Provender Gleed (49 page)

In the event, he appeared to stay true to his word. The police did not call on Is. If anyone in officialdom connected her with Damien Scrase, for whatever reason the connection was not followed up. Gleed influence kept her in the clear. She was relieved about this, naturally, but she also felt furtively guilty. It wasn't right that she should be so utterly exonerated. It felt a bit like cheating.

A couple of her nurse friends, who knew of her one-time relationship with Damien, remarked to her about his arrest. He had always struck them as a borderline case, they said, violence lurking below the surface. In fact, they opined, they were surprised nothing like this had happened sooner. At any rate, it was a good thing Is had dumped him when she did. She was well shot of him.

Even her part in his downfall was kept out of the public domain. It was Arthur who took the credit, and he was only too happy to. In an exclusive interview on a popular TV chat show Arthur related at length how he had liberated his cousin Provender from the anti-Familial madman's clutches and then disarmed him and decked him with a single punch. It all took place in the backstage murk at the Shortborn, so there weren't any eyewitnesses who were able to disprove Arthur's claims explicitly. There was no one, even, to pass comment on the improbability of Arthur managing to bring down Damien, a man twice his size, with just one blow. So persuasive was Arthur that he made his account of the incident wholly credible. Perhaps he himself believed it was the truth. That, after all, was what good acting was about, inhabiting a role so thoroughly that you came to feel the part was really you. It was, at any rate, great publicity for his play.
Hamlet
was now sold out for its entire run, and there was talk of taking it on a tour of the provinces and even abroad to the US and Japan.

Damien himself adopted a policy of stony silence. At the arraignment hearing he didn't utter a word, not even answering when the judge asked him to confirm his name and abode. He wore, in the words of one journalist, 'a heavy armour of defeat'. Pictures by court sketch artists confirmed it. In so far as such artists could be relied on for an accurate reproduction of reality, the Damien they depicted in pastel and pencil looked shrunken, hollowed, half the man he had been. He was heading for a fall and he knew it. Is believed that, once his anger had abated and he had time to reflect on the atrocities he had committed, his conscience had caught up with him. There was blood on his hands. Two innocent lives taken. Whatever his beliefs, no matter how great his faith in his cause, he had killed. There was no getting around that.

Reports of his suicide while in custody came as no surprise to Is. Damien hanged himself in his police cell on the night before his trial was due to commence, using a blanket for a rope and a light fixture for a gibbet.

Deep down she was able to find it in herself to feel sorry for him. Mostly, though, she felt that he had got what he deserved. In a sense, he had shown himself to be decent at the last. A less proud man would have tried to weasel his way out of responsibility for his deeds, blaming the Gleed Family, perhaps, rather than himself. But not Damien. Principled to the end.

She learned where and when his funeral was to be held but didn't go.

And one month became two, and two expanded into three, and Is got on with things because that was what she wanted, wasn't it? A normal life. Wasn't it?

And summer decayed into autumn, and London's few trees took on a brown tinge and there was a knowing nudge of cold in the air.

Then two letters arrived for her, both appearing on the same morning in her pigeonhole at the nurses' lodgings.

The first was in an ordinary-sized envelope which bulged with the several sheets of foolscap folded within.

The letter itself was videotyped and the first page was printed on a sheet of headed notepaper alerting her to the fact that it came from Romeo Moore, Anagrammatic Detective, who could now lay claim to official Gleed patronage. The Family's crest appeared alongside his name and address, motto and split-nutmeg motif stamped crisply into the paper.

For all the impressiveness of the stationery, however, the tone of the letter was anything but proud or gleeful.

Dear Is,

I apologise for contacting you like this, out of the blue. Finding out where you live wasn't difficult. I am, after all, a detective. For what that's worth.

Truth be told, these past few weeks have been very hard for me and I really need to unburden myself to someone who I know will lend a sympathetic ear, someone moreover who was there when it all happened. If you would prefer not to be that person, I will understand. I remember, in the car on the way back to London, you said you hoped to forget about it all. I don't blame you for that. If that's still the case, don't read on. Crumple this letter up and throw it away.

I've been thinking about anagrams a lot, Is. Words have been whirling around in my brain, settling then taking off again like flocks of starlings. Words that seem to have meaning and then no meaning.

I've been thinking about your name, for one. I feel it was unfair of me to characterise ISIS NECKER as NICE KISSER. That was a shallow and dull anagrammatic interpretation. With time and reflection I've been able to see that ISIS NECKER is also CRISIS-KEEN. You are. You were. How you dealt with things at Dashlands House that day, and also what you told me later about how you and Provender escaped from Damien Scrase... CRISIS-KEEN indeed. A remarkable, resourceful woman you are.

Mainly, though, I've been thinking about the word RELATIVES as I sit here in my lonely office through the long hours of the day. No doubt thanks to our encounter with the Gleeds, the word has begun to obsess me. Even at night it blurs through my thoughts. Such a VERSATILE word, RELATIVES. IT REVEALS many things.

It tells me about the VASTER LIE that was perpetrated on myself and my colleague Merlin Milner when we were hired by Carver to find Provender. He told us one lie when he praised our track record. The VASTER LIE was that he hoped we would not succeed at all. He intended us to fail in our task.

When I didn't fail, I was exposed to the full vengeful fury of the Gleeds' manservant: a VALET'S IRE.

But what befell me was nothing compared with what befell my partner. You probably are aware that Scrase murdered two people. What you may not have realised is that the first of his victims was my colleague, and friend, Merlin Milner, who succeeded far better than I did at locating Provender. VITAL SEER that he was, he actually tracked down Provender's captor - and was stabbed to death for his pains.

I found out a couple of days afterwards. His corpse lay undiscovered in Scrase's flat until a neighbour noticed. I can hardly bear to think about it. Merlin, dead all that time. Somehow that's the worst part, the loneliness of it. Even dead, to be abandoned like that... And I had no idea where he was. I looked high and low for him, fretted about him, and then he turned up. I was the one who had to go to the morgue to identify his remains. Truly that period, those few days between his disappearance and his burial, was and still is the VILEST ERA I have ever had to live through.

I attended Scrase's arraignment. I sat there in that courtroom facing my partner's murderer and I watched his deadened, faraway gaze, his VISTA LEER. (It reminded me, in its way, of the horrible resentful look in Great's eyes when Provender took his signet ring off him, that EVIL STARE of his.) I nearly cheered when a trial date was set and I
did
cheer when I learned that, on his TRIAL'S EVE, Scrase had killed himself. Even though, if he had gone to prison, it would have been for life - he would never LEAVE STIR - this was altogether better. I'm not by nature a sadistic or uncharitable man, but I truly hope he suffered during his final moments.

What remains for me is to wonder about the Gleeds, whose inner strife reached out and affected ordinary existences like yours and mine, whose squabbling can have a ripple effect, shake the world, TEAR LIVES. What are we to make of people like them who can casually, inadvertently, with a selfish decision, destroy some and leave the REST ALIVE? People who have such power and wield it with such thoughtlessness?

I don't know. It may well be that I'm going mad. The anagrams - my trade, my craft - are closing in around me, ensnaring me. I've been too long inside my own brain and I can't seem to find a way out. Everything makes sense and nothing does.

Maybe, with time, this will pass. Funnily enough, I feel better simply for having typed this out to you, using my brand new videotyper.

I've been getting a lot of offers of work lately, on the strength of my new Gleed patronage. I've been turning them down, but maybe I should take them up. Maybe work is the best cure. Make myself master of the anagrams again, rather than have them be the master of me.

I have money, Family patronage, everything I could possibly wish for. Yet I'd give it all away in a flash, if it meant I could have my friend Merlin back, sitting opposite me, annoying me, one-upping me. Really, I would.

Yours sincerely,

Romeo

P.S. You remember, when we arrived at Dashlands by tram, I mentioned an anagram of Provender's full name which I wasn't able to account for then? I think I can now. PROVENDER OREGANO GLEED - GREEN ROAD DEVELOPER O.N.G. The O.N.G. bothered me. I don't like left-over letters. It's untidy. Then I realised, in the light of subsequent discoveries, that it might well stand for 'On Needle Grove'. You've seen the recent news stories about the estate, I take it. The anagrams twist and turn. They're snaky and deceptive. But in the end, they never lie.

Saddened, Is folded Moore's letter shut and tucked it back into its envelope. Poor man. Half crazy with grief. His world, even more than hers, had been churned up by Damien, and by Carver and Great, and no amount of Gleed kindness after the fact could smooth out the gouges. She resolved to phone him sometime, offer to meet up with him for a drink and a chat. It was the least she could do.

An odd thought struck her. She reopened the letter and reread the P.S. 'Subsequent discoveries'? 'Recent news stories'? She didn't get the reference. She would ask someone at work today what was going on at Needle Grove. If she couldn't find anyone who knew, she'd go to the local library and check back through the newspaper archives. Obviously she had missed something, but then lately she had become a lot less thorough about keeping up with current events. The outside world had ceased to impinge so directly on her, much to her delight.

Then there was the second letter. This one was in a large, card-backed manila envelope, and had apparently been hand-delivered. There was no stamp or frank. She opened it carefully, with fingertip delicacy.

Inside were maps. No covering note, just a sheaf of maps.

Architectural plans, to be precise. Copies of architectural plans...

...of Needle Grove.

Each plan detailed a section of the estate, and on most of them, though not all, there was a portion shaded in green.

Who had sent her this? She thought she knew, but she discarded the notion, not willing to acknowledge it until she had to.

Some of the shaded portions were large, some small. Each touched the edge of the page it was on. Each formed an irregular geometrical shape.

It didn't take Is long to divine that there was an over-all pattern. Cumulatively the shaded portions amounted to something greater. They were parts of a whole.

She cleared a patch of floor in her bedsit and began laying the plan copies out. Her shift was due to start soon and already she could hear other nurses in the lodgings leaving their rooms and clacking along the corridor to the sky-bridge which led across to the main part of the hospital. She was in her uniform and ready to go, but first there was this puzzle, the plan copies like jigsaw pieces demanding to assembled and solved.

On her knees, she shuffle the sheets of paper around, aligning edges, matching up shaded portion with shaded portion. The pattern grew. The geometrical shapes fell together, creating several larger, discrete geometrical shapes.

Then, all at once, she had it, and she sat back breathlessly on her haunches, staring down. The plan copies were spread out in front of her in a rough rectangle, across the middle of which were four capital letters and a punctuation mark picked out in green:

ISIS?

Each character was comprised of streets, roads, walkways, bridges; of plazas, squares, sections of wasteland; of numerous interlocking outdoor segments of the estate, all at different levels. Someone had taken a lot of time, expended a lot of effort, in putting this together. But for what purpose? Why contrive such an elaborate, convoluted way of writing out her name?

'And why do it anonymously?' she said aloud, adding, 'Provender,' as though he were in the room with her.

She peered at the plans again, and it was the question mark that snagged at her and made her think there was more to all this than met the eye. That, combined with the remarks in Moore's letter. Something was afoot. This wasn't merely some sort of declaration she was looking at, a statement of her name...

It was an invitation.

She got one of the other nurses to call in sick for her - stomach bug, sudden thing, sorry. She changed into civvies and sneaked out of the hospital. A bus transported her across town, the bus she always used to take when visiting Damien. She knew the route intimately, every stop and turn. Part of her felt she was wasting her time, she was blowing a sick-day for nothing, she had misread the meaning of the plans. Another part of her knew otherwise.

As she passed beneath an entrance arch and stepped onto Needle Grove soil, she flashed back to her and Provender's run-in with the Changelings and a frisson of remembered fear shivered through her. Her throat tightened and her breathing felt constricted. She nearly turned back. Then she spied a group of workmen nearby, gathered in a hard-hatted huddle, studying blueprints. Behind them stood a mechanical digger and a dump-truck whose hopper was heaped high with fresh earth. The sight restored her confidence and refreshed her curiosity. She walked past the men, close enough to overhear one of them, who looked very much like a site foreman, say something about avoiding a gas main when they began excavation. Which was reassuring to hear but not exactly a huge clue as to what was going on.