The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [56]
She found herself staring into the capacious features of a brown-eyed man she had never seen before.
He waited for her to realize, as she tried to raise herself, that she was wearing only her not-so-smart underwear—at which point she snatched up the sheet she had been trying to cast off.
She glanced around at the room, which was small and low-ceilinged, its walls papered with off-white anaglypta that probably dated back at least to the 1990s. The abundant but desiccated autumnal foliage visible through the wood-framed window, eerily lit from within, suggested that she was in an upstairs room overlooking a tree considerably older than the wallpaper. The bed had a tubular-steel frame whose brown paint was flaking off, and the chair in which the brown-eyed man sat was a pine kitchen chair whose cherry-red woodstain was equally eroded. She certainly wasn’t in a police station.
Night had obviously fallen again, but there was no way of knowing exactly how long she had been unconscious.
A large hand extended a cup toward her that was full of a warm brown liquid, at which she stared suspiciously.
“It’s tea,” explained a deep voice.
“I don’t drink tea,” she said, contradicting herself by taking a tentative sip. “And I wouldn’t take sugar if I did,” she added, grimacing.
“Drink it anyway,” the brown-eyed man advised. He was wearing a smartsuit made from the same fabric as Peter Grimmett Smith’s but cut in a contemporary style. Its quiet elegance made Lisa all the more conscious of her own lack of clothing and the fact that her undershirt was far from smart in any sense of the word.
She drank some more tea, figuring that the only thing that really mattered, given the circumstances, was its wetness. It moistened her mouth and moderated the intensity of her thirst. Then she said, “Who are you?”
“The man who saved you from abduction by two crazy women. Abduction—or worse,” he replied. He obviously knew that she was a police officer, and felt obliged to establish his moral credentials in case she felt—as she was surely entitled to do—that wherever she was it was not the place she ought to be.
“Crazy women?” Lisa queried.
“You didn’t know they were women? Or was it that you didn’t know they were crazy?” He was trying to make a slight joke, but she wasn’t in the mood.
“Those matte-black one-pieces aren’t the most figure-flattering garments in the world,” she pointed out. “Who are you—and what were you doing crashing into the parking area like that?”
“You can call me Leland,” he said in an offhand manner calculated to suggest that it probably wasn’t his real name, first or last. “We were paying a call on someone in the building. We figured that something must be wrong when we saw the security guard unconscious, hanging halfway out of the hatchway. It seemed to be our duty as honest citizens to ride to the rescue.”
“It probably was,” Lisa conceded. “But you must have checked the ID in my pouch, so the fact that you’ve brought me here makes you guilty of obstructing justice, as well as abduction and unlawful imprisonment, so you can cut the honest-citizen crap. Why did you take my clothes?”
“They were dirty and torn,” Leland told her. “Even smart fabric wouldn’t have been able to cope with all that rolling around on the concrete, and there were some old bloodstains too. Your belt wasn’t clean either—police personnel really ought to be more careful about pollution, especially the metaphorical kind. Intruders in the night don’t just take things away, you know.”
“They bugged my belt?”
“I’ve cleaned it—but if you’ve said anything you shouldn’t have in the last eighteen or twenty hours, you’d better start thinking of ways to limit the damage. I think I can find you a shirt and some slacks to wear until your own clothes have been cleaned—Jeff’s, not mine. He’s more your size. He was with me in the van; you owe