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

to lie about, nearly stunned me. “How,” he demanded angrily, “did you like her cake?”

Much later, I did consider that my semi-detached house, when it caught alight, possibly even with a small explosion, might endanger George and Vita. The brief mental sketch I’d made still inclined me to think the fire would be smelled if not heard, seen even – smoke billowing – early on. Even drugged by whisky and whatever else, Vita would wake up, her hearing wasn’t bad. Failing that neighbours or the fire brigade would alert them.

But to be quite honest, I didn’t care.

I didn’t give a damn.

Long ago, before modern forensic techniques, and also given the inattention to detail only displaced now and then by a real life detective of the type of Sherlock Holmes, I could have got away with it much more easily.

Finding Roy Phipps’ house burned down and a burned male corpse inside it, very likely said corpse would have been taken for Roy Phipps.

Not now, of course. By no means.

They would learn if not who, then who he was not, inside a few days at most. And despite the ruse I’d set up and the care I’d taken, any police force not completely composed of morons would instigate a search for me.

I had decided to make for France, via the popularly-named Chunnel.

To access the train times of Eurostar would have taken too long tonight. I’d opted to catch the last Ashford train from Charing Cross. There were a couple of hotels in Ashford. I’d pick up the Chunnel train tomorrow as early as was practicable.

My French was adequate. Besides, two years before, when I went over there on some business junket with Gates, (signing books and so on for an affiliate French company known as Lisez-moi!), I’d found even the Parisians, notorious for their hauteur, had come to speak English, many of them. Maybe only in order to disgrace us by talking in our language more elegantly.

The train going in to Charing Cross was almost empty. It was by then about eleven.

I sat in the carriage with one of my bags squeezed into the uselessly narrow rack overhead, the other bulkier one on the next seat.

The thick yellow light was both somnolent and unrestful.

For the very first, finally, I began to feel a hollow terror at what I’d done. But it was far off. For now at least I could ignore it. I took out the miniature of whisky I’d bought en route, and downed a gulp.

The train presently made its pneumatic hissing sound and we stopped. I don’t recall the station, although at the time I noted it. The couple of people already sitting back along the carriage got out, and someone else got in. I heard him give a sigh. And then he walked up towards the front of the carriage. I smelled an exclusive male fragrance I had met before, and quite recently. I couldn’t think where. Then his shadow crossed over me and I found I looked up quickly and in alarm.

There was nothing in my head. I had no forecast image of a policeman, plain clothes or otherwise. Nor of Sej. Sej, I knew, was in no position now to have caught this train with me.

“Mr Phillips,” said Cart, and sat down facing me in the dark yellow light.

My first, and probably not utterly inane thought, was that the credit card company had refused to pay out on my ‘deliveries’ from him. I hadn’t checked my current credit, thought I’d paid a lot off the last card bill. (I’d not yet received the one which would show me what name Cart’s outfit traded under).

I stared at Cart. He wore a dark raincoat.

“Now,” he said, “Mr Phillips, you seem dismayed. Please. You have been an ideal customer. That’s the only reason I now seek you out.”

“What for?” I said. I had felt very sick, but after a second this went off.

“It is about the unusual apartment your dangerous young friend was in, at Saracen Road.”

I didn’t know what I could say, or what I needed to say. I said, “How did you know which train…?”

“Oh, you were followed, Mr Phillips, like before. I have received the text at the proper moment, and come at once to board the train too. Aren’t you curious,” he went on, smiling a little, “to know what is my interest in the apartment of Mr Sej?”

In the false light his thick blue-black hair, eyebrows, lashes and moustache seemed made from some lush material that couldn’t, any of it, be hair. He looked manufactured.

Unzipping the pocket in my bag, I took out the whisky and had another swig.

“Ah, a whisky man,” said Cart, all approval. “So I am, Mr Phillips. The purest alcohol there is. Vodka is poison, and wine – the dregs of vinegars. But a fine malt may not be rivalled.”

I felt bleak. I was afraid. “Tell me about the apartment.”

“Very well, of course. Our good friend Mr C has discovered something of great importance about it. This we felt you should learn also, as it may be to mutual profit.”

His English, which had been fairly sustained before, tonight seemed a bit less sound. How I noticed this I’m not sure. But it can happen. As when going blind, other senses compensate, the faculty of logic enters some other area when shut out of the main stream by fear. In the same way, apparently, condemned criminals can often describe in minute detail a pebble or a drop of dew, glimpsed on their way to the gallows.

“All right,” I said. I put the whisky back in the zippered pocket, although I needed to take more. There wasn’t much left by now.

“It seems there is another door into the flat. Mr C was concerned that some heavy furniture, a piano and so forth, were in the loft, and only an outdoor ladder to be going up.”

I too had thought of that, had I not?

“And so?” I said. My voice didn’t sound