To Indigo by Tanith Lee (read along books txt) 📕

I made some coffee, and having parked the hall table against the front door and laid various bits and pieces by the curtained windows to announce entry, I took myself upstairs.

The computer switched on, I checked for emails. There were none.

I turned to the notes for the new dry little novel. Sat there staring at them.

Was I being a complete fool about all this?

The phone in the hall rang at 3.07 p.m. It’s handheld, and when I work upstairs I bring it with me. I wondered if the police had decided to contact me and quiz me about wasting police time.

“Hello.”

“Hello, Roy.” he said.

Christ, his voice, so soon, was entirely unmistakable.

What to say? Who is this? Or break the connection. Break it, and unplug the phone?

How had he got the number? He could not have got the number unless he had found out my second name. And there was no way on earth he could have. Or maybe there was, that thing about searching the Web – every house shown on some sort of map, every name, even the most obscure, locatable somehow…

I hadn’t spoken. So he said, gently, “You’re asking yourself how I got this number?”

I swallowed. “Yes. I was.”

“Shall I tell you? You really ought to work it out for yourself, Roy, shouldn’t you? But then, you still don’t grasp how I found your house – or have you deduced that?”

Deduce. He knows me. He knows I write detective stories. Is that it? But I write as R.P. Phillips…

“I have,” I said stolidly, “been in touch with the police.”

“Really?” I could hear his smile, all the way along the wire.

“They suggest…”

“If only you knew, Roy, how pointless all this is, on your part. I have become interested in you.”

Apparently he too understood the police would think this situation irrelevant. But how could he be sure? Perhaps – had he done this sort of thing before?

“Interested in what way?”

“Well, human interest, you know, Roy. No such thing as a dull person. What is that quote from the German – ‘scheinst… And how the dull shine!’ Bernhardt, isn’t it? Actually a Jewish philosopher, living in Germany. I’m sure you’ve heard of him.”

“No.”

“There, you see, I could introduce you to his work.”

“Tell me how you got the number.”

“I’m just round the corner. It’s taken me until now to digest that amazing breakfast. I’ll be with you in…”

“No. You won’t be with me in anything. Stop this now. I’ve told you about the police.”

“Oh. That.”

I cut the connection.

I sat there. I was imagining him scrambling ably over the fence, tapping out the window with a hammer and brown paper so it made no appreciable sound. I had never had the windows properly double-glazed. A cat could get in if it really wanted.

I went downstairs, carrying the phone, and with the sharpest of the knives I had previously selected.

From the front window I peered out, between my mother’s heavy Dralon curtains.

The day had clouded over, adding to the indoor murk. The blonde woman from across the street, No 73, was standing on her front lawn, staring despairingly at her poodle, which was performing the first syllable of its breed name in the grass.

Could I signal to her? It would be useless. She and I anyway had never exchanged more than a polite grunt.

I waited rigidly for the phone to go again, but it didn’t. Nor did he appear.

At this juncture I made a resolution. I pulled the phone plug out.

Instead I tried my mobile. Thank God, no sign of unknown calls, no private numbers.

I thought of Harris up to his eyes in Dad’s Death, and considered he had, in all the thirty odd years we had known each other, never given me the number of his personal telephone or mobile. Harris too was not a friend. He could, would, do nothing.

I was very angry by now. I was frustrated, jittery, at the end of the proverbial tether.

Probably, I thought, he will get tired of this. And also, if he has done this before, perhaps he does have a criminal record. For example, if he had done this to a woman, the police would have been far readier to intervene. The name Joseph Traskul – it was much too dramatic. It could well be an invention, and each victim would be offered a different one. I hadn’t described him to the police – I don’t, in my ordinary fiction, go in for a lot of description, it slows the action down… But I had his letter – handwriting and DNA. I went straight to the kitchen and got that and in that moment the doorbell went.

Naturally I’m not brave. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Which has to be one of the truest analogies ever coined.

The bell went once, then twice, then again and again. And then the letter box flapped up; I could see the slot of light between the table legs of my barricade.

A voice called briskly through to me. “Roy. Are you all right in there? Can you hear me, Roy? Can you answer?”

It wasn’t his voice.

In the shock of relief I couldn’t think for a second who the hell it was. Then sense returned and I knew.

“George – yes, hang on.” It was my attached neighbour from 72.

“Oh, that’s good. You’re all right, are you? Only…”

“Hang on, George. Don’t go away.” I got to the door. I was numb with the release of tension.

“But all your front and side windows are blacked out…” George insisted, anxiously harking back to the war years I so wisely missed, “and…”

“I’m fine.” I dragged the table away.

George is old, about seventy-nine, eighty maybe. We’d exchanged a few pleasantries, the odd pint of milk or piece of advice on electrics or plumbing. His wife, Vita, once brought me a slice of the delicious cake she’d baked for his seventy-seventh birthday, after I politely cried off the party. But now George, perhaps, was an ally, a character witness. Too