Ivoria by Tanith Lee (uplifting novels .txt) 📕

The man now did not respond. He only said, “Walk uphill. Stay under the trees. Remember I’m right behind you.”

They walked, Laurence, and the man, as he had said, right behind him.

Thin fallen branches split and crackled underfoot. Frost or only damp caught the moon, gleaming in white highlights. Something darted away through the dead ferns.

Laurence’s shoes were going to be ruined. Christ - God - shoes - as if that…

Is it the Pin? How can it be? What is it? Please let him tell me - Do I need to… ? Don’t let him hurt me. God - don’t let him…

Christ. He had wet himself. Oh God, what the fuck did that matter? Laurence felt so sick now he was choking on bile. He spat, and nearly stumbled. The whole wood spun.

And incongruously the man said “Steady, Mr Lewis. Nearly there.”

The shadows closed right round them eventually. Even the moon barely shone into this spot.

“Stop,” said the man again. There was a faint crisp rustling, and Laurence swung round to see what was happening. He saw the man, already straightening, had bent and picked up in his gloved left hand a broken stone from the ground. The stone was large, about the size of a coconut, Laurence wildly thought. The man held it, hefted it, getting it just right in his grip.

“What are you…?”

“What do you think, Mr Lewis? Turn round again now. And then kneel down.”

“What - why?”

“Just do as I say. You’ll find it easier. Quicker.”

“Easier for you to kill me - No - for Christ’s…”

Laurence after all turned and began to run. It was mindless impulse. He could not resist it. He slipped, staggered. He expected a bullet to enter his brain immediately.

And it seemed one did.

After about five seconds the man ran forward and kicked Laurence hard in the side, testingly. He might have passed out. Or even be faking. But Laurence did not stir. The dark red his face had gradually turned in the car seemed very congested, very fixed. The man crouched down then, and swiftly examined Laurence more intimately, using his gloved hands. Presently he drew off the right outer glove, leaving on only the plastic one. He checked once more for pulse and heartbeat. None. He had put the gun in his pocket by then. That was how sure he had already become that he would not need it. Nor the preferred stone intended to bash in the back of Laurence’s skull.

The Man had been in the business for several years, and before that in various military outfits around the world. He knew dead well enough, and how to make dead by now even better. But never before, in his long and professional career, had death itself stepped in and struck the blow for him. It will be a story to tell one day, somewhere or other. For now, the client would be very pleased. Natural causes, not even a spurious mugging.

As a rule, at this post-mortem point, the hit man, for good measure, would pocket any money left on his victim. But under these circumstances it was better to leave it.

Besides, something had begun to make him feel wary. It was not the curious means of his success, but a faintly nagging trained nerve, which had begun, off and on, to tick ever since Laurence pulled the Volvo on to the Lower Richmond Road. For it had seemed to The Man then that someone, after all, however inexplicably, might in turn be tailing them. Needing to concentrate on his subject, the man had not been able either to confirm or cancel this idea. Now, mission accomplished so abruptly – he could be off, and this seemed wise.

There came an augmentation.

Just as he straightened up, a sudden stampeding rush of noises erupted to his left along the slope, and every moon-reflection there shattered and shook. He had no notion as to what caused this, but without hesitation, in a surge of nearly uncanny speed, he sprang away, up and under the trees. He was gone. Next moment instead, a kind of demon leapt from the darkness, smashing to smaller pieces the scattering fragments of the night.

Stewart phoned his lover that night at eleven twenty-three.

“Yes?” she said breathlessly.

Stewart spoke crucially. “Your worries are over.” She said nothing, but he interrupted her silence: “You remember what’s next?”

“Yes. Thank…” she said, but he had cut her off completely before she could utter another word.

Stewart himself had received the affirming call only twelve minutes before. It had been even shorter, and rather more obscure, than his to his lover. “OK?” the caller had asked “Fine,” said Stewart, “yourself?” “Just fine,” the caller answered. That was it. It meant the prepaid job was successfully done. And Stewart had no reason to doubt or quibble. He, or rather those few he recommended, had all been served to perfection.

Laurence Adrian Lewis was dead. And if at that moment Stewart and Angela both thought Laurence would be found to have been the recipient of a random, probably junkie-based lethal mugging, something even more unpolice-worthy could only provide a cherry on the cake.

Angela had met Stewart about three months prior to the events of that Friday.

Their first rendezvous was in a rundown pub in Putney known, to its regulars, and the Shit-Hole.

Stewart could tell instantly Angela was uneasy, and she was besides far too overdressed. She wore a Maeve Astly sweater, mid-calf length velvet pencil skirt, high-heeled suede boots, and a Venetian cagoule. She had an attractive walk, however, and an excellent figure, which even the cagoule did not disguise, once she sloughed it. She was about forty-five, he thought, but then he himself was forty-eight. He liked her narrow, rather canine face, too, with its large hazel vulnerable eyes and generous mouth filled with white teeth. Her hair was fashionably short and streaked.

She drank gin and tonic, paying for it herself, of course. He stayed