"The Riddle Of The Third Mile" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dexter Colin)CHAPTER FOURThe taxi-driver knew the street, and Browne-Smith settled himself in the back seat with a heightened sense of excitement. He would have wished to savour these moments longer, but in less than five minutes the taxi pulled up at the kerb of Number 29, a large four-storied balconied building in a fashionable terrace just behind Russell Square. In general, although the original brickwork on the lower reaches of the walls had been smutted by traffic-fumes and smoke, the house seemed to have maintained its elegant fagade with comparative ease. The black door, with its polished brass knobs and letter-box, was framed by white pillars; and the woodwork of the windows was also painted white, with neatly kept window-boxes adding their splash of greens and reds. Black railings, set in concrete, were stretched along the front; behind which, after a gap of about five feet, the wall of the house continued down to a basement. On these railings a board had been affixed: Luxury Apartments for Sale or to Let Please apply: Brooks and Gilbert (Sole Agents) Tel. 01-483 2307 Viewing by appointment only Browne-Smith walked up the three shallow steps, and pressed the single bell, apprehensively fingering the blue card that was now in his inside jacket-pocket. He waited. But he had heard no sound of ringing on the other side of the great door, and he could see no sign of life. At this moment, and for the first time, the idea filtered into his mind that he might have been cruelly duped for the silly fool – the silly But the door had opened silently behind him. ‘Can I help you?’ (That West Country intonation again.) ‘I’m a friend of Mr Sullivan’s.’ (Hardly the customary tone of his Mods tutorials-hesitant and slightly croaky.) ‘You have an appointment?’ He took out the small, oblong card and handed it to her. The typewritten legend was exceedingly brief, but also (as Browne-Smith saw it) exceedingly significant: ‘Please admit bearer’-nothing else, except for that little constellation of asterisks clustered hi the top right-hand corner. The woman stood aside and beckoned him over the threshold, closing the door (again noiselessly) behind them. ‘You’re an important client, sir, and we welcome you.’ She smiled appropriately as they moved through the large entrance hall, carpeted in a light-olive shade, with the same carpeting leading up the wide staircase which faced the front door. She turned to him as she walked on ahead up these stairs, and Browne-Smith noticed her inappropriately ugly teeth as she smiled again. ‘All blue cards are on the first floor, sir. I’m afraid we haven’t got our full complement of girls just for the moment-it’s the evenings usually that we have our busiest time. But I’m sure you won’t be disappointed in any way. No one’s ever disappointed here.’ On the first landing, she turned to him again, her eyes assessing him shrewdly, like a tailor mentally measuring some wealthy customer. Then, after looking along the corridor to left and right, she appeared to decide where the most appropriate prospects lay, for she opened the door immediately across the landing with a brusqueness which seemed clearly to betoken her mistress-ship of the establishment. At a table immediately inside the room on the left sat a woman of some forty summers, blonde and big-breasted, wearing a low-cut, full-length purple gown; and, as the lady of the house introduced her client, she stood up and slowly smiled. ‘You’re free, I think, this afternoon, Yvonne?’ ‘Thees eevening, also, madame, eef you weesh it.’ The blonde smiled bewitchingly again, showing her beautifully even teeth. She was exquisitely made up, a moist lipstick marking the contours of her sensuous mouth, her hair piled immaculately on top of her finely-boned head. ‘Is Paula free, too?’ ‘She weel be, madame. She ‘ave a client for lernch, but she weel be free aftair.” ‘Well-’ (madame spoke directly to Browne-Smith) ‘-if you’re happy to stay here with Yvonne, sir?’ He swallowed and nodded his unequivocal assent. ‘Good. I’ll leave you, then. But you are to have everything you want, sir-I hope you understand that? Absolutely She turned to go. ‘You must know Mr-er-Sullivan ‘I was just able to do him a little favour, that’s all. You know how these things are.’ ‘Of course. And you promise to let me know if there’s anything that Yvonne here can’t-’ ‘I don’t think you need worry.” Then madame was gone, and the back of Browne-Smith’s throat felt parched as he fought to stem the flood of erotic imaginings that threatened to swamp him. He had little help from the woman who, briefly resuming her seat in order to make some entry in a red leather-bound diary on the table, leant forward as she did so and revealed even to the most casual glance that beneath her dress she was wearing little else-at least above her rather ample hips. ‘I am weeth you now, sir.’ She rose from her chair and walked round to him. ‘Let me take your coat.’ Browne-Smith took off the light brown summer raincoat he had worn continuously since leaving Oxford, and watched her as she folded it neatly over her left arm, slid her right hand under his elbow, and guided him over to a door at the far end of the room. Compared with the somewhat austere and sparsely furnished room they had just left, this inner room was lavishly and (to Browne-Smith’s tastes) rather luridly equipped. Two blood-red lamps, affixed to the inner wall, cast a subdued light around, and thick, yellow curtains, drawn fully across the single window, cut out all but the narrowest chink of natural light. The other furnishings were gaudily provocative with a cohort of multi-coloured cushions covering the long, low settee, and, behind that, bright yellow sheets and pillows on the widely welcoming bed, its coverlet already turned back. Opposite the settee was a tall, well-stocked, drinks cabinet, its doors standing open; and beside it a film projector, pointing a protruding snout towards the white expanse of wall to the left of the curtained casement. Pervading all was the heavy, heady smell of some sweet scent, and Browne-Smith felt a semi-permanent, priapic push between his loins. ‘You’d like a dreenk?’ She went over to the cabinet and recited a comprehensive choice: whisky, gin, campari, vodka, rum, martini… ‘Whisky, please.’ ‘Glenfeeddich?’ ‘My favourite.’ ‘And mine.’ There seemed to be two bottles of each drink, one of them as yet unopened, as though the liquid capacity of even the most dedicated toper had been nobly anticipated. And he watched her (why was he puzzled?) as she ripped the seal off a new bottle, poured out a half-tumbler of the pale malt whisky, and brought it over to him. ‘Aren’t you going to have one, er-’ ‘Eevone. Please call me “Eevone”. I call you “sir”-because, madame, she inseest on eet. But for me-Eevone!’ Even as she spoke, Browne-Smith found himself thinking, albeit vaguely, that her French accent was carefully cultivated and-yes, completely phoney. But why worry about that? More important, for his own fastidious tastes, was the fear that someone else might enter the room. So he took a large gulp of Scotch and voiced his anxiety. ‘We shan’t be interrupted, shall we?’ Phew! She went over to the door and turned the key, went over to the cabinet and poured herself a gin and dry martini, and finally came to sit beside him on the settee, her thigh pressing closely against his own. She clinked their glasses: ‘I’m sure we ‘ave a good time together, eh? I always like it eef I dreenk.’ Browne-Smith took a further gulp of his Scotch, sensing even at this early stage that the alcohol was having an unwontedly powerful effect upon him. ‘I feel you up a leetle?’ Momentarily he misunderstood her pronunciation of that second word; but when she took his glass he nodded in happy acquiescence, watching her in a wonderful anticipation as she walked away. ‘You like my dress?’ She was in front of him now, the replenished glass in her left hand. ‘Eet show off my figure, non?’ ‘You have a lovely figure.’ ‘You theenk so? But eet ees so ‘ot in ‘ere. You take off your coat, per’aps?’ She leaned over him, helping to remove his jacket, the dress soft against him, her body soft, the lighting soft; and he sat there passively as she slid her hands beneath the cuffs of his shirt, and deftly unfastened the cufflinks (Oxford University) before pushing the sleeves slowly up the arms. ‘Just to see eef you ‘ave a leede, what you call eet, “tattoo”?’ ‘No, I haven’t, actually.’ ‘Nor ‘ave I. But soon you weel be able to see for yourself, non?’ She sat closely beside him again, and Browne-Smith gulped back another large mouthful of his drink and willed himself to relax for a while. But she gave him little chance, taking his right hand and placing it on the shoulder of her dress. ‘You like that?’ she asked. My God! His hand fumbled for a few seconds with the material of the dress, and then slipped tentatively beneath it, feeling the soft flesh around her neck. ‘Can I-?’ ‘You can do anytheeng,’ Even as she spoke those blissful words her eyes sparkled, and she jumped to her feet, pulling him up in turn with both hands. ‘But we ‘ave a leetle feelm first, OK?’ Reluctantly, Browne-Smith did as he was bidden, taking his seat in an upright chair in front of the projector, and seeking to prepare himself for the voyeuristic aperitif. Clearly the pattern of events she’d suggested was not an unusual one; she, doubtless, must occasionally feel the need for some erotic stimulus. It was rather sad, this last fact, but he was too intelligent a man to feel surprised. The scenes now witnessed on the white patch of wall beside the yellow curtaining were wilder by a dozen leagues than the few X-certificated films that Browne-Smith had paid to see at the ABC cinema during the Oxford vacations. It was a pity that the woman wasn’t seated close to him; but (as she’d explained) unless she continually made some slight adjustments to the focusing mechanism, the technicolour delineation tended to drift out of true. It was all so strangely A man, in a smartly cut business suit; a beautiful blonde in a full-length, purple gown; a few intimate drinks on a multi-cushioned settee; the man’s hand slipping slowly inside the low-cut bodice and hoisting there from a bronzed, globed breast; then a teasingly slow, provocative undress on the part of the blonde, followed by much mutual grasping and gasping-before a finale that was fully orchestrated by climactic groans and an energetic spurting of semen. The whirring, clicking projector was now switched off, and he felt her hands on his shoulders from behind. ‘You like eet again?’ She came round and sat on his knees. ‘Or would you rather ‘ave me?’ He swallowed the first ‘There ees a long zeep at the back of my dress-that’s eet. Just pull down-pull! Yes, that’s eet!’ Browne-Smith felt the sinuous movement of her hips pressing down on him as his fingers ventured across her naked back; and then she got up and walked over to the bed. ‘Come and let me undress you.’ Her back was turned away from him as she shrugged the dress off her shoulders, bent down to slip off her black, high-heeled shoes, stepped professionally out of her dress, and folded it neatly over the chair at the foot of the bed. Then she turned fully towards him, and he felt an enormously urgent need to take her immediately; but still she teetered on the brink of things, and he thought of the mercilessly tortured Tantalus and the illicit grapes that dangled just above his lips. ‘One more lettk drink, per’aps?’ Browne-Smith, now almost in a delirium of anticipation, watched her as she walked over to the cabinet, watched her as she poured the two drinks, watched her as her beautifully formed breasts bounced towards him once more. ‘Just lie there a leetle meenite. You can ‘ave me very soon.’ She had disappeared through the only other door in the room, doubtless (judging by the flushing of water) a bathroom. And he, for his part, lay there almost fully clothed upon the yellow sheets, wondering in a hazily distanced sort of way just what was going on. Although his mouth seemed dry as the Sahara, he put down his drink untasted on the bedside-table, and for a while his mind grew clearer. Why had she used the When, after what seemed an eternity, she returned, he watched her again, leaning half-upright on his right elbow. But his request was the oddest she had ever heard. ‘Have you got any sort of cream, or something? My lips are awfully dry.’ She fetched her handbag from the settee, opened the flap, and delved around for a few seconds. Then, unscrewing a circular container, she leaned over him, her breasts suspended only inches from his eyes, and smoothly smeared some cream along his lips. ‘That ees better, non? Dreenk up, darleeng!’ She unfastened his tie; then unfastened the front of his shirt, one button at a time, at each stage her fingers splaying across his chest. For Browne-Smith these moments were almost unbearably erotic, and he knew that he had little hope of lasting out much longer. Yet he made one further quite extraordinary request. ‘Can you open the curtains-just a little bit?’ When the woman returned she saw that the man’s jacket, hitherto folded at the foot of the bed, was now lying beside him; and as she looked down, at his motionless body, she saw the tell-tale stain that seeped around the front of his well-cut, dark-blue trousers. His eyes were closed and his breathing steady, the right hand hanging loosely over the side of the bed, the index finger missing below the proximal inter-phalangeal joint. His glass, on the table beside his head, was now empty. She gently took his right arm and lay it alongside his body. Almost, for a moment or so, she felt a pang of tenderness. Then she hurriedly redressed, unlocked the door of the room, went out, and spoke in whispers to a man standing outside-a man who was reading a book entitled Her duties were done. |
||
|