it to me very clearly that most of the money, and any property outside the Hampshire place, was hers. I’m sure you grasp, Harris, she said, I’m entitled to that. I’ve had to put up with quite a lot from your father. This with him on his bloody slab not two miles away.”

“It must have been tough.”

“Yes. And I went down with food poisoning, or some Spanish bug…”

Somehow I couldn’t resist. “A fly, perhaps?” I asked mildly.

A month ago he might have got that and laughed. A month ago however I doubt I would have said it aloud.

“Flies? You are correct. Everywhere. The air conditioning just made them frisky.”

He continued to fill me in on his saga.

I pictured him, racked with worry and the unadmitted grief or fear I’d glimpsed in his eyes that day in the restaurant in Holborn. And stuck there in the luxury hotel, with his still current expense account from the firm, via which, I had no doubt, he had financed Veronica’s lavish dinner.

“And there’ll be death duties I’ll have to pay on the damned house. Can you believe it, Roy? I mean, that crumbling wreck of a place. Hampshire! Miles from London. The dunnies don’t even work properly. For God’s sake.”

The light was darkening. It looked like rain again.

“But you haven’t told me anything about you, Roy.”

I hadn’t had much chance. “I’m fine.”

“So this personal stuff of yours blew over.”

“Yes.”

“They have a habit of blowing over, don’t they? These nasty little troubles. I suppose even all this shit with Dad will blow over. And you’re OK with Gates – old Lew Rybourne?” (Lewis was at least twelve years his junior).

“Yes.”

“Working well?”

“Fine, Harris.”

I poured him another drink. He was already leading us towards the last third of the bottle, although I’d only had a couple.

“Are you seeing anyone?” he asked suddenly. There was a kind of sly subterfuge in his voice.

“You mean a woman. No. Not at the moment.”

“You’re a wise boy, Roy. Wish I had your bloody self control.” He then launched into a monologue on ‘someone’ he had met on the plane back from Spain, which rhyme he included several times, like a chorus. “I mean that is a dire little flight. Don’t know if you’ve ever done it – the plane from Spain? No, well. Not missed much. Too short to get stuck into anything, too long to manage not to get cabin fever. But then this plane from Spain had this girlie on it. And I got lucky. Or she did. Sat side by side. Really bright girl – oh,” as if I’d asked, “about twenty-nine or so. Could be a bit older – don’t you find women don’t look their age now. Until they hit about forty-five, and then – everything falls, as they say