Provender Gleed (23 page)

'You want to get rid of your cake and eat it, that's what you mean.'

'You make it sound like I'm being unrealistic. I think I'm being ultra-realistic. There's that bit in Chapter Thirty-Nine of
The Meritocrats
where I talk about, or rather Jack Holloway talks about, capitalism and responsibility. Basically, are they mutually exclusive. You know the section I'm talking about?'

'Provender, I've never got beyond Chapter Six.'

'You really hate my book, don't you.'

'Don't be hurt.'

'I'm not hurt. Well, yes I am. You have to understand, you're the first person I've met with a copy of it and you don't like it. That's not good for my author's ego. But I guess I can live with it. Your friend, after all, he loves it. Which is ironic, as I get the impression he'd happily stove my head in if I wasn't so valuable to him financially. That reminds me - how is the ransoming going? Have my Family agreed to cough up yet? How much am I worth?'

'I can't really talk about that.'

'Can't or won't?'

'Can't. There's a lot to do with this business that I'm being kept in the dark about.'

'What on earth for?'

'To protect me. The less I know, the safer I'll be if things go wrong.'

'Your friend's idea? How chivalrous of him. Or maybe he doesn't trust you. Maybe he has an inferiority complex and can't bear the thought of you, a woman, being on an equal footing with him.'

'Clumsy, Provender.'

'What?'

Is stood up. 'You were doing OK. This
Meritocrats
thing. That was working. A trump card, and you played it nicely. You almost had me on your side. But then you overstepped the mark. I can't blame you for that. You're Family, and Family members don't know when enough's enough. But if you're going to win me over completely, you'll have to be a whole lot subtler and a whole lot smarter.'

She exited the bathroom, slamming the door harder than she intended to. In the main room, she flung
The Meritocrats
down and stomped over to the window. It was a full-length window that gave onto a small balcony. To open it took some effort; the runners were warped and rusty; it rolled grudgingly. Is forced it sideways till there was a gap large enough for her to slide through. On the balcony she stood and gazed down on Needle Grove. In the twilight, the shadows were growing. The hum of the surrounding city was abating and the estate's own cacophony was becoming more audible. Shouts echoed, ricocheting upwards between walls. Music blared from windows. Televisions jabbered. Down at the lowest, most lightless levels the gang-tribes were starting to gather for their after-dark wilding. Is could see them at their regular meeting-places, tiny figures. She knew they would be sharing bottles of cheap strong cider, shots of Tinct, and pugnacious jokes. Soon Needle Grove would be theirs again. All decent folk would stay locked in their flats till daybreak.

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".'