Provender Gleed (17 page)

By their mid-twenties, Milner and Moore, still separately, had both arrived at the same conclusion: there was much more to words than met the eye. Words were not merely symbolic representations of abstract and concrete concepts. In some strange way words
were
the concepts. The two were indissolubly linked. When somebody spoke of a 'dog', for instance, they weren't merely using the noun which by common consensus had become attached to the wild or domestic animal of the genus
Canis
, they were also conjuring up the image of a dog in the mind of the listener. They were evoking the intrinsic notion of doggishness, the essence of dog with its attendant impressions of fur and slobber and devotion and implacable pursuit and cur-like cowardice, a whole raft of information compacted into that three-character monosyllable. It was impossible not to think of a dog when somebody said 'dog'. Everything you knew about dogs could be tapped into by mention of the word. It was the key to your entire mental archive on the subject, to your individual understanding of the nature of reality as far as dogs were concerned. If there was no word for dog, you might look at a dog and not know what it was. You might not even see it. It would be outside your sphere of comprehension. Without the appellation 'dog', it was possible that dogs would cease to be.

Such was the power of words.

And if words could be pulled apart and reorganised into new shapes, perhaps this pertained to the things the words stood for as well. By moulding and refashioning the letters, you could reveal meanings no one even knew were there. You could expose the hidden connections of the world, the patterns which people followed subconsciously, the secret interleavings of existence.

It was, in a way, like playing God.

Or, indeed, playing dog.

It should be pointed out that at this stage in their lives, when they formulated their individual but identical theories about anagrams, both Milner and Moore were exceedingly frustrated young men. Each was working in an unchallenging, dead-end job - respectively, town planning and hotel management. Each was unmarried, living alone, parentless, loveless. Each was coming to that midlife cusp where the dreams and aspirations of youth had nearly all fallen away and a sense of limitation was creeping in, along with feelings of disappointment and the first intimations of mortality. Each, at about the same time, arrived at the same conclusion: it was time to change tack. Try something else while he could. While he was still young enough to resume his old job if things didn't work out. It was now or never.

Each thought,
Why not put into practice, somehow, my theories about words? Why not make use of all those hours I've spent absorbed in my linguistic hobby? Turn a pastime into an occupation?

Thus, simultaneously, synchronicitously, at opposite ends of the city, two Anagrammatic Detective agencies were set up.

Neither thrived.

Clients came, but hardly in their droves, and most departed without engaging the services of Milner or Moore. Once their initial curiosity about how an Anagrammatic Detective actually worked had been satisfied, they laughed and left. Those who didn't laugh and leave were surprised to discover just how effective that particular system of investigation could be.

They were in such a small minority, however, that it made no difference. The money wasn't coming in. Overheads were not being met. Bills began to pile up. After a year, both Milner and Moore were finding that (a) self-employment was not all it was cracked up to be, and (b) being a private detective was not all it was cracked up to be either. Each man knew he was staring failure in the face. The prospect of re-entering the job market, dispiriting though it was, was beginning to look like the only course of action available.

That was when each learned about the other. Neither could quite believe there was another Anagrammatic Detective out there. They communicated, they met up at a vertiginously high rooftop bar in central London, the Old Hyde Park Tavern on Kensington Heights, and, in the space of one drunken evening, they compared notes, got on, and decided to pool their resources.

By sharing an office, each cut his overheads in half at a stroke. At the same time, neither was in competition with the other for the same jobs. Work began to pick up. The trickle of clients became ... well, not a flood, but a slightly faster trickle. And the agency scored some notable successes. Not the sort that garnered headlines, nor the sort that won awards and honours, but still, achievements to be proud of, all of them adding to a lengthening backlist of Cases Solved.

There was, for example, the time they tracked down a missing person, a certain Andrew Riding who had vanished from his home in Portslade, near Brighton, taking all the family savings and leaving behind two small children and a wife who was beside herself with worry. It turned out that Riding had for many years been harbouring a repressed transexualism. The woman in him had been trying to force her way out, until eventually he could keep her contained no longer. Having used the family savings to pay for a sex-change operation overseas, Riding had then settled down in a small town in Gloucestershire, which was where Milner and Moore unearthed him, or rather her. ANDREW RIDING of PORTSLADE was now INGRID WARDEN of ADLESTROP, and although Ingrid was unhappy at first to have been located, the Anagrammatic Detectives were able to coax her into rejoining her family on the South Coast. Regular letters from both Ingrid and his/her wife kept Milner and Moore updated on the progress of this somewhat unorthodox household. Neighbours had got used to them. The children quite enjoyed having two mothers.

Then there was the case of the taxi firm whose owner was alarmed and baffled by a sudden, substantial drop in his profits. Milner and Moore, inspired by the equivalence of TAXIMETER to EXTRA TIME, took several rides anonymously in the firm's cabs, then compared the drivers' journey records to their own receipts. It was straightforward enough. A number of the drivers were fiddling their records and diddling their boss. Sackings ensued, and the grateful owner rewarded the Anagrammatic Detectives with a bonus on top of the agreed fee: a year's free use of his cabs.

There was the complicated affair of the SHORTCAKE and the TRACK SHOE. There was the THRENETICAL CHAIN-LETTER. There was the case of the restaurateur who was POISONED, although not lethally, by a rival, the proprietor of a seafood eaterie called the POSEIDON. There was the unusual job involving a group of south-east Londoners who had taken it upon themselves to find mates for lonely-hearts in the vicinity, bringing them together by surreptitious means so that they did not know they were being matched up - it became known as the SIDCUP CUPIDS case.

But such exciting and intellectually demanding investigations were, alas, the exception rather than the rule, and sometimes in order to make ends meet the Anagrammatic Detectives were obliged to take on assignments which did not call on their powers of wordplay at all - run-of-the-mill stuff that any private investigator could do. More often than not this meant snooping on errant husbands and wives, and to console themselves that there was some sort of wordplay involved, however tangentially, Milner and Moore filed such cases under the heading of BEDROOM BOREDOM. They argued, too, that adultery commonly took place within marriages where the APHRODITE had ATROPHIED or where an unmarried individual had got together with a MARRIED ADMIRER. Quite often the end-result of their evidence-gathering was a messy and combative divorce. That was when it became clear why the word MARITAL was just a letter-swap away from the word MARTIAL.

On this particular morning, the Monday after the Gleed Summer Ball, Milner and Moore had no work on, not even a BEDROOM BOREDOM case. There were no assignments pending, no invoices to be sent out. Their in-trays and out-trays were empty. Their bank accounts were starting to get that way too.

And so, as was their wont, they were sitting at their desks competing to see who could finish a cryptic crossword first. Each had a copy of the nation's highest-brow daily broadsheet and each was bent over its back page, forehead furrowed, pen poised, filling in the lights as fast as he could. Beating each other was part of the attraction, but devoting attention to the crossword meant, also, that for a few minutes they didn't have to think about their lack of work and the parlous state of their finances.

Milner was within a hair's breadth of solving the final clue when there was a rap at the door which not only shattered his concentration but came as such a shock that he half leapt out of his chair. Moore, lagging two clues behind, was no less startled. Each of the Anagrammatic Detectives looked over at the other, waiting for him to say something. Then each, in unison, stammered out an invitation to enter.

The tall, elderly man who walked into their office was a perturbing sight. Hulkingly large, bent like a lamp-post, and wearing a suit that would have set Milner or Moore back a year's salary, he strode in with a disdainful air, as though he begrudged every step of the journey that had taken him here to these tatty premises in this low-rent part of town. Having closed the door behind him, he rubbed fingers against thumb as if the doorknob left some kind of greasy residue. Then he cast an eye around the office, taking in the cracks in the ceiling plaster, the collection of dead flies inside the hemispherical light fixture, the shelves of old books bought by the yard to lend an air of respectability to the place, the arthritic electric fan flailing this way and that as it tried to lower the room temperature, the cheap metal-frame desks the Anagrammatic Detectives sat at, the clearance-sale typist's chairs they sat on, and finally the Anagrammatic Detectives themselves, with their shiny-kneed trousers, their nylon shirts, their fake leather slip-ons. Apparently none of what he saw met with his approval. Nevertheless he nodded in greeting to both men, and even attempted a smile, which caused the scar on his cheek to pucker and deepen in a very unwinning way.

'Gentlemen,' he said, 'the name is Carver.'

This was news to Milner, but Moore had already recognised the Gleeds' major domo. Milner had little interest in Family affairs, whereas Moore, who affected indifference on the subject, was often to be found leafing furtively through the Family pages of the newspapers.

'And you'll be pleased to know that I'm here,' Carver continued, 'to offer you gainful employment.'

22

At around the same time that Carver stepped into the Anagrammatic Detectives' office, the dirigible carrying Prosper and Fortune was beginning its final approach to the Island. In the control car the captain barked out orders. 'Pitch Helmsman, rear elevator up two degrees! Trim Helmsman, keep her steady! Engineer, reduce thrust on starboard fore prop by a quarter! That's it, boys. Nice and easy. Gently does it.' The control car's atmosphere of apparent agitation belied a steely professional calm. There was noise and commotion but the captain had everything firmly in hand.

By contrast, in the dirigible's passenger lounge there was no discernible anxiety or urgency. Within both Prosper and Fortune, however, there was, to varying degrees, ferment. The day ahead promised to be eventful. Extraordinary Family Congresses seldom were not.

Fortune, breakfast Bloody Mary in hand, was leaning on the handrail of the for'ard-facing viewing gallery. Roughly five miles ahead, and getting closer by the minute, lay the Island. Set in a shimmer of Atlantic, it was an unprepossessing upthrust of volcanic rock, the kind that appeared virtually overnight, welling out of the waves during an eruption and hardening into a crack-contoured cone which was then colonised by only the hardiest and ugliest of vegetation - scrubby bushes with shallow roots and thorny stems, razor-edged grasses that could go for months without rain. Too small and too sheer-sloped to invite human occupation, for centuries the Island had sat at the far end of an archipelagic chain, unwanted, uninhabited, unnamed, an afterthought, an appendix, a full stop at the end of a sentence ... until the Families came along and decided it was exactly what they were looking for.

In the wake of the First European War, it had seemed wise that there should be a place, neutral territory, where Family matters could be discussed, inter-Familial complaints worked out, and pan-Familial problems resolved. The Island fit the bill perfectly. Nobody else wanted it, it was centrally located, and it was going cheap. Every Family chipped in to have it built on and landscaped. In next to no time the Island had a Congress Chamber with several sets of living quarters attached, along with gardens, a beach, a harbour, and an aerodrome. The place served as a useful talking-shop, and everyone agreed that some potentially disastrous confrontations had been defused there. Everyone also agreed that the seeds of the
Second
European War had been sown there, but it seemed better not to mention this. The Island's successes far outnumbered its failures. That was good enough.

It was on the aerodrome that Fortune's attention was presently focused. Situated on a southern peninsula which had been dynamited flat to accommodate it, the aerodrome offered mooring spaces for up to fifty dirigibles as well as hangars and a runway for the security planes that were even now patrolling the skies around the Island, protecting the arriving Family members against attack. For any normal Congress this was sufficient. Many Family heads preferred to travel by sea rather than by air, and the Island's harbour afforded ample room for yachts and cruisers. A hundred boats could berth there comfortably. With an Extraordinary Congress, however, time was of the essence. Summoned at short notice, you went by the fastest mode of transport available. This meant flying boat, which could dock at the harbour, but more usually it meant dirigible.

'I count about five gaps still free,' Fortune commented. 'We made it before they start having to do turnaround.'

When spaces ran short at the aerodrome, the last few were utilised on a rota basis, each dirigible mooring for as long as was necessary for its passengers to debark, then taking off again. On the next island along in the chain, some ten miles away, there was a public aerodrome large enough to accommodate the overspill. Nobody was best pleased if their dirigible was one of those that couldn't get a permanent parking place. Therefore it was imperative to be punctual.