To Indigo Read online

  This was going to be one of my fully insomniac nights, or so it seemed. I got to bed about ten-thirty and tossed and turned until one. Then I got up, made some tea and went into the study.

  Here I tried to make a start on the new novel, Kill Me.

  Outside two cats were wauling at each other. Up the road No 98 was having a party; I could catch the thump-thump of their music.

  I managed to squeeze out five hundred words of dry, formulaic crap, but it was, I told myself virtuously, a start.

  Then I found myself reaching out for the disc of Untitled.

  I put it in the machine.

  Chapter XVI. Printed up, this began on page 273, and ran on to Chapter XVII, and so to the part at which I had left it, in the spring of the year 2000.

  I skimmed through it, once or twice pausing, even now, to change a word, pare or extend a sentence.

  Lying on the floor of the Master’s upper room, Vilmos had just slaughtered a man dragged in for him from the alleys. Vilmos had performed the murder gruesomely, but without involvement. A rat had come from the corner to feast. His own body starved and tortured by the Master’s minions, Vilmos lay in the blood, the stranger’s and his own, his mind clear for the first time perhaps in twenty-five years, his eyes full of blue flashes, the visual product of another variation on his migraines. But the blue being very beautiful, very evocative, entertained him with its colour.

  My own eyes had begun to ache.

  I printed the amendments on paper, then switched off the machine. Going downstairs for a whisky nightcap, I poured it in one of the sturdier glasses from the kitchen. I felt done in, but would I sleep? Outside I heard the cats still fighting violently across the front paving. Their spitting struggle, or something like it, might fit well into the next paragraphs of Vilmos’s horror. Maybe other rats could come in and these would fight. I scribbled a note and took the whisky to bed.

  To my surprise I drifted after only a minute or so, into a warm and trackless sleep. Just two more days, then I’d be gone.

  Waking, the alarm-clock, blurred by my vision, said it was 4.12 a.m. There was as yet no light. Was I awake? I thought not completely, and turned eagerly to swim back down.

  That damned party up the road was still going on. I could hear the music, not thumping now, in fact a piano playing. A piano playing tunefully. Softly, pleasingly. I thought, Oh, that’s only Sej. And again I slept.

  I woke at half past ten. Nowadays that’s unheard of for me, even after a white night.

  When I sat up, a light wave of vertigo slid across my brain. I’m not subject to such things. My mouth tasted unusually nasty, chalky…

  A stab of absolute fright shot through me. I’d been drugged. I had been drugged. How? The tea – no, I’d worked a while after that. It must have been the whisky. Look, I hadn’t even finished it. I picked up the glass and sniffed it. There was no smell, only alcohol. But then, there hadn’t been any other smell than alcohol in the red wine I gave to him.

  This was the moment I recalled hearing the piano being played downstairs.

  I floundered out of bed, ran into the bathroom and grabbed the shaving-foam. It’s of the type that sprays.

  Running, vertigo forgotten, I took the stairs in leaps and sprang into the front room.

  No one was there. The lid of the piano was shut, as I’d eventually left it despite my cleaning girl’s admonition.

  The library and kitchen were also empty. There was no sign of any tampering, had been none upstairs. The windows were shut and locked, the back door also. The front door too, when I went and looked at it, was the same as I had left it, the upper bolt shakily done up and the bottom one stuck in the undone position. Both door locks were secure.

  Then I remembered the chair, which I’d left leaning on the door. It wasn’t there.

  Back into the front room I went. The chair stood, where it usually did. Had I misremembered? Hadn’t I moved it out into the hall? Had I dreamed I’d done that, then dreamed I heard him playing – what had it been? Gershwin – Someone to Watch Over Me – and then something else…

  I walked back into the hall and, not undoing the door, pulled at it very gently.

  The upper bolt fell straight down on the floor. It had been secured, this time for appearances only, by blue tac. When I’d fetched the magnifying glass from the library, knelt down and peered through it, I saw too the mass of something transparent and shiny that had trapped the lower bolt in its slot, unable to move. Superglue, probably.

  I stood there, thinking over the ultimate riddle. He must of course, during the short while he was here before, have managed to obtain copies of the two front door keys. But the bolts had been fine until the night before last. Thursday. Had Sej then already somehow broken in while I was here? I have reasonably good hearing for my age; surely I’d have heard him? The very camouflaging of the wrecked bolts indicated he’d wanted to enter quietly, to – shall I say – surprise me. And the drug, if there was one, in the whisky – I’d had a glass of whisky on Wednesday night, without any ill effect. I’d slept in the usual way, not well, only the peculiar dreams, but I’d had those off and on since first I met him.

  No, something had been done here later than Wednesday. And somehow I knew it hadn’t been by Joseph. This was an animal deduction. My instinct, if you like. As if I might have detected him by odour, or a pricking in my thumbs.

  Yet if not him, then who?

  It was at this moment that I recalled the young woman with the stalled car. She was tall enough to reach up bolt-high easily, but had she the strength to pry the bolt loose, the skill not to loosen it entirely, only enough a slight nudge from outside would shift it? Of course she could have slopped the glue on to the other, lower bolt. I remembered how she’d bent down, risen with the dropped Kleenex in her hand, and wiped her nose – or seemed to wipe it – so sadly, as if holding back tears. Had there been space also for her to pop into the front room and fix my whisky?

  Who was she? Why had she done it?

  She must have done it because Sej told her to.

  I remembered something else.

  I remembered the woman with the run-over dead white dog at the Belmont Hotel.

  SIXTEEN

  It goes without saying that ringing both Duran’s home number and his mobile got no answer. He was at the hospital. However, now I couldn’t quite push off the grim feeling that Sej had somehow also got at him, and that the labour of Duran’s girlfriend was a lie. The non-mad area of my brain dismissed this theory over and over. Duran would not be, let alone become, any pawn of Sej’s. And yet…

  Instead I called a local locksmith. I explained I needed my front door locks changed and bolts replaced.

  “Sorry, squire. I’m spoken for this next month.” He suggested another name and number who, politely saying much the same thing, also gave me another name and number. In the end, after several more similar calls, a nasal voice said he might be able to ‘help me out’. The price he quoted was exorbitant, but I agreed. He never turned up.

  What should I do?

  Damn it to hell. If Sej wanted bloody access so much let him have it. I’d had to abandon the house before. It would be lunacy to stay here now. Waiting. I began to pack that early Saturday afternoon, and in among the clothes and other stuff, held in bubble-wrap and a small box, I placed my mother’s red glass dog. Red, for Vilmos and his Order, was the colour of the lowest chakra, located at the genitals. Or blood, of course. Even a white dog could be made red that way. And what had I seen of it, that dead, white dog, I, the perceptive writer of detective fiction? A bundle out of which hung a tail. I hadn’t even gone close. It could have been a child’s sock. And the rest? Fake theatrical blood normally available in joke shops, if nowhere else – or even ketchup. And a small bolster.

  I raised the lid of the piano after I’d taken the ornament. I thought of smashing the keys of the piano with the hammer I use to knock in the odd nail.

  I also thought of poisoning every item of drink or f
ood in the house. I didn’t need sleeping pills, or bleach. Clear shampoo would do in the dry ginger. Sink cleaner, a white cream, smeared last over the frozen piece of chicken, appearance and smell obscured by the cold. Enough to make him sick again. Enough to sting. I toyed with these notions. I wanted to booby-trap the place but now there wasn’t time. I had to get out, before everything else in the street curled up in another night, and lying sleepless and fully dressed for morning, I heard the two keys turn in the locks, as I hadn’t last night. I’d piled several items against the front door again, kitchen chairs, pans and pots, the original paraphernalia plus. I’d managed to bump and heft one of the armchairs out of the front room too. Make it hard for him. I would leave by the back way, use the small kitchen ladder to climb over the back fence which, as I was light, should just take my weight as it had taken his rangier, slightly-heavier one the first time.

  In a defunct plastic vitamin bottle I poured a sample of the-perhaps contaminated whisky. I still wasn’t sure, there. Had I only been very tired? If it were a pill I’d like to know the brand name. Apart from slight giddiness on first sitting up, I felt fine. Thanks, Sej, for finally finding me the occasional good night’s sleep.

  I was loath to destroy the computer. To have to buy a new one would be annoying, and everything lately had taken a toll on my ‘savings’. Left alone it should be useable for another eighteen months at least, and for my requirements, probably three years. I had the discs, and I’d set it to delete again.

  Additionally now, I’d also pulled out the paperback copy of each of my novels, and dumped them in another bag. I’d put the big paper copy of Untitled in there too, complete with the recent printed corrections and hand-written scribbles. I added my mother’s Bible, the King James edition, retained by all of us for its language and antiquity, rather than any delusions of a God.

  I locked my bedroom door again and for good measure, before that, myself pumped glue down the upright of the door’s edge. Post locking I pumped glue as well into the lock. This was sheer perversity. There was nothing interesting in the room. I just wanted to frustrate him.

  But I hadn’t smashed the piano keys. It would take a lot to make me do something like that. It was a musical instrument, valuable not only as an object, but for its potential. In the same way I’d have been happy right then to poison Joseph Traskul, but not to break his fingers.

  Perhaps it goes without saying I had written down the number the ghastly Cart had given me. I nearly called it twice that afternoon. But then I couldn’t say exactly where the quarry was likely to be. Take it with me, and I’d have a more concrete clue that he might be here.

  At this time I had no notion of the 666 number of Sej’s London flat, only that such a flat was supposed to exist.

  I’d previously checked train times on the web, and was aiming for something between three and five-thirty. The grey stone village where Matthew, once with Sylvia, lived, is like many others, all of them rather more charmingly evidenced by the famous venue in Last of the Summer Wine. It was a few miles outside Cheston, and Cheston. with its concluding change of trains at Crewe, would take, all told, four hours. Cheston had the Empire Hotel. There I would park myself over Saturday night and Sunday, and polish off the last of the credit on my Barclaycard.

  Everything locked, bolted, barricaded, disconnected, made, where feasible, user-unfriendly, I left the house which had been my parents’ at 2.15 p.m. The bags were going to feel heavy. Having unlocked the back door, closed and relocked it, I climbed the kitchen ladder at the end fence. I intended to lower the bags over the top of the fence to the alley, trusting the packing would protect the glass dog.

  The day was miserable, gloomy. No one was about. Birds sang however, and up in the fir there came the flutter of wings.

  Looking over the fence I felt a fool. But there was no time for that. I lowered both bags with care; they only had to drop the shortest distance. Then I took hold of the barrier. Thank God, it at least was in decent repair. I kicked the ladder away and heard it skid along the paving, then launched myself across and down.

  A boy could do that. Now and then I had, as a boy, done such things. But I’m no longer a boy. I landed awkwardly but not badly, scraping my hand on the fence, and one knee on the concrete of the alley. In the fir the birds took flight with disapproving cries. And he rose from the shadow where, unseen in black, he had crouched, smiling, and helped me to my feet. I write books. I was a book. And he had read me all before, it seemed.

  Blood was seeping through my trouser leg where I’d grazed my knee like that boy I wasn’t anymore.

  He looked at that. “Oh dear.”

  “Take your bloody hands off me.”

  Smiling, he stepped back. And before I could think, he’d picked up both my bags. “We’ll go in the front way. Can you make it OK, Roy?”

  “The door is barricaded.”

  “I’m sure I can shift it. Don’t worry.”

  “There’s more there than last night.” I didn’t sound defiant, only meaningless.

  “Well, I’m strong. Come on. Won’t take a minute.”

  I stood where I was. I said, “Why don’t you leave me alone?”

  “Because I like you.”

  “I don’t – like you. Go to hell.”

  “How do you know I don’t already, on a regular basis?”

  An awful laugh burst out of me. I sounded madder than he did. “Right,” I said. “Are you going to give me back my bags?”

  “Of course, if you think you can manage.”

  “Give me my fucking bags.”

  He widened his eyes at me. It reminded me of a woman’s facial gesture. Maureen had never done this. Others, especially Lynda, had.

  “Take this one, then.” He handed me the holdall. “But this one, it’s smaller but it feels heavier. What have you put in here? Your secret wine cellar? Better let me carry that.”

  And turning from me, he sauntered back along the alley and turned the corner towards the front.

  I could have let him go, run the other way – my knee wasn’t bad – got out by the alley’s other exit nearer the Crescent. I would, I think, have got away.

  But the bag he had hold of contained my books, my discs, and my MS of Untitled. I realised in those seconds that I, too, was definitely unstable. In the holdall I had my passport, all crucial documents, even the house deeds – even now the glass dog. Yet I went after him. I hurried.

  He was already at the front door using the keys when I reached him.

  “Mmm,” he said contemplatively. “I can feel it’ll be a bit of a push. That’s all right.”

  Just then the front door of 72 opened. Out ambled amiable George, with the big kitchen scissors he uses to trim the hydrangea on his front lawn.

  “Hello, Roy. Oh, hello…” he added, beaming, to Sej.

  “Hi. How are you, Mr Fulton?” politely inquired Sej.

  “Oh, we’re fine, thank you.”

  I said, “George, I need to have a word with you.”

  George looked vaguely concerned. As I moved forward, Sej got in my way, putting an arm over my shoulders. I thrust him off.

  “George, this man is not my son. Go indoors. Call the police.”

  Stricken, George stood there, like a child on Christmas morning finding the presents are gone and the tree has died.

  Sej spoke to him before I could do so again. “Sorry, Mr Fulton. It’s all right. I think I explained a bit about this before. He’ll be OK now I’m here. Just leave it…”

  “George,” I said loudly, “for God’s sake do as I say. Please.”

  “Er, Roy – well, er…”

  As I took half another step in his direction, he performed a most determinative action. Largely I think it was subconsciously dictated. But then, I’ve never known them well, my neighbours. How could any of them be sure what or who I really was? He pointed the scissors at me, the points towards my chest, and backed up the lawn, in at his door. He was still saying, almost still amiably, “Er,
well, er,” as he closed it.

  I had my own mobile in my hand by then. Better late than never, but it was not. It was too late.

  “Now, Roy,” said Sej, not even glancing but predicting once more with total accuracy as he spun the phone out of my grasp. It hit the path. There was a crack. Had anyone else seen or heard? If they had, so what? We all have troubles of our own.

  “Give me the bag,” I said.

  “Not yet, Roy. Let’s get the door undone first.”

  Leave it, you fool, leave it all – sentimental glass dog, documents, manuscript, disc, book, DNA, house. Escape, you confounded fucking idiot…

  But instead I came at him, I, who cannot fight to save my life and never even scrapped with anyone since I was fourteen and Ben Oggey stole my fountain pen. Ben won, incidentally. No great amazement, that.

  Sej simply caught me and somehow swung me round, and as he put me down again he thrust with our combined weight at the front door. The pans went over inside with a stupid noise of armour, the chairs went too, even the armchair had shifted just enough.

  The wind was knocked out of me. He pushed me in through the open slice of door, then threw the bag of books over my head and along the hallway. Perhaps he thought I’d be impelled to race after it like a stick-addicted puppy. But I merely leaned on the wall and in he came, squeezing past the fallen barricade, putting down the other bag, the holdall, which he had also somehow relieved me of in our brief non-fracas.

  My front door too was shut. Outside my mobile was lying, maybe useless or not, on the path. But things get thrown on to the front gardens sometimes. There was even once, I’d heard, a whole box of uneaten pizza found floating in the pond at No 82.

  “Well then,” said Sej. “Let’s see about that knee of yours. Then we’ll have some tea.”

  Naturally I didn’t allow him to touch the graze. I saw to it myself in the bathroom, which he permitted. I had to conclude he had permitted it, even to my locking the bathroom door. But he could break it in anyway, I was fairly certain of that.