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

She wore a dark blue dress that looked like satin, pinned with a blinding brooch on one shoulder, feasibly diamonds. Her hair was done differently. Now, smiling and glamorous, not in tears or beside a bundle of bloodied shirt and dead dog, she seemed the perfect hostess.

“Hello, darlings. Come in, come in.”

Leo opened a bottle of Dom Perignon. Marga told us, reassuringly, there were ten more of these in the other larger fridge (This was the one on the landing outside the upper door into the attic). She added there was a roast of lamb in the oven.

The smell was appetizing and corroborated the statement. In the kitchen area potatoes waited and a transparent bowl of green salad. But she also handed round plates of crisps and nuts and cocktail sausages.

I was seated on one of the green and blue couches, the bags at my feet.

Cart sat on another couch with Leo, and Marga in a deep dark green armchair.

Bach was playing softly on the stereo.

Cart had remarked, “Better than that shit you play, Leo.”

And Leo said, “Either you like it or you don’t.”

“Are you all right, Roy?” asked Marga in a little while. “Shall we start to explain now? Please, I know this isn’t simple. We’ve all been through it. Haven’t we, guys?”

“You betcha,” said Leo.

“Mmm,” said Cart, and drank a little champagne. He had removed his coat, which was also blue.

Marga lifted her glass, a flute I hadn’t spotted here before. We all had one. “To Roy Phipps, aka R.P. Phillips.”

They drank to my health. I didn’t.

I put down my glass on the polished coffee table.

“Tell me,” I said. “When does Sej arrive?”

“Oh, Roy,” painfully said Marga. She put her hand to her mouth. But this time she didn’t cry.

Leo said, “Look, Roy, he’s in the hospital.”

“Really. But he always gets over that,” I said. I felt as if I had been frozen inside old ice. I was miles off. But also, here.

Leo looked round at me. “Roy, feller, you did a very good job. The last text I got from Liss, Sej may be going into theatre for an op. You seem to have fractured his skull, Roy. Didn’t you know?”

I sat there.

I sat there.

“But you could be lying,” I said. Or the thing which spoke for me said it.

Leo said, “Only I’m not. Hey, Roy. It’s OK. He knows – we all know. It can happen. You play this game, you put your life, and anything else worth anything, on the line. If the bus goes o’er ye, ye’ve none ta blame than yoursel’.”

“And he would never blame you,” said Marga. “None of us would.”

Like a stone I said, “What happened to the house?”

“C and Liss and Sid put the fire out. Hadn’t gone far. You’ll need some new carpet, though. Then they got him off to the hospital. Apparently,” said Leo, “some old guy next door called down out of the upper window, what was going on? C said they were friends of Sej’s. He needed looking after. The old guy said he wasn’t sure, he thought he ought to call the cops.”

“And so Sid said,” helpfully interposed Marga, “that was maybe the best thing. If the old man would be kind enough to give the police all the details when they came, in about an hour or so. But meanwhile they needed to look after Sej. They’d be at so-and-so. Obviously that wasn’t where they went.”

“No,” I said.

Marga said, “Leo, Cart, should you tell Roy how C and Sid and Liss knew what was going on?”

“They were watching the house,” said Leo. “I mean, he’d said, this was almost certainly the night,”

“The night,” I said.

“The night you got there.”

“Where?”

“Where we go.”

I thought, Can I get out of this room? Is it still conceivable I can get away?

She, Marga, said quietly, “Roy, this is the hardest bit. Trust me. Hang on. It gets so much better.”

The door into the attic, seen from inside the attic, was painted dark blue. A faint tang of new paint clung to it, barely discernable in the aroma of cleanliness, polish, and roasting lamb. A panel in the pale green plasterboard had been pulled back to reveal it and give access. Normally this panel would close flush to the wall. And a bookcase stood there, or had done previously, now moved on up the room by about five feet. I would never have noticed this panel, as it had been. But someone like C – Mr C – must have done so. He hadn’t needed to find it, however, had he? Evidently he’d already known of its existence, as he knew about everything else in the flats, both below and up here. He had probably stayed here, now and then. They might all have done, all this gang – this team of mad people who were the accomplices and friends, perhaps the lovers of Joseph Traskul. Should more than one person stay at a time, there would be little privacy for them here, of course. If you slept here you would then sleep, if not in the same bed at least in the same room. And there had been two wash basins in the bathroom, a shower and a bath. Imaginably other things could be seen to in pairs, or groups.

They had no secrets from each other, that was no physical secrets.

And the way they spoke about him, it was familiar in the truest sense. It was familial. They were his family. Siblings, incestuous or not, brothers and sisters.

They told me things in segments, listening to any questions I asked with grave attentive faces, answering gravely, yet sometimes laughing too, appreciating, they said, my clever gambit with the sleeping tablets and Duran’s new locks, (which C and Sid hadn’t, even so, found particularly difficult to undermine. I’d kindly turned the alarm off for them, too. They were also amused by that. C could have neutralised it in moments anyway, they reassured me. He had been a policeman, did