Provender Gleed (24 page)

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 incan
des
cent 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 handwriting 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.

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 --