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

I know?) They congratulated me too on my last tactic, presumably the meal or they had heard the piano from outside, that which had so lulled Sej and resulted in his fractured skull. How did they square this with their demonstrated liking for, admiration of, love of him?

“Roy,” said Marga, “we know what it cost you. We’ve all been there,” she said, “I told you that.”

“You mean,” I said, “are you saying – he’s done to all of you the sort of things he did to me? He drove you so far towards insanity that you attacked him, meant to kill him? Is that what you’re saying?”

“In a way. Yes. But it isn’t towards insanity.”

Leo said, “You should have seen what I did to him, Roy. I threw him down a flight of stairs, broke both his legs. His right leg’s full of metal.”

“No one blames you, Roy,” said Cart, the first time he’d used my Christian name.

“I don’t care if you blame me,” I said woodenly. “You rescued him, you took him to a hospital – if any of this is true.”

“It’s true.”

“What about the last time? That beating up, C and – who is he? Sid?”

“No, he didn’t need the hospital bit then. The doing over – some was real – most faked,” said Leo. “Really just the first blow, that was genuine, to convince you. Then stagecraft. The way actors learn to do it. It would look good, like it did in movies before the digital stuff came in and made all the stunt-men redundant. C’s taught us all a lot of it. Marga’s an actress too. She still has contacts. Even I have now been to drama fight school. I could fight for real before, you understand. Had to unlearn quite a lot.”

They cracked another bottle.

I still hadn’t touched my first glass.

No one pressed me now to eat or drink.

About 2.30 a.m. by my watch, the man called Sid came in via flat 5 below, to which they all had keys. He was the young one with the bony face I recognised now not only as C’s companion hit-man, but the tall man kissing tonight the tall girl by the dark blue car in Old Church Lane. And she had been the one called Liss, the girl whose car had originally ‘stalled’, allowing her to glue or break my door-locks. Tonight’s blue car had been her white one. They’d simply resprayed it. (I’d asked. They’d told me).

Sid now wore dark blue also, a dark blue pullover with a white 0 on the right arm. This seemingly represented his full name, which he told me was Obsidian. “Obsidian mate, innit. But just call me Sid.”

He told us Liss was waiting at the hospital. The op hadn’t happened yet. Surgeons were discussing X-rays. Liss had said could one of the others relieve her before 4 a.m. C was still there, but she needed to get home, she had to work tomorrow. “I’ll do it,” said Leo, “haven’t been out all day. I’ll give the car a run.”

About ten minutes later another man arrived. For a minute I didn’t think I had seen him before, but I had. He wore a dark blue suit, Armani it looked like, a dark blue Italian tailored shirt. His shoes were possibly worth two thousand pounds.

Dark blue. All of them wore that. The car had been sprayed dark blue, even C’s van, I’d gathered, which had waited round the corner in the Lane and which I hadn’t spotted. Certainly the inside of the upper door into the attic.

Dark blue: indigo.

He had read the MS. The colour was one more game played against me, the rules made up so no one new could learn them. There were no rules. In fact, that was what you had to learn.

Marga said in the ’90’s she hadn’t had work for three years and her husband was a bastard, but a rich one. He still kept her on as insurance against any of his “tarty birds” trying to force marriage. Divorce, he told them, was out of the question. He couldn’t harm his wife like that. Once one of the birds, crazed with jealousy mostly of the bastard’s bank balance, got the address of his and Marga’s huge flat in Hampstead. “She came round with a gun. It was only a toy, but I didn’t know and I passed out. Scared her, I suppose, and she took off. A couple of months after Sej homed in on me out of nowhere. I nearly went mad with fear – only it wasn’t. The worst thing,” she said, serenely, “was when I had to strip naked. I was over forty. Too old to be very confident, and with few reasons to be, either. I hoped even so he’d make love to me. Hoped that was what he wanted. But he didn’t. He doesn’t, Roy. He’s – celibate, so far as any of us know.” (I thought, He gets his jollies from this game he plays. But I didn’t say it. Although she was an actress and this was likely only one more performance, her stillness held me there.). “So that was why I tried to finish him off. Do you know what I did? I stuck a carving knife in him.”

“But you got it wrong.”

“It struck a rib. Apparently a common mistake for the novice assassin. Yes I got it wrong. But he was hospitalised then, too. Quite a while.”

“And then?”

“And then, Roy. And then.” And her face lit up.

Leo said, “And I was a bloody alcoholic, Roy. I’m not now. Oh I like my dram. A glass of wine. But the shit stuff all went. I’d had nothing in my life. D’you know what he said to me, Sej? Life plays with us. So we don’t play that game. We play our own game. Harder. That’s what it is, Roy. It’s play. Like kids do. Cruel sometimes. Funny sometimes. But it breaks the mould. Then we can get out.”

“Out