by Tanith Lee
I stood, nonplussed by the inevitable inference he had taken.
He ended, “Thank you, sir. Have a nice day.”
After the police I tried Harris’s number again. This time a perky P.A. answered. She belonged to Janette, of course. Janette was staying at the house in Hampshire while Harris sorted out his father’s affairs in Spain. However, right now, Janette wasn’t available, could the P.A. assist me? Obviously she could not.
After this, I went through an inventory of any person who might be able to assist, but as I had decided earlier, there was no one. The few non-business friends I now possess are of the acquaintance variety, and the males among them are my age or older, either skeletal or overweight, with diabetes and heart problems, or simply doddery.
I was on my own. The place I have been most often.
Every ten minutes or so I was going round the house, glancing from windows, out at the street, down at the side path and across the garden (where the dustbin still maintained its sentry post) to the alley to the back. I even scanned the frontal oak trees and the fir at the rear. Joseph Traskul, like Vilmos, seemed quite capable of physical feats, such as climbing up into trees. He must have scaled the back fence after all, toting the bin.
Belatedly I wished I had modernised my security. The locks and bolts and the temperamental burglar alarm were all I had. And I had noticed the alarm hadn’t gone off when I let myself back in this morning, though I had fumbled in my haste.
At lunch time I checked the fridge and freezer. I don’t eat vast amounts, and I had reasonable provender for a short siege.
I made myself a quick omelette and drank some tap water. I checked my potential armament, which is quite impressive, as in most homes it is, if ever analysed. Years of penning my usual kind of book had taught me quite a lot about what can be utilised, and even to some extent how. But I’m not a violent man. To describe a killing and a death neither excites nor upsets me. But the idea of doing it myself is still as alien to me as the thought of landing in person on the moon. Even so, we recall, men have landed there.
I put a couple of meat knives, a screwdriver, hammer, and a small drill and some other stuff, on the kitchen table, which by now I’d pushed up against the back door. I’d let the blind down over the side window of the kitchen, and stacked up pans in the sink, both to impede an entry and to make a noise. He would have to break the windows anyway. That would be enough.
On the credit side, if I ever felt able to sleep again, I never sleep for long unbrokenly, nor very deeply.
At the other windows on the ground floor I drew other curtains. The lower storey grew dark and menacing.
How long would this go on?
The telephone still worked. I kept testing it. Even if it failed – tampered with in some way – I had topped up the mobile and recharged it only yesterday morning. On the other hand, if I called them again the police might not bother. My sergeant had plainly concluded I was an ageing queer who had had a tiff with his young lover or not properly recompensed a male prostitute. They had more important things to see to.
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.
&nbs
p; 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 old to involve with a stalker, he might still make an impression on the Bill.
As I undid the door I heard him reassuringly murmur something outside to Vita, saying it was all right, no need to be upset.
And I felt very sorry to have worried them both, these sprightly fragile pensioners. Then I opened the door and there they stood. George, and behind him Vita, with both her hands clasped round the right hand of the man beside her, who was a strained, almost tearful Joseph Traskul.
“Oh thank God, Dad,” he exclaimed. “I really thought this time you were dead!”
SIX
Having raised the blind, he stood in the kitchen, looking at the pans and bottles erected in the sink to bar his entry.
He seemed to take my precautions quite seriously. He appeared to be considering their value, giving them marks out of ten. As if I’d asked his opinion.
Naturally too he had seen the knives. Not the smallest one, however. I’d slipped this some while ago in my trouser pocket. It had a leather cover on it. God knows what it was for or if my parents had ever used it.
Finally he said, “Should I be flattered?”
“You should be somewhere else.”
He smiled. He was, is, always smiling. Yet these smiles do not seem to be gratuitous ever. If I were writing this as an invented manuscript, stylistically I would need to edit some of them out. But then I’m not, this isn’t a book.
At the front door he had leapt forward and grabbed my shoulders in a sort of abortive hug.
I tried to say to George round the lean, tall back of him, “Call the police, please, George. This man is insane.” But George and Vita were beaming and George now had his arm about his wife. Relief, actual joy at our refinding of each other, his and mine, son and father, had made them both take on that look of sheer youth of which only the ageing or the old are ever capable.
They also looked incredibly and alarmingly frail. One swipe from Joseph’s arm might snap all their brittle bones in two.
Besides he was already pushing me, friendly and determined, back into my hall, coming in after me. He called over one shoulder as he went, “Thanks so much. Thank you both. It’s OK now. Don’t worry, I’ve known about these moods of Dad’s since I was fifteen. We’ll be fine now.”
And George gave me a little kind, rather cautious wave, and Joseph shut the door.
I wanted to punch out his lights, as used to be said.
But I’m no fighter in any area, let alone a physical one. He’d only floor me, and any puny blow of mine might make him worse.
He wasn’t holding on to me now. I turned and walked briskly on into the kitchen.
He walked behind me, amiably saying, “It’s dark down here.”
And then there we were, him letting up the blind, calculating the barricade of the kitchen table and my mother’s stainless steel pans in the sink.
“I don’t think that would keep anyone out for long.”
The verdict. He sounded quite regretful.
“No.”
“But then why would they break in?”
I just looked at him.
He turned and sat on the kitchen table. “You haven’t got a drink, have you?”
My mind raced. I thought, Yes, ply him with beer from the fridge and then some whisky, get him pissed. It might work. I could powder some aspirin or paracetamol, the ones with codeine, in his later drinks. This might be an answer.
“All right.” I said, careful not to seem too eager. “What did you have in mind?”
“Cup of tea?” he winningly asked me.
I saw, or thought I did, he was well aware of any other plans I might have. If he had done all this before, presumably things had been attempted.
I filled the kettle from the tap and switched it on. As I was setting out a mug and so on, he said, “You ought to use a filter.”
Try to be normal, if reserved. Treat him like a minor annoyance, nothing too much.
“The water here is all right. They replaced the pipes last year.”
“Well, I wouldn’t trust it, but there.”
I wondered if he would have some problem with the tea bags or milk – but he didn’t. He didn’t want sugar.
When I handed him the mug he gazed at it, examining it scrupulously. I didn’t think he was already checking for attempted drugging. He seemed curious, as one is sometimes about another person’s things. This was confirmed.
“I thought you might still use a cup and saucer.”
“How do you know I don’t?”
“Well I don’t know. Maybe you keep mugs for visitors only.” He tried the tea. “That’s good.”
My mother had always stuck to the cup-and-saucer method. After her death my father did too. One of my last most tragic memories of them, before she died, was of her lying in her hospital bed and saying to him sadly, “I do miss my china. Isn’t that silly?” A nurse had brought them both a cup of hospital tea. Me too, only I couldn’t swallow it.
I wanted only to escape. But I could do nothing to help her except remain at my post, with him. We used to go to the pub when visiting hours ended, or later in an interval when they had extended the visiting hours indefinitely. This is a strange and awful thing. He was with her when she died. Not me. I had had to go to the lavatory. When I came back he said, “Look, she’s sleeping really peacefully now,” and I thought he knew, but he believed she was asleep. I went and got a nurse, let her tell him. She held his hand while he cried, but he was very quiet, didn’t want to distress this kind nurse holding his hand when she was so busy.
That came back to me with a terrible immediacy as I stood there and Joseph Traskul sat on the table and drank the undrugged tea.
I wanted to kill him in that moment.
The first moment I ever truly wanted that.
I averted my eyes, in case he could read them.
Outside a pigeon had perched again on the black dustbin. It seemed to be inspecting the earlier pigeon dropping. Was it the same pigeon, come back to evaluate its own previous artistry?
I felt tired. I sat in the chair.
He’d finished the tea. He put the mug down on the table and said, “Did you figure it out?”
“What?”
“Any of it. What you were asking me over the phone.”
“No.”
“But you realise what happened next door?”
“You said you were my son and I was your father, and I had moods during which I drew the curtains in the daytime and – I assume – might be likely to attempt suicide.”
“Close enough. I thought a son-father relationship would be more compelling than the uncle-nephew scenario you foisted on me in the pub.”
“That was true. You do look a bit like him. Less and less the more I see of you. He wouldn’t behave as you have, either.” I had decided to keep my army of invented relatives about me.
But he only said, “You don’t have a nephew, or if you have you never see him. Y
ou don’t have a wife.”
“I have a wife.”
“But she’s still away.”
“Her mother has been taken to hospital. I’m supposed to go over too.”
“But you won’t be, will you.”
“Won’t I? I’m your prisoner, am I?”
I thought he would laugh this off in his inappropriately urbane way, but to my dismay he didn’t. As with the pans, he seemed to be considering what I had said. “Are you?” he asked me eventually. “My prisoner? I wonder if you are.”
I found I held my breath. I was irrationally relieved when he seemed to gloss it over.
“But we still haven’t established how I found you. Shall I let you in on it, Roy?”
“Yes.”
“Tell you what. I will spill all the beans in exchange for another mug of tea. By the way, can I use your toilet?”
“It’s upstairs, to the right.”
Did he glimpse the spurt of possibility in my face?
If he had, it had died even as it arrived. I had nothing to hand. Though I had carried the smallest and sharpest knife upstairs and placed it in my pocket, I had not thought on my return downstairs to bring any tablets. Demonstrably, in spite, of my planning, I could never really have reacted to the notion of his being here in the house with me.
He swung gracefully off the table and almost loped from the room. I heard him go up.
One frantic moment I rummaged in my mind for anything in drawers or cupboards. But there was nothing. A mostly dried-up bottle of Peptobismal, the remains of some Cabman’s Cough Mixture from January, the cod liver oil tablets I occasionally took – I did think of the bleach under the sink. But I shrank from that. It wasn’t only cowardice, but the memory of the disbelieving policeman. I could picture the scene, having described it in various books, the body, the mess and bloody vomit. The police would see the evidence of an unfriendly tea-party, and conclude I had now poisoned my former lover, malice aforethought.
I therefore simply made him another tea and left it on the table.
Upstairs the cistern sounded.