'Tell me you know how to drive this thing,' Is said.
'To be honest, this is the first time I've travelled in one on my own. Not on my own exactly, but you know. Without another Family member.'
'Don't get out much, do you.'
'Not till lately. However...' Provender toggled a switch and several bulbs lit up on the console. 'It isn't that difficult, I think. If Extravagance can manage it, I can. All you have to do is - yes.' Another switch brought illumination to a display window marked DESTINATION. 'Then you just dial in the place you want to...' He manipulated a pair of knurled knobs, one of which caused the display window above it to scroll through a list of regions throughout the country, the other of which summoned up a sub-list of tram stops located within each of those regions. Finding BERKSHIRE with the first knob led him to find DASHLANDS easily with the second. 'And then,' he said, 'with just a press of this button - voilà. We are on our way.'
The tram car gave a lurch and began to roll, pulling away from the platform, the stop and the inert Changelings. It picked up speed and in no time was cruising at a steady 20 m.p.h. through west London. The city trundled by outside; the wires above gave off enthusiastic fizzes and sparks; the wheels drummed. Provender ensconced Is in an armchair, then went to the bar at the rear and fixed them both a whisky, adding ice from an ice-cube maker. They sipped the drinks facing each other, and Provender felt the weight of his recent travails begin, at last, to lift. He was truly out of harm's way now. In little over an hour, he would be back home. The whole horrible escapade was over.
'You, er, you didn't think that was really me back there, did you?' he said.
'What?'
'When I was talking to those kids. Offering them a bribe. Acting like a twit. I was just putting it on.'
'Could have fooled me.'
'No, really, I was - Oh, I see. You're mocking.'
'Frankly, Provender, at the time I wasn't sure what to think. I thought you might have gone mad. I also thought there was no way they were going to fall for it.'
'Neither did I, but I reckoned it was worth a shot. They were going to beat us up anyway, but I thought if I could persuade them to take us out of the estate first, we'd have a better chance of getting away from them before they started. It worked. I'm stunned that it did, but it did.'
'Must be the Family mystique.'
'Must be. Also, there is a kind of magic in behaving like a blithe, posh nincompoop. It protects you like a charm. People are disarmed by it. I don't do it myself as a rule, but I've seen it work for others. My uncle Fort, for instance. He does it all the time. Acts the buffoon and get away with murder. Mind you, with him I'm not sure it's an act.'
Provender drained his whisky tumbler at a gulp, much as his uncle might have done, and asked Is if she wanted hers refreshed. She shook her head, then changed her mind and said yes.
Second whiskies in hand, they gazed out of the tram's windows as the turrets of Acton and then the tenements of Old Ealing passed by.
'I have to ask now,' Provender said. 'I can't not. What was it all about? Why was I kidnapped? What did your friend Damien want with me?'
'Money.'
'That's it? Just the money?'
'Isn't that enough of a reason? He wanted several million from your Family, money he would put to use renovating Needle Grove, to make it a nicer place, not the sort of place that breeds gangs like that lot back there.'
'But ... he wouldn't expect to get away with it, surely. It's hardly subtle or covert. He gets the money, hands me over, next thing we know someone's spending a fortune doing up a slum housing estate. If he wanted to draw attention to himself, if he wanted everyone to know who the kidnap culprit was, he couldn't do much better than that. My Family would be on it like a shot. We'd have him. He'd be in jail faster than you can breathe.'
'Don't think Damien didn't realise that.'
'But he was still prepared to take the risk. D'you know, I'm almost starting to admire him.'
'No, because there was no risk.' Is studied her tumbler, swilling the liquor around inside it and making the ice cubes clink. 'Look, I suppose you ought to know. It's only fair. Damien wasn't acting alone.'
'He had you with him, yes. And if you're worried about that, don't be. My Family will go after him, have no fear, but you are going to be absolutely safe. I'll see to that. You'll have complete protection. No one's going to prosecute you or anything.'
'Do you actually listen to me when I'm talking, Provender? Sometimes I think you only hear what you want to hear. I'm not referring to me when I say he wasn't acting alone. Clearly I was an accomplice. That's pretty bloody obvious.'
'There was someone else? A third party?'
'Genius! And they say Family inbreeding lowers the IQ.'
'Hey!'
He looked genuinely wounded. Isis waved a hand at him in apology. 'You're right, that was uncalled-for. It's just - I don't like to have to be the one to break this to you.'
'Go on.'
'Because you're not going to like it.'
'I'll be the judge of that.'
'He had help. Damien. Inside help.'
'Help.'
'From Family. From someone in your Family.'
'No!'
'And before you ask, I have no idea who. He wouldn't tell me. Said I was safer off not knowing.'
'Oh, but that's preposterous. No one in my Family would do anything like this. He must have been having a joke with you.'
'Believe me, he wasn't. I saw him have phone conversations with this person. He didn't like having to rely on a Family member, it didn't sit well with him at all, but he did it anyway. He - we - couldn't have pulled off your kidnap otherwise. Somebody had to buy off the security guard so that he wouldn't be at his post when we were leaving Dashlands, and Damien didn't have access to those sort of funds. And of course another part of the arrangement was that when Damien got the ransom money, he'd be guaranteed immunity from prosecution and from anything else the Gleeds might have in mind for him. He could spend the money how he wanted and not get caught for it.'
'And this is somebody in my immediate Family?'
'I don't know. I suppose so.'
Provender wagged his head wonderingly. 'It can't be. I mean, who? My mother? Never. My father? Unlikely. Gratitude or Extravagance? It wouldn't be Grat, no way, and 'Strav, she and I don't get on but she'd hardly stoop to something like this, not even as a practical joke. Far too much like effort. Then there's Great, but he wouldn't. He couldn't. And Uncle Fort... He's a troublemaker, a piss-head, fond of himself, no question, but not - it's just isn't him. What would he gain from it? What would any of them gain from it? No, I don't accept this. I refuse to.'
'Provender, you have to. It's the truth.'
'It's someone in my Family?'
Impatiently: 'Yes.'
'My immediate Family?'
'I told you, I don't know. How immediate is immediate?'
'Well, a cousin... Oh.'
'What?'
Provender rubbed his temples, his brain churning. 'A cousin. Oh mierda, yes. Arthur. That little pendejo rat-bastard.'
'This obviously sounds like one of your favourite relatives.'
'Hmm? Arthur? Oh no, far from it.'
'Sarcasm, Provender.'
But even Is's admission of sarcasm was wasted on him. He was pondering too hard, too deep in concentration.
'Arthur,' he said, 'Arthur doesn't like me, and that's fine, no problem, the feeling's reciprocated, but would he go so far as to...? He might. He definitely might. Just to fuck up my life. And maybe, maybe... To annoy my father? To get him to resent me for costing him a chunk of money? That's like Arthur. And then, while I'm off the scene, tucked away in a Family-hater's bathroom, Arthur could always swan over to Dashlands and pretend to be all concerned, show sympathy, come across as the perfect cousin. Jockeying for position. Reminding everyone who he is, how wonderful he is, isn't he better than Provender?'
'I'll just join in the conversation when you
're ready.'
'And then at the party... Good God yes. That tirade of his about actors. His attempt at the world record for the most uses of the word "bloody" in a single sentence. And, no, before that, when he was talking about his play. Offering me tickets. He said - he said I should come if I wasn't doing anything else.'
'Any time you want some input, you only have to ask.'
'No, he didn't say that, it was more specific than that. What the hell was it? If I'm not ... otherwise detained! Detained. Christ, that cocky little cabrón, he was telling me, he was just about giving it away. This was what was going to happen to me. I wouldn't be going to his Hamlet first night because I'd be fucking being held hostage!'
'I'll sit here quietly minding my own busi--'
Provender sprang to his feet and hurried over to the control console.
'What are you doing?' Is asked.
'What's it look like?' He grabbed one of the destination knobs. 'I'm diverting us.'
'We're not going to Dashlands?'
'Nope.'
'But we have to.'
'No, we don't.'
'Yes, we do. Your father. If your father sees you, if he knows you're safe, he can get the politicians to back down. There won't be a war.'
'It can wait.'
'It damn well can't.' Is stormed up to the front of the car and seized Provender's arm. 'What's more important, Provender? Going after your cousin or pulling a continent back from the brink of conflict?'
'Going after Arthur.'
'You don't mean that.'
'I do. I want to catch him unawares. I want to see his face when I turn up on his doorstep, free. I want to watch him gape and gulp like a stranded goldfish.'
'Fine, then do that, but leave it till after we've been to Dashlands.'
'No way. If all of a sudden everyone starts suing for peace, Arthur will know the game's up. Whereas if everything remains as it is, just for now, I can walk right up to him and he won't be expecting it. It's the only way I'll ever know if he's involved in the kidnapping.'
'No, it isn't. Damien could rat him out. To the police. If he was arrested and being interrogated.'
'Arthur would deny it. There's no proof of a connection between them, I bet. No physical evidence. Just phone calls. Just Damien's word against a Gleed's. Guess who everyone'll believe. Especially,' he added, with an ironic leer, 'when one of them's a much-loved star of stage and screen.'
'But what if everything goes wrong? What if war is declared? For all we know it could already have been. We haven't exactly been keeping up with current events this past couple of hours.'
'There's an entertainment system somewhere in the tram, with a radio. You could turn it on and listen.'
'That isn't the point.'
'An hour, Is. All I need. One measly hour.'
54
Romeo Moore - now, although he was as yet blissfully unaware of the fact, the world's only remaining Anagrammatic Detective - was at his post outside Arthur Gleed's house. He couldn't think of anywhere else to be. The shame of letting Arthur slip through his fingers that morning had abated, but he still couldn't think about what he had done without feeling a smart of self-recrimination. Determined not to repeat the mistake, he had contacted the cab firm whose owner he and Milner had once helped - the TAXIMETER/EXTRA TIME case - and had hired the exclusive use of one of his cars for the entire day. The year-long free-travel offer had expired a while ago but the owner still held Moore in enough esteem that he was able to negotiate a decent rate. The taxi was now sitting at a corner of the square, engine running. Moore would have been in the back, in a far more comfortable seat than the park bench he was on, but for the fact that the driver was one of those garrulous types who not only couldn't stop talking but couldn't seem to take the hint that his passenger was in no mood for trivial chitchat. After half an hour of listening to the driver bang on about any subject that crossed his mind, a torrent-of-consciousness rant, apparently unstoppable, Moore had excused himself, saying the park was the better vantage point, with a more direct view of the house. The driver had carried on talking even as Moore exited the taxi. For all Moore knew, he was still talking now.
The newspaper crossword was done-and-dusted a long time ago, Moore winning his battle of wits with the setter in just six minutes. The newspaper itself, with its disturbing reports of potential armed conflict, had been perused from cover to cover. Moore was pleased to note that the review of last night's performance of Hamlet was more or less as he had predicted: the paper's theatre critic was ho-hum about the production itself but Arthur Gleed had 'essayed a unique Hamlet, inhabiting the role of arch-vacillator as though born to it'. The comment had more edges than an icosahedron.
As for the threat of war, Moore had seen little evidence that people were unduly concerned. Everybody seemed to be going about their business as normal. Shops were open and there was no panic-buying as one might have expected, nor was there any sign of an imminent exodus into the countryside. London was proceeding at its customary pace, hectic but no more so than usual. Doubtless things would change if war was declared. Then again, Homo sapiens was on the whole a phlegmatic species, and sometimes events were so momentous that they simply had to be ignored. Unless bombs were actually raining down on the capital, life would go on with the minimum of disruption. The taxi driver had touched on this, when flitting from one unrelated topic to the possible war to another unrelated topic. 'Not a sod I can do about it,' he had said. 'I just drive a cab. Unless it's stopping me driving my cab, I'll just carry on doing that.'
And Moore was an Anagrammatic Detective and it wasn't stopping him doing his job, so he was carrying on too.
Needing something to occupy his thoughts till Arthur returned, Moore set himself the task of devising a word game. It was what he often did during idle moments, a way of pressure-valving his philologically hyperactive brain. Initially he came up with the idea of forming words from the letter sequences on vehicle licence plates. He tried it out with the cars parked in the square and it was satisfactorily entertaining but not much of a challenge. Looking for something a bit more taxing, he hit on the notion of finding words in which you could substitute one vowel with any of the other four vowels and create a valid new word each time. This was altogether more intellectually demanding, and Moore put his brain to work on it, mindful not to get too wrapped up in case Arthur reappeared and he didn't notice. He thought Milner would be pleased by the game, and wondered what he might call it. A Latinate or Hellenic name was conventional. Varivocalis? Pentalogue?
Before the astonishing event occurred - before the resolution to the Provender Gleed case all but fell into his lap - Moore managed to identify two strings of words which fulfilled the game's criterion. One was pack, peck, pick, pock, puck. The other was mate, mete, mite, mote, mute. He was racking his brains to find a third, preferably something more than four letters long, when two people walked into the square via its eastern end, emerging from the street which led to the nearest Family tram stop. Moore registered them, thought them of no significance - a young man and a young woman, perhaps a couple but, if so, they were in the throes of a lovers' squabble, not getting along, because he was a few paces ahead of her and she had her arms folded across her stomach in a manner that reeked of discontent - and then Moore blinked, hard, then rubbed his eyes as if to wipe them clean and start afresh, because his eyes were faulty, surely, some defect was causing them to tell him he was looking at the kidnappee, the Gleed heir-apparent, the reason for his vigil outside Arthur's house, Provender, who was now striding round the square's perimeter, heading for that selfsame residence, and it must be a vision problem, brought on perhaps by lack of sleep, a hallucination, and further blinking and rubbing would get rid of it, but this didn't work, not even banging a hand on the side of his head would do the trick, Moore tried it, a few hefty knocks with an open palm, but what would usually fix a television set when the picture wasn't right did not have the same effect on the mechanism of the human cranium and
the Provender apparition did not correct itself, there he still was, with his companion a few steps behind him, climbing the steps to his cousin's front door and prodding the doorbell button with a forthright forefinger...
Finally Moore galvanised himself to move. It was the faint ringing of the doorbell within the house that did it, that proved he wasn't imagining what he saw. Hallucinations, he reasoned, couldn't make doorbells ring, could they? Leaping to his feet, he hastened feverishly out of the park and arrowed towards Provender.
I was right, Merlin, he thought. I don't know why it's turned out the way it has, I didn't think this was how I would find him, but I have, I've done it, I've won our bet, dammit I was right!
55
'He's not home.'
Provender wheeled round.
The man who had spoken was a timid-looking individual, slight of stature and dressed in a cheap, rumpled suit. He stood on the pavement clutching the bottom of his jacket and rocking on his heels like a nervous schoolboy. Is was peering at him quizzically, and Provender couldn't help but do the same.
'And you are...?'
'Oh, yes, forgive me. Romeo Moore, Anagrammatic Detective.'
'Whatsis detective?' said Is.
'I have a card.' The man reached inside his jacket and rummaged. 'They're in here somewhere. I'm a private investigator. A special sort of private investigator. Oh dear, can't find them. I've been charged with the duty of -- A-ha!' He produced a sheaf of business cards and handed one to Is, then climbed the front steps and proffered another of the cards to Provender, who took it, glanced at it, saw that it said Milner and Moore, Anagrammatic Detectives together with an address and phone number, and tucked it away in a pocket.
'Charged with the duty of...?' Provender prompted.
'Uh, well, you, I suppose.'
'Me.'
'Yes,' said Moore, and added, 'Sir.'
'No need for "sir". What about me? What duty?'
'Finding you.'
'Right. Which you appear to have done.'
'I know.'
Provender Gleed Page 28