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

Secops judged the whole family unstable. It augured well.

In the end, (and without a recorded reply from Pond), they heard Nick laugh, and a while after this Pond arrived.

Almost affronted, the listeners, (yes, as in the poem by de la Mare, the unseen listeners Nick had visualised, if elsewhere, were made party to his life), they heard Stewart Pond’s invented take on the - by then invented - death of Laurence Adrian Lewis. And, too, Pond’s comments on Claudia Martin - mother of Laurence and Nick, and Serena, and even more insanely, Kitra. They heard of Nick’s tracking of Kitra to the flat in Marylebone.

But the outcome of this scramble? Pond might work for Nick in his minor capacity as a detective. It was not enough. When Nick arranged by phone to spend an evening with his dotty sibling, Serena, the Secops team tried their most coercive gambit to date. For them, it was not the worst they could do, but it afforded them a chance to breach the bastions of Nick’s cloistered existence and hopefully smash on through.

They broke once more into the rich flat with the big window, this time in the form of a three-man gang of dubious habits and intention, (two look-outs left below in the cul-de-sac). They had kept in tow the by now muddled and frankly anxious (but completely bought up) guy with the lost drawer.

For the grand theatrical performance, Grey had equipped himself with the best actor’s wig and fake false teeth known on stage and screen. They made his healthy and fully-toothed gums ache. But it was all in the line of duty.

Crang came too, shaven-headed.

They poured Nick’s vodka down the drain as well. It was meant to seem they had drunk it, but they had no intention of getting pissed on the job. Crang and Mr Drawer ate the apples and cheese. “Cut out the cores,” Grey had said. “These teeth -a man with falsies’d never be able to eat fruit otherwise. And it better look like I joined in.”

When they were done with Nick Lewis that night, Crang certainly had strong hopes of Pond’s being enlisted by Nick to find someone to kill every member of the gang they had portrayed.

There had been only one rogue moment. When it seemed Nick thought they were after the tracker - the ‘Roman pin’. Which would have implicated Secops in the sting. But it turned out Nick was on about some other ivory object, unknown to the rest of them, including the Drawer-man. Fatal complications did not accrue: Crang invented some fairytale that fitted the bill - something about a broken doorknob - and the Drawer-man, told to agree with everything the ‘gang’ said, backed Crang up. Nick gave over on the ivory. Nobody knew what he had been talking about. And it had no bearing on the case.

So. They were back on course for victory. From nowhere attempted murder intervened.

The following morning the hapless Nick was stabbed by Person Unknown.

The Secops bug relayed tiny fragments of dialogue, and sounds, no more - enough. Very decidedly fortunately for Nick Lewis, a member of the team reached him in a few minutes. The operative stemmed the haemorrhage and, posing as a useful bystander, made suitable arrangements, albeit via the NHS. Without the bug, and the listeners, Nick might not have lived.

It had appeared, from Nick’s remarks (aloud and uncharacteristically addressed to himself, or the empty flat, before opening the door “…bloody locksmith…don’t need him now… pay him to go away… How old I look. I look about ninety… A fucking stupid kid of ninety…”) that Nick was expecting somebody to put a new lock on the door. Perhaps this was later borne out by a glimpse of a guy arriving at the flats, balking at the ambulance, going.

None of this though, after all Secops’ hard labour, led to the desired result.

Yet luck did not desert them. It seemed, just as they were trained to do, luck too was fond of fostering logical improvisations.

One afternoon the flaming mad Angela Lewis, now technically widow of the (still living) Laurence, came right off her trolley.

She attacked her lover, Stewart Pond, she flung glassware and screamed, blaming Pond for Laurence’s death, threatening to tell All to the police. It was sometimes fascinating to see the fiery lengths to which guilt and sheer moronicity - as Grey termed it - could lead the weak and needy. Angela went bananas and Pond, evading her implosion, went himself straight to call The Man to clear her up.

The last scene of the drama was now therefore about to be enacted. Angela was cast in the part of the woman who would die. Secops would, leopard-like, slide forward from the wings when it was done. (“We’re doing the crazy bat a favour.” Grey again. “She’d have never stood prison.”) They would take The Man. And Laurence, the great undead, would irretrievably identify him. The Man would be - theirs.

In fact they wanted him far less for the purposes of retributive justice - than for a programme of forthcoming work carried out under their private aegis. A lot of the jobs would be overseas. The Man was a class act. He had unusual skills, and the computerised hagiography of the born assassin. They had stalked him, devoted fans, for years. There had been so many missed chances

Laurence, and Angela - dying ostensibly of booze and pills - would give Secops and all its affiliated friends, a very shiny human blade. No, they would not imprison, let alone execute The Man. They would simply grapple him close. They would own him.

What everyone wanted. Result.

Alone in her spacious apartment on the west side of the house, Qirri takes another shower. She loves to shower. In her childhood and earliest youth she had been restricted to washing, and that was cursory.

Tonight at 9 p.m. there will be the next meal, dinner. The ClydeShelley pair will not be coming, but those grisly French chicks undoubtedly will. Monique