Greyglass Read online

  Had Anne, had she known? No. Anne, for all her crash into age and unbeauty and vodka, was not that kind of woman who could consentingly bring a kid of twelve to England to become the sexual toy of some wealthy group or outfit of paedophiles. Was she. Was she?

  “Do you think I was in on this?”

  “Well, Miss Wilde, were you?”

  They must have tapped Anne and Wizz’s phones. They would have heard conversations between Anne and Susan. Did these people suppose it was all done in code, in case?

  After they had photographed Susan, searched her – so shocked by then, numbed, she barely noticed this search, carried out by an expressionless woman, but wondering if there would be an internal search – there was not – then later wondering if Anne, the courier, had been – a woman of almost sixty-two – subjected to one – after they had done these, and other matter-of-fact, intrusive things, some of which Susan only recollected hours later, Susan thought, They do think I’m guilty of this. And Anne is guilty.

  But she kept trying to persuade the gingery man and the svelte Scottish woman that neither she nor Anne was guilty at all.

  Susan told them about Wizz, and what she knew about Eve. It was so little.

  She supposed they would not catch Eve, either. Perhaps not anyone from the firm.

  And so Anne and she might have to do.

  “What time is it?”

  She thought the chocolate woman might not answer, but she glanced at her watch and said, “Nine thirty-five.” They had taken Susan’s watch away, along with some of the things in her bag. If this was expediency, or another form of coercion, she did not know.

  Some unmoist cheese sandwiches had been brought, and some tea. They had let her have a glass of water, too.

  “I don’t know what I can ask you,” said Susan, “what am I allowed to ask?”

  The chocolate woman looked at her.

  “When can I see my mother?”

  The chocolate woman said,” I wouldn’t hold your breath.”

  “She isn’t young,” said Susan. Even in this extremity, saying that, she felt disloyal. “I don’t think she’s very well.”

  The woman nodded. The nod meant nothing.

  At one a.m. Susan asked the time again. And at seventeen minutes past one, when she asked again, the ginger man, the Scottish woman, and another man – fat, with glasses – came in.

  Susan got up.

  “Let me see my mother, please.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the fat man. He sounded sorry, apologetic, not unkind, which seemed unbearably threatening now, or had Susan only watched too many shows on TV?

  “At least tell me if she’s all right.”

  “Quite all right. Rather distressed, of course.”

  Susan suddenly found she was crying. She sat down. The tears ran across her face and stopped. She wondered, removed and bleak, were tears a show of innocence to these people or only of culpable fear?

  The fat man came over and pulled out a chair and sat sidelong to her. The ginger man stood. The woman perched on the larger table, across which all dialogue had previously been lobbed.

  “This hasn’t been pleasant for you, Miss Wilde. I know that. And I’m sorry to tell you there will be charges brought against Anne Wilde, your mother. Personally, I’m of the opinion she’s merely been incredibly naïve, but at the moment not everyone is happy with that. I suppose rank stupidity could be counted as an offence in a case like this.”

  Susan felt void. It was like the last stages of a virus. She didn’t care anymore. She said, mechanically, “Will the child be all right?” Because in the distant future she might sometime want to know.

  “Perhaps.”

  “I thought –”

  “Oh, we’ve got the child away from them. There won’t be any more of that for her. But I’m sure you’re aware, in these situations, certain things will already have happened. She’ll be damaged. They always are. But, she’s young. As you are, Miss Wilde. We heal better when we’re young.”

  Beyond the room, a bell rang, once, twice. It sounded almost like a fire drill, but no one took any notice.

  “There’s just one other matter I need to mention, Miss Wilde.” He waited, as if for her to say brightly, Oh, what? Then he said, “Your friend at the flats, Crissie Fielding –”

  Susan thought, Who is Crissie Fielding? She thought, But they will have watched me, too, they know everything. They probably know what I have for breakfast. They probably know my whole life story. They know I have a neighbour who is unhinged, and called Crissie.

  “What about her?”

  “It seems she has some influential admirers, Miss Wilde. We wondered a little, you see. But she isn’t someone who would need to be involved in this sort of dirty little game.”

  “You thought Crissie –”

  “No, we didn’t think anything, Miss Wilde. Nor do we think it about you, you’ll be relieved to learn. And now that’s sorted out,” (what had been?) “maybe we should get you home.”

  Susan started to say, in her viral voice of halting cotton wool, “You must let me see Anne first –”

  But nobody took any notice.

  The fat man went out, smiling and affable, his work, whatever it was, well done. Susan had to sign a couple of papers. They took her down to another room and gave her back her watch and the things from her handbag.

  Then she had to sit and wait, and now she didn’t know why. Unless it was all a ruse, and they weren’t going to let her go.

  In this room, which was bigger, with pale, grey-washed walls and more-padded chairs, and an unoccupied desk, there was also a clock.

  The clock and Susan’s watch showed almost an hour’s difference. Obviously it would be her watch which had gone wrong, slowing down in captivity as she had.

  And she thought of Anne somewhere in the building, (as if she had only just realised this) her own watch useless, and should Susan have made more fuss? But no, it would accomplish nothing.

  She thought, What do I have to do? Do I have to get her a lawyer? Maybe Mike Hammond, or Laurel, could advise her. She would have to talk to someone. It was all such a business. She remembered Anne saying, soft and sombre, “Oh, God, now we’ve got all this death business, forms, mess, and the bloody funeral.” After the police found Catherine sitting dead on a park bench, twenty years ago.

  It was five a.m., or four-ten. Someone came in, a man. “Come along, Miss Wilde.”

  She followed him, and they went through a lot of fiercely lit corridors, and at the windows, which any new room they passed had, the black sky seemed never likely to give way.

  She fell asleep in the car, as Anne had, during the drive back into London. The driver woke her in a side street. Here she had to leave the big car and get into a cab. She was cold. She thought confusedly the cab driver would start to talk: Where have you been? Where are you going this time of the morning? He never spoke.

  She wondered if she had enough money on her to pay him. This grew frighteningly important. She started to elaborate mental plans of how she must explain, leave him what cash she had, rush into her flat and bring the rest out. In the end, he pulled up in Dunkirk Street, where now the trees were large and fine and covered with the spearheads of buds. It was so cold. Something like white sugar coated the gutters, the roofs, the limbs of boughs. She got out, but the cab drove off before she could begin the rigmarole about money.

  In the early morning, with the milk-floats going by, under the thinning sky, where light had broken through the blackness after all, in the smell of the cold. Walking.

  Why hadn’t the cab brought her to Tower Road? They would have had to come by another route. Was this to cause more disorientation? Or a mix up?

  Over fences, creepers had shawls of ice. Would the park gates be closed? No, they were open. Someone was collecting litter. A bird sang shrilly from the direction of the public toilets.

  But the grass was all slathered in brittle white. It crunched under her shoes. And then people hurried
past her, off to catch the early trains, and she thought of Anne, left behind. And she thought of Anne.

  As she let herself into her flat (6E) Susan recalled she had gone by Crissie’s flat across the hall, (6C) and hadn’t seen it, as if it were not there.

  Had she gone by the statement about Crissie like this, too?

  What had the fat man said? What had he implied? Crissie had influential admirers. Presumably men she had slept with, in her trade as a prostitute. So, what she had told Susan about that was a fact after all, not a fabrication.

  But also – also had the fat man been saying that they had investigated Crissie, and to protect Crissie, or her ‘admirers’ – they had left Susan herself ultimately alone? Or did he mean that Crissie had somehow learned what had happened, and asked someone, some admirer, (Heinrich maybe, Ed, or Todd) to intervene at a high level and save Susan’s skin?

  Why? Why would Crissie – why would she care so much?

  The curtains stood open at the arched windows, undrawn last night.

  Beyond the French doors of the main room, as on the drive leading to the house, lawn and trees were frosted white.

  Susan found she had switched on the central heating. It made a knocking, tapping sound. She walked up and down across the room, trying to be warm again. Should she make tea? Pour a measure of brandy? The decision was beyond her. It was like the time after R.J.

  In the end, she went to the French door, unlocked it, let the icy air come slicing in. She didn’t know why she did. She didn’t understand at all. None of it.

  On the recently painted bench to the left of the steps something was.

  Susan turned to see.

  Someone was sitting on the bench.

  Susan looked.

  It was the figure of a woman. Slender and straight, with loose fair hair – or hair that had been loose and fair.

  “Crissie…?” said Susan.

  The woman sat there, on the bench. Her skin appeared monochrome, nearly colourless. Nearly sepia… her clothes, her hair, these were covered with the white lace of the frost, which at the edges of her garments, hair, had turned to a crochet of white. In profile, one eye of dark grey crystal – that seemed daintily fractured as if by a flung stone.

  But it was Susan’s eyes that had fragmented, one pane sliding across another.

  She was back in the past of this living, metamorphosing house. The face she saw was not dead, but only mummified with its bitterness.

  “What is the point,” said the old woman in the pumpkin house of Susan’s memory, “of my being alive? There you are, the two of you,” (She means me, and Anne, my mother) “flesh of my flesh, the children of my body, there you are, and I am alone. This is what I have come to.” It had been her fault, and perhaps she had realised that. Was it tears in her eyes? All that poison and tactless cruelty – made of regret and tears. We hated her, were allergic to her, Susan thought. As now I dislike and dread my mother.

  Catherine. She had died. There in that cold park. And after that she had haunted this house. Not as a ghost, but as a poltergeist expressed from the body of a baby that became a child, miles off. In Kent. (I knew in her flat that evening, in the twilight when we put the lights on – and that’s why I’ve avoided her. Not because I thought she was insane. Because I saw what she’d told me – was true.)

  As someone had said, Catherine hadn’t known she must go away. Rather, she had thought she must return to her house. And return she did in the only way she then could. Years of fascinating the cats in Jackie’s rescue centre, terrorising grumpy Mildred with knockings, opened windows, hidden things, distressing Olivia and Jeremy’s trendy existence. Only finally settling into her reborn physical self at the age of nine: Crystal, the daughter of a wealthy builder and his gold-medal wife. And Crystal’s life was to be as different from the life of Catherine as Crystal could make it. Until fate, or her burning inner will, manipulated the world, and brought her again to the vegetable house. After which, Susan knocked on the door of her flat.

  Catherine had wanted love from those two who never loved her. Only this second time, one of them had.

  Catherine sat on the blue bench, covered in the frost of her previous death, living now, but demonstrating how it had been.

  Catherine. Who had become Crissie.

  Crissie turned. She turned her head. The frost came with her lightly, like a veil. It was in her fringe, on her eyebrows, lashes. It was over every inch of her. But the grey crystal eyes were not fractured, only webbed, and they saw. She looked at Susan and smiled her ice-rimed, frozen, triumphant smile of grey glass.

  If you’ve enjoyed this book and would like to read more great SF, you’ll find literally thousands of classic Science Fiction & Fantasy titles through the SF Gateway.

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  Also by Tanith Lee

  Birthgrave

  The Birthgrave (1975)

  Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1977) (aka Shadowfire)

  Quest for the White Witch (1978)

  Novels of Vis

  The Storm Lord (1976)

  Anackire (1983)

  The White Serpent (1988)

  Four-BEE

  Don’t Bite the Sun (1976)

  Drinking Sapphire Wine (1977)

  Silver Metal Lover

  The Silver Metal Lover (1981)

  Metallic Love (2005)

  Tanaquil

  Black Unicorn (1989)

  Gold Unicorn (1994)

  Red Unicorn (1997)

  Blood Opera

  Dark Dance (1992)

  Personal Darkness (1993)

  Darkness, I (1994)

  Lionwolf

  Cast a Bright Shadow (2004)

  Here in Cold Hell (2005)

  No Flame But Mine (2007)

  Other Novels

  Volkhavaar (1977)

  Electric Forest (1979)

  Day by Night (1980)

  Lycanthia (1981) (aka The Children of Wolves)

  Sung in Shadow (1983)

  Days of Grass (1985)

  A Heroine of the World (1989)

  The Blood of Roses (1990)

  Heart-Beast (1992)

  Elephantasm (1993)

  Eva Fairdeath (1994)

  Vivia (1995)

  When the Lights Go Out (1995)

  Reigning Cats and Dogs (1995)

  White as Snow (2000)

  L’Amber (2006)

  Greyglass (2011)

  Collections

  Cyrion (1982)

  Tamastara (1984) (aka The Indian Nights)

  The Gorgon: And Other Beastly Tales (1985)

  Women as Demons (1985)

  Dreams of Dark and Light (1986)

  Forests of the Night (1989)

  Nightshades: Thirteen Journeys into Shadow (1993)

  Tanith Lee (1947–2015)

  Tanith Lee was born in London in 1947. She is the author of more than 70 novels and almost 300 short stories, and has also written radio plays for the BBC and two scripts for the cult television series Blake’s 7. Her first short story, ‘Eustace’, was published in 1968, and her first children’s novel The Dragon Hoard was published in 1971. In 1975 her adult fantasy epic The Birthgrave was published to international acclaim, and Lee maintained a prolific output in popular genre writing throughout her life. She twice won the World Fantasy Award, and was a Guest of Honour at numerous science fiction and fantasy conventions including the 1984 World Fantasy Convention in Ottawa, Canada. In 2009 she was awarded the prestigious title of Grand Master of Horror, and in 2013 she was given the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. Tanith Lee was married to author and artist John Kaiine. She died in May, 2015.

  For more information see www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/lee_tanith

  Copyright

  A Gollancz eBook

  Copyright © Tanith
Lee 2011

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Tanith Lee to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2015 by

  Gollancz

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK Company

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 0 575 12087 7

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.orionbooks.co.uk