Provender Gleed (47 page)

'An ex-soldier? And by all accounts a fearsome warrior in his day? Not so hard to conceive, Miss Gleed.'

'You weren't there, Grat,' said Extravagance. 'He was berserk. I think he really meant to do it.'

'But why?' said Prosper. 'What for?'

'To protect the Family,' said Moore.

'Protect us? From...?'

'Er... Me. Or rather, what I had found out, a piece of information that was highly damaging to him.'

'Come on, man, talk straight. What information?'

'I'm getting to that.'

'Well, can't you hurry it up a bit?'

'Dad,' said Provender. 'Stop hassling him. Let him explain in his own time.'

'But he's --'

'
Dad
.'

Prosper fell silent, cowed by his son's forthrightness.

'Go on, Romeo,' said Provender.

'Right. So. Um. What it comes down to is the fact that the whole kidnap plot was orchestrated not by some outside agency but from right here, at Dashlands.'

Now it was Fortune's turn to expostulate indignantly, although he did so in a more muted manner than his brother. 'That's not right. Can't be right. Why would anyone...?' Rather than complete the rhetorical question, he submerged it in a draught of gin and tonic.

'We can, I hope, get to the bottom of "why?" shortly,' Moore said, with a surreptitious glance towards Great. 'I myself had an inkling from the start that it might be an inside job. What I didn't realise was that the culprit was the very person who was employing me to investigate the crime.'

'Yes, why is that?' said Provender. 'Why would Carver have hired you unless he thought you... Oh.'

Moore nodded, with chagrin but also with a hint of vengeful satisfaction. 'He told me himself shortly before he attacked me. He honestly didn't think I or my partner had a hope of cracking the case. He took us on ... well, principally so that he could appear to be doing something useful, but also because of all the trees he could have barked up, ours was the wrongest one. If you see what I mean. It was almost a joke to him, I feel. "Who's the least likely person I can find to send to look for Provender?"'

'We only have
your
word on any of this,' said Fortune. 'You could be spinning us some cock-and-bull story in order to...'

'In order to what? Get myself off the hook for supposedly stealing some trinket from you? Hardly likely. Besides, I have a Family witness here who'll attest to the fact that Carver was trying to silence me, don't I, Extravagance? He all but confessed his connection to the kidnapper, Damien Scrase, in the moments before he... we...'

Moore experienced again the terror of being bent over the banister, Carver's furious features filling his vision, the sense of the drop beneath him, the hard tiles below, his utter helplessness. His fingers, reflexively, went to his throat and explored the tender flesh there. It was weird to be alive after having been so close to death. It was at once exhilarating and deflating, an emotional alp from which the only route was down.

He became aware that he had faded out and Extravagance was speaking, filling the gap he had left. She told everyone that not only had Carver clearly been intent on murder but he had recognised Is, who also had some connection with this whole messy business.

'Don't you?' she concluded, with a frosty look at the person with whom, half an hour earlier, she had been going through her wardrobe, selecting skirts to try on, all girls together.

Before Is had a chance to reply, Provender stepped in. 'She was an unwilling accomplice, forced to take part against her will. She helped me escape, too, and in case you've forgotten, she saved our mother's life.'

Is shifted in her seat, exquisitely uncomfortable. She opened her mouth to say something before deciding that saying nothing was the better option.

'I can vouch for her as well,' said Moore. 'I saw her tackle Scrase at the Shortborn, when he was threatening Provender. She's definitely on the side of the angels.'

Is started gently massaging her wrenched shoulder, head down, avoiding all stares.

'But if we're looking to lay blame,' Moore continued, 'there is someone in this room deserving of our attention. Carver is guilty of a lot but there's someone who I'd say is even guiltier.'

He let the words hang in the air, allowing the Gleeds to draw the correct inference, which, gradually, they did. Heads turned, homing in on the one person present whose head could not turn.

Great's stare remained forward-fixed as ever, his eyes stony. His hand was not tapping. His whole body was statue-still. Then, little by little, his eyes began to move, sweeping across his assembled relatives, defiant, challenging. You could read anything into the way those glittering blue orbs looked, from an admission of culpability to astonished, out-and-out refutation.

'No,' said Fortune.

'Great?' said Gratitude.

'Too far,' said Prosper. 'You've gone too far now, Mr Detective.'

Even Provender looked dubious.

'I understand your scepticism,' said Moore, 'and no doubt I'll only add to it when I tell you that it was his full name, his proper name, which set the seal on it for me, bearing out my suspicion that Carver was just the brawn of the outfit and someone else was the brains.'

'What
is
Great's proper name?' asked Extravagance.

'Oh really, 'Strav!' said her older sister. 'You don't know?'

'I forget. No one ever calls him by it.'

'Arthur does.'

'Does he?

'You are
so
unobservant sometimes. Coriander.'

'Oh yes. So it is.'

'Coriander,' said Moore. 'And CORIANDER GLEED happens to be an anagram of CODE RINGLEADER.'

Fortune snorted a laugh.

'It is.'

'I don't care if it is, Moore, I simply think you're taking the mickey. Anagram indeed!'

'It's what he does, uncle,' said Provender, 'and I hate to say it but it works. That was Carver's mistake. He thought it was ridiculous too.'

'So we're expected to believe, on the strength of an
anagram
, that a paralysed old man was capable of --'

'Forgive me,' Moore interjected, 'but Great is not paralysed.'

'Some bloody detective! Of course he is. Look at him. He's been in that chair for, Christ, over a decade. He's not faking it. What, suddenly he's going to get up and walk and tell us it was all a big sham?'

'No, no, not at all.'

'And I'll bet he speaks, too. Eh? He's just been pretending he can't all this time.'

'As it happens, he can speak. Not in the conventional sense, but --'

'Pure bollocks!' Fortune exclaimed. 'I can believe, I suppose, that Carver's a bad guy. Never much liked him, to be honest. But now you're telling us that the oldest member of the Family, for some reason that has yet to be established, went to the trouble of having the heir-apparent abducted and caused all this chaos. Why, for God's sake? Family doesn't harm its own. That's an unwritten law.'

'His motives I hope to find out. His methods? When I said he can speak, what I meant was he can communicate.'

'Oh, and how?'

'What isn't he doing right now?'

'Anything. He isn't doing anything. Because he's paralysed.' Fortune said this condescendingly, as if conversing with a simpleton.

Provender said, 'Tapping. He's not tapping.'

'Correct,' said Moore. 'But when he does...'

'Code.'

'Exactly.'

There was a pause, a collective intake of breath, a communal click of understanding.

'It's not possible,' said Gratitude. 'We'd have noticed. Surely we would have.'

'But we didn't,' said her brother. 'It happened slowly. He lost movement, he lost his speech, the tapping started... We just didn't think about it. We thought it was a symptom.'

'Right under our noses,' said their uncle, wonderingly.

'And Carver,' said Prosper, 'he knew.'

'They served together in the army,' said Moore. 'Both would have a working knowledge of Morse code.'

'Well, of course,' said Fortune. 'Carver always seemed to know exactly what Great wanted. We thought it was just because he was a good servant and had spent so much time in Great's company. What's that word when two different species of animal co-operate?'

'Symbiosis.'

'That's the one. That was their relationship. Kind of psychic, almost.'

'Only it wasn't,' said Provender. 'Carver knew what Great wanted all the time because Great was telling him.'

'Are we idiots not to have seen it?' said Extravagance.

No one else answered, so Moore felt honour-bound to. 'Not necessarily. Why would it occur to you that that's what was going on?'

'
You
spotted it.'

'Like I said, patterns. And the anagrams. It's how my brain is wired.'

'But you met them and saw it straight away. We
live
with them.'

'Sometimes, when a thing's right in front of you, you adjust to it. You take it into account and don't think anything of it. It's just
there
. Also, an elderly, disabled relative tends to fade into the background, especially when, as with this Family, everyone else has such a strong personality. The elderly relative becomes, with all due respect, part of the furniture.'

He anticipated protests, but there were only mute nods of assent.

Throughout the foregoing, Great's eyes flicked from speaker to speaker but his hand stayed resolutely still, denying by its very motionlessness the abilities Moore was asserting it had. Then, abruptly, it started shaking, twisting from the wrist to bring the finger with the signet ring into contact with the wheelchair armrest.

The assembled Family listened in silence, paying attention to a sound they had hitherto regarded as just so much meaningless reflex-movement drumming. Not one of them had any idea what Great was saying but they knew for the first time that he was saying
something
, and this, in itself, lent the tapping a strange articulacy. Great, dumb for a decade, was talking again. Speech - incomprehensible but speech nonetheless - was issuing forth from him.

'Can you understand him?' Prosper asked Moore.

'I know Morse. Sort of. I know how each letter is represented. But he's going to fast for me to follow.'

'Great,' Prosper said, 'you'll have to slow down. Mr Moore will be able to translate then.'

The rate of the tapping decreased, but Moore, try though he might, still could not make head or tail of it. The louds and softs, dashes and dots, all seemed to merge into one another.

'Slower still,' said Prosper.

The tapping became painstakingly protracted, Great leaving long gaps between letters and making the distinction between the dashes and dots as marked as possible. Moore was just about able to keep up now, although not without effort. He had memorised the Morse alphabet a long time ago, purely as an intellectual exercise, but he had never actually had to use it before. Adding to his difficulties was the fact that he was having to recall it under pressure. He made, therefore, several mistakes to start with, although gradually his ear attuned and his fluency improved.

'FAMILY GETTING WEAP,' he interpreted. 'WEAP? What's that?'

Great tapped out the last word again.

'Oh, WEAK. NEEDED SHAKING UP. BOY NEEDED... SHOCK? Is that it? SHOCK?'

Great tapped out dash-dot-dash-dash, dot, dot-dot-dot. YES.

'BOY NEEDED TO GET OFF... I'm not translating
that
word. AND DO SOMETHING.'

'Me?' said Provender.

'YES,' said Moore. 'USELESS LAZY... I'm sorry, could you run through that one again please?'

Dash-dot-dash-dot, dot-dot-dash, dash-dot, dash.

'SO-AND-SO.' This was not, strictly speaking, the term Great had used, but Moore had no wish to offend anyone by repeating the actual profanity.

'THEREFORE KIDNAP. RUDE AWAKENING. BRING TO SENSES. GLEEDS MUST SURVIVE.'

'A bit extreme, don't you think?' said Provender.

'DESPERATE TIMES DESPERATE MEASURES. IN MY DAY WAR MADE MAN OF YOU. FACE FOE FACE SELF. LEARN COURAGE AND DUTY. NO WAR NOW THEREFORE OTHER CHALLENGE NECESSARY.'

'Only there nearly was a war. You didn't count on that, did you?'

'GOOD IF BOY TURNED SOLDIER.'

'Yes, like
that
was going to happen. And Mum. Another little drawback to your scheme, Great.'

'SAD. WRONG. CYNTHIA ONLY DECENT GLEED. PROSPER UNGRATEFUL... No, I won't say it.'

Great banged the word out again, forcefully, and Moore relented.

'All right. UNGRATEFUL BASTARD. I apologise, Mr Gleed, those aren't my sentiments of course. I'm simply the messenger.'

Prosper waved it aside, looking as if he knew he deserved the censure.

'And if I'd been killed?' said Provender to Great. 'Believe me, I came close. That would've scuppered you, wouldn't it? Talk about an own goal.'

'ACCEPTABLE RISK.'

'Oh, thanks.'

'CARVER MONITORING SITUATION.'

'Obviously not that closely.'

'ACCEPTABLE RISK,' Great reiterated, via Moore.

Provender sighed. 'You're quite mad, aren't you? I'm not saying I don't understand why. Sitting in that chair all day. Stuck inside your own body. Stewing in your own thoughts. Staring out at a world you can't directly affect. Year after year of that - it's not surprising a few of your marbles have gone astray. But that's no excuse for what you did. To me. To all of us. Do you regret it now? Do you feel even the slightest remorse?'

Great's hand stayed in his lap for almost a minute, until with solemn, precise emphasis it sounded out two letters: dash-dot, dash-dash-dash.

Translation was superfluous.

'Thought not,' said Provender.

'ACTED FOR FAMILY. DOING BEST FOR FAMILY. GETTING HOUSE IN ORDER. FAMILY EVERYTHING. FAMILY MUST NOT FADE. GLEEDS MUST SURVIVE. GLEEDS MUST ... again, SURVIVE. GLEEDS. GLEEDS.' Moore listened as Great continued to tap out the same sequence over and over. In the end the Anagrammatic Detective shrugged. 'That's it. GLEEDS, GLEEDS, ad infinitum.'

The tapping quickened and grew louder. It was all Great had to say now. His gaze scanned left to right and back again, taking in each and all of his relatives. The pattern of dashes and dots became insistent, hypnotic, like a peal of church bells, a phrase from a song, a complex tomtom polyrhythm, dinning itself into every skull in the room, until eventually Provender snapped to his feet, strode over, grabbed Great's hand and wrested off the signet ring. The ring came free with surprising ease, a little too large for the bony finger it encircled. Provender tossed it upwards and snatched it from the air at the start of its downward arc, stealing it from sight.