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

Joss had, over the years, by negotiating clandestine, conceivably Masonic financial routes, regained much of his wealth and its holdings, next creating new ones. He seemed charmed by Qirri. He said he had never known of her existence, but evidently her claim was genuine, she was so very like - indeed identical to - his former wife.

She began as a sort of PA. She, of all things in fact a quite talented occasional painter, helped organise the eccentric painting course Joss’s corporation had set up on the island.

This treat included invitations of the richest, or most influential, of the ‘students’ to favoured get-togethers as guests at the house in ‘Little Venice’. The idiocy of people, as she saw it, could tickle Qirri. She went along with the peculiar lunches and dinners. She was fairly sure that Joss was beginning to verge on some form of dementia. Which might be very beneficial. She also won over the fake steward, Stephanos. It turned out he too liked sex with a stir of spice, as he put it to Qirri, in Greek. They got on well. Lust without hang-ups, two handsome dogs waiting by the table for the Ten Million Dollar Bone to fall.

The way things were going with the world economy, they might need everything they could get. But they were only partners in crime, Stephanos and she. Dead Laurence remained her lover. Her only love.

Even now, sitting on the fake ruin-stone she herself had suggested be put here, above the olives and the sea, Qirri remembers the touch and taste of Laurence’s mouth on hers. She has only to think of Laurence-inflicted bruises on her body for the inner shudder to course through her centre, the playful little frisson of her waiting womb.

She does not tell Nick any of this.

Why should she?

On the other hand, the Roman ivory pin, what Laurence had called the Augusta Pin, and which he had told her about on the phone from Coreley, and about which (since) she had learned rather more, is now only a few feet away, held in the grasp of the little brother, Nick. Nick the Prick. Claudia’s one true look-alike.

Dress him, corset and contour him as a woman, a wig, or hair-extensions - make-up. Yes, Nick was Claudia’s double. If Qirri was incredibly like Claudia, beside Nick, Qirri was only the undeveloped film.

“That’s cute,” says Qirri. “What is it?” Although she knows.

“No idea. Laurence hid it at my flat.”

“Why?” she asks indolently. Some months ago she would also have known why. Laurence said he lied about the pin - for this object can only be that, exactly as described - in order to tease Qirri and so trigger the game-play.

But other knowledge has accumulated. Laurence, who did have the pin, hid it in Nick’s flat not only to tease Qirri. He had not told her that in true fact he hid it because he had sensed he was being tailed. Uneasy at having lifted a valuable find from the dig, he thought pursuit of some type might be likely. Though pursuit was, of course, not for that reason.

Laurence had been meant to see and pocket the pin. They had judged him well. It seemed he had, now and then, got away with the odd archaeological item before.

But now Nick, undeniably in ignorance, says, “I don’t know why he hid it. But presumably it’s worth something.”

“Nothing. It’s only a very good fake.”

How does she know it’s a fake so quickly? Is she an expert? Nick puts the pin on the grass, and only then Qirri says sharply, “Give it to me.”

“If it’s worthless, why do you want it?”

She has got up anyway. With a fluid grace very like Claudia’s, she bends and picks the pin out of the grass and straightens, holding it. Nick makes no move to stop her. As before, he does not care.

Qirri wants the pin because Laurence had held it. He had meant to give it to her for safekeeping. But unease, and then the game… She has kept the small fake ivory square he did give her, for the same reason - his absent touch. She still has the square. And now this. She utters a swift low murmur, then a laugh. Nick glances up at her. Her laugh has reminded him of Laurence’s, that time in Nick’s flat. Sexual and secretive, unsuited to anything that had or has been said and done.

Nick stands up too. Rather bizarrely, they both now stand there, gazing out at the water.

“I can only see four or five islands,” he says.

“There’s a haze,” she says, “You need a clear day to see them properly.”

He does not want to ask her anything at all. He travelled all this way, lugging the wounded lung, loitering, catching a boat with eyes. But he does not want to ask anything, nor be answered.

It goes without saying she is Claudia’s child. It goes without saying she has worked out on each of them some persistent, maybe well-founded spite. She has had each of them, one way or another. And now she works on Joss.

Can it be she was even, in some way, responsible for Claudia’s death? Perhaps suddenly turning up, startling Claudia or somehow threatening her, scaring her, so that the bud of the aneurysm was rushed into full flower. Was it Kitty indirectly then who killed Claudia, all those years ago?

Look at her. Claudia’s double, doppelganger almost. And if you met yourself, just as the poet had prophesied, you died.

“Well,” he says, meaninglessly to the view.

“Will you stay to dinner?” asks Claudia’s daughter. Her - Claudia’s - blue eyes dance on with that dubious laughter.

Nick smiles.

“No. I don’t think I’ll stay for the painting course either. Have a good time. Enjoy yourself.”

Then she stares full at him, and inside her really quite breathtaking face, Nick sees, he thinks, nothing obscure, only a bottomless depth of the most mundane evil, an evil too brainless and trite even to be human, even to be evil