Provender Gleed

by James Lovegrove

  It could be better than this. Damien had promised her that. With money extorted from the Gleeds, Needle Grove could be brightened up, smartened, cleaned, made more liveable. There could be green areas - foliage-green, not paint-and-neon green. There could be improved lighting, and some kind of system of security patrols, maybe, to keep the kids off the streets until the kids got the message and stayed off the streets voluntarily. There could be new drains installed to replace the old ones which got clogged up during rainstorms and meant certain squares and underpasses flooded and were unusable for days. There could be playgrounds, safe zones that weren't vandalised or commandeered by the gang-tribes for their fights, places where the smaller children could actually play. Needle Grove could become an estate people wanted to live in, as opposed to an estate people ended up living in when there was nowhere else available, or were stuck living in because they didn't have the wherewithal to bribe someone high up in the Risen London Authority to get them out.

  Is wanted to believe Damien when he said this. She wanted to think it was a vision that could become a reality. It was how he had sold her on the whole kidnapping plan. He had painted a picture of Gleed millions - money the Family could easily spare - being siphoned off into Needle Grove. He had described, in beguiling terms, a reversal of the usual model: money going from the rich to the poor, rather than the other way around. He had so enraptured her with this noble design of his that it was nearly, nearly, like the old days, when they were first going out, before she got to know him too well. When he used to seem principled, rather than priggish; focused, rather than fanatical. When what he and she had in common was a bond of conviction and not, as it became, a bone of contention.

  And now she was no longer sure. About anything. She was angry with Damien. Angry with Provender. Angry with herself. She was less and less happy about being a part of Damien's scheme. But if she backed out, she would be leaving Provender alone with Damien and she wasn't happy about that idea either. Perhaps Provender deserved whatever came to him. Then again, for all his faults, he wasn't a bad person. He was attempting, in his fumbling way, to be a good person. She wanted to hold The Meritocrats against him but, damn it, she just couldn't. Terrible though it was as literature, at least it was a gesture in the right direction. And the more she saw him, trussed up and helpless in the bathroom, the more she felt that he was a hapless victim in all this, and the more she pitied him.

  Is simply didn't know what to do any more. A dusky haze settled over Needle Grove, the tower blocks clustered against the darkening sky, lights flickered on, the estate's nightly nocturne of yelps and yammering swelled - and she didn't know what to do any more.

  PART IV

  30

  Overnight, it began.

  Shortly after eleven p.m. GMT a battle group of British warships - three frigates and a destroyer - put out from Hull. Ostensibly on hastily-scheduled manoeuvres, they ploughed into the North Sea bearing due east on a course which soon took their radio transmissions within range of the listening post at Kolobrzeg in Poland.

  Less than an hour later the German radar station at Zinnowitz detected ship activity at the naval yards at Gdansk and Köningsberg. Not just a battle group but fully half a division had begun steaming out into the Baltic. Polish military high command had not publicly announced any such deployment of vessels in advance. Messages flashed from Zinnowitz to Berlin, and thence to Stockholm, thanks to the intelligence-sharing pact between Germany and the Scandinavian countries instituted in the aftermath of the last war. Stockholm contacted Helsinki and Copenhagen, and all German and Scandinavian armed forces went from green alert condition to yellow.

  Around three a.m., watchtowers to the west of the border between Germany and Poland were submitting reports of armoured brigades trundling along local roads on the Polish side. Similar reports came in from watchtowers along the German/Czech border and the Austrian/Hungarian. The German and Austrian armies responded in kind, sending out tanks from bases near Dresden, Passau and Güssing. To either side of the line dividing West Europe from East, the night air was shaken by the rumble of diesel engines and the clank of segmented steel tread on tarmac.

  As dawn approached, troops were brought into play. On both sides, whole battalions had been roused from their billets and were marching eastward or westward to take up position a few miles from enemy territory. By this stage the premiers, presidents and prime ministers of every country in Europe were out of their beds and on the phone. For most, the events unfolding came as a surprise. They had believed the continent to be in a relatively stable state, everyone rubbing along contentedly enough, the odd dispute here and there, nothing that couldn't be solved through diplomatic means. They had had no idea that the peace that had endured these past five decades was, in the event, quite so fragile.

  While the political hotlines from capital to capital crackled, the sun rose. Light moved east to west across the face of Europe, and with it came warplanes. Aerial visibility enabled takeoff. Reconnaissance craft, with fighter escorts, crisscrossed their own countries' airspace, coming near to but never quite entering enemy airspace. Strato-Class dirigibles also took flight, easing ponderously into positions of readiness in the upper atmosphere, at altitudes too great for fixed-wing aircraft and ground-based artillery to reach. These were huge creations, leviathans of the skies which made ordinary passenger dirigibles look like minnows, and they carried immense payloads of ordnance. City Smashers, they were colloquially called. Pregnant with death.

  The national leaders, still on the phones, debated, soothed, squabbled, accused, objected, hectored, harangued, weaselled, wheedled, vilified, mollified, blustered, filibustered, postured, pontificated - and that was just with colleagues they knew to be allies. Within the bloc of West European states, a consensus started to form. Within the Pan-Slavic Federation, the same. Pledges of assistance were made to those countries on the front line of any potential conflict. They invade you, they invade us, was what it boiled down to. England in particular was keen to form a part of any western military coalition. Troop carriers were placed on standby at airbases in Aldershot, Colchester and Peterborough, poised to take to the skies at a moment's notice.

  It all happened fast, as if it had been waiting to happen, as if some fault-line was suddenly starting to flex and tremble once more, a political seismic fissure long thought dormant, largely forgotten. From Lisbon to Lugansk, from Hammerfest to Syracuse, people awoke to discover the Europe they had gone to bed in was not the same Europe in which they were yawning and stretching and blearily blinking. A shift had occurred. An old rupture was reopening. As they picked up their newspapers, as they switched on their radios and TVs, they felt a vague dread settle in their bones, strange yet familiar, new yet known. A sense shared by millions of civilian souls across the continent: Here we go again.

  31

  As with any creative profession, being an Anagrammatic Detective entailed a highly disproportionate ratio of perspiration to inspiration. It was all very well shuffling letters around, making new words out of old. That was the fun part. But it was only the preliminary. The casting of the verbal runes, the reading of the orthographic tea leaves, the (in more than one sense) spelling - this was to lay the groundwork. Afterwards came the hard part, the standard gumshoe stuff, the gathering of proof, the amassing of evidence. The legwork.

  For Romeo Moore, legwork had meant eighteen straight hours of covert pursuit and stakeout, with little to show for it except sore feet, the jitters from drinking too much coffee, and a notebook containing a breakdown of the movements of Arthur Gleed during the past afternoon, evening and night - a breakdown which, though meticulously detailed, was also sadly unenlightening.

  Moore, stationed on a bench in the park at the centre of the Regency-era square where Arthur lived, was reviewing his notes now, by the early light of Tuesday morning. Birds were shrieking their aubade from the treetops. Traffic was beginning to move, London stirring from its rest. In the old parts of the city you heard and
felt everything more clearly than you did in the metropolis's high-rise canyons. You got a glimpse of what London had been like before the aerial bombardments of the last war wiped 70% of it from the face of the map. These were little pockets of the past, miraculously preserved, history nestling in the shadows of the newer, upthrusting London. Porched and palinged, the housefronts spoke of genteeler, more sensitive times. As property, however, the houses themselves fetched premium prices and never changed hands without cutthroat haggling and gazumping. Gentility cost. A hunger for sensitivity brought out the worst in people.

  Moore had written comments to this effect in his notebook entry headed 3.40 a.m., after the words 'Still no apparent activity within the premises'. During the small hours, when all Arthur seemed to be doing was sleeping, Moore's notebook entries had taken on an increasingly personal and ruminative bent, becoming less an account of his suspect's behaviour (or lack of it) and more an internal monologue, Moore addressing Moore. 'I'll never be as rich as a Gleed' was a frequent refrain throughout the pages, along with 'Merlin's going to be laughing on the other side of his face' and other similar affirmations that he, Romeo Moore, was on the right track and his partner wasn't. Then there were the lists he had made of possessions he might like to buy with some of the fee from the investigation. A new record-player and a more comfortable armchair for his flat were the common features of all the lists, and were probably the only things he would buy. He was somewhat saddened by his lack of material ambition. In the notebook's margins he had made several attempts to divine Milner's approach to the investigation, of necessity using Milner's own anagrammatising technique. Nothing useful had resulted. There were, in addition, a few doodles, scrawled by lamplight.

  It had been a long night.

  He had picked up Arthur Gleed's trail yesterday shortly after two p.m. Arthur was returning to the Shortborn Theatre to resume rehearsals, following lunch at a nearby bistro with a couple of his fellow-actors. Moore's first note relayed his impression of Arthur's mood: 'Seems upbeat. Confident. Makes his companions laugh with a joke. About nuns and soap(?).'

  Later, Moore tried to gain access into the theatre via the lobby but was prevented from doing so by an usher. 'Told I could buy a ticket from the box office for performance if wanted but not allowed to enter auditorium.' His next entry, fifteen minutes on, read: 'Stage door located in alley alongside theatre. Knocked on. Opened by large man. Bodyguard/doorman type. Tried to get on good side of. Claimed to be ClanFan autograph hunter. Bodyguard/doorman's good side not got on of. Claim believed but not effective. Told that Mr Gleed did not sign autographs. Persisted. Invited to "f*** off".'

  Arthur re-emerged from the theatre shortly after five, this time with a gaggle of people. Together they wended their way back along New Aldwych to the bistro and shared an early supper. Moore sat at a table within earshot and nursed several coffees in a row while Arthur and company raucously discussed the preview performance that was due to begin in a couple of hours' time. Moore noticed their affectation of addressing one another by their stage characters' names. Arthur took it one step further by referring to himself in the third person, as the Prince and the Dane, as in 'Pass the Dane the salt please, Polonius, there's a good chap'. Moore's notes, which he jotted surreptitiously, using a menu as a screen, included the comment: 'Actors like nothing better than for other people in the vicinity to know they are actors.' He also observed that their reactions and mannerisms were never normal, always exaggerated, as if they lived life at a higher pitch of intensity than everyone else. '"Laertes", describing event of trifling annoyance. Face aghast. Pinching bridge of nose. "I was incandescent with rage!"'

  The cast trooped back to the Shortborn. Moore followed in their wake. From then till eleven, all he did was stand across the street from the theatre and wait. A few people went in to watch the preview. Critics, he assumed, judging by the fact that most were carrying pads of paper. As a point of interest he noted that on the marquee outside the theatre, the name which appeared largest was that of the star of the show. The play's title and the playwright were both subordinate. Arthur Gleed merited as many yards of neon tubing as Hamlet and William Shakespeare combined.

  The critics emerged three hours later, some looking pleased, some not. However mixed the reviews were, Arthur's performance would be singled out for praise. He invariably got a gentle ride. Moore could never forget how one TV critic had striven manfully to say something good about Arthur's execrable Cabaret Cop series and come up with 'Gleed's torch-singing is astonishing enough to stop any burglar in his tracks', which veered just the safe side of ambiguous. Arthur's Hamlet, in that spirit, would very likely be acclaimed a great Dane.

  Roughly half an hour later Arthur himself came out. He did not look best pleased. 'Stomping' was how Moore's notes put it. 'Thundercloud above head. Not happy with perf? Or other reason?'

  At a safe distance, Moore tailed the disgruntled Arthur to a Family tram stop. Arthur spoke his name into the microphone funnel by the gate. The gate rolled open and he proceeded through onto the platform to await the next tram.

  Moore, at this point, was in an ecstasy of dismay. Arthur had stepped onto Family-only territory. He could be headed anywhere on the tram network. Moore was about to lose him - and if Arthur was holding Provender captive, now was exactly the time when he might visit his hostage cousin, to check on him, perhaps crow over him.

  As luck would have it, a taxi happened along, For Hire light shining like a beacon. Moore hailed it, and once a tram arrived and Arthur got on board, Moore instructed the taxi driver to trail the tram wherever it went.

  'I can't do that,' said the driver. 'There's laws against that sort of thing.'

  There weren't. At least, not proper laws. But there was the aura of untouchability that surrounded the Families, as good as a law to some folk.

  Moore fished out a hefty wedge of his half of Carver's start-up money. 'Are you sure about that?'

  The taxi driver eyed the cash. Looked to the tram. Back to the cash.

  'Wife's got a birthday coming up,' he said, snatching the banknotes out of Moore's hand.

  The pursuit was shorter-lived than Moore anticipated, and only once did the taxi driver seem in danger of losing the tram, when it plunged through a tunnel at the base of a building and he had to run a red light and screech around a couple of corners in order to catch up with it again. There was a near-miss with another car, as the driver's concentration on the tram momentarily eclipsed his concentration on the road. Other than that, the chase was problem-free. The tram lines, though hived off from the rest of the world by lofty chainlink fences, stuck close to the public highways, piggybacking on the existing transport infrastructure. Keeping up with a tram in another vehicle was, if due care and attention were paid, a relatively painless affair.

  'Disappointment,' read Moore's note, written after the taxi had deposited him near Arthur's destination. 'A.G. alights at tram stop closest to his house.' Appended to the note was a record of his outlay on the taxi ride, which he could not help commenting on with a large exclamation mark.

  Outside his house, Arthur paused on his way to the front door to run a hand lovingly over the bodywork of a Dagenham Rapier convertible parked at the kerbside. The car was a sleek thing, low to the ground, with whitewall tyres, a bull-nosed radiator grille, and chrome headlamps that looked astonished at their own good fortune to be perched atop the front mudguards of so wondrous an automobile. Moore couldn't blame Arthur for stroking it like a pet. He would have done so too, had it been his.

  Arthur paused again as a pair of ClanFans who were stationed near the house plucked up the courage to approach him, autograph books in hand. He spent a gracious five minutes with them, signing his name and letting them tell him how wonderful they thought he was. He parted from them with a show of great unwillingness, saying how tired he was. Then he went indoors, the ClanFans departed, thrilled, and Moore's midnight-to-dawn vigil in the park began.

  He didn't think he slept. His handwri
ting was slightly slurred on a couple of entries but the very act of making regular notes kept him awake and alert. He left his post on the park bench only once, in order to find an all-night café where he had a torrential pee and then gulped down a pot's worth of coffee. He was gone for less than twenty minutes, and Arthur's house looked no different when he returned. Still darkened. Still nothing occurring within.

  With the arrival of morning, Moore was disheartened but not despondent. He remained convinced that Arthur had Provender. Perhaps not here, though, at his house. That was too obvious a location. Cronies of his were keeping Provender somewhere else, somewhere remoter, isolated. Sometime today, before the first night of Hamlet this evening, Arthur would undoubtedly pay a call on his cousin. And Moore would be dogging his steps all the way. His plan was to flag down a taxi perhaps an hour or so from now and have it sit idling at the kerbside, near Arthur's house. When Arthur left, whether he went by car or tram, Moore would follow him in the taxi, just like last night.

  One of Moore's private mantras was that to maintain HOPEFULNESS one must PUSH ONESELF. When things looked unpromising, when you were tired and fed up, that was when you had to try harder.