Provender Gleed (33 page)

Is didn't know true love when she saw it. That was her problem. That and getting a bit too chummy with Provender fucking Gleed. But Damien couldn't even fault her there, not really. It was Is's nature to be kind, to see the best in people. That was one of the things he loved about her.

As the lift hauled him up to the forty-fifth floor, Damien contemplated stopping off at Mr Ho's along the way and buying some flowers. It would, however, be too corny and obvious a gesture. Is might even take it the wrong way: as if a bunch of flowers could just wave everything away like a magic wand. No, humility would be best. Honest, sincere contrition.

He was formulating his apology as he stepped out of the lift. He was still working on it as he unlocked the door to the flat. Composing himself, he swung the door open and began, 'Is, I've just got to tell you...'

She wasn't there.

She wasn't on the floor. She wasn't sitting in a chair. A glance through the bedroom doorway told him she wasn't in there either.

The flat was silent. Shockingly, tellingly silent.

What was the balcony window doing open?

Where the fuck was the table?

Then Damien caught sight of the loops of severed flex on the floor not far from where Is had been lying when he left. That was when he knew what had happened, but he strode over to the bathroom and flung the door wide, because he had to be sure, he had to see it with his own eyes...

And when he did, when the bathroom's emptiness gaped at him, he felt a tremendous downward rush, as though the building had vanished and he was plummeting to earth, five hundred feet straight down. Weak, he grabbed the door frame for support. He croaked, 'No,' and then 'No' again, as though by denying it he could somehow make it not have occurred. He lowered his head, closed his eyes, reopened them and looked up, hoping against hope that Provender would be there again, bound and helpless on the floor.

Of course he was not. The bathroom remained empty.

But not completely empty. Something was there which should not be there. Something had been placed there for him to find.

Bending forward, Damien reached out a numb hand and picked up his copy of
The Meritocrats
, which was on the floor next to the bath in the exact spot where Provender should have been.

There was handwriting on the front cover. Damien held the book up to the light and read:

Look on page 1.

This is how misguided and gullible you are.

He knew the handwriting was Is's, and although he resented being called misguided and gullible he resented even more that she had defaced his copy of the book. It wasn't in the best of condition to start with, admittedly, but to scribble on the front like that was just plain vandalism. Sacrilege, even.

Look on page 1
. Damien's fingers felt thick and clumsy as he obeyed the instruction. He leafed the book open to the start of the story, wondering what Is had done there. More defacing, he reckoned. That bitch.

He knew he should be out looking for her and Provender. He should be scouring the estate for them. He couldn't let them get away.

But first this. He had to see what was on page 1. Why he was allegedly so misguided, so gullible?

Here was the page. Initially Damien couldn't discern anything different about it. What was he meant to be looking at?

Then he noticed that certain letters had been highlighted - the first letter of each sentence of the first four paragraphs.

P
rovidence saw to it that Guy Godwin was born and brought up in a house at the confluence of three types of transportation.
R
oad ran alongside the house.
O
verhead a railway viaduct arched.
V
ery close to the end of the garden, a canal flowed.
E
very minute of every day, almost, Guy could look out of a window and see voyagers go by...

And as he read, and as he perceived, and as he understood, there came that downrush again, that giddying sense of freefall, but worse this time, as though all certainties were collapsing, as though support columns were giving way and the structure of Damien's life was crumbling to pieces beneath him.

Now he couldn't hold himself up. He buckled to his knees. He began moaning, rocking his head from side to side, not willing to believe that such a huge, monstrous trick could have been perpetrated on him. Not just on him but on thousands of others. The magnitude of it. The evil of it!

How long he knelt there, he couldn't say. Abject in his misery, he went into a state of withdrawal, distant from the world, outside time. There was no meaning. There was no fairness. Everything was a hoax, a cruel prank. He seriously considered ending it all, there and then. Draw his knife from its sheath, plunge it into his guts like a dishonoured samurai. But his arms were nerveless. He couldn't reach behind him. He lacked the strength.

What finally roused him from his stupor was a rap at the door and a quiet voice saying, 'Excuse me.'

He had left the door open.

A man he didn't recognise was peering into the flat.

The man rapped again on the door, a formality, looking directly at Damien as he did so. Puzzled that Damien was crouched there in the bathroom doorway. Nervous.

'Yeah?' Damien intoned, bleakly, wearily.

'I'm, umm... I'm looking for Damien Scrase,' said the man. 'Would you be he?'

48

Milner fully expected the answer to his enquiry to be no. He had the correct flat, 45L, but the man slumped in the bathroom doorway could not have corresponded less with his vision of Damien Scrase. He looked confused, helpless, broken, lost. He looked like someone who couldn't, at this moment and maybe at any moment, tell his BOWEL from his ELBOW, or for that matter his ARSE from his EARS. No way could he be Provender Gleed's kidnapper. And no way could this flat, with its front door wide open, be where Provender was being held captive. As far as Milner was able to see, it was empty, the slumped man its sole occupant.

Provender, he concluded, was elsewhere, and so was Scrase.

Maybe with Demetrius Silver? Were Scrase and Silver in it together, co-conspirators?

Such a prospect was not at all comforting, and Milner felt it was time to cut his losses and run. He would get a call out to Carver. Carver would do the rest.

'My mistake,' he said. 'Didn't mean to bother you. I'll just --'

'Who are you?' the man demanded.

'Uh, nobody.'

'No, you said my name. You came to see me. Who the fuck are you?'

Milner was lost for words - a rare occurrence for him, a dereliction of duty, almost anathema. His mouth opened and shut soundlessly, even as his mind raced to come up with some sort of excuse for his being there and knowing Scrase's name. He grasped the enormity of the blunder he had made. He had assumed the man was not his suspect, and he had been wrong.

'I, um, I thought...'

Scrase moved fast - shockingly fast. He sprang to his feet and lunged. Milner barely had time to flinch, let alone take evasive action. All at once Scrase had grabbed him by the shirtfront and was hauling him into the flat. Scrase kicked the door shut, slammed Milner backwards against the wall, and thrust his face so close to Milner's that the Anagrammatic Detective could hear the breath whistling in and out of his nostrils.

Milner knew then that the anagrams had not lied. The furious, staring eyes that filled his field of vision were all the proof he needed. MEAN CAD RISES. INCREASES MAD.

SCARES MAIDEN?
he thought, remotely.
SCARES ME AND I!

'What do you know?' Scrase snarled. His breath reeked of tobacco. 'Where is he? What have you done with him?'

'I have no idea what you're --'

With a soft
zing
, just like that, a knife appeared. Scrase held it up in his right hand while his left continued to grip Milner's shirtfront in a tight knot at his throat. Milner's stomach went hollow, and for a moment he thought he was going to soil himself. Everything seemed to have turned upside down. Reality was gone and there was only an insane nightmare: the knife poised in front of him, its blade about a foot long or so it seemed, light playing along honed steel, Scrase's eyes behind the weapon looking hard and lifeless and pitiless, knifelike themselves.

'I'll ask again,' Scrase said with bitten-lip patience, 'and you will answer in a straightforward and completely truthful manner. I'm not in the mood for mucking around. First off, who are you?'

'Merlin Milner.'

'And you're here because...?'

Milner didn't dare tell Scrase the truth:
I'm here because I've found the person who kidnapped Provender Gleed - you
. That would be nothing short of suicidal. He struggled to come up with some sort of cover story, and did. It wasn't much of one but it would have to do.

'Authority,' he said. 'I'm from the Risen London Authority. We, er, we're following up on that rent business a while back. You know, the protest. We're canvassing residents' views. How are we going, have things improved, and so forth.'

Scrase took the information on board and, with a nod, appeared to accept it as an explanation. The knife wavered in the air, then drew away from Milner's face. Milner allowed himself to relax. There. A nice piece of lying. A plausible tale plausibly told.

Then, almost a sigh, he heard Scrase say, 'Rubbish.'

There was a flash of metal, and a faint ripping sound, and a feeling like an icicle being drawn sideways across his cheek, and a moment later a sensation of warmth, of wetness, and then a sudden sharp sting of pain which opened up into something fiercer, fierier, more deep-seated.

Milner moaned, and his hand flew to his cheek to clutch the wound. At the same time Scrase relinquished his grip on him and stepped back a couple of paces, like an artist wishing to observe his handiwork.

'You're not RLA,' he said. 'The RLA doesn't do follow-ups. The RLA couldn't give a big fat hairy shit about this place. Authority officials come here once in a blue moon, and when they do it's always in groups, never alone. They're not stupid.
You
are, thinking I'd fall for that load of bollocks.'

Milner wanted to say something indignant. Through the pain, through the sight of his blood on his fingers, he wanted to tell Scrase he had no right to do that - cut him like that. He felt violated. It was an outrage for this man to have slashed his face, split his skin, simply as punishment for not being honest. It was disproportionate and spiteful and unjust.

Sensibly, however, Milner kept his opinion to himself. Instead, in humble, faltering tones, he said, 'Please, let me go. I won't tell anyone anything. I'll leave and not come back. You'll never see me again. Just ... don't hurt me.'

Scrase studied him sidelong. 'Well now, that depends. I'm having a pretty shitty day, as you can probably tell. Things that were supposed to be ... working, haven't. I find out I've been lied to and cheated on in all sorts of ways. And then you come waltzing up to my door and I reckon you know something about what's going on here, you're involved in this somehow, and you won't give me any straight answers, so...' He shrugged. 'So you've paid the price for that. And I don't think you'd be so daft as to try it on with me a second time. Right?'

Milner nodded eagerly.

'Right. What I think would be best is if you come over and sit down and you and I have a nice little chat. Discuss a couple of things.'

Scrase motioned to a chair, and Milner, on weak, wobbly legs, tottered over to it and sat down. Scrase pulled up another chair and seated himself opposite, laying the knife across his lap. The knife was angled towards Milner but not pointing directly at him. Milner chose to regard this as a positive sign, cause for optimism.

'That's, erm, an impressive-looking utensil you've got there,' he said. Admiring the knife seemed a good way of defusing its dangerousness. A compliment about the knife was a compliment about its owner.

'Bought it at an army-surplus shop,' Scrase said. 'See that?' He indicated the haft, which was gnarled and muddy brown for the most part, shading to white near the pommel, colours like an Irish coffee. '"Stag-handled" is the technical term for it, but it's deerhorn to you and me. Kind of ironic, since it's a knife designed specifically for gutting and skinning deer. Talk about adding insult to injury. See those serrations along the top edge of the blade? That's to prevent it slipping out too easily when you're using it. And now that we've established that my knife is a handsome, well-made piece of kit, let's get down to business, Mr Milner. Because I think we're past the pleasantries stage, and I think if you're trying to delay me for some reason, that would be very unwise of you.'

Milner nodded to show he was in complete agreement with that last remark. 'It would be, and I'm not trying to delay you.'

'Good the hear. So now you're going to come clean about everything. Who, when, what, why.'

Honesty, Milner told himself. SAY TRUTH and STAY HURT -
stay
as in
prevent
.

He started speaking, and what he said elicited head-shakes from Scrase, and a hardening grimace, and eventually a hiss of dismay. And when he was done - when he had explained who he was, what an Anagrammatic Detective did, who had employed him, and how he had found Scrase - there was a long silence from the other man. Scrase's eyes were narrowed, calculating. The silence stretched on, and Milner began to believe that he had won himself his life and liberty. Just as his lying had been punished, his candour would be rewarded.

'You have no idea where Gleed is then?' Scrase said at last.

'None whatsoever. He should have been here.'

'Well, he isn't, is he. The fucker escaped. I don't know how but I know he had help. She helped him.'

'She?'

Scrase flicked a hand. 'Not important. You don't need to know. You mentioned you have a partner, another Anagrammatic Detective. You said he's pursuing a different line of enquiry. He thinks the kidnapping is an inside job.'