Provender Gleed

by James Lovegrove

  He repeated the mantra to himself, as he huddled, stiff and bleary, on the park bench and waited for Arthur to wake.

  To maintain HOPEFULNESS one must PUSH ONESELF.

  Moore's partner, meanwhile, was enjoying a pleasant breakfast after a good night's sleep, well earned after a long but profitable day's work. One thing troubled Merlin Milner this morning, and it had, as far as he could tell, no connection with the Gleed case. The news headlines were distinctly worrisome. Without warning, with shocking abruptness, Europe was lurching towards war. Politicians were talking about trade disagreements and about breaches of clauses of international convention so obscure that even legislative experts claimed not to have heard of them before. Live TV feeds from around the continent showed ambassadors shutting between embassies on urgent rounds of negotiation. The military build-up, however, hogged the greatest amount of airtime, since tanks, troops and warplanes in motion were far more rivetingly photogenic than middle-aged men in suits speaking into microphones or stepping out of limousines.

  Milner chose to believe that the matter would resolve itself peacefully. Something which had blown up so quickly could not, ipso facto, be that serious. The louder the heads of state on either side rattled their sabres, the more probable it was that they weren't going to draw them. It was an elaborate charade of bluff, double-bluff and counter-double-bluff. You couldn't ignore that something bad was happening, just as you couldn't ignore the commonality of the words ANGERED, DERANGE, EN GARDE, ENRAGED, GRANDEE and GRENADE, all of which seemed applicable here. At the same time, LEADERS were also DEALERS. WARMONGERING could be broken down into three component parts, GAME, WORN and GRIN, which in almost any order pointed to a realpolitik truth. What seemed MAD POLICY could in fact be DIPLOMACY. Those doing the SABRE RATTLING might equally be ARBITRAL GENTS.

  More to the point, Milner was not prepared to let himself be distracted by outside events. The political situation was beyond his control. The Provender Gleed case was not, and needed his full attention.

  Yesterday afternoon Milner had paid a visit to the Central London Library to check through the newspaper archives on microfiche. After an hour of scrolling he had found the article he was looking for, a short piece about tenant unrest on one of the capital's municipal housing estates. Next, he had gone to the Risen London Authority's records office, asked to see a list of tenants in a certain block on that estate, and been told by the registrar that thirty days' notice and a stamped endorsement from the RLA were required before such documents could be examined by a member of the public. In response, Milner had slipped the registrar a fifty, asked again, and shortly had the relevant paperwork in front of him and was busy jotting down the names of all those tenants whose initials were either D.S. or S.D.

  The resulting list was long - some thirty individuals - and had to be winnowed down somehow. Back at his flat, Milner had spent the evening anagrammatising the names one after another. A bottle of wine was gradually emptied as the floor of the living room gradually filled up with discarded crumples of paper. Near midnight, Milner had reduced the list to seven. Each name, in one way or another, gave him a hit. Each could be refashioned into a phrase that sounded sinister, untrustworthy, or downright criminal.

  Today, he planned to visit the estate and knock on the door of each of these seven tenants' flats. One of them would be the person he was looking for. Instinct, he was sure, would tell him which one. He would recognise the kidnapper straight away. He had seen enough guilt over the years to know the telltale signs. Over-friendliness. A tendency to talk too much. Distractedness. An underlying, ill-disguised aggression. One glance, and Milner would have his man.

  Needle Grove was not a place he looked forward to visiting. It had a reputation. Teenage tearaways. Vandalism. Violence. Drugs. The joke went that the only needles you found there nowadays were on the tips of Tinct syringes.

  Still, there was nothing he could do about that. The anagrams had spoken. The letters pointed just one way.

  PROVENDER GLEED contained NEEDLE GROVE, and that had inspired Milner to try various phrases using Provender's name to see what they yielded. PROVENDER GLEED KIDNAPPED. PROVENDER GLEED TAKEN. PROVENDER GLEED CAPTURED.

  It was PROVENDER GLEED STOLEN that worked. Stirred, mixed, muddled, reordered, the letters came out as NEEDLE GROVE RENT LOP D.S. or NEEDLE GROVE RENT LOP S.D.

  The RENT LOP part had pricked a memory. A couple of years back residents of one block in Needle Grove had staged a protest about their living conditions, refusing to cough up their monthly dues unless their landlord, the Risen London Authority, acceded to a list of demands. The tenants barricaded themselves in the building, promising they would stay there for as long as it took, and were sternly, stalwartly militant right up until the moment the RLA offered them a small reduction in rent, at which point they caved in. It seemed they had had no real stomach for the fight, and the first excuse they got to back down, they took. The idea of a little more money in their pockets made everything else seem bearable. Of course all the other blocks on the estate demanded, and were given, the same rent reduction, but the Authority still won, in as much as the drop in its letting income was less than the amount it would have had to spent sprucing up Needle Grove to the standards the original protestors had been hoping for. Not only that but, if the RLA's track record elsewhere was anything to go by, rents at Needle Grove would have gradually, almost imperceptibly crept up over the past two years till they were back at the previous level. It wasn't just the Families who bled the common people dry. The common people were pretty good at doing it to each other too.

  Block 26 was the one that had attempted and failed to persuade the Authority to clean up the estate, and so Block 26 was Milner's destination this morning. He finished breakfast, showered, shaved, dressed, and, with his short-list of seven names in his pocket, sallied forth from his flat and caught a bus that ferried him cross-town to a stop within ten minutes' walk of Needle Grove.

  The walk, in the event, took more like twenty minutes. Milner's pace was that slow, that trepidatious. At last, however, he reached the entrance to the estate. Standing before the arc of iron letters, he nerved himself with a deep breath, squared his shoulders, straightened his neck, and, like Theseus about to enter the labyrinth in pursuit of the Minotaur, stepped forward.

  32

  Provender was home. He was lying in his bed, sleeved in sheets of Egyptian cotton. He could hear the rumble-hiss of the cascades outside his window. There was a vague memory of unpleasantness. Something bad. He had been ... held prisoner? Something like that. But it was in the past, long ago. He was home again, and warm in bed, and it was bliss. He could stay here for ever, lying here, free to loll and luxuriate. He could straighten his legs --

  -- his feet hit an obstruction --

  -- and he could stretch out his arms --

  -- his knuckles cracked against a hard surface --

  -- and he could wallow in the depression his body made in the mattress --

  -- only there was no mattress.

  There was just the bathroom floor that had been under him for more than forty-eight hours now. The blindfold was still fastened around his head. His wrists and ankles were still bound with electrical flex.

  It was not as heart-sinking an experience as it might have been, awaking from a dream of home to find himself, as before, in captivity. Bathroom and blindfold and bindings had, in the course of the two days, become the norm. A kind of tired passivity had settled in him. He could, with a strange calmness, foresee spending the rest of his life like this, sightless and helpless, never to look on another human face again, dying an old man on this very spot. There was a contentment in believing that that would be his fate. He was rid of the tormenting hope that somehow, at some point, he was going to be freed. To be back in his bed at Dashlands? Yes, that was truly a dream.

  He lay and listened to the building's morning gush of water, the pipes, the ducts, the inner purging, till eventually Is arrived with something for him to
eat and drink.

  He realised immediately that there was something different about her this morning. A tremor in her voice, a tautness.

  'What's up?'

  'On the news. The TV. It's incredible. Dreadful.'

  'What is?'

  'I think... They're all saying we could be going to war.'

  'Eh?'

  'War, Provender. As in everyone kills everyone else.'

  'Where did that come from? I mean, who's going to war with whom?'

  'The Pan-Slavic Federation. The western European countries. Just like last time and the time before. It's happening all over again.'

  'But that's bonkers! We're at peace with the Pan-Slavic Federation. Europe's all one big happy family. Why would...?'

  'Why would what, Provender?'

  One big happy family.

  But not one big happy Family.

  Had Provender's hands not been tied, he would have slapped his forehead with one of them.

  'Has anyone said what the reason for war is?'

  'There's some sort of mumbling about treaties that haven't been honoured and other stuff like that, but the main thing is the Federation have started moving troops and warships around in a threatening way and we've had to respond in kind.'

  'So nobody's invaded anywhere yet?'

  'Not as far as I can tell.'

  'You realise what this is, don't you?'

  Is paused to ponder. 'You think you --'

  'I don't think. I know.'

  'Your Family.'

  'My father, to be precise.'

  'Your father's starting a war because of you? How is that going to help?'

  'It isn't. At least, he think it's going to help but that's because he's clearly grasped the wrong end of the stick.'

  'What do you mean?'

  It didn't take Provender long to sketch out the state of antagonism that existed between the Gleeds and the Kuczinskis. Is knew about the feud. Most people did. What she and most people didn't know was just how deep the mutual hatred ran. Provender was certain that his father had pinned the blame for his kidnapping on the Kuczinskis and was taking steps to force them to hand him back. The Kuczinskis, in return, were responding in the only way they could. They didn't have Provender, and they had no doubt told his father that in no uncertain terms. They couldn't, though, simply sit back and let western Europe mobilise for war against eastern Europe. They had no choice but to meet the threat of aggression with the threat of aggression.

  'Families can do that? They can throw a whole continent into chaos just because one of them doesn't much like another of them?'

  'Is, think about it. There isn't a politician in office who doesn't owe his or her position to Family influence, or else wants to get on a Family's good side. They're like chess-pieces to the Families. Or, no, like trading cards. To be bought, sold, swapped, trumped, disposed of. Politicians, in a sense, are the biggest ClanFans of all. The Families' power just mesmerises them. Being a politician is the closest they can get to being Family.'

  'Well, yes, I know all that. What I meant is, Families are prepared to do that? They'll start wars over nothing?'

  'I think I'm a little bit more than nothing, at least to my dad, but still, I take your point. And the answer's yes. My father's been itching for an excuse to get back at the Kuczinskis. I'm it. Tell me, was there by any chance an Extraordinary Family Congress yesterday?'

  It had been mentioned on the news. 'Yes.'

  'My dad,' said Provender, nodding. 'He called it. And I bet it didn't go well. I bet he and Stanislaw Kuczinski got right up each other's noses.'

  'But the Congress resolves Family disputes. That's the whole point of it.'

  'In theory. In practice, when it's not just all the Family heads getting together and having a "we're so wonderful" knees-up, it's a massive bitch-fest. Everyone yells at everyone else, there's a lot of nasty name-calling, then they all go home again. Cathartic, I suppose, but otherwise essentially useless.'

  'So it wouldn't stop a potential war.'

  'The opposite. Any Family worth its salt, after all, has a munitions-manufacturing plant somewhere in its business portfolio, and an aeronautical engineering firm, and a shipwright's. War brings profits. It's an old maxim but still true. Those air forces will need new planes when their existing ones get shot down. Those navies will need new ships when their existing ones are sunk. And then of course there's the rebuilding. My Family made a killing from the reconstruction of London after the last war. We razed the old Dashlands House and built a brand new one just to celebrate how much profit we'd made.'

  'It's about money.'

  'It's always about money, Is. Not for my father right now, maybe, or for the Kuczinskis, but for the rest of them. They might have made disapproving noises are the Extraordinary Congress, some of them, but really each and every Family head was rubbing his hands and totting up the potential revenue.'

  'That's disgusting.'

  'Tell me about it.'

  'But no one on the television mentioned anything about your Family or the Kuczinskis.'

  'Why would they? Who, ultimately, owns those TV stations?'

  'The Families.'

  'Exactly. You won't get TV reporters reporting things the Families don't want them to, not the things that really matter.'

  Provender heard Is let out a sharp hiss of contempt. For a minute after that she spooned breakfast cereal into his mouth, saying nothing. He could almost hear her thinking, the motor of her brain as troubled but as stoic as that of the extractor fan. Then she said, 'If we got you back to your Family, would that mean --'

  The sentence was cut short by the sound of the door being flung open. There was a moment when everything seemed to stop, even the extractor fan. Provender pictured Is, startled, peering round. In the doorway: her accomplice. Provender had built up a mental impression of how the man looked. He imagined, now, a face that was cruel to begin with, further uglified, contorted with rage. The man had been eavesdropping at the door. He had overheard what Is just said. For all Is's protestations that he wouldn't dare lay a finger on her, Provender felt that, if pushed far enough, he would. And surely her unfinished question, what it implied, was 'far enough'.

  Absurd notions flashed through Provender's mind. Leaping, somehow, to Is's defence. Interposing himself between her and the man. Taking, on her behalf, whatever the man dished out.

  It was easy to be heroic when there was, in fact, little he could do.

  Then the man spoke, and Provender was surprised at how even his voice was. Not the fusillade of fury he was expecting at all.

  'You done here yet?'

  'Nearly.'

  'Only I need the bog.'

  'Use the bucket.'

  'Fuck that.'

  'I'll be a couple minutes more.'

  'OK. Hurry.'

  No sooner had the door closed than Is let out a long, breathless 'Oh God.'

  'Did he hear what you said?' Provender whispered.

  'I don't think so. Christ, I hope not.'

  'Did you...?' Provender hesitated. 'Did you mean what you said?'

  'I don't know. Maybe. Shit, no, it's madness. What am I thinking?'

  'You're thinking that if you help me, you may just be able to prevent the whole of Europe turning into a bloodbath.'

  'Yes, but - I don't know. I don't know how I could do it. I might not get the chance.'

  'Does he go out ever? Leave you alone here?'

  'Yes. But I never know how long he's going to be gone for. If he caught us trying to...'

  'Is. Look at me.'

  'I already am.'

  'OK. Good. You see me? You see I'm not the inbred Family cretin you thought I was? You see what getting me out of here, getting me back to Dashlands, is worth? This isn't about ransom any more, or whatever the hell the reason is you kidnapped me. The stakes are much higher. This is a whole different business now.'

  'Maybe I could talk to him. Explain what you said. About the war and the Kuczinskis and all that. It
might change his mind.'

  'You honestly think it would?'

  'Honestly, no.'

  'Me too. And you talk like that to him, it could rouse his suspicions. He could decide not to go out at all. Best not say anything. Act normal. Wait for an opportunity. It'll come.'

  'I'm not sure, Provender.'

  'Is, please. You know it's what's right.'

  'It's crazy.'

  'Often the same as what's right, unfortunately.'

  33

  It was known as the Chapel, but that was a misnomer and something of a bitter joke. It was no House of God. It was a folly built on a rise about half a mile west of Dashlands House, close to the site of the original house before the original house was flattened and replaced with the newer one. A cylindrical structure capped with a dome, it mirrored the observatory which stood on another, higher rise a mile due south-east. Externally, the sole difference between the two edifices was that one had a high-powered refractor telescope protruding from its roof.

  The superficial similarity was no accident. Both Chapel and observatory had been erected in the mid-eighteen-hundreds by Prosper's great-grandfather, Cardamom, amateur astronomer and ardent atheist. The observatory peered up into the universe and saw only stars and space. No God up there. Plenty of beauty and scientific wonderment, but no God.

  The Chapel, by contrast, was blind. It didn't have an eye on the heavens. It was deliberately purposeless. Inside, there was a flagstone floor, a low circular dais at the centre, and, set equidistantly around the wall, alcoves of the kind that could have held idols, statues of saints, representations of gods, something like that, but here were left ostentatiously empty. The message was clear. Deities had no place in the Gleed scheme of things. The Chapel was a parody of a church, a mock temple, blasphemous in its bareness. There was nothing within it to genuflect before, not even an effigy of Mammon.

  This, nevertheless, was where Cynthia came when she needed to pray. There was nowhere else to go, nowhere else where she could be guaranteed solitude and silence and stillness, nowhere else on the estate that even vaguely resembled a place of worship. The cool air, the damp smell of stone, and the hollow, hushed echoes, all reminded her of the cathedrals of her childhood. The Lamases were rare among Families in that they had not wholly dispensed with religion. Perhaps it was because the trappings of Catholicism, especially Roman Catholicism, were reassuringly gilded and grandiose. Equally it might be because, as Cynthia's father often said, it was wise not to reject the Almighty altogether, on the off-chance that He did exist. Confession, too, and the taking of the Sacrament, and general prostration before a higher power, did much to shrive the wealthy of their guilt about being wealthy (assuming they felt such guilt in the first place). Attending a two-hour Mass every Sunday was a small investment of time, given the psychological and spiritual dividends one stood to gain from it.